davemclain.com

After much deliberation, I have accepted Credera’s offer of employment. So I’m going to be a consultant. That’s kinda weird.

This last week involved far more progress on the job front than I was expecting. I am currently looking at written offers from Microsoft in Seattle and Credera here in Austin with Austin Capital sometime soon. I feel like every hour my opinion changes on who I want to work for changes, and it has been occasionally surprising who suggests staying in Austin and who suggests going to Seattle.

One of the thing that strikes me as very pro-Austin is the fact that in the 10 day forecast 6 out of the 10 overnight lows in Austin are warmer than the corresponding highs in Seattle. This culminates next Sunday with Austin having a high of 83 and a low of 61 compared to 49 and 44 in Seattle. That’s not fall, it’s winter.

Ron Paul has:
Never voted to raise taxes
Never voted for an unbalanced budget
Never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership
Never taken a government paid junket
Never voted to increase the power of the executive branch

He:
Voted against the Patriot Act
Voted against regulating the internet
Voted against the Iraq War
Returns a portion of his Annual Congressional Office budget to the US Treasury every year

I was examining the top 25 ranked football teams in the nation and i noticed something that saddens me: every school I applied to is ranked higher than Texas.

The University of California at Berkeley, which a surprising number of Texans don’t realize is called Cal (which is fair since I’ve known a surprisingly large number of Californians who had no idea that Texas and Texas A&M were different schools) is ranked number 2 in the nation. Cal has had a surprising amount of BCS related drama with Texas, which makes my use of a Cal hat for studying particularly awkward for those pesky fall finals. I’d certainly have had a better football weekend if I had chosen to go to the family school, Stanford.

The University of South Carolina at Columbia Gamecocks are having a pretty impressive season with wins at Georgia and over Kentucky with only one loss to the currently #1 LSU. These guys offered me a full ride, but since I ended up not actually studying International Business I’m really happy I went to a school with good programs outside that one area

This blog pot serves no purpose other than to highlight the ridiculousness of the current process for posting sermons for the Austin Stone Community Church. We built this system because the old system of hand hacking the html through Dreamweaver or a shell was too accident prone.

1. Rip CDs from the service(s) that we’re putting online to WAV
2. Use some audio editor to splice together the multiple tracks (split conveniently whenever Matt pauses for effect). Use same editor to pick and choose different parts from different sermons if something went partially wrong at the service we want.
3. Upload WMA to specific folder on austinstone.org (the hosted server)
4. Kick off web application residing on Doug’s private server, this automatically downloads the WMA from austinstone.org, then converts it to a compact mp3 with correct id3 tags, and uploads it to the right folder on austinstone.org
5. Remote Desktop into the database server at the office and using Enterprise Manager add rows to the database for the sermon and the bible verses associated with the sermon, this becomes easier as you start to get the various foreign key ids memorized
6. Navigate to media.austinstone.org to check if everything went correctly.

It’s a pretty straightforward process that only involves 4 separate hosts and only takes 20-30 minutes or so if you know what you’re doing and nobody interrupts you. This also constitutes the most thorough documentation of this process available anywhere, so if Doug and I get incapacitated during some late night Taco Cabana run, the sermon might be a little late getting posted the next week.