I’m John C Bland II

Husband, Father, Tech Author, Deacon.
Founder ofย Katapult Media, and full-stack polyglot developer.
Political Free Agents Podcast Host.

I create. I launch.

YouTube Channel

I post regular fun on YouTube like me playing the bass and anything else I find fun.ย 

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All project work goes through Katapult Media. Business is open. Let’s chat.

First, I forgot my laptop at home. Ah well…they had one ready for me. ๐Ÿ™‚ It felt weird being without my laptop…like really weird but when they slapped a fresh Dell Inspiron 9400 on my desk……..well……..that all went away. ๐Ÿ˜€ I’ll be getting a desktop with some sweet monitors too (I’ll take some pics of the office here soon…it is kinda cool).

Anyways…enough of the gadgetry. Everyone, that I met, is super cool at Limelight (LLNW). I mean they went out their way to help me make sure everything was setup (albeit a bit after I made it in) and numerous people went out there way to ensure I had access to everything I needed.

I’m in the UI Dev’ “department” (a corner of the dev’ office area) with Jake and Dave. They are cooler than a fan, both very quiet though. I’m used to people talking to me all day (namely Tia, my wife, and Lil’ John) or at least some form of chatter. ๐Ÿ˜‰ Although I could hear people talking it was usually muffled in some way.

LLNW has a lot of stuff going on. I had my first assignments (yes, plural) given to me today and I ALLLLLLMOST completed one today between having no desk and using the previous developers laptop to setting up on a desk to learning the old code to porting everything from the old laptop to my new one to having to upload some test files my manager needed to see (nothing I coded; they just needed it online to test)….{phewww, taking a breath}….I dang near made it. ๐Ÿ™‚ There was a list of 12 updates to a simple app and I have all but…mmmm…4 or so. {snaps fingers} I wanted to have a huge triumph today but coming close was good enough, at least they seemed happy.

So, those’re all of the highlights. What about the lowlights?

My only gripe is having to deal with non-classed Actionscript. The project is Flash 8/AS2 but all of the code is implemented in includes. “FusionCharts”:https://www.fusioncharts.com/ wasn’t difficult to use or anything but I had to mod some of their code to implement event dispatching (they use asfunction; ewww). It took everything in me not to rewrite the entire app as a class-based app but I refrained. This is just a “demo” anyway so I’ll probably end up rewriting it.

Yep…that’s all of my lowlights. Well, having “endless” amounts of snacks readily available is kinda a bad thing. ๐Ÿ™‚ (uh oh waist line) lol

LLNW is doing some sweet stuff. I don’t even know everything that’s going on (not even close to it) but just a few mini-discussions with some folks opened my eyes a bit to the “massiveness” of their infrastructure, goals, and responsibilities.

Oh…1 more thing…THEIR SERVER ROOM IS UBER-GEEKY! I smiled all the way through it. LMBO. I don’t know why but I love server rooms and their setup is super sweet. It even includes an air-sucker-outer (so in case there is a fire, suck the oxygen out…fire has no choice but to go out). ๐Ÿ™‚ NICE! Love it!

This is going to be fun!!!!!

Well, it is 12:30 and I gotta get some sleep. I can’t stay up late like I used too. ๐Ÿ™‚ Tomorrow is a day of multiple meetings as well as some doc signing. Hopefully I get to code a bit between all of that.

BTW, I won’t blog about specific projects I’m working on unless they are public and I have approval. It is just a formality and cool by me. ๐Ÿ˜‰