CNN reported to me today that the DoJ has approved the merger of XM Radio and Sirius Radio.  I must say that I love the XM Radio in my Acura.  I've had my car for three months now and my radio time has been perfectly split between the XM radio and my local NPR station.

Last week my XM trial subscription ran out.  I had absolutely 0 qualms about renewing it and paying for a year of membership.  It is worth the 50cents per day (or whatever it ends up being) to me to have a little extra selection on my radio dial.

Don't get me wrong--I love local radio.  But I despise jocktacular morning shows and my commute is typically when I listen to the radio.  Competition is good and satellite radio is forcing an entrenched industry to reinvent itself in the digital age.  The iPhone and 3G connections and streaming Internet radio will further shake up the industry.  In my opinion there's room for a lot of innovations and significant amount of new programming.  In the end the viewers will always follow the content.

Usually I don't post about deaths of famous figures, but Arthur C Clarke was something special. This is the main who brought us the notion of a communications satellite (which he never patented) and the man who wrote 2001 and shared an Oscar with Kubrick for the screenplay adaptation.

I read every single piece of Arthur C Clarke's science fiction I could find when I was younger. The 2001 novels, the Rama novels, the short stories, etc. It was all so brilliant and he created such immersive futuristic worlds and scenarios.

One of my favorite projects while working for ONEsite was developing the chat component of our interactive media player.  The first version of this player was developed using Actionscript 2, Server-side Actionscript and Macromedia's Flash Communication Server (FCS).  That player was very impressive technically, but we found the license for FCS to be prohibitely expensive.

The second iteration of the player was also developed using Actionscript 2 and Flash but was built upon open chat standards and socket connections instead of the closed source FCS.  The new player offered the same features as the first player but was much easier for us to administer and scale.

The third version of the player was built upon Actionscript 3 (AS3).  It was designed to be a dramatic overhaul of our player--leveraging more and more of our web services to enable increased social functionality during the media streaming.  I really fell in love with AS3 even though at the time the documentation for it was sparse and the community was in its infancy.  AS3 was such a refreshing change of pace from AS2 (especially the changes to the visual layers).  It felt and acted like a *real* programming language.

This week we've begun to deploy Event Driven changes to our PHP architecture.  This essentially allows all of the actions on the social network (of which there are tons!) to have listener events associated with them to enable custom functionality or achieve unique flows.  Our platform is already incredibly extensible and these AS3 inspired enhancements are going to let us achieve another level of customization for our clients.

Over the past several months we've been hard at work on a new forum architecture.  Discussions are integral to social networks and we just weren't satisfied with our previous forum system.  The old system was one of the only pieces of code in the entire ONEsite system not to be written by scratch--and it showed.

The new forums are the culmination of a lot of hard work by Mark who headed up the project.  They are built using services from our SOAP architecture.  What this means is that if one of our customers doesn't like how a particular piece of the forum works, more than likely they could use the SOAP services themselves to achieve the desired flow changes or to embed functionality similar to our forums on their external webpages.  We built the forums using the exact same services available to our customers.  The new forums demonstrate the power and extensibility of the ONEsite platform.

We're really excited about the first version of these forums.  In the next several days we'll be deploying several unique features to the forums to really drive engagement in discussions on the social networks.   We've learned a lot about what does and doesn't work on our networks and we believe that it is time for forums to once again be a centerpiece in social networking.

I took a day off from work yesterday to have LASIK done on both my eyes.  I've been thinking about getting LASIK done for several years now, and finally decided to spring for it after I scratched my latest pair of glasses a couple weeks ago.

The procedure itself was pretty much a breeze.  Some patients were nervous because the "foot pedal" on the LASIK machine had broken that morning, and they had a technician come and replace it.  But I figured that the foot pedal couldn't be that important :)

The worst part of the procedure for me was them actually putting the eyelid speculum on my eyes (the device that prevents you from blinking).  i'm a notorious flincher.  But once that was done everything went really quickly.  There's only actually about 10 seconds of laser work done per eye.  The coolest part of the whole procedure was when they hook up a suction ring to your eye and lift it up a bit while they create the flap.  You lose vision for a couple seconds in that eye, but it is more of an interesting experience than it is a scary one.

I took a nap after the procedure and then listened to some podcasts for a few hours.  I did actually watch American Idol last night (I couldn't stop myself).  This morning my right eye is terrific and my left eye is a bit blurry...  but I had a followu visit to the doc today and he said the left eye will clear up pretty soon.

All in all I would recommend the procedure to anyone.  I was really amazed that immediately after the procedure I could see right away, and several hours later I could see nearly just as well as if I had been wearing my glasses.