The Odyssey Begins...

There are moments in our lives where we must take a large step to change the direction our lives are headed. Sometimes this step is into the void, an action with no clear outcome.

On Thursday 21st of February, I made just such a step. With a beating heart but clear head I resigned from my position of senior developer at Quickflix, a role I have been in since the company was founded in 2003.

It is important to note that I am not leaving Quickflix for any other reason than I need a change. I have seen this company from inception through to where it is today. I have had a hand in nearly every part of the behind the scenes systems driving the company (hell, every DVD that gets scanned in or out, or is entered into the inventory is still done through applications I built nearly 5 years ago). I have designed and built (almost always from scratch) each of the 3 major redesigns of the website. I am proud of the work I have done for Quickflix and I think the company has a bright future ahead of it.

I have no jobs lined up for when I finish in March, no idea of what I will do. I need nothing more than enough money to pay my bills so I am not too worried about finding work, in fact I will be actively looking for work in areas like hospitality. I need to interact with people again, to build my confidence and use my hands again.

The one thing I am sure of is that now I can dedicate myself to chasing my dream (even if it is somewhat misguided) of doing a world trip that encompasses the worlds biggest gaming expos. TGS, GDC, PAX, Leipzig, you name it I want to visit it. An Odyssey if you will, a Gamer's Odyssey. I will blog this entire adventure from my last day of work here at Quickflix to returning to Perth sometime either 2009 or 2010. It will require a lot of planning, gaming and determination, but I am sure, now that I will have time and (slightly) less stress I can see this adventure through.

Keep checking back here, or at a Gamer's Odyssey soon to see when the site goes life and the Odyssey begins.

New Look Quickflix is now Live

20 minutes ago we released the new look Quickflix website. We've improved the navigation a bit, cleaned up the layout and organised things a bit better.

Something most people seem to be commenting on though is that the site is a damn site snappier: as it well should be. I reckon I shaved an average of about 60% off the page weight of each page.

Not bad for a hack and slash job on the current code base. Just wait until we release version 4.0!

Forza 2 now owns my life

It's been a while since my last post, so I thought I would post a quick update.

I am still powering through with sitecore on my Quickflix project, and we are on I think the 11th or 12th concept for the redesign of the look and feel. It is a tough slog, but we're getting there.

With the Beta of Halo 3 closed, and my Guitar Hero 2 fanatasism reaching it's pinaccle, I felt a yearning for a new gaming experience. After tripping up in JB Hifi I purchased Forza Motorsport 2 for my Xbox 360 and I have found it to be (barring a few minor annoyances) the best racing sim I have ever played. The Wireless Racing Wheel I got to compliment it is the icing on the cake.

Some reviewers have claimed the graphics to be "bland", or "functional" and I would have to agree... to a level. They are best described as realistic. The cars look phenomenal, but the tracks are bland looking, mainly because we are used to looking at the over the top craziness that is the courses found on games such as Need for Speed or Project Gotham Racing. Playing deeper into Forza 2 rewards with more tracks, and some of these look beautiful. One track places you winding through a track covered over with orange leaved trees in Autumn and it just looks amazing.

But, this game is all about the simulation, and it does this perfectly. From the torque steer on front wheel drive buzz boxes to feeling the wheels loosen up when cresting over a hill, Forza 2 gets it all spot on when using the wheel. If you are playing with the controller, you are missing out on most of the experience.

It did give me quite a thrill when I bought my real life car in the game and found it handled perfectly like the real thing, right down to the change in handling putting wider tires on mine did.

The depth of this game is just amazing. I can spend hours tuning or tweaking my car, or just sit back and watch races currently on the go on Xbox Live. I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what Forza 2 has to offer. As I take a few glorious of my cars in the game expect them to get posted on couch-review for your purusal.

Peace out.

Sitecore: Powerful but mystifying

My Quickflix project (codenamed: phoenix) is going well and working with SiteCore has proven to be a challenge in both the best and worst senses of the word.

Articles on the net seem to be a bit thin on the ground when it comes to some of the more advanced areas of the application and it is proving to be a bit of a struggle. While the API documentation is great, finding out what certain parameters mean and also how / if I can do things is proving to be difficult, often ending up with just going back to trial and error.

If anyone out there has any knowledge about the following, or can point me to some help that would be great:

Passing fields as parameters to renderings: is it possible? can you do it from within the content editor? I would like to have a rendering that allows the user to specify some values from fields in the template (like the background image to use) but not actually specify the value, just the field to grab.

Can I write Sitecore or ASP control references in XSLT templates and still have sitecore render them? This would be handy in some of the controls I am trying to build, otherwise I will have to build ASP controls and write a heap of logic behind them, rather than just parsing the XML.

So far I am pretty happy with SiteCore and I am enjoying trying to meld it into something that will be easy for the content managers to use, whilst still allowing a heap of flexibility in page layout and functionality. Baby steps.

Bad Film Tagline of the Day : Wayne's World

"You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll hurl."

Tagline for the film Wayne's World (1992), available at Quickflix

Never really understood the point of this tagline, but Wayne's World is one damn funny movie. One of my favourite quotes:

Wayne Campbell: She's a babe.
Garth Algar: She's magically babelicious.
Wayne Campbell: She tested very high on the stroke-ability scale.

Excellent.

Bad Film Tagline of the Day : Thunderball

"Look up! Look down! Look out! Here comes the biggest Bond of all!"

Tagline for the film Thunderball (1965), available at Quickflix

One of funniest Bond Tag lines. They really knew how to sell films in the 60s.

Bad Film Tagline of the Day : The Phantom Planet

"See!! A 6 ft. astronaut shrink to 6 inches before your very eyes! See!! The Moon Maidens! See!! The attack of the Fire People! Starring DOLORES FAITH the Girl from Outer Space!"

Tagline for the film The Phantom Planet (1961), available at Quickflix

A piece of absolute gold tagline writing. You can imagine the campy 60's voiceover dude reading this one out. It actually had a couple of other fantastic taglines: "Captives of a power far, far out!", "Science Shocker of the Space Age." and perhaps my favourite "It Begins Where Others End! On the Moon!". Classic.

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.

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

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.

New Quickflix Office & Project Phoenix

Today marks the end of our first week in the new Quickflix Office. We've finally settled in, I've got myself a bonsai tree and a wall to utilise and everything seems to be going pretty well.

The bonsai on my desk.

For those who aren't familiar with my job I am a senior developer and graphic designer at Quickflix, the biggest independant DVD rental company in Australia. I have been working for Quickflix since its inception, and have been involved with its development from prototype to full blown business.

As with most companies where their entire existance revolves around our technology we've reached a point where we've out grown our current IT offering. We're wanting to do things now to enhance our members experience that are just not feasible in our current environment.

Enter Project Phoenix. This project is about two things. Providing our subscribers with the best possible online DVD rental service through both efficient fulfilment and delivery and becoming the household name in home entertainment by having the best most engaging service available.

I am fortunate enough to be leading the redevelopment of our website from the ground up. In the next couple of months I will be blogging about our progress and you should see notes and info on the development of a new beautiful and dynamic interface, new exciting features and tools to make the Quickflix experience amazing, and ideas I will be using to help my team turn flashes of inspiration into full blown features.

I will be taking photos through the entire process and you can see these and more photos on my flickr page under the "Pix from the 'flix" set.

If you are a Quickflix member and have had some ideas about how you would like to make your Quickflix experience even better please don't hesitate to post a comment on any of posts I make. The more suggestions and ideas you provide the better we can make the service.

Please note: This blog is in no way affliated with Quickflix. I mearly work for them. As part of my contract and NDA, I will not be able to directly comment on new features and things that have not been yet released to public. I cannot comment on the inner workings of Quickflix so don't expect special insights that have not been made public to our users or the market.

EDIT: Fixed Typo

Latest Mike & Mal Video - For real this time

Ok, gootube finally converted one of our supplied videos properly and as such here is the latest Mike & Mal video promoting Quickflix. Enjoy!

Remember: You can see more Mike & Mal clips on youtube

Latest Mike & Mal Video

UPDATE: gootube couldn't convert the video correctly and it ended up all screwy. We're contacting the producers to send us the video in various formats and hopefully we can get something that youtube actually likes. Stay tuned.

PLEASE NOTE: youtube is taking its sweet ass time processing the video below, so if nothing comes up when you try and play it, please come back later. Stupid gootube.

Quickflix has published the next in the series of Mike & Mal Videos. The series has been pretty funny. You can see the rest of the videos on youtube.