The past six months of my life have been filled with work, work, more work, and a little play. I stopped blogging in July to try and preserve the amount of time in that “play” bit, because I was picking up a couple of new projects.
Well, since then, the projects have either been completed or fizzled out on their own (or both), and 2011 looks to be a less stressful year. As such, I’m back in the blogosphere and will hopefully be contributing to it on a regular basis. All the sweet development stuff I’ve done over the past six months has had no place to be shared, so I’ve got some catching up to do!
Right now I’m working on a WordPress theme framework that will eventually be the platform for several premium themes sold by Barrett Creative. The framework on its own will be a free download for anyone who wants it. I aim to finish it in January 2011, so stay tuned.
For now, here’s a desktop wallpaper for all you WordPress fans (click for full size):
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and I’ll be back with more soon!
People often talk about “work/life balance,” which really boils down to prioritizing your time. For a lot of creative professionals, it’s more of a “work/life/pet projects” balance. There’s only so much time available to spend on that third category, and even within that, priorities are rethought and shuffled around. Some don’t make it past the shuffling.
Aliso the Geek is a casualty of that shuffle, at least for now. Just as the past three months have demonstrated, I won’t really be adding new posts. I will still be moderating comments and replying to them, and all my content will still be here for reference.
Will I pick up this blog again in the future? I don’t know. That’s my honest answer.
I won’t be disappearing from the blogosphere, though. My husband and I are starting Two in Queue, a blog for gaming couples. It will have game reviews, opinion pieces, discussions about games or the gaming lifestyle—all coming from a couples or co-op point of view.
Transmit is my favorite FTP client for the Mac. It has been ever since I bought Transmit 3 back in 2006. Well folks, the day has finally come for Transmit 4! I won’t be commenting on its features at all—for that, you can go to their website—but I will be pointing out their awesome new app icon. Even that got an upgrade!
In my quest to learn Dvorak and reduce my wrist and hand pain, I ordered a TypeMatrix keyboard (in Dvorak) last week. It arrived today! I’ve only been using it for an hour or so, but I figured a blog post would be a good way to practice on it and give my first impressions.
When I got my first stick shift, we (my family) had to sell my automatic to afford it. My only option for driving, then, was the new stick shift I hadn’t learned yet. I sucked at it at first, but I quickly got a lot better. It’s like learning a foreign language by living in a foreign country. And so begin my adventures in learning Dvorak.
I’m blogging from 30,000 feet again, on my way home from NYC. I feel like I got to see a lot more of the city compared to the last time I was here. Even though I was very unfamiliar with the subway, or had never been to Little Italy before, I recognized buildings and details everywhere I went—recognized them from video games.
I’m on a plane to New York right now, along with my boss, Damian. (It’s his birthday today, by the way. Happy Birthday, Damian!) We’re headed out there on a project for Brave New Media in which I’ll be making a custom Flash app for USB drives. I’d say more, but I’m not sure what I can reveal about it on my personal blog, and the person who would be able to answer that is asleep in his seat across the aisle.
Some of you might have seen my posts about PAX appear and then vanish. Well, PAX was another Brave New Media trip, and my blog posts needed to come down until after the blog posts for the client were live. It was my mistake. However, those blog posts are live now on BlueberryMuffinTops.com, so I can post mine again. I will be back-dating them to match up with the actual days they cover. Days 2 and 3 aren’t written yet, so those will (hopefully) be coming sometime this weekend.
I won’t be having much downtime while I’m here, because like PAX, this trip is filled with lots of really fun work. In the time I do have, I’m going to do—you guessed it—daily blog posts! As with past trips, I’ll be posting in parallel on the Brave New Media blog.
That’s it for now. Look for my Day 0 blog post tomorrow morning!
I expected Wil Wheaton’s opening keynote to be pretty good. Really good, even. I didn’t expect it to be utterly fantastic! He spoke about his experience being a gamer, growing up playing D&D, and how it all impacted his life. It was interwoven with brilliant humor, some digs at Jack Thompson, and lots of gaming references for the enjoyment of the hundreds of geeks in the audience. By the end of his speech, I felt more proud than I ever have to be a gamer.
My favorite part of the entire thing was his example of being emotionally invested in game narrative: Dragon Age. I won’t repeat what he said since it contained some major spoilers, but for anyone who may have seen/heard/read the keynote… damn. It almost brought me to tears.
It was followed up by some hilarious Q&A with Gabe and Tycho (a.k.a. the Penny Arcade guys, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins). The best part was when someone decided to narrate an impromptu round of Action Castle and start Gabe and Tycho off in a cottage with a fishing pole:
(Sorry about the shaky camera; I was laughing really, really hard.)
For those who have no idea what is going on in that video, it’s a nod to the old text-based adventure games that were notoriously picky and repetitive.
After the Q&A, it was time for some dinner (which meant I wolfed down a tuna croissant sandwich from Starbucks) and then time to walk in the way-too-cold-for-no-jacket weather (with no jacket on) to the nearest Best Buy. As you can see from the quality of the video above, I was using the standard lower-end Flip camera (instead of the HD version I was supposed to bring with me). I needed a Flip Ultra HD badly enough to speed-walk through downtown Boston with my eyes trained on the blue dot on my iPhone’s GPS.
I got back to the convention center just in time for my next panel, Bringing Up the Next Generation of Geeks. The panel consisted of the assistant editor and five contributing writers to Wired.com’s GeekDad blog. I walked up to the theater 15 minutes before the panel was supposed to start, and they were just announcing that it was down to standing room only. I weaved my way through the crowd and grabbed a spot on the back wall. That panel was fantastic, and it was filled with great “oh that’s so damn cute” anecdotes of little mini-geeks. It also addressed some great topics like how technology affects kids growing up today, and how gaming can be a tool to make kids more well-rounded and cultured rather than less.
I left that panel early to make it to the Girls & Games panel, which had a line longer than that of the Wil Wheaton keynote. The panel got started late, and I barely made it in the line before it got cut off at max capacity. The panel itself was, unfortunately, pretty disappointing. It was much more dry and boring than what I expected.
Anyway, after that, I decided to spend my final 45 minutes in the convention center waiting in line to buy a t-shirt. I followed that up with a chocolate ice cream cone from a nearby Ben & Jerry’s, and came back up here to dump my video and write this blog post. Now it’s time for bed!
Tomorrow is the big Blueberry Muffin Tops/Joystiq breakfast. Woot!
Today I arrived in Boston, MA, where I will be heading to PAX tomorrow!
It was fairly entertaining to watch dozens of people in hoodies and black jeans file into the fancy hotel lobby today. There are gamers everywhere! I didn’t think so many of them would look like the stereotypical gamer, but I can’t help spotting them from a mile away. Amongst all the hipsters on the streets during the day, the tourists on the Freedom Trail, and the business people leaving work at 5:00 PM, the gamers stick out like a sore thumb.
On our trek down the Freedom Trail today, there was one thing in particular I enjoyed a lot. We caught a few minutes of a highly entertaining street performance:
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It’s late here… feels like 10:30 to me, but I’m not that lucky. One hour makes a lot of difference when you have to get up before 7:00 AM. Check back tomorrow night for coverage of PAX Day 1!
