I like the analogy, actually. There's nothing wrong with a field of work that allows so much creativity. Both involve people working creatively and interactively, which are good ingredients for cultures to flourish. If one were to somehow remove what made our field like fashion, I wonder if there'd be any passion left.
I don't dismiss the creativity and innovation, on the contrary. I just dismiss blindly following the what other people are doing just because they are famous and/or vocal.
I was thinking about innovation this morning actually - how do we innovate? Is it on purpose? I thought that most of the innovation actually comes in one of two ways - by picturing a bright future and bringing the world to it, and much more frequently by coincidence. You are trying to achieve something you envision and most of the times you fail, but in the process of doing this you discover something new. And even then you can actually not realise that you have innovated. Most of the times a certain amount of time needs to pass in order you and the world to realise what you have done.
I really like the "grouping people" idea. Some other groups you could easily filter by (to find "your" kind of people), Rep/Dem, Technologists, Actors, Financial sector, etc.
A few months ago, I convinced my startup to try bitbucket because of the free private repos. Over the course of a month or two, there were multiple times that I could not collaborate with my teammate because bitbucket was unreachable. We have since switched to github, pay a small fee per month, and have never had this issue.
How is everyone else's up-time experiences in the past few months? I'm setting up a few personal projects and would like to give them another shot if they've improved that one aspect.
BitBucket is a vital part of Atlassian's internal development process, all product teams use it on a daily basis and we treat it as a mission critical service, I'm really surprised by this comment as here in Sydney we rarely see any issues, I would be lying if some hiccups hadn't happened in the past but they were usually in very short duration, and usually only affect the UI so you can still pull/push using HTTP/SSH, moreover we have a 24/7 dedicated team to respond to any outages and there is absolutely no differences in terms of infra-structure of free vs. paid accounts inside Bitbucket, so rest assured that we put a lot of effort on making the site better for everyone.
We would love to hear more feedbacks like this through our usual support channels when it happens so we can investigate and improve our service.
(Disclosure: I work on Atlassian's OnDemand team).
There are multiple principles being mistaken for one another or improperly being combined into one. There's PASSION and BALANCE. One camp seems to disparage another for their lack of balance, while the other responds that the first lacks passion.
They're not talking about the same thing! We can have both. We shouldn't spend all day in a job that leaves us uninspired, but neither should we let passion (or any driving force) make us sacrifice our physical health or essential relationships. We SHOULD have both.
Six months later, Bungie was purchased by Microsoft. The most relevant consequence of that deal was that Halo, a major turning point in gaming evolution, was on Microsoft's new console: Xbox.
Edit: forgot to make the obvious point. Mac was on the verge of becoming very relevant to gaming over a decade ago, and Microsoft stole that thunder for their entrance to the console races.
I have 2 hours of commute and I'm battling mental instability. I have to keep a queue of audiobooks handy, because two weeks with traffic and nothing to uplift me is enough to drive (haha) me into a bad mood by the time I'm home. I'm also a more aggressive driver when I'm not listening to something worth-while. The worst part is, last job, I had the same time commute, but could code on the train. Night and day.
Caveats:
- Published in 1999 so I don't know how available the albums are.
- Classical is really sensitive to dynamics, and cheap car stereos suck at same. You turn up the volume to hear the quiet parts, then get blasted by the loud ones. I don't have a good car stereo, don't know how much it would help. Earphones are much better, but I don't know about driving with them.
Like you, I couldn't even entertain this had I not an enormous load of audiobooks and a Kindle loaded with hundreds of titles. Most of which I've read. And listened to. At least twice.
Off topic, I know, but the local library often has a lot of good ebooks + audio books which are mp3 or on CD which you can rip... You probably could get an account with the library where your job is, too, if the rural one is too low-scale.
Its interesting -- my little rural library is very good. If you want a book they don't have, you fill in a card and they will either requisition it from somewhere else or they will buy it.
Although I'm rural, the local amenities are actually great -- one of the reasons I'm here. We're lucky. Excellent doctors and hospitals, too.
Great neighbours who aren't weirdos, its also so quiet on a Friday and Saturday you could hear a pin drop. That might drive some people crazy but I like it.
I have a little garden which I'm making nice and a few interesting little techie projects that I want to finish (I just don't have time right now) but I will quit and then use my time rationally. Who knows where it might lead?
With the wife and boys out of town for a few nights, I took one afternoon to see what I could make in 4 hours. I was really pleased with aspects of the language and libraries that, compared to my language of trade (C/C++), enabled me to add features almost as quickly as I could think of them. A+ would use again, especially if they could figure out mobile platforms.
For mobile, take a look at Moai[1]. I don't like it as much as LÖVE -- it feels more low-level and fiddly to me --but it's Lua and it's pretty full-featured.
I work on Moai - we just shipped 1.0 last week. It's designed to be a minimalist, open source framework for game development. We think that's the best approach for experienced game devs - look at Bungie's Crimson Steam Pirates on iOS and Chrome for an example of what you can achieve. If you need a higher level scene manager, then check out Rapa Nui for Moai at https://github.com/ymobe/rapanui
If you want to write mobile (outdoor) games using Lua, take a look at my site http://geolua.com/
It allows you to write (multiplayer) games that execute in the Browser. Lua is executed on the server side. The browser side is implemented in GWT and is getting pushed the game state.
It really is too bad that they still don't have anything for iOS/Android. I used Love a fair bit a couple of years ago and I seem to recall a few people who had been able to get it working on iOS, it doesn't look like anything came of it though.
