Ben Benner’s Blog

For those of you that have not yet heard, my darling wife is starting a new job, very soon, this Monday actually. She had her last day in the Austin office last Friday. This week she has been in Longview. She will be starting her new job at the Humane Society of Williamson County as their “Rescue and Animal Care Supervisor”.

As part of her adventure, I have as I usually do, pushed her to write about it, I set her up a blog and choose a theme that I thought she would like. You can read about her adventures at ShelterStartup.com, I will be pushing her to blog regularly and if she doesn’t, then I might just use my journalism talents to blog on her behalf.

Gina has already volunteered (it was only half a day, but it counts) at the Humane Society and based upon what she told me, I have not doubt she will do a fantastic job there.

There are a few other things that are changing, but that will have to wait until the official announcements are sent out, I would love to scoop the story, but I’d rather not. I’ll post a follow-up in a few days.

However, I can say that work has been going well, one of my main focuses has been to expand my team. We found a great hire, Roger Le, he started with us last Thursday and has been picking up on how we do things pretty well. He has a lot to learn, but thus far I believe he will do just fine.

I continue to enjoy my Camp Gladiator workouts, though I do need to get back to a more consistent schedule, but thus far I have managed to get in two sessions a week. In the two and a half months of doing Camp Gladiator I have lost about 10 lbs, which on it’s face value isn’t great, but I have been adding some muscle, so it is all evens out. My clothes are fitting better and I find that all of the manual labor (yard work, demolition, etc) I have been doing in the last month has been easier to do.

I can jog about a quarter mile without stopping these day, my goal is to be able to go a full mile at a decent jog pace. I bought a heart monitor watch, to help me understand what my maximum heart rate is and it has the added benefit of telling me approximately how many calories I burn during my workouts.

In between this Camp Gladiator and the previous one, we had a week off. During that week I did three sessions of jogging at a soccer field near the house. I didn’t burn nearly as many calories as I do during one session of Camp Gladiator, but I do believe that I managed to increase my jogging stamina, I really want to start getting at least a thirty minute session in after (or before) work in addition to Camp Gladiator, just need to work it into my routine.

Well, I best get back to the grind, my late lunch hour is about five minutes from being done and I need to finish putting lunch stuff away.

Laterz

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… the more they stay the same.

Let’s see, updates on what has been going on.

1) The Benner family has gotten a new bunny. I am not referring to Zoe, who joined the family back in June. I am referring to ‘Wash’, yup his name is Wash. Unfortunately, I do not have any pictures of Wash, but Gina has been snapping plenty of photos.

2) Gina got an early X-mas gift. She got a Canon Rebel EOS XSi. She has long been into photography, but her old 35mm Canon cameras need to be repaired. You might think that the reason I got her a digital is purely due to my love of technology, it is not purely due to my love of technology. She has really liked her digital cameras in the past and has scanned several pictures for web posting or reprinting. It just seemed like the best logical progression.

(note: Gina will tell you that I also got it for her, so that she would have a hobby. I prefer to think of it in terms of helping her find a creative outlet, mine lately is bread.)

3) I got a Mac. John bought a new Mac Pro (desktop) and cut me a great deal on his old 13″ Mac Book Pro. I have made the conversion from my HP laptop to the Mac. There are A LOT of things that I like (Exposé for instance - it is FANTASTIC) , but there are some thing that I am still getting used to. Like the fact that the ‘control’ key doesn’t do anything I want it to do anymore, meaning I have not yet finished the training myself to use the ‘command’ key yet.

4) Work has been extremely busy. There has been the normal fare, the day-to-day stuff that always takes up time. But we have also been knocking out a few new things here and there. One of our customer’s Oddcast had us work with them on a project for Whataburger. If you are from/in Texas then you definitely know the name, from what I am told other southern states have this unique burger chain as well, but anyone from Michigan will likely be a bit clueless.

The Whataburger project itself is a variation on a few different projects we have done for Oddcast in the past, but there was a spark of genius in the way in which we implemented this project that I hope to leverage for all future projects like it, in terms of fluidity and efficiency I would dare say that the underlying work represents a 10x increase in both areas. That project launched on Nov 9th and runs until Dec 21st, which reminds me the entire dev team will be heading to Whataburger to get ourselves an A1 Thick and Hearty Burger here either on Friday or Monday.

With the new team that I have assembled to work on web applications for the parent company, we launched a new web app for a customer. Unfortunately, I cannot state who that customer is at this time. I do want to note that Kevin and Daniel (the two senior developers on the team) played a big part in completing this project for a timely launch. We have found (and corrected) some bugs here and there, which is to be expected with as quickly as we rushed it into production. But along the way we have also made some enhancements that I feel really proud of. We will be re-using parts of what we have done on other parent company projects in the future.

The other notable project/product that we have been working has recently launched a pilot with a retailer that I think everyone would know the name of, but at least right now I cannot state who that retailer is. The product is CommentFunnel. (Jaduka blog post)

We took some of the telephony tech that we had created for Oddcast in the past and reworked it a little bit here and there to allow for a comment recorded by a customer can be immediately be emailed to the store’s management and we also provide a dashboard that allows for reporting and reviewing comments right on the web. As we move beyond the pilot phase we will be upgrading the telephony and the web aspects of CommentFunnel. We will look to add in text (sms) messaging for mobile couponing and look at transcription technologies to allow us to make the audio comments searchable.

5) I fixed Gina’s big red chair. Had I not lost the IKEA receipt for the chair, this item would read ‘I got a replacement for Gina’s big red chair.’ The Chair’s ’spring’ supports had broken away from the frame, causing you to sink into the chair. After much contemplation (which sounds better than, ‘I was being lazy’), I finally devised a solution for the chair. A square piece of 1/2″ plywood, some metal ‘L’ brackets, many wood screws, my trusty Black&Decker drill, some muslin and my Powershot staple gun. After a couple of hours in the garage, the chair was ready to be put back into the living room. I used the muslin and staple gun to replace the fabric covering the bottom of the chair, and unfortunately hiding my handy work.

I am sure there are mundane things that I could list out here, but I will leave that for another blog post.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

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My wife has recently become addicted to technology, one might go so far as to call her a TechnoSnob. I just got off the phone with Gina a few minutes ago, she is in Florida for the next few days on vacation with her mom and a few of her cousins. They are all in town for Bubba’s wedding, one of her cousins from Lansing who has since moved to the Florida (somewhere in the Ormond Beach Area).

Well, apparently there is no Wi-Fi in the vicinity of their hotel. Gina told me that she was not able to find any available networks when she booted up her macbook earlier.

NO INTERWEBS!!!!

Whatever is she to do?

Apparently, the correct course of action is to text me and ask for locations that are nearby that have wifi access. I found a couple of places, the one that actually looks pretty neat is 15 miles north. I didn’t bother to send her the link for the BeachHouse Beanery. Maybe if she gets online and reads this post, she might think about heading 15 miles north for some wifi and coffee on the beach.

The only time that I have ever really been without access to hi-speed Internet access was up at the cottage and well I kind of found a way around that as well.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

UPDATE: I was looking over the hotel website and it says “We also offer our guests a lobby business center with complimentary high speed internet access.” I read this as them offering wi-fi in the lobby, it could just mean they offer a computer that is hooked to the Internet. I have yet to hear from Gina as to what form the “complimentary high speed Internet access” comes as.

bdbenner Technology, gina, travel, vacation florida, gina, travel, vacation, wifi