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This was kind of a shit year for me, perhaps the roughest of my adult life. Not that I didn't learn a lot! But it sure did leave some bruises, this time around.

I have never been one to say "Good riddance" at midnight on the 31st — it's not like some magic curtain qualitatively separates one second from its successor just because one happens to flips a calendar page in between. But I won't be able to escape the feeling this year.

Looming largest:

• I paid, very literally, for some poor business decisions I made in 2010. (Yes, last year. These things have tend to have inertia.) I sank fairly deep into debt again, filling my credit card back up almost to the brim once more. Thankfully this started to turn around before the year ended, and I'm on a good trajectory again; I socked four grand into my card this week, and hope to do it again next month.

But I still haven't put one penny into savings since I went independent over six years ago, and that's not awesome. I feel very self-conscious about being behind schedule here.

Built-in silver lining: hey, at least my owed income tax for 2011 will probably be the smallest ever. And the cause for the debt was entirely self-directed; if I fall down this hard again, at least it won't be for this same reason.

• My teaching experience was hugely disillusioning. I was so ready for this to be the doorway to a whole new professional identity for me, and… well, it wasn't so simple as that. This particular implementation was doomed from the start, for reasons I've already described, and working through the semester despite the hardships soaked up nearly all my time and attention for three months.

Good things:

• My teaching experience is hugely extant. Saying that I've taught a college course is probably as big a boost to my feeling of self-worth — and my objective, CV-based image — as saying that I co-authored some O'Reilly books. I have a feeling that, just as I did with the books, I'll use my experience as a lever into future interesting (and, I hope, more personally compatible) activities.

• Appleseed picked up a great new client, in the best possible way — initially referred by a colleague via Twitter, did a great job on a small but exciting project for them, and went ahead from there. I feel very hopeful about this relationship.

I still have the Icon of Steve pinned over my desk. He's going to stay there into the new year, asking me silently if I'm spending my limited time in the best way that I can. Under his gaze, I disengaged from the teaching job as gracefully as I could, and now it's all mine to decide what to do next. Here's hoping I do a better job this time.

And here's hoping for a successful, healthy and wealthy new year for you too.

On Saturday, December 10, I am going to travel to the FunSpot arcade in Laconia, New Hampshire, to celebrate the end of the semester. We visited it for the first time last year to celebrate Amy's graduation, and I still have a whole mess of tokens left over from that trip. It seems only appropriate to cycle them back in now that I too will soon have a schools-out event to cheer about. I plan to be there from lunchtime through dinnertime, more or less. If you have the means to visit a true mecca of digital games on that day, I invite you to join me.

Why this is cool: FunSpot (http://www.funspotnh.com/) is also the home of the American Classic Arcade Museum (http://www.classicarcademuseum.org/), caring curators of many coin-operated arcade games that they maintain on-site. As much as possible, the museum keeps these machines plugged in and playable, collecting tokens just like they did when they were brand new. These lucky games are having the happiest retirement they could hope for, and I wish to drop my remaining tokens into them. If you are standing nearby when I do this, I might be able to tell you weird trivia or personal anecdotes about the game at hand. (And where I can't, there are often signs and placards nearby that can fill it in.) It'll be great.

FunSpot also has a lot of pinball machines, which frankly are largely in crap condition, poor things; unlike the videogames, they have many moving parts that become increasingly irreplaceable as the years go by. But they're nice to see all plugged in and lit up anyway, even if their flippers aren't quite as strong they were in their youth.

And there's, like, bowling alleys and mini golf and an entire floor filled with skill games of the ticket-spewing variety, including a counter where a friendly person will eagerly exchange your won tickets for kewpie dolls and coffee mugs and Elbonian grey-market iPod knockoffs and so on. I'm not so much into these games but I live with at least one person who is, so there'll be that going on as well. And finally, there's a pizza parlor and a bar on-premesis, though I cannot speak to their quality since they were both closed for some reason the last time we were there.

Anyway, yeah. December 10.

I didn't decide overnight to back off the teaching gig. After sharing my concerns with the instructor who hired me, we redefined the role a bit and I decided to let it cruise in a probationary state before I made a final decision, remaining for the rest of the semester in any case. But then, within days of each other, two things happened that all but made my decision for me.

First, the excellent podcast Freakonomics Radio published the episode "The Upside of Quitting", about the solid but often obscure benefits of bailing as quickly as possible from a job (or career, or lifestyle) once it starts to fit badly. I remember exactly where I was walking once I heard the episode's topic, over my headphones; it meshed uncannily with my teaching situation, and gave me something to think about.

I was still thinking when Steve Jobs died. And all across my RSS feeds and my little corner of Twitter, countless very smart people eulogized him not merely by reflecting on his technological legacy, but by linking to his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, and quoting in particular this excerpt:

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice.

And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

Everything else is secondary.

(Full transcript of the address here.)

My outlook on life might be slightly less adversarial than Steve's was; I don't really see people actively trying to yoke me to their own dogmas, per se. But I do know of my own proclivity to enter into agreements and responsibilities that carry me away from what my heart knows is my right path, just because they're something new or — much worse — something less scary than what I ought to be doing. The quote resonated so deeply with me and my situation that its contemplation, with its great psychic weight from Jobs' own transformative death, brought me to tears.

That one photograph of Jobs — you know the one I'm talking about — is going to gel over the years into a real icon, and it won't represent Apple or iPads or whatnot so much as the attitude and philosophy that drove him, the most positive aspects of which he expressed in that address. Over time, you will see the photograph about as often as you'll see the photographs you think of when I say "Marilyn" or "Che", and it will carry the same level or power, the same amount of compressed symbolic payload.

The day of his passing, I pinned a printout of that photograph to the corkboard over my desk, and I expect it will stay there for a long time; perhaps one day I'll wish to replace it with something a little more permanent, more fitting for an object of meditation. I find the image's gaze and pose an irresistible invitation to consider what I'm doing, and weigh whether I'm really spending my limited time as well as I could be. And when the answer is "No", to find the courage to take the next step.

And, yes, it's happened once already.

The teaching job ended up a bad fit, and I decided several weeks ago that I'd wrap it at the end of this semester. I treasure the experience I have gained, and I leave the door open for future opportunities in this sphere, but this position in particular doesn't work well for me.

Some of this is general shock at re-entering the salaried life, even part-time, and finding surprise at how much I've grown apart from it since 2005. To read this makes me sound a little like a sniffing prima donna, but it's more an effect of how I've defining my own pace and attitude about work over the last several years. I don't fit so well anymore in the compartmentalized schedule that salaried work requires, something that seems obvious in retrospect but which I didn't consider beforehand. It would be a different story were I switching careers entirely, but I attempted this instead as a balancing act, and I find it doesn't work how I hoped it would.

For one thing, I hadn't foreseen how much I'd dislike commuting again, but I do. Reading and podcasts help take the edge off, but that's still two and a half hours a day burned up, like it or not. (The trip to campus takes between 45 and 60 minutes, but after a couple of harried early days, I find myself compelled to leave super-early as a buffer against unexpected subway failure, because showing up late for class is not an option.)

More to the point, I perform poorly with mixing my own work-pace with an externally enforced schedule. I find that I can't do much in the way of creative work (including Appleseed work) when I know that my time from noon through 6 is spoken for. Sometimes I can sneak some work in, but more often the entire work-day goes into supporting that day's 100-minute class meeting, and then I don't want to do anything else. As a bad side-effect, the two weekdays I have free therefore feel like days off, rather than days to cram full of Appleseed catch-up. I do my best at that just the same, but under a sort of internal protest that it's the weekend and I really should be decompressing with video games or something. Even though it's Thursday.

In balance, doing my best at the teaching job leaves scarce little time to run my business, and exactly zero time to pursue any other creative projects. This is why I have not made a single Gameshelf post since the semester began, and why I have attended almost no gatherings of the local game-studies and game-development groups. I balm any frustration about this by looking at the teaching as filling my creative-project slot, which does make sense — but that also provides an even stronger argument to draw the project to a close, rather than continue doing it indefinitely. (In this light, I do look forward to writing up my experience next month, including all the written class materials I developed; a contribution both to my successor in this position and to the world at large.)

Other problems are specific to this class, and the largest struck on day one. After I agreed to lead three weekly sections of 20 students each, the school decided to increase the cap of the popular class, so that I ended up with section sizes closer to 40. This makes for a very different, and I'd argue lesser, experience for both student and teacher, especially for a class that was supposed to be a highly interactive games lab. Once the honeymoon ended and the reality of the scaling problems I now faced dawned on me, I became upset enough to write a resignation letter before September ended, though I was willing to ride out the semester. So that's what I've been doing.

Before September, when I was very excited to start this job, I often said to friends "If I'm not terrible at it and I don't hate it, I'd consider a new career." Well, I don't think I'm terrible at teaching — the right proportion of students seem to be digging it, one teacher-pal who visited thought I was doing just fine, and the program is already inviting me to return to teach other classes. But it is a terrible fit. And while I certainly wouldn't say I hate the job, one close friend suggests that I do hate the fact of being wrong about how much I'd love it, which I'll allow.

So: all that. I've six more class meetings spread over the next three weeks, and then back to life. The last three months have felt like nine, just from the sheer amount of novel challenges they've held, and there ain't nuthin wrong with that.

Someone stole my laptop two weeks ago. With the help of the BackBlaze data backup service and some friends, I located it last week, after the thief had sold it to someone else. I told the police all this. I have it again. The thief remains at large, as far as I know.

The theft occurred the Wednesday before last at the Panera Bread on Huntington Avenue, near Northeastern University, while I was lunching before the class I teach there. I did all the stuff one is supposed to do in this situation, bought a replacement laptop (and bag), then carried on. I skip many details here so that I can get to the more interesting story of its recovery. (The fact of the theft is differently interesting, since I believe it to be the first blatant crime of this sort committed against me, and it deserves documenting. I hope to dedicate a separate post to it, later.)

To that end, I note here that I subscribe to the BackBlaze online backup service. While I took a financial hit from the laptop's loss, I did not suffer the devastation that would have come with losing years of work and data, because I pay BackBlaze a few dozen dollars per year to back all that stuff up elsewhere. A day after the theft, I had all my old working environment all set up on my brand new laptop. Weirdly, I found it hard to shake the feeling that I simply upgraded my computer on an impulse, and here I sat enjoying the results.

I hadn't considered the anti-theft implications of BackBlaze until the theft happened. To its credit, BackBlaze doesn't hide them; when you log in to recover your data, it presents you with obvious links to web pages on the topic of theft, and the ways that a victim might best use the tools now in front of them. For one thing, I could see the IP address that the thief was at when they popped the laptop open most recently -- the BackBlaze software connects to its remote servers several times a day in order to perform its backups, and that means it phones home the moment a laptop connects to the internet for the first time in a while, as was the case here.

That led to a spate of excitement. It was easy to see that the the IP belonged to a Comcast router somewhere in Boston. I asked Twitter for advice, and when some friends suggested I call Comcast and ask for the physical address associated with the router, a Comcast CSR (and Twitter trawler) politely let us know that they would only divulge this information to search-warranted police, so perhaps I should go talk to law first. I passed it along to the BPD detective on the case, who said that a single IP wasn't enough to write up a warrant, but invited me to keep watching and let him know about any future pings.

Then, nothing for nearly a week. I resigned myself to accepting that the laptop was lost, and hoped that the lack of any further pings meant that the thief had wiped the hard drive prior to flipping the machine on Craig's List or whatnot. I had changed all my passwords days before, of course, and had my clients change theirs as appropriate, but I knew that it was most likely that the thief hadn't bothered to dig through my data anyway; selling hardware is a much easier task for a typical street-crook than identity theft and other informational black-hattery. So, I felt safe enough, and was ready to move on.

The turnaround came when I sat down last week to write the original draft of this post. I wanted to brain-dump about the theft, which I suspected was bothering me more than I was allowing myself to let on. After writing a couple of sentences, I decided to check with BackBlaze one last time just to confirm that the machine hadn't emitted a peep since that one yelp, the day after the theft. Had I found what I expected, I would have started the process of shutting down that BackBlaze account and setting up a new one for my new machine.

Surprise: the most recent ping had come just the evening before. I swore, then, because it meant that the thief had not simply wiped my hard drive, as I had hoped he had. Taking the advice of that BackBlaze webpage about theft, though, I took a look at the most recently backed-up files, and gasped. There was a new user directory named "leo", and it was full of documents. Judging by the filenames, they looked like college admission forms and homework.

I immediately started crowing about this on Twitter and a couple of chat rooms I hang out in. My friends all agreed that was something else, all right, now could I please hurry up and download the files so that we could start to dig through them?

Looking through documents and sifting through web-history files, I teased out the user's name, email address, and other stuff, and my friends helped confirm and corroborate this information by scouring the web while I worked. Quickly, a profile of the user emerged. A Boston resident, she is an 18-year-old mother of an infant son. Perhaps just married, since her Gmail address has a different surname, but her current name came up on new-mother web forums. She plans to raise her son while starting down the path towards a college degree, and the laptop clearly played an important role in this plan.

(We knew her age because one of us found a 2007 feature photo of her from a local news website. The caption used her old name and said she was 14. And I know her combined academic and parenting plans because she wrote about them as a homework assignment.)

You can see how, at this point, I started feeling bad in entirely new ways about the theft. This young woman clearly wasn't a thief (though perhaps she was a bit dopey to buy hot merchandise), and wanted to use the laptop to help improve her station in life, as well as her tiny son's. Part of me just wanted to let it go entirely at this point, but it seemed objectively incorrect to just sit on this information. I also thought of that laptop thief on the large, and how I'd like to see him caught.

When I updated the detective the next morning with the results of our research, and he said "don't worry, we'll charge her with acquiring stolen property unless she surrenders it," I felt kind of heartbroken. With my nice new computer, I didn't really care about the old computer anymore, and I hated the thought of the police showing up at this woman's door to take away her computer -- a totem of a more hopeful future -- under threat of arrest. I felt like I'd made an infernal compact, and started up something beyond my control that was now going to go out and hurt people in my name. But I didn't make any effort to reverse it, because the other options didn't seem much better.

The student had a helpfully unique name (which did not resemble "leo" in any way), and within hours the cops had repossessed the laptop. According to the police report, the student's mother told of how she herself had bought the laptop from some dude at a local pizzeria, thinking it a well-timed gift for her ambitious daughter. The detective also found it funny how quickly the mom handed over the laptop as soon as two officers visited -- in all likelihood, she was under no illusions as to its likely origin, but (just like the police and me) hadn't expected it to call home for help.

When I visited the police station on Saturday to pick the laptop up, I gave the detective, at his request, a demonstration as to what BackBlaze was and how it had helped us recover the machine. At this point, I discovered that the thief had erased my user account, but had not wiped the system. This had allowed BackBlaze, which installs itself at the system level, to continue running.

The detective assured me that the investigation to the thief's identity would continue -- they still had some security-camera footage from the Panera Bread to go over -- though he was careful to not suggest that it would result in an arrest. He also passed along a message from the mother to me, a request that I please erase her kid's data once I got it back. And that was that. I don't expect to hear any more about this case… though further surprises, I suppose, wouldn't surprise me.

At this point, I had two laptops, one nicer and newer than the other. I liked the idea, which several friends also suggested, of offering to legitimately sell the laptop back to the poor student caught in the middle of this mess, once the dust had settled. But after a friend pointed out that I could return the new laptop to the Apple Store for a full refund -- Apple has a two-week return policy on this stuff -- I came to find that option irresistible, after sleeping on it and talking it over with others. It would peel the unexpected charge of $1,199 plus tax off my credit card, already suffering from a tough year. While I liked the idea of being magnanimous, it was just too hard to refuse this opportunity for personal recovery. So I visited the Apple Store Monday, and they took the laptop back with no hassle.

"Oh!" said the clerk at the store, when I told her why I was returning the machine. "Wow, that's great -- I'm really happy you got it back!"

"Thanks," I said.

Posting this here for the sake of future google-searchers; the discussions I found on the Apple support fora didn't help much.

TL;DR: Tether your phone to your iTunes machine. In iTunes, click your phone's icon. Click the 'Podcasts' tab. Note the "Include Episodes from Playlists" checkbox list, which I do not believe existed before iOS 5. Adjust its values needed, then hit 'Sync'. Boom.

Background: I use the "Music" (neé "iPod") functionality of my iPhone mainly to listen to the most recent episodes of my favorite podcasts while I commute, exercise, wash dishes, and so on. With iOS versions 2 through 4, I found that a great way to accomplish this involved creating a Smart Playlist in iTunes, instructing it to fill itself up with my most recent unplayed podcast episodes. I'd then ask it to always sync this playlist with my phone when it was able, et voila: a fresh batch of new podcasts after every sync.

This stopped working with iOS 5. I had noticed that while the playlist continued to show up on my phone, it was always empty after every sync, even if it was full of the correct new podcast files on my desktop machine's iTunes.

Solution: Unless I'm mistaken -- I didn't empirically document every step of my research, here -- the solution lies with a new checkbox list labeled "Include Episodes from Playlists". You can find this in iTunes, under the "Podcasts" tab, while your iPhone is connected to your computer and selected in iTunes.

If you were having the same problems as I, then you'll discover that your podcast playlist is unchecked. Check it, then sync again.

Everything should now work as you remember. Enjoy!

I last week accepted a part-time position at Northeastern University, teaching a lab section attached to Games & Society, an intro-to-game-studies class taught by Brian Sullivan. I'm so far signed on just to handle the fall semester, but if I'm not terrible at it and I don't hate it, I'll likely do more afterwards.

Teaching this lab involves guiding groups of students through the play of a by-the-syllabus game (which may be a tabletop game or a videogame), and then gathering as a class to discuss it. As with many other games-studies classes in universities, it's only a year or two old, so its structure and content are rather malleable; while I'll have the materials from past semesters, others in the program have made it clear that I can help reshape it this fall, should I wish.

While I fully expect this to represent a significant time investment -- I've also agreed to help grade papers from Brian's class -- the pay doesn't really match, so I've no plans to change my position or workload at Appleseed. I chose to leap at this opportunity because even though doing a good job writing software makes me feel awesome (and puts money in the bank), my real passion is with games, and the study thereof. I have no reservations accepting an adjunct's stipend in order to finally, finally become a paid member of the game-scholar community, even just an entry-level one. I had thought last year that when this moment arrived, it would be via my selling an article or essay to some publication. I have no complaints about the surprising form it ended up taking.

This is also me backing down from my brief fling with iOS game development from a couple of months ago. While that's a topic I remain interested in, there's just no way I can pursue that, Appleseed, and now teaching without doing a bad job at probably all of them. I had to put one of them away, and sadly, the iOS project was the obvious choice: it offers no guaranteed income, and represents a much weaker expression of my passion to work in game studies than the NEU opportunity does.

I feel really happy about this, and hope that it will give me the opportunity, in time, to grant more attention to my own game-studies pursuits. I'd love to return to making mature and intelligent videos about games, for one thing. I have pipe dreams of new video series, but have lacked the backing, both resource-wise and spiritually. This opportunity might help change that, down the road. We'll see.

mmcirvin and

hrafn note in comments on my previous post, Google has been acting capriciously about perceived TOS violations involving names. If they happen to see a name they find fishy -- or that fails a regex, or that gets tattled on by another user -- they immediately lock that user out of their account with no way to get at their data until Google wills them back in.

(I'm alarmed to wonder how deep this lockout goes, thinking of the case of this 10-year-old who permanently lost access to all his Gmail after filling in a Google+ sign-up form with his honest age -- to the shock of his parents, who approved of his joining them online. But I expect there'd be an even louder freakout if lots of people were losing their email archives en masse, so I read this as a tangential issue.)

Weak-willed and prone to distraction, I'm not the sort to leave a service I'm enjoying in protest (at least not very quickly). But I find the argument that real-name use is a privilege of those with privilege both novel and compelling, and Google's position against it troubling. It also makes me belatedly realize that Google's celebrated decision to let Plus users make their "Gender" field private is less helpful to those whose truenames -- which, according to Google, they are required to use and make public -- signify their gender.

Bleh. We'll see. I really am going to have egg on my face if I end up disgusted with Google+; this'll be the Nth stupid social thing I've allowed myself to flip out over and spam my friends about, only to wonder weeks later where all the shiny went. The only social networks I haven't felt this way over are Twitter and LiveJournal, and I note that in both cases I very gradually figured out why they were cool and how they could work for me.

Where I am on the web these days:

Still posting like dokken to Twitter, but find myself warming to Google+ as well. In many ways it does everything that LiveJournal was doing a decade ago, but with a far friendlier UI. Most everyone I know seems to be piling on in, too. It seems the best candidate for carrying LJ's torch forward.

Here's me on Google+. Feel free to encircle me as you will.

I have all but abandoned my Facebook account, and am likely to delete it later this year. I actively dislike Facebook for a number of reasons, privacy perhaps the least of them -- I find their attitude towards both their users and the rest of the internet cynical, exploitative and exasperating. Even if we don't wish to hang a halo on Google, their own new social network has already demonstrated their willingness and ability to be far better than Facebook in all these ways. I believe they want to deliver a service that's attractive and good for both Google and their users, and not just themselves.

I discovered last month that I created a tumblr four years ago and forgot about it. I started warming to it again, going so far as to make a long, experimental post to it. But with Google+ on the scene, I'll probably let it lie fallow again.

Hello, lovely network:

Would anyone be able to assist me in finding a good real estate agent, to help my parents sell their apartment house in central Maine?

This is the property in question: http://57highstreet.com

Why yes, I have been assisting them in setting up an internet presence! But I know that just slapping up webpage somewhere isn't going to make anyone show up at their door with a half-a-mil check. So, I'm hoping to hook them up with a decent professional, and have their permission to introduce them to someone with a good reputation.

I know so little about how real estate agents operate that I don't know if (in 2011) they're necessarily bound to their respective local geographies. So I dunno if I should be restricting my search to agents physically located in central Maine, or if I can search more broadly. (And, more to the point, search local-to-me.)

It's trivial to find directories of agents on the web, but I hope to find a referral -- or, failing that, a yelp-esque directory of professionals that invites client reviews. After some 50 years of property trading, my parents are actually deeply cynical about working for anyone else, and they trust me to connect them to someone better than a dart thrown at a phonebook. (Which is pretty much the best that they could do, having no internet access themselves.)

Any pointers would be deeply appreciated!

Hello my friends,

I haven't posted for a long time, for reasons that are not interesting. Today I am taking a sick day, so why not break habit and take stock?

First of all,

classicaljunkie and I will be going to Origins this year. Will we be seing any of you there?

Business: As I've written before, Appleseed has wanted to grow as a business, almost since I founded it more than three years ago. This year I decided to let it play out and see what happens. In April I met with lovely and generous

dictator555 for business advice, and made the beginnings of a plan. I would take on more of a management role in Appleseed, delegating more client work to my subcontractors, and spending more of my own time in business development and professional growth.

Under the continued guidance of the lovely and far too patient

classicaljunkie, I've been working eight-hour days since then, between management and billable hacking. I didn't expect this, at the start, but in retrospect it seems correct. Changing course is expensive, and it feels right that it'll take extra effort for a while. If I am still bound to working this hard five days a week a few months from now, I may wish to re-examine my decisions, but I'm all right with it for now.

One concern is that I haven't really started bizdev yet. But for good reason: later in April I learned of a work opportunity via an acquaintance on Twitter, a short-term gig involving mobile web development and HTML5. I was very hungry for more professional experience in these topics, and since the timing had the quality of a planetary alignment, I jumped on it. And so that spoke for my next few weeks! I only this morning put the resulting check in the bank, and perhaps more importantly have scored a new client who loves what I did and is eager to give us more work.

The whole adventure was absolutely worth the time and effort, but in the meantime Appleseed still has a static website that says "Copyright 2008" on it. I shut the blog off ages ago because I hadn't been posting to it enough, and turned of our poorly-tuned AdWords campaign as well. All this must change if I'm serious about business development, and it'll take a lot of work.

I would still like to move more into a product-based business, somehow. This has been a dream for a long, long time. I still want to make and sell games! Another potential partnership opportunity has popped up in this field, the latest since "Project X" died on the IP-rights-negotiation table two years ago. This one takes place on a platform far more relevant to the games I like than the Xbox. Yes, stop the presses, jmac is all excited about another computery game project. Well, yes. I'm going to keep doing this over and over until I finally do it right, and then I'll do it some more.

And, yes, I've been blogging at the Gameshelf a lot, albeit in fits and starts. I always love writing, but I just can't seem to make a regular habit of it. No, that's not quite right: I've been writing daily for months, but I'm starting to believe that I can only have at most a single target at a time. I'll write a lot of Gameshelf posts until I need to switch to writing a lot of business mail for several days, during which I write no blog posts. And very lately I've started to lay the groundwork for my next work of interactive fiction, and that fills up my one slot very neatly, too.

Could it be that I'm just more attuned for project-based work than the continual attention that daily blog updates demand? So long as I actually keep shipping, that's not really something to get sad about...

Sunday evening I "launched" a project I've been quietly focusing on for a few weeks: the shutdown and dissolution of Volity Games. The fact of it's been an open secret for a little while, especially to those closer to the company. But the farewell page (with text written by Zarf) finally went up on Sunday night, replacing all Volity and Planbeast web content.

The Volity Network games -- Fluxx and Werewolf and all that -- are all taken down and packed away as well. I saw that someone was playing a game of Fluxx right up at the very end. I took a screenshot before updating the DNS records and then pulling all the game servers down.[1]

When it was all done, I was surprised to find myself feeling bone-deep tired, though it was only 8 PM.

This was, finally, the public acknowledgment that this project that obsessed me and consumed so much of my life from 2001 through 2007 is essentially dead.[2] And though it's a relief to put it behind me, and though I can point with pride at the good work that went into it, it's unavoidably painful and saddening just the same.

It's also confirming that it was a total failure as a business, and that the financial investment that our friends put in years ago will never see any returns worth mentioning. (We broke the news to the investors weeks ago, in email. Number of surprised responses we received: zero.)

Every member of the core Volity team has gone on to more successful projects, with Zarf and I both getting involved in much saner-scaled game work, shipping a lot of neat stuff with more to come. And honestly, I don't have much love left for Volity, which I will always regard as a nadir of nerdism for me, one I spent far too long in. And we probably should have shut the company down two years ago, honestly.

But it still hurts to see it go. (Where by "see it go" I mean "bury a shovel in it." Sigh. Enough.)

[1] The volity.net jabber servers continue to run (on a different machine), for those what care.

[2] At least one person I know hopes to keep Volity's (significant) open-source portions alive and moving forward. I honestly think that's awesome and with them luck. But just the same, I don't plan on being involved in any significant way.

The LiveJournal/DreamWidth Coprosperity Sphere still rocks the hizzle when it comes to getting stuff done locally. After failing to divest myself of "The Monolith" after a year of occasional posts to the

prog LJ, to Craig's List, and to Freecycle, a single post to

davis_square on Saturday did the trick. I got two email enquiries almost immediately, the first of which resulted in a successful haul-away just a few hours ago.

What also helped was a helping of focus I applied to this project, spending Friday night dragging the Monolith around and applying all my set-dressing skills to shoot the two extraordinarily contrived photographs found on that post, improvising props out of various objects from around the house. Compare them to the bland photo I took two summers ago. I can sell an image when I choose to put my back into it, I think!

I will also take this opportunity to say that I don't really understand quite how HDR photography works -- I haven't read about it outside of the paragraph that my iPhone's manual devotes to it -- but its results are pretty damned magical.

And then no fewer than three Monolith owners, past and present (I didn't know until recently that it has a twin, owned by the twin brother of the friend who gave it to me!) left comments on that post, reminiscing about this most unusual piece of furniture and answering other petitioners' questions. I couldn't ask for anything more than that.

People can be awesome about the silliest things.

Now that we come to it, I say goodbye to the monolith with a touch of melancholy. I love giving things away, but this was a lot of... a lot of raw mass to give away all at once, really, and the fact I was doing so not for my usual selfish reasons but to promote domestic tranquility (read:

classicaljunkie hated its particle-board guts) made its departure a little sad for me. But I'm happy I managed to make a memorable event out of it, and even a successful little art project. That's a fair trade!

When I was first learning Linux and personal system administration a dozen years ago, I was taught the importance of security. However, at the time it seemed something like the importance of knowing a fire drill. We all agreed that the threat was real, but at the same time it had the air of a bogey-man story: nebulous and unlikely. And so for a long time I ran my public servers -- jmac.org and its related interests -- without thinking about any of that stuff too hard. I always use solid passwords just like I always lock my front door behind me, and I left it at that.

I think the world's changed since then. As far as I can tell, it's the case now that all computers visible to the public internet are under constant attack. If your machine has a public IP address, then I can guarantee you that throughout the day, it's getting continually peppered with network traffic from across the globe whose only purpose is probing it for security flaws. Imagine that every time you approach your home or your car, you have to elbow your way through a thin but inevitable crowd of characters tapping at the doors and windows, looking for a crack they can jimmy open and slip through. As far as I can tell, that's how it is now with every computer on the internet. Every single one, at all times.

This traffic is entirely malicious, though it probably doesn't give a shit about you or your data; it just wants to steal your computing resources to further its own ends. It might be the stereotypical maladjusted nerd-boy building a botnet to vanquish his foes in Black Ops by crushing their Xboxes under a network-traffic firehose. My understanding, though, is that it's increasingly likely to be the undertaking of organized criminals, tending to the always-lucrative ~~SEO~~ spam-generation market. Or, geez, at this point I fully expect that several governments and NGOs are playing, too, creating weaponized networks of 0wned personal computers for god knows what, heedless of what country they actually reside in.

I write all this because I've been having some frustrating issues with my own server over the last couple of months. There's a particular, very popular web technology I'd like to use[1], but literally within minutes of my installing the software in question I find my machine enthralled, running scripts by some teenager to knock over a rival's IRC server, or by some 21st-century entrepreneur to smear viagra ads all over someone else's blog. Removing the software would make this stop; re-installing it would re-zombify the server, but in an entirely new way and from a wholly different aggressor. Only today did I start making inroads on why this was happening[2], and I knock on wood that I have actually fixed it for now.

The machine has already been fully compromised once, just last summer; I had to move everything to a new server. It took a long time and I lost stuff in the process, as one always loses things during a move. With the help of friends wiser than I about such things, I set up the new server to be harder to attack than the last one. And still the orcs come, and still I worry that they might have breached the walls yet again.

I don't know what I'll do if they did. I don't want to have to set aside two weekends or more every year to rebuild the machine for the Nth time, just so it can be swamped by agents of the pharmaceutical-selling mafiosos du jour.

Maybe running a personal Linux server just isn't a good idea any more. If so, I literally don't know what I ought to do instead. I expect that there is an answer, and I expect that it would involve giving up a lot of the freedom that I enjoy from running my own Linux server with my own root account. And that would make me awfully sad.

[1] Wordpress, and hence PHP.

[2] The default php.ini file that Debian installs is surprisingly insecure, to the point that it even states at the top of the file that it's too insecure to run in a production environment. Yes, I am deserving of your penguin-waving scorn for installing software without total awareness of every effect it would have on my machine's security, sure. I'm still surprised and disappointed that Debian, of all organizations, would take this stance.

This must be a sort of Saturn Return year for our entire ideological group.

Harper's Magazine responds to a question from me.

My very first Mac App Store rec is Romain Piveteau's LiveQuartz, a simple and elegant image editor. It features all the basic image-manipulation verbs you'd expect, as well as support for layers and filters, and its UI is very polished and pleasant to work with. I used LiveQuartz to create most of the images used in my various Gameshelf essays and videos over the last couple of years.

Its brand-new App Store version costs 99 cents this week, after which it inflates to its usual $10 price. In either case, Piveteau says that all future updates will be free to paid users. If you, like me, are a Mac user with an occasional need to edit 2D images using only the most common 5 percent of Photoshop's (or GIMP's) enormous featureset, then this would be a wise investment of a dollar for you.

The flights home Wednesday were fine. The first leg was indeed on a zippy little Embraer jet, small enough that I couldn't plant both my feet flat when sitting due to fuselage curvature. And yet, I was cool the whole way over. The crosswinds near the ground greeted the little plane with some playful buffeting as it prepared to land in Milwaukee, and I nearly laughed at the sensation.

Second leg actually gave me more jitters because even though we were on a big fat Airbus. It was moderately bumpy ride for the first hour or so, and it was too dark and cloudy outside to visually recenter myself. But then, just as the NOAA turbulence report predicted, it cleared away completely at around the halfway point. And then, magically, Chuck Jones' The Grinch Who Stole Christmas appeared on the seat-back displays! I plugged my headphones in and I tell you, this time I really did laugh. On an airplane! Several times, and not the hysterical kind, either. This, I would have not predicted.

In retrospect, the thing that has scared me the most about BOS landings has been the descending U-turn over the ocean that flights coming in from the west must often (always?) perform. Back when my I let my caveman-brain run unchecked during plane flights, even when this maneuver involved no turbulence, it was still terrifying. Ugh ugh! Ground went away! Water getting closer! Plane tipping over! Flee!! But this time I rode it down with a smile on my face (though I admit I craned my neck to keep the beloved twinkling city lights in view while we banked).

The fallout of all this is that I find my great personal success on these four flights the most memorable part of this vacation, and a source of honest pride on a personal demon subdued, if not utterly conquered. While I don't have reason to expect I'll ever really look forward to plane trips, I think I'm done being mortally terrified of flight. So, that's good!

As a bonus, enjoy this brief, silly Twitter conversation that happened between myself, my friend Jon, and Milwaukee's General Mitchell airport. MKE's message is what I woke up to find the morning after the flight, and it really was like a grown-up(?) version of getting a pilot-wings pin. I was a flyer, once again.

http://twitter.com/#!/JmacDotOrg/status/20285761140035584
http://twitter.com/#!/roody_yogurt/status/20288326221168641
http://twitter.com/#!/MitchellAirport/status/20489212797124608

Today's itinerary has us flying an ickle plane from Columbus to Milwaukee (yes, not quite the right direction), and then a nice big jet for three hours back to Boston.

I'm both amused and frustrated that these four plane fights seem like three progressively more difficult challenges for an aviophobe, with the plane shrinking in size (and therefore more prone to turbulence) each time, followed by a boss battle where I get to ride a larger plane again but the total flight time is about the same as the previous three flights added together. There's even a sense of nemesis with the very last bit, since my two previous landings at windy, peninsular BOS were memorably scary (albeit on board smaller planes). And then I'll be home, and maybe leveled up...?

Not boarding for another five hours or so. I've eaten breakfast and had my one allowed coffee (which might be putting me at my chemical-nervousness peak right now). Time to take one more walk around suburban Dublin.

Landed in Columbus last night, via Philadelphia. Early critical reviews suggest I did a very good job as an air passenger, significantly exceeding all expectations based on past performance.

See my Twitter feed from yesterday for the blow-by-blow, plus some postmortem commentary. Somehow the flight on the smaller jet between PHL and CMH was honestly one of the smoothest plane trips I've ever had, maybe the smoothest on a sub-747 airplane. We flew in a straight line over the gently snowing clouds for a full hour, surrounded by a pitch black sky and more stars than I've seen since I was in college. (And it reminded me how much I'd like to do some proper stargazing again, sometime.)

Things I did differently, between yesterday's flights and previous ones:

* Used LJ and Twitter as I did. A stylish pilot-wings pin from me to all who sent along their good thoughts; you all helped me tremendously.

• Read (several weeks ago) Captain Stacey Chance's online multimedia essays for aviophobes preparing to fly. Despite its Web 0.9 layout, its frequent dips into inspirational-poster corniness, and its conclusion in a pitch for books and CDs by the good captain, it contains what was for me a small wealth of great advice. I found that, when things got juddery on the plane and I started getting nervous, thinking on these lessons calmed me down immediately.

My favorite single takeaway from "Capt. Stacey" is that, to an airplane moving at typical speed, the air rushing past "feels" like a much thicker fluid that it usually does to us groundlings. In the past, I'd try to think of the plane like a great ship on the sea, but now I had a much better metaphor: it was like a submarine! It wasn't skimming atop the medium that always threatened to swallow and destroy it; it was part of it, surrendered to it utterly, and therefore its master. Such an elegant and beautiful image.

So when the plane passed through turbulence and my hindbrain said Ugh! Plane shaking! Wind trying to kill us! Flee!, I would picture this image. The new perspective really took the edge off of the fear.

• Consumed no coffee -- or anything else caffeinated -- beyond my wake-up cup. A lesser challenge than usual, because my body was too distracted by the stress of travel to cry out for its afternoon dosage.

(And I allowed myself two and a half glasses of wine at the dinner party, but my flight-nervousness is so sobering that it's hard to tell whether it had any effect. Definitely didn't hurt, though.)

• Used the NOAA's live turbulence charts to see what we could expect to fly through. This was on

mr_choronzon's advice, and it really did help. It added a little bit of dread to see some orange-colored moderate turbulence in our flight path, but this ended up being a fair price to pay for losing the surprise and confusion of encountering it unexpectedly.

• Sat beside

classicaljunkie the whole time. Yes, I did this last year as well, but this year we had reason to mutually support each other: on the first leg she was really stressed out by all the children on board, something that doesn't perturb me so much. Worst was the toddler who tried to relieve his holiday hyperactivity by bashing at her seat-back with his shiny new Tonka truck while singing his very own Christmas song into her ear. Poor Amy! So it was nice to be able to lend her some support right back. (The kid situation was awful enough to move the leggings-and-Uggs-clad teenager sitting on Amy's other side to join us in hushed commiseration.)

• When we banked, I could pull up my iPhone's compass and watch as our heading changed and then restabilized. Where my hindbrain could before cry Ugh! Plane is drooping out of sky! Flee!, I could now wash the whole system with undeniable visual evidence that this was happening for a good reason. And by god this helped shut the damned caveman up.

• I learned a new mantra from a TED Talk that Ze Frank gave recently. (The particular story, and eventually the song, begins at 14:20.) I have used mantras on planes since I first became afraid of flying, and they have evolved from genuine prayers to God for safety to repetitions of songs I like. I found this one effective because of the story of community behind it -- I really am a sap for stories like this -- and it tied in thematically with how I leaned on y'all for support, too.

While I can't say I'm looking forward to the flight back -- I haven't regained my long-lost ability to read while in-flight yet, for example -- I'm not in bring-me-my-brown-pants mode about it either.

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A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

That's awful high, Jason. That's awful high.

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