Finding Ambition

SUMMARY: My July has been booked by a video game-related project, and I was recently on-site at the company to get up to speed with their development process. I rediscovered the excitement of working with people who were intensely into what they were doing, and realized that there's an important ingredient in a great team that I've missed: ambition.

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Back Here from There

SUMMARY: Ongoing thoughts on accountability, ambition, podcasting, and forming associations with people. These are just things that are on my mind. Plus, a preview of some product reviews I'll be writing.

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A Temporary Change of Place

This week I've traded my basement dwelling ways for the ridiculously sunny skies of Southern California, somewhere around Irvine, to work on-site at Red 5 Studios for some UI-related work. The last time I did any game development work in an environment like this was the year I spent at Electronic Arts Florida in the late 90s, but last year I'd also worked on a museum installation that used video game technology; thankfully this means I'm relatively familiarized with current 3D graphics rendering technologies. What's most exciting is the chance to be immersed in the game development team environment again, because there are lots of smart, creative people doing intriguingly-difficult creative work. Dropping one's self into such an environment and being productive is, in my mind, a heady challenge for my toolkit of interpersonal skills.

When I was a lot younger, I would have been preoccupied with fitting-in and demonstrating that I could do the work and have been nervous about it. Being older, my emphasis has shifted into a listening and observation mode with less of an emphasis on hitting immediate home runs; I know now from experience that it takes me a while to get a true handle on what's going on, and so I've learned to wait for the big picture to build over time as I interact and produce things with the people in the team. It's yet another way to practice do not hurry, do not wait.

I also was reminded by one of my oldest friends that I tend to be on the theoretical side when taking about user interface, and that it's probably not necessary to communicate an entire theory accurately and completely; instead, it's enough to IMPLY there's a theory and then answer questions or provide concrete examples. I'm going to test this today and see how it goes, though the thought is so new to me I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to do this. But we'll see :-)

Groundhog Day Resolution Review Day 7/7/2010

SUMMARY: Setbacks, setbacks. But I'm cool with that. In this month's Groundhog Day Resolutions update, I postulate that my "productivity engine" is actually a capacitor which stores engine from inspirational sources, and only fires when it's full and "ready to burst". Instead of trying to work like an engine or even a battery, maybe I should just embrace it.

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The Lizard, Blogs, and Self-Incentive

SUMMARY: Convincing myself to work on long-term projects with no immediate gain is difficult, and I write out some thoughts on why this is. Partly it's due to the lack of definition, a lack of desire to redefine for the umpteenth time, and the lizard-like part of my brain that is concerned with conserving effort. But perhaps by maintaining focus on the the act of blogging itself, I can resolve all these issues at once.

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Distraction-Free GMail-ing

Tell me if this has happened to you: you need to email someone about something important, so you hop into your mail program to fire off the email. However, the first thing you see upon firing up Thunderbird/Eudora/Mail is your inbox, and in it you see a few tasty subjects that have you clicking away and laughing. You spend 30 minutes processing the emails, get ready to shut down the computer and head home, and then...oh, I forgot to actually send that email.

This happens to me multiple times a day, and I'd sort of accepted it as the inevitable price that point-and-click has exacted from my brain. In fact, the reason I'm writing this post is because IT JUST HAPPENED AGAIN. But it occurred to me that I have a solution, thanks to my current email setup.

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Big Time Chunks, Little Time Chunks

SUMMARY: For most of my life, I've assumed that commitment to a project meant pouring lots of hours into an unbroken block of time. However, making a commitment of that magnitude is mentally very taxing; I'll do it, but it feels like I'm laboring beneath a giant weight, and it takes a lot of support from other areas to keep my spirits up. What if, though, my assumption about the required size of the time block is wrong?

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Battling Mental Weariness

SUMMARY: Freelancing is tiring, especially when you are working in isolation. You have to take the time to maintain your mental energy and clarity; this blog post addresses that need and shares some insights I've had recently.

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“Life Balance” Revisited

SUMMARY: Life Balance? It's more about how you ask the question, isn't it. This post kicks-off a series on designing a life-balance application for the iPhone, seeking input from people who are asking themselves the same question.

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The Star Trek Online Experience

This is NOT a review, but it IS a very long unabashed rundown of my two-week experience playing Star Trek Online, a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game from Cryptic Entertainment. And yes, I did actually gain some useful insights from it.

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