Well so far my job is safe looks like if things don't pick up by 2H (American companies love there H's and Q's for some reason) then things may turn back to redundancies again but so far so good. The new lot took a hammer to the software team with most of the redundancies there people that had been with the company longer than I have (and I've been here 7 years now) people I've worked with or under when I was but a fresh faced innocent young graduate now out the door.
It's worrying as this among other things shows the new owners as a very hardware focussed company and from descriptions they really have no idea about software. Hopefully they will learn quick how important software is to the bridge side of the business or else I can just hang a sign with "expendable" on my back. I've also now got more contact with the upper echelons previously my boss was sort of ablative padding that kept me and them apart I did the work he did the lying and reporting. Now I'm going to have to be his stand in for meetings to the vp or something or other should he be out of town. Still getting more responsibilities is no bad thing.
Anyway on to more fun stuff. I recently purchased a little media player box in fact this one http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=572 the WD HD TV Media Player. I'd been looking for something for ages and most of the stuff either didn't do what I wanted or was too pricey. I'd tried using the ps3 as a media player machine with some extra software on the host pc it can sort of function a bit but it had meandering media support and most of the popular download formats it won't support natively without some sort of fiddling and transcoding or repacking. The same goes for the xbox and a lot of the stand along units. So I looked around most of the media units that did full 1080p were quite pricey or hard to get hold of with varying levels of support. Then I came across this little gizmo. It streams from USB devices only so at first I dismissed it. But then I saw it supports full 1080p will output over hdmi or composite and it's media support is pretty good the usual divx xvid H.264, mpeg1/2/4 wmv even including matroska mkv support which seems to be the container of choice for hd content off torrents.
It's also 70 quid and quite portable and since it will play off portable media and out of composite it struck me as a quite useful little box for taking places and playing out media without having a pc to do the hard work. It took a few weeks to get one, these things are quite popular at the moment and stocks are selling out. Eventually it turned up and I hooked it up to my tv and stuck in a disk with all my collected media on it. So far so good it plays beautifully so far anything I've thrown at it it's coped with, I need to get a 1080p file to try as all I have are a few 720's but it looks like it does the job perfectly.