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

So, a lot's been going on. Good things!

I've been playing a lot of role-playing games lately. I hosted a game of The Shab Al-Hiri Roach a couple of weekends ago, and yesterday I helped classicaljunkie host a play-through of The Immortal Murders to celebrate her birthday. In both cases I found that I'm capable of playing storytelling RPGs, but also found it a draining activity rather than an energizing one. However, I'm not sure how much of that was due to the act of playing and how much was from the additional stress of hosting.

I prefer narrating to literal role-playing, and it was interesting to discover the difference between the two. (Roach, a tabletop game, allows both styles. Immortal Murders is more like a LARP, so either you're role-playing or you're not playing at all.) With both styles, though, I felt on-edge and tense the whole time my character was on the scene, like I need to be ready to jump in at any moment. After only a couple of hours of this, I was pretty exhausted. Compare to a board game, with its regular cycle of high and low periods that I can ride for many hours (if the game is compelling enough). It could be that I'm just not playing right.

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The Gameshelf shoot went great, even though I'm currently having a frustrating time importing the footage. I didn't think to clean the tape heads of the borrowed SCAT cameras - which many people use - before using them. As a result, the tapes have some schmutz on them, and every time Final Cut encounters such a blotch, it throws up its hands (as well as a modal dialog box) and saves the import-so-far to a file. There's nothing to do at this point except fast forward the tape a bit and pick it up from there, hoping that nothing juicy got skipped over. It also results in lots of smaller files to comb through versus a few long ones. This makes an already time-consumig task even longer. But I'll get through it.

This will be a fanatstic episode, but I think it's destined to be an anomaly among Gameshelfs... a "special" that I wanted to do specifically because it's so radically different than anything we've done so far, and it seemed like exactly what I personally needed to tackle in order to get into the show again. After this, we have to start getting disciplined about the show's format, enough so that planning, shooting and editing the episodes can maybe happen with some goddamn regularity for once. I have come to the conclusion the the show will never be really popular if it only comes out a couple times a year (if that).

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I hope to open the jmac.org video store this week, where I will sell DVDs of The Gameshelf and Jmac's Arcade. I have high hopes for this. Even a handful of sales would help cover my materials costs of recent Gameshelf-related adventures. It would also serve as a huge encouragement to me to produce more of both, and in theory would also serve to promote the shows to a wider audience. The presence of the DVDs will probably get me to promote the shows more aggressively, at any rate. We'll see.

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I'm rather buried in Appleseed work. I lost the subcontractor I was working with just as I picked up a new small job in May, leaving me with four tasks all on my own plate. This is too many. I've been dealing with these best as I can, and this includes starting the process of bringing in new help. I am hopeful about this.

I love running the business. For all my crazy project ideas it's still the only enterprise of mine that brings in revenues, so I shouldn't shy away from the idea of letting it grow. Honestly, a large part of me is reluctant to invest much energy into growing Appleseed beyond just-me. This is the part that considers it my "day job", with a scoff. It's the same part that fuels my eagerness to work on my nuttier entrepreneurial projects, which I spent most of last year and the start of this year chasing at full throttle, and it's not used to being told to shut up for a bit.

I owe myself another period of reckoning. 2007's four-pillar system worked well and it's time to take stock and see what I really want to be doing now. The answer, I suspect, will be different from last year, or the year before that. I can only hope that the answer will fit better than it has in the past.

[Crossposted from Appleseed Blog]

While I do almost all of my work - and maybe a little too much of my play - on a MacBook laptop, I keep an older desktop computer in my office for tasks that are better left to sessile machines. I seldom use it interactively, though, and its display - balanced on the back edge of my desk - usually shows only whichever screensaver has most recently caught my fancy. (Was running SurveillanceSaver for a long time, but lately have favored HAL-9000.)

Recently, I discovered, quite by accident, a new use for this arrangement that may permanently improve the way I work. For a project I'm working on, I had reason to comb through some video footage that existed only on one of this machine's two hard drives. It was a time-consuming task, so inevitably the usual forest of Twitter clients and Gmail windows and RSS feed-readers and such sprouted up as I worked. (How strange, yes, as if by magic.) Presently I completed by task and switched back to my laptop, but decided that I liked how all the happy little info-stream windows looked on the larger display, so left them there.

After getting back to work, I quickly realized that the constant Bing! New email and Bong! new tweets and Doink! new news articles interruptions I had going on my laptop were now entirely redundant, as these same activities were also evident on the screen in the background. My background in physical space, recall, running on a separate computer.

Experimentally, I turned off all my laptop's many new-event notifiers. I found myself in a new place: the streams were still present, and I continued to stay current with the outside world, but the sense of constant interruption had vanished.

Now, when I need a micro-break, I need only cast my eyes up at my other display and see what's changed. I do this often enough that I never fall behind; the crucial bit is that I decide when I'm ready to take another sip from my personal external-info fountain, rather than have it splash me in the face while I'm in the middle of a thought.

I realize this exact solution isn't something that everyone can implement, since not everyone happens to have the same computing setup I do. But I do recommend that fellow information workers who share the need to be continuously plugged in, but also feel the constant low-level stress of continuous, clangorous interruptions, re-invent this solution in whatever way works for them. I'm hopeful that, in a small but crucial way, it's changed my life for the better.

A client of mine is looking for some help on a new project that is all Java Struts. This would be a contract-work gig. I have worked extensively with this client in the past, and can speak for their excellence. Can I speak for yours?

If I know who you are, and if this sounds interesting to you, send me an email / comment / IM / wev.

I kind of don't know why I'm bothering to look at Craigslist "computer gigs" posts. Ninety-five percent of them fall into these formats:

• I'm looking for an "intern" to work 20 hours a week on this project. I have many shiny bottlecaps I can pay you with. Great for college students!

• Here is a somewhat reasonable request for a piece of custom software. Please submit your bid. Not looking to spend more than $50.

• MY COMPUTER BREOK I PUT THE CABLE IN AND THE MAN SAID IT WORK OK BUT IT IS BLANK HOW LONG TO FIX

Anyway, this is why I launched a Google Adwords campaign for Appleseed yesterday...

I've been getting a lot of calls from tech recruiters. One caught me yesterday morning while I was still sipping coffee, and before I'd gotten started with anything important, and so I chatted with him for a few minutes. I learned that he found me by just Googling a few key terms, which led him to my resume on jmac.org. When I told him I wasn't available for work he joke-groaned with disappointment because I looked so perfect for the job. This is all a nice ego boost, but at the same time I don't need the extra interruptions, so I've just updated my resume with a mind to deflect them.

Was of two minds about splitting my most recent consulting period into two entries, with the formation of Appleseed as the split-point, but decided to go with a single entry and making it clear in the summary that I sell my expertise through the company now.

While I was in there I updated the jmac.org about page, which still had a lot of pre-millenial cruft on it. The opening paragraph used to suggest that my entire online presence was on jmac.org, when in fact it's been spread across a wide cloud of domains, just like with everyone else, for years now. I only use the domain for miscellany that doesn't fit anywhere else, now. So it says that now. Also admitted that I'm now using a commercial hosting service, after eight years of the server equivalent of couch-surfing.

On Monday daerr and cthulhia joined me for a larkish lunch at Diva. The bill was covered by a Ameriprise, a big ol' financial-consulting outfit who sponsors local put-your-business-card-in-the-bucket-and-get-a-free-lunch dealies. I allowed them to reel me into a free consultation later in the week, on the why-not principle.

That was this afternoon. I enjoyed tripping out to Charlestown for it; don't have reason to go there much. Also enjoyed talking to them and seeing how my current situation fit into their comparative chart of financial hairinesses. Basically "Low Complexity" on all fronts, but naturally they were quite pleased to offer me a year of consulting for their lowest annual fee, and how did starting first thing Monday morning sound?

After I got home, classicaljunkie, who is, uh, a professional financial consultant hey, wait a minute suggested that I have better things to spend my money on, seeing as how I have little enough of it as it is, and my most immediate targets (mostly debt-related) are very well defined, and large enough that any finanical plan rather writes itself for the immediate future. So I just sent em an email telling them no, thanks. Maybe when I get hairier.

I have to say, it was also good, as an independent consultant, to objectively observe a couple of experienced and besuited consultants on their home turf pitching at me. The conclusion of the meeting was almost literally "So, do you want to hire us?" "I'll have to think about it." "Of course. How's Monday?" "Okay." Very nice.

It's been a little over a year since I signed my first truly independent work contract. I continue to feel like I've solved "work". I don't think I'll ever need to go job-hunting again. Unlike every other job I've had since graduating college, I'm not bored after a year of it, and I don't foresee that ever changing.

(Of course, in a real sense I am in fact looking for work all the time, now. But there ends up being a world of difference between attracting customers and seeking employers, as far as their respective outcomes go. It has everything to do with who controls you.)

Part of me just wants to embrace this evolved sense of work completely, invest some spare cycles into the next potential leap forward (Project X), and just let go of everything else for now. But I don't wanna, so instead I just procrastinate, by putting more time into Appleseed or X. Well, that could be a lot worse.

And X is going fine, thanks for asking. I am a little bummed that both my career and my biggest sub-project both deal with computer programming right now; though the projects are quite different the overall context is kind of monotonous. X is finite, though; the software itself has well-defined goals, and then it will go through a pass/fail submission process, which I hope to hit in around ten more weeks. If it fails, it fails, and if it passes, everything will change. But let's deal with that when we come to it.

After a week of consultation and thought, I've decided to pursue "Project X" at full tilt. This involves me creating a prototype game for the XBox 360 and then pitching it at Microsoft, as a candidate for their "XBox Live Arcade" service of smaller, downloadable games. Things have aligned in such a way that not doing this right now would seem very foolish. Over the last few weeks, and much faster than I anticipated, I got Microsoft's ear, and I earned the support of the rights-holders of the game I wish to adapt. I have the skills, and the time to do it. OK: let's do this, then.

Success, which looks not impossible, spells a significant amount of prestige and passive income. Yes this turf looks a bit familiar. Already the project is reminding me of writing the books, except that I'll actually enjoy the work, and the checks will be bigger. Much bigger, if everything falls out the way I hope, and I have good reason to believe that it really can. I mean, actual market research, with hard numbers. Good stuff.

I shall continue to avoid describing the particular game in public blogging, at least until the project pitch has been delivered, and its fate decided. At that point, on success, there would be great joy, a press release or two, and then six months of deep magicking. On failure, there would be surprise and disappointment, and perhaps a time of deep magicking anyway with an eye to float the title in the upcoming XNA Community Games thing. But the first route would be quite preferable, since it would include a great deal of support from Microsoft.

This project will happen under the Appleseed aegis. (I'm ramping up a DBA to use specifically for game publishing.) I'll look for ways to involve Volity, but Volity is not a deal-maker-or-breaker. No matter what happens, though, there's plenty of opportunity for positive blowback in Volity's direction.

I am pleased to announce the public debut of my latest professional identity, Appleseed Software Consulting LLC. Web and graphic design by Rob Oliver, who was also behind Volity's website and branding efforts.

The website is pretty spare right now; there are at least two major sections, including a new blog, which aren't ready yet. But the remainder makes for a fine public web presence, and so up it goes today.

Yes, the domain name is a little fiddly, but what can you do? I also nabbed appleseedsc.com and appleseedsofwareconsulting.com, but I figure that the version with the hypen in it looks best in print. It's what's going on the business cards.