A Social Weekend

Took some pictures on my crazy weekend! Feel free to watch my Flickr photostream for more great shots like the one to the left there. I think it would look fabulous up against a black backdrop.

I've been busy just being social - spent the weekend in Nanaimo with some new friends and doing some light partying, picked up a copy of Rock Band 2 (Beer Crisis lives again!), and doing some of that web contract work every night. 

I suppose the biggest news is that Fantastic Contraption released the iPhone version of their game on Saturday! It's already got nearly all 5-star-reviews and is truly going to be one of the great apps on the device. After just 3 days of being on the US market it's already cracked the top-100 in the app store, and it's sitting at #57 for games. Exciting times!

Still practicing with my camera and just trying to make some money. I've pretty much taken care of most of my finances now - I'm not scott free yet, still need to work for a few more months, but it's all looking rosy. All my responsibilities are taken care of and I just have to pay the occasional bill now.

I guess I'm not really telling the whole story - there's a bunch of personal stuff going on in the background too, so it's not like my life is being incredibly dull. I'm having a blast and I'm looking forward to what the rest of this year will bring!

Photo-graphing

To help document the year to come, I've acquired myself a new camera. It's a proper Digital SLR with a few lenses - and I've been soaking up the last few weeks with taking shots in my spare time. Not much else going on. I like to think I'm taking some really neat shots though!

I've taken this nice shot of Aubrey walking down the train tracks in esquimalt. I really like the power poles in this shot, it makes it look a bit more old-timey I think.

Been doing some other stuff too, just browsing around and having fun, getting work done for Fantastic Contraption as well as my employer in Vancouver. Nothing too exciting.

The iPhone version of Fantastic Contraption will be coming out shortly! Can't wait. I think I will end up doing a video blog for them at some point.

Other stunning news: I lost both my hat and my wallet. On seperate days. Sigh.

Article of the day: Our Universe might just be a Hologram.

Destinations

The Whopper Sacrifice is the best Facebook Application ever made.

People ask me where I plan on going on my global adventures. Well, I have a "short" list of places I want to travel to.

First and foremost, I want to live for a time on the beaches of Belize. I went there once a few years ago on vacation, and during my 6-day-stay it was pure heaven. I look forward to seeing them again.

I've never crossed an ocean, so I plan on doing that at some time. I don't have a particular draw to any country, but here's a short list:

• I wish to see Norway's Fjords
• I want to take a good look at some New Zealand landscapes
• I want to hang out with those wacky Austraaaalians and listen to their accent while drinking their beers
• I want to check out some small Pacific Islands
• South Africa might be neat
• A tour of Egypt
• aaaand finally I'd like to see Easter Island if I could. Maybe just for the day.

It's a pretty long list, but it's a lifelong one at that. If I can knock them all out of the park in the next few years, all the better! But my only goal for 2009 is Belize.

Specifically, I wish to return to Caye Caulker. The place is pure magic. A small population of 1200, it is very cozy and doesn't have a lot of development on it. At least, last I checked. I hope it hasn't gotten too pricy.

It Is Done

Today I have been exposed to a great deal of excellent media. I think I'll share it!

First, on a tip-off from BoingBoing, I took a listen to Stephen Fry's Podgram on Language. It was truly excellent.  I was vaguely aware of who Stephen Fry was before this point, but this 32 minute rant on linguistic padantary has actually made me shake my head and realign my thoughts about the whole business. I dare say I'm a better man because of it, and I recommend everyone take a listen.

Then there was an article in the New Yorker about how to spot a good teacher - or rather, how you can't before they're hired. I'm not one to peruse the New Yorker normally, but the style of the writing was so excellent and gripping I couldn't set it aside. It even goes into sport correlaries - NFL ones at that - but it still remained gripping through and through. Another truly excellent read.

Then I took a gander at the 37 Signals blog, where they discuss how a successful business can follow pure enthusiasm and belief rather than thought and business plans. An interesting take on the industry, I suppose - a refreshing new perspective.

And after all that reading, I sat down and opened up The Onion. I found an article that was short, to the point, and had an excellent punchline. But immediately following 3 masterpieces of thought and discussion it kind of paled. Funny how your current perspective and mindset can ruin things you normally enjoy.

I still persist the punchline is excellent, though.

My old house is now officially moved-out-of and the cleaning crew goes in tomorrow. Things should be squared away and finalized by the weekend, in terms of moving-out-inspections and damage deposits. Excited to get that slice of life put behind me so I can start moving on.

Most excitingly though - my hot pink gaming laptop arrived today. I took some pictures of it - but none that would be quality enough to post here. I'll get on making my camera work for the masses shortly.

Another Day Cleaning

Spent this glorious day all cleaning the house and making plans. Looks like things will be all out on Thursday-ish and I will be all cleared up. Will be nice to have this moving mess off my plate!

Fantastic Contraption seems to be running smoother after a database server reconfiguration. We'll see if it holds up. Hoping for some exciting new things in the coming month... ;)

Other than that, not much to report except that I now am the proud owner of the top 100 hits of the 80s, all sorted by Month and Year they reached their peak. It is nice to know that when I turned 5, Tina Turner was belting out "What's Love Got To Do With It."

Relaxation (Plus Americans)

Today was a relaxation day. I played some City of Heroes with Aubrey and ordered my very first online-grocery-delivery from our local supermarket Thrifty Foods. Aubrey and I also sat down and planned out what kind of meals we'd be eating over the coming months. Very mellow. I've got a lot of work to do tomorrow (Monday); locksmithing appointment at my old place, some cleaning and chores to do, and then I have to schedule a charity truck to swing by and haul out all my stuff. I wish I knew how to get rid of a sofa though, not sure if anyone will take it. Good condition, too.

My hot pink gaming laptop will be arriving in short order. I'm very excited about it. It has a solid state hard drive and 6GB or RAM (and a 64bit OS to support it all). I'll have to bust out my camera once it shows up.

I made a detailed post on the problems with the SQL server for Fantastic Contraption on their own forums; you can read a bit more about it there. It's tough having problems in the first place, but it's also tough having to report this to your clientbase. I truly feel bad for all the paying customers having to endure outages and slow speeds as frequently as the FC crowd does, but I suppose it's my job to try to keep them as happy as possible.

On the brighter side, the press release inXile released indicates we will be seeing an iPhone version of the game soon! That has got me really excited and will have us seeing a whole new set of customers pouring into the forums. I can't wait!

And finally, the news of the day I suppose: my good friends Colin and Sarah have just gotten married, and were just seperated by the American Authorities! Bastards!

The World Without Wheels

Just before I started moving, both my cars died. I didn't think too much of it - I'd rent a truck to help me move, get lifts from my friends, and do a great deal of walking everywhere.

And most of that did happen. What I did not expect was how slowly things tend to move without vehicles; waiting on other schedules; not being able to do things right when you need them.

I had a long list of things to do these past few weeks and with a day borrowing a truck from my parents, I was able to get almost all of it done. The house I am moving out of is almost completely empty, the garage is full of charitable boxes, and I made a few deliveries as well. I've got someone disposing of the barbecue shortly, and I've found someone to buy some of my odds and ends. Things are looking up!

Looks like Fantastic Contraption was most likely down due to some sort of unexpected power outage at the hosting facility. It was down most of the day today.

Nobody Likes to Move

Due to complications in moving I'm renting two places for December and January which means I've had a pretty slow move. Normally I'd think that's a good thing (plenty of time to move crap) but really it's just dragged everything out annoyingly.

I've got a garage full of boxes that are all going to go to charity; I have to call a truck in to swipe them. I have to find someone to take my deep freeze and my sofa and big comfy chair. And then I have to make an appointment with someone to come pick up my BBQ and a few other toys I'm giving away.

Then I have to find a cleaning company to do a real fine job of wiping the place down.

Sounds like I haven't done much at this point, but really I have! The new place I am going to is a teensy basement suite. It's great because it's forcing me to pare down what I have. There's no room for extraneous junk.

On the work front, I've finished up one of the websites I've been contracted to work on. I was handed the HTML and had to code a database an administrative back-end for Lindenmuth Realty. It wasn't anything groundbreaking or exciting, but I did learn a few new tricks for handling files, PHP forms, and made a few file-handing library functions for future use. 

I'm also working on keeping the Fantastic Contraption community from falling apart, but it's getting a little difficult. The game has been running a little slowly for two to three weeks now, and the DNS is currently failing. Hopefully we'll track down the server problems soon.

Clarity

It seems drilled into your head - "Goal Setting" - and I've always avoided it. I've never liked goals and it seemed to me to be a very mechanical way of measuring success.

Turns out not setting goals is probably one of the qualities that makes me so unmotivated.

So I should clarify what I will be doing this year:

• I will finish moving out of my house in this next week. I am moving into a smaller basement suite with my girl Aubrey, so this isn't so painful.
• I will sell or give away most of my material goods by February 1st. I can't be wandering the globe and visiting tropical beaches if I have to pay rent just to store my sofa and bed. Anything I absolutely cannot part with will be going into a small storage locker, but I'm hoping to minimize this.
• I will continue working on my various web contracts to pay for my bills. This is web design and community management work. It isn't a free ride, and I'm not rich by any means. 
  
• I will make an effort to cut expenses. This year is going to be pricey and I need something in the bank. Less eating out, more home cooking, less home electronics. This should be easier since I am trying to avoid material goods collection.
• I will finish all of my half-finished projects by April 1st. This includes my custom blogging engine I should be using instead of blogspot, my personal websites, and cleaning up a few draft PHP libraries I have half finished. I think it's important to clean up your old work before starting anything new.
• I will continue brainstorming at least one new application or game per week. This is a big one. I'm making an effort to blog every day, but blog is just talk. Once per week I'm actually going to have a tangible product that, given infinite resources and time, I would actually want to make.
• I will select a Flash Game from my list and create it by November 1st. I hope this happens sooner than November but this is my hard deadline. I have zero Actionscript experience and have only made a few budget flash animations in the past. This is going to be a from-scratch effort. Hopefully it will make me a millionaire.
• I will select a travel location and get there by September 1st. I'm hoping this will happen much, much sooner but international travel laws make things more complicated. I'm thinking this could happen as early as April. Again, hard deadline.
• I will spend New Years 09->10 in a foreign country. Drunk.
• I will post a retrospective Summary on January 3rd, 2010, and officially end this blog. Not to say that aught-ten isn't just as good a name. ;)

There we go. Now I have some solid goals to meet.

Post One

Aught-eight was a tough year. Lots of things went upside down with my life, and for better and worse I came through and survived to January First.

I truly believe I've been handed a rare opportunity. My life seemingly has me poised to change careers and truly strike off on a new direction. I have been merely surviving until this point.

This blog will be the 1-year story of how I become a successful human being.

A bold statement, to be sure. I am launching a new career, a new set of websites, and have my eyes set on ending up programming a flash-based game from a tropical beach somewhere. That's a far cry from working the same-ol' desk jobs and being tied to my house because of the responsibilities and goods I own.

As part of this success-story-style-project I am going to try to post every day on my progress. Any day I have news, that is.

For the record, I am starting from scratch: I have zero web presence and little gaming-industry experience. My tropical locale experience is limited to a single short vacation. I have a house I am renting that is full of material goods that I cannot walk away from at moment's notice. This has not been a project that is just being realized now and has been in planning for a long while.

This is a true bedtime story that will traverse from beginning to end...

And this is the Prologue post.