Truncated Day

I'm Today I was planning to take the day off because it's a three day weekend and that would extend it to a nice long four day weekend,always a good thing!

Instead, knowing that I will get out after a half day I decided to go into the office and save the DTO for another time. The weather is still gloomy and rainy, Cicely had to go in anyhow and there was not much of anything that I could do with the first part of the day otherwise.

I already gave my team a heads up that they can cut out early if they want to and have no pressing game obligations for demos going on next week. I did ask that they stay until both studios are finished with the lunch that we are providing for everyone. Otherwise if everyone cuts out early, no one eats and food is wasted those types of extra events will go away and that sucks. Not to mention a lot goes into setting them up, even something as seemingly simply as getting food for everyone can be extremely time consuming and a ton of work to make happen, much less make everyone happy with what is ordered.

Cycling

Last night after work I was able to get on the trainer and go for a nice spin. It was a little on the short side of things because I only went just under 11 miles. The cool part is that it was a really intense climb from the start and I was sweating like crazy, legs burning and still feeling good enough to push harder.

Today it may be more of the same, I won't be able to get out on the bike because of the afternoon rain showers the weather guessers predicted and I think based on the sky overhead as well as what is rolling in over the mountains they will be on target.

It's okay, the trainer is flippin' awesome to have and I would not be doing as good as I have been when actually cycling outside if it were not for the trainer keeping me strong. It can become boring at times, even with all the variations that I have to ride. Kudos to everyone that managed to stay focused and on the old trainers, I'm not sure if I could have stayed motivated enough to do so. Maybe I could have, I enjoy being on the treadmill, watching YouTube videos or shows on NetFlix so that's probably what I would have been doing to stay focused.

Weekend

Anyway, bad weather or not it will be nice to have a few days away from the studio to spend with Zoey, Oggy & Cicely. I would like to get the website up and running for Zoey as I've been planning to forever it seems. It's not that difficult either, it's more a matter of finding a few hours in a row to get it going, be willing to work out the kinks and sorta go from there forward with it.

The Grid

At the same time, easy or not, a large portion of my hesitation is that I am part of this new front-end website development company that is building the foundation for its users to have websites built for them. They go by the name 'The Grid'. What, built websites for you? That is not 'new', you're wasting your money is the only thing you can think of to say to me. I get it, I'd prolly say the same thing to you so let me explain a little more and clear the muddy waters.

Okay so as I was saying, sure, this does not sound new so hang on a moment. I realize that companies have been making websites for people forever it seems right? Yes they have, the difference is that this is completely automated based on the content that you add to it, the initial style(s) you may have chosen and whatever else you are allowed to tweak to personalize it.

You would think that this would mean everything would look the same if there are only a select few variations to choose from. That is where it gets even more bad ass because no matter how similar one page is to the person that built one the same time as you and potentially used identical settings, it will continue to be unique. Why?, because as mentioned the design is content driven not the other way around. Unless you both had identical content you would never have two identical designs.

The Grid handles the website development and design through artificial intelligence, sorting, arranging and so on - which I think is bad ass and comes at a very reasonable price, again blowing my socks off for what it is. Even if it's half that it's cracked up to be. To support them it was only $96, renewing annually, yet not starting the clock ticking down on your year until you're invited into the actual beta. Even then I think they are planning to give everyone 6 months additional time free, have I said 'bad-ass' already? Well I need to again.

What's even cooler is the fact that they expected to have approximately 3,000 founding members. If memory serves, their pie-in-the-sky goal was to have as many as 10,000 members 'eventually' and this was after they finished getting things going with the founding members. My guess is that this would allow them to be able to build and sustain the company and grow into something much larger and dominating as it deserves to.

My initial thought is that they probably hope they will be bought out by another company. Someone like Google or another big web front end or something more like the all-in-one sites and/or blogging companies.

Either way they have an awesome idea. If they have the underlying software to handle everything as they claim to based on the demos and literature on their website, which I think they do, along with the infrastructure and back end to support the user-base.

If they get all of that right along with everything else, it's going to be awesome! Honestly, simply based on the demos that I've seen that ultimately managed to hook me into reaching into my wallet, pulling out cash and becoming a founding member were very convincing and gave me the technology goosebumps that I love to have!

Anyway, they figured they would do 'okay' at best starting out. I'm stoked, yes stoked, to hear they are something like 40k+ founding members to date! How awesome is that!?! Super happy for them and makes me feel that I made the right decision as well to support them. Now it's the long wait until I am selected to start using the service.

I think the initial group was supposed to roll out by June 2015, that would be 3-5,000 users. Mostly because that is a great number to start to test server loads and so on. I think that based on my place in the 'virtual founding member line' that I am in the queue for mid-to-late summer when I may get the long awaited email notice to jump on-board and start to use the service, I can't wait!

Anyway, enough out of me for today. I am out to a late lunch right now with my girl, we went to Great full Gardens again, and I want to focus my attention on her.

Photo: Quite the dreary day outside. Looking out the window this is what it looks like today. Big drops, cloudy and a little bit cold. Great day for napping honestly.