The owner's manual for the office microwave oven has been sitting on top of it for over a year now. I'm very tempted every time I see it sitting there to file it in the round filing cabinet. While I was waiting for my coffee to finish, I thumbed through it to see exactly how … Continue reading More Office Treasure!
This is a taboo topic, so I'm probably not going to broadcast this one across social media. I'm very fortunate. I earn decent money doing something I find interesting: programming. I don't love sitting in front of a computer all day, but that's where most of the programming happens, so I've learned to deal with … Continue reading Salary
I love going into our office and exploring our kitchen / break room / storage closet when I'm waiting for my coffee to brew. There are so many strange things we've held onto for who knows how long. Like today, I just noticed this nice Pelican case sitting behind the refrigerator: What treasure could we … Continue reading Office Treasure!
I've been getting better at using Org Capture to keep a work journal (as in, actually remembering to write in it). It was especially useful during Crestron Masters to keep everything organized. Org is a very powerful tool, and I've found that working with the parts that are easy to understand, it's easy to slowly … Continue reading Org Capture
Back in 2010, I had just started at a new company as a full-time AV programmer. I already had a couple years of AMX programming under my belt, and I'd just started getting the hang of Crestron and SIMPL Windows. Most of our engineering and programming team were East Coast-based but I was the lone … Continue reading The Time I Almost Got Fired
The brutal truth. Ever since our company was acquired nearly four years ago, I've wondered what the long-term plan for traditional AV (audiovisual) services was going to be. If you look at an IT business pie chart, AV is a tiny sliver compared to giants like telephony, managed services, and cloud. At times, I've felt … Continue reading Into the Cloud!
It's been about a year since the last time I thought about where AV programming is headed. The world was a different place then. COVID-19 has caused the shutting down of shared workplaces, diminishing the need for complicated spaces even further than before. What's a programmer in the AV industry to do? This is what … Continue reading The Future of AV Programming: Part 5
I highly recommend purchasing an external SD card for your Crestron processor. They're cheap and will increase the lifespan of the flash memory built into the processor. This one was only $10! You can even setup logging to write to it instead: > FORMAT > RMLOGERR ON NOTICE > RMLOGERR RMLOGERR status: Current Log State … Continue reading Easy Insurance for $10
My employer purchased a CP4 for me to mess around with, and wow is this thing fast! File transfers are at least twice as fast. It's hard to tell how much quicker it is since the progress window disappears almost immediately. I haven't thrown any large programs at it yet to see how it handles, … Continue reading CP4
Let me pull back the curtain a bit on how my work week ended up. I think this is a good example of Worse Is Better that's worth sharing. Last Friday we had an impromptu meeting to discuss an upcoming project for a long-time customer. The scope of work seems simple enough: add a new … Continue reading When Worse Is Better
Kiel the Coder 