A Wheeler goes round

Well, it has been a while. And there have been many changes! The big one is that my family and I up and moved to Minnesota - the Twin Cities area. After child #2 we decided that being closer to free babysitting my wife’s family was a priority. And as luck would have it, a cool job cropped up that sealed the deal. Since this is my tech blog, lemme just focus on that.

I’ve joined Good Technology. Good develops and sells mobile enterprise software and services - push email, calendaring, etc. They essentially compete with RIM, makers of the Blackberry. But the huge difference from RIM is that Good’s software is entirely platform agnostic.  Their client software runs on many different devices, including Treos, Windows Smartphones and Pocket PCs, Symbian devices (like the new Nokia E62), and, interestingly, some of the early Blackberries.  (I’m currently dogfooding on the Treo 700p Good provided me with - cool!).  Companies needn’t “lock in” to a particular hardware platform - they can even let each employee pick a device/OS they’re comfortable with.  I’m also told that we have a great admin back end compared to some of our competitors - I’ve used it before, but I’m definitely more focused on the handhelds at the moment. 

Anyway, I joined the Advanced Technology Group, a new and very small team here in Minneapolis (the rest of the company is in California) where we’re working on all sorts of interesting stuff.  My boss reports directly to the CTO, and we work pretty tightly with Engineering.  Our charter is essentially to work on stuff that Engineering doesn’t have the bandwidth to deal with.  It may be new product R&D, or just cleaning up some code that we all think will improve maintainability  (So far I’ve done both of these).

So what does all this have to do with audio driver development?  Well, nothing.  It’s something fairly new - though I did do handheld work at my previous company.  I was ready for a change - and, for better or for worse, there’s not much in the way of DSP audio gigs in Minnesota.

So that’s my current status.  We’re still staying with my in-laws (yah, it’s a bit crowded), but we’ll hopefully find a house and get more settled in fairly soon.  And when that happens I’ll hopefully have some time to work on OneSnap again.  I see that a few people have run into bugs - and I’ve run into another issue w/ ON2007’s shared notebooks.