05 March 2005

Rock musicians occassionally say profound things. Steve Tyler, frontman of Aerosmith, once said something that stuck with me like nothing anyone has ever said "To have fun, you just have to let the kid out" My other hero is Peter Pan - go figure. My kid is there for all to see if you look hard enough, but twice a year he comes out screaming, whooping and causing the sort of disturbance that gives all kids a bad name; Christmas, and my Birthday. Yesterday, I turned 35, going on 12. Heather has a hard time with me at Birthdays. I get antsy and excited about a month prior to the event, then start dropping hints (well, hints in the sense that the invasion of Poland was a hint that Germany had something on it's mind), before finally launching on a full scale political campaign lobbying for the perfect presents about 3 weeks before the big day. This year though I didn't lobby. I sent a list. A simple, short (very short for me) list of what I wanted. I emailed it to Heather one morning from the office and sat back nervously for 3 weeks. THe list was short, but the items were big, way bigger than usual. I didn't stand a hope in hell of getting them I thought. But I did. Every single one of them. I asked for books (Wil Wheaton's Dancing Barefoot and Just A Geek, and Andy Hertzfelds Revolution In the Valley). The in-laws came through with them courtesy of a carefully hidden amazon package that had been smuggled into the house when I was out at work. I asked for Moleskine's after reading the postings of Omar Shahine and others. I'm working through David Allen's book "Getting Things Done" to find a way to circumvent my somewhat crappy short term memory and manage my workload efficiently, with less stress. It's going great, but Omar and a few others have said that it really works well when you turn away from technology and use the fabulously constructed Moleskine notebooks to capture your action lists. I can vouch after a week of doing it this way (Heather caved into my pleadings and gave me the Moleskines a week earlier than my birthday to shut me up) that those guys are right. Moleskines rock, especially when combined with GTD. I didn't ask for fudge, but I'm every bit as addicted to the stuff as a crack-addict to crack, so my dad came through with a great big box of every single kind of fudge I can imagine. I'm slowly working my way through it, eating it as slowly as possible, savouring every morsel so as not to use it all up and be left fudgeless for another year. Dad - you rock. But, the biggies, the biggest things I asked for that I knew for sure I wouldn't get, but hey if you don't ask...... well I got them. I came home from work yesterday to the gleaming, shiny, slick blackness of the Sony PSP, Sony's new Playstation portable, a machine due for release here in the UK sometime before hell freezes over and later this month in the US. Heather imported it from Japan for me, complete with Ridge Racers and Lumines, a retina melting variation on the Tetris theme. I have to say, the machine is stunning. As every other person out there has said it really does feel worth a lot more than the price Sony are asking for it. And the screen! Oh my god- when you turn on a new piece of tech and your wife sees it power up and says "That screen is AWESOME", you know you're onto a winner. It's fantastic. It's better than any notebook I've ever used, and when you combine it with the fact that the PSP can throw really cool 3d graphics around it, as well as video and photos it's just amazing. I'm so stoked with this machine. At last I have a handy device i can play awesome games on, on the train, and on which I can carry with me pictures of my family, as well as TV shows I'm currently into. It's incredible. Despite what all the nay sayers have said as well, the battery life is out of this world. I played it non-stop last night (about 3 hours after I got home late), and on and off throughout today (about another 2 hours in total), and I still don't have a battery life warning up. The battery is fine. The games are stunning too, real works of art - Sony have a great habit of lining up killer games with their new platforms and the PSP is no exception. Ridge Racers will melt your heart with it's stunning graphics and gameplay, while Lumines has once again reborn my life-destroying Tetris habit. I'll post a full set of pictures, including the packaging and the games, later - CSI is about to start so I can't stay much longer. The final present was a piece of paper from my 3 year old son. Seems he had hacked his mom's email and seen my list and taken it upon himself to get the last item on the list. It's not here yet, but as of next Friday I will be the proud owner of a Nintendo DS. WOOT! 9:14:49 PM

I caught a late train home last night, packed full of a mix of drunk, suit wearing idiots talking loudly into their cellphones about this blonde PA, or that brunette executive assistant, how "tough" they had been with this new joiner, or that boss, of and of course the usual expletive filled conversations about football. I buried my head in my Bose QuietComforts and Wil Wheaton's Dancing Barefoot and tried to ignore them. I checked my phone too, and had this text message waiting. "Haven't seen you online for a while or seen any blog posts, hope you ok mate."  That made me smile. There are too few examples of people in the world today actually reaching out to show someone they care. Thanks Nayur mate - I'm fine. In fact, I'm better than fine. I was 14 years old the last time I was this fine. My friend Dagwin (his name was actually Darren, but somehow he landed himself the nickname of Tarquin, which later morphed in the way teenage nicknames do into a Dagwin) came running up to me at school, grinning from ear to ear, clutching a piece of paper. A letter, from a company, to he and I. I don't know of many 14 year olds that get an awful lot of postal mail, let alone letters addressed to them personally from a company they admire. In our case, the top of the letter bore the word "MARTECH", a leading light in the newly formed UK games industry and bore a heading that said "Letter of Intent to publish". Dagwin's brother was dating the school's former sex symbol, a tall leggy vision of beauty with long flowing blonde hair and deep blue eyes. That's all I remember about her; her hair and her eyes. I don't even recall her name. After leaving school she had landed herself a job at Martech as a secretary and PA to the company boss, Dave Martin, and through much begging, pleading and I'm sure one or two cash bribes via Dagwin's brother she had landed us a meeting at Martech to show Dave Martin the Commodore 64 game we were working on. It was a great meeting despite the 3 mile walk from Dagwin's house to their offices, despite having absolutely no sleep the previous evening, and despite puking all morning through nerves. We booted up our game, "Assassin", on the company demo Commodore 64 and walked Dave through the work we had done. It was early days at that point and our demo consisted really of two kids being really excited about actually being in the company's offices and walking him through Dagwin's hand drawn cartoons of the games main characters, and storyline, before I showed him the graphics on the live machine, complete with our awesome parallax scrolling routine, and of course way more than the 8 sprites the Commodore 64 was theoretically limited to displaying at once. The result of that meeting was our letter of intent, a letter that stated if we carried on as we were, developed a couple of levels to the game and turned up back in Martech's offices within a few months, they'd pay us, and publish us. It was a dream come true, the start of a career we both thought. It didn't work out that way and we never got our own game published, but we did get to glimpse inside a successful games company and strike up friendships that lasted for quite some years. I actually bumped into Dave Martin a few years ago at ECTS in London and nearly fell over when he handed me a business card showing him to be the creative director of one of the UK's most successful video game publishers. He remembered every facet of the meetings, and we spent a few minutes catching up before going our separate ways. The feeling I had way back then as a 14 year old with a dream about to come true is still indescribable. It was better than sex, and highly addictive. You know, if I had to liken it to anything, I'd say the impression it leaves is like the bad guy in Star Trek Generations and his insatiable craving to get back in the Nexus. It never left me, and when I entered the life of "Office based code monkey" 4 years later I knew that if I stayed in that office, or ones like it, for the rest of my life, I'd die with an aching sense of loss for not having gone after what I really wanted to do. 21 years ago I thought that feeling was the anticipation of wealth beyond my wildest dreams. Today I know that feeling to be the anticipation of living a life on my own terms, doing precisely what I want to do, when I want to do it, actually arriving at the mirage of a "work-life" balance to discover it's not a mirage at all. That's really why I haven't blogged lately. Everything's fine. The contract I'm doing is good, the money's great, the people are wonderful. But it's not a realization of a dream. It was never meant to be. These past couple of weeks have been spent knee deep, outside of the nine to five, in the new book, and something very special, something that the more I think about it and plan it, the more that feeling I had as a 14 year old boy wells deep inside me. And, you know what, I'm not going to blog it. It's not a big secret. Meet me in the street and I'll tell you all about it. Hell, most of my colleagues know what it is. But I'm not going to blog it. Blogging dreams has a way of jinxing them that I'm not willing to risk at this point. It is taking up a lot of time that would normally be spent reading blogs and making blogs though, so bear with me. I will post up some stuff on other very cool things this weekend, I promise.       8:53:20 PM