Scooter whoopage

Yesterday I reamed myself on the scooter. I hit a patch of crap pavement at full speed and launched myself over the handle bars. I hit the ground pretty hard, but luckily my face was in the way to take most of the impact.

3 internal and 9 external stitches to my chin, and a potentially fractured hand and elbow later and I am back at work. I tried to power on through with my work on Quickflix's Project Phoenix yesterday but I had to head home for a lie down.

Today I get a couple of xrays to find out the damage to my right arm, and on Monday I head back to the docs for a check up.

Hasn't put me off riding though: I scooted to work and the doctors today, although riding was a little difficult with the busted up arm.

As for Phoenix: I should have the final style guide and touched up page layouts of the redesign ready for monday, although I have effectively lost a day and a half to the accident. The new site is, in my opinion, looking good and I can't wait to get cracking on the SiteCore implementation soon.

UPDATE: X-Rays are done, I've fractured my elbow and it has a haemarthrosis. Nice. Just waiting for the doc to get back to me on what to do from here.

Yac-it-up festival photos now on flickr

You can check out my photos of Birds Of Tokyo playing at Yac-it-up festival now on flickr

Second only to the challenger disaster: PS3 launch in Australia

I love this stuff. Playstation 3 launched in Australia last night and I just had to laugh at the coverage. Practically no one came. Stores that opened at midnight shut up shop, a few preorders got picked up, stock filled shelves. I mean, I thought there would be some excitment surrounding the launch, but boy was I mistaken. What a dud.

Some awesome reads:
Australian PS3 Launch - Unmitigated Disaster
Playstation launch is a muted affair
Australian PS3 launch shindig

The launch party of the dodgy new bourbon McKennas (a bourbon for the discerning bogan) I was at last night had a better showing. Bad luck Sony, that will teach you for treating your market like crap. Wii and 360 FTW!

Quickflix share prices hits all time high

Today Quickflix's share price hit an all time high of 24.5 cents! This is brilliant. It shows that the market is finally getting the Quickflix idea, and that there is confidence in what we are doing and our direction.

It's about time really. Being 1 of the 2 big players in this market is important: we don't need to be the biggest, or the only player. Quite the contrary. We want to be the BEST in town. Being the only player would make us stale, unexciting and unimaginative. With competition in the market not only do we constantly STRIVE to be the best, but we innovate at the same time. This is something we haven't seen alot of from our competitor, who must now be more than a little worried. Online DVD Rental is what we do, its all we do and we do it bloody well.

Competition is a good thing. Expect a whole lot of tit for tat between the players in the coming months but we have the drive, brains and determination to be the best and stay the best.

Xbox Live reaches 6 million subscribers, Good news for Quickflix

Microsoft really has pulled out all the stops on the Xbox 360 and driving a large portion of its uptake has been the unsurpassed Xbox Live service.

Yesterday Microsoft announced that the service had passed the 6 million subscriber mark. This is fantastic news, showing that a well thought out gaming machine can not only deliver awesome multiplayer experiences across the net but also a rich multimedia library directly into the lounge rooms of punters.

Concerns regarding the "download" rather than "stream" model seem to have fallen by the wayside with people quickly embracing the Live Marketplace and Video Marketplace available in the US. From the article:

Consumers have quickly jumped to the Xbox LIVE Marketplace as their one-stop download center. More than 70 percent Xbox LIVE members are downloading content from Marketplace, driving more than 135 million downloads since the launch of Xbox 360.

Xbox LIVE Marketplace is home to more than 7,000 pieces of individual gaming and entertainment content, downloadable at the click of a button.

Gamers have also quickly adopted the new Microsoft Points stored value system, with more than 5 Billion points activated on Marketplace to date.

This is great news for Quickflix. Why?

It is no secret that Quickflix has plans for VOD or DTO in the future. In fact an early version of our service was showcased at the launch of the Intel Viiv platform. With the news that people are willing to queue up and download content to be watched later as with the Video Market place, it means our entry into this segment of the market should be much easier. In these days of "I want it now" it is nice to know people are still willing to be patient and wait a little while for quality. A download to own / rent model is much easier to implement and overcomes a lot of the infrastructure hurdles currently presented by the Australian telecommunications network.

Now if only I could get in good with Microsofts Australian Xbox Live division ;)

EDIT: Added a little more info from the article

26 Reasons Why I Love Neon Genesis

Over the next 8 weekends my mate Colin and I will be watching the entire 26 episodes in the series of Neon Genesis Evangelion. I consider this anime to be the absolute pinnacle of the genre. Having seen it probably 18 times over, and now preparing to watch it again I figured it is about time to post on my opinions of each episode in a kind of analysis / review.

Strap yourselves in. The first round article will be posted after this weekend and will encompass the following episodes:

• Episode 01 - Angel Attack
• Episode 02 - The Beast
• Episode 03 - A Transfer
• Episode 04 - Hedgehog's Dilemma

Check the excellent episode guide at Wikipedia for a synopsis of each episode.

If anyone else has access to the boxed set and the determination I wouldn't mind a bit of lively discussion here on the blog after each Neon Genesis post. Bring it on.

Project Phoenix officially kicks off

The Quickflix office is alive with activity. Project Phoenix is now full steam ahead after a brief prep talk meeting this morning over coffee and muffins. While my portion of work has a name, we've still yet to come up with some decent project names for the other units. The remaining large portions of work to be named are the CRM implementation, the Allocation re-write, redevelopment of the financial systems, and redevelopment of our backoffice inventory tools (which we call "Director").

A little on Project Phoenix: At this point in time we've decided to use a third-party CMS application called SiteCore. We have quite a bit of experience with this CMS in house, however we've never done anything quite as big as Quickflix in it. We will be customising the actual CMS quite a bit to make it suit our needs, however it does save us writing alot of functions we would rather not have to deal with by providing them right out of the box (workflow, editors, pre-built tools, security etc). Right now I am in the process of setting up a virtual machine to use for development and training and it is a good learning exercise in setting up a SiteCore environment. The virtual machine will have Visual Studio 2005, SQL 2005, SiteCore 5.3 and the .net 2.0 framework all running on the Windows Server 2003 OS.

My goal by the end of this week is to be familiar with SiteCore enough to produce a prototype of the next Quickflix. Stay tuned for info if I can achieve this and any hurdles I come across.