Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/#ixzz0oZh3lpDQ

An excellent article on Facebook, and a call for an open solution. I totally agree. Let's make it happen! :)

Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative

We Are Here

Not a waste of time.

Global Game Jam '10 Keynote from Ste Curran on Vimeo.

Amazing video of the keynote form the Global Games Jam '10. I almost teared up with inspiration :)

Rooted

What is it that keeps you in your current day to day routine? Or the city you live in? Or the friends you keep?

I would hope the answer to that is "the fact that I absolutely love what I'm doing / where I am / the people I'm with". If not, are you working towards breaking those routines? If not, why not?

I'm not sure if it's seeing a new place, or being in a new work environment or just visiting with family, but every once in a while something pulls me back from my current situation to really reevaluate.

Actually, even stepping back a bit, I think it's when I really find something that I want. My default reaction is almost always, "Do I really need this? Can I live without it?" and 90% of the time the answer is that it's unnecessary and I do without it. (Now trust me, I have my share of impulsive / emotional / just-because-I-want-it decisions as well).

The problem comes up when I come across those things that I really do want, or those things where I say, "Why wouldn't I go after this?" It's those kinds of things that tend to rock the boat a little more.

This, of course, is all in reference to a recent trip out to Cali (one that's still going on, as I sit here on the San Francisco Pier), an area that is absolutely gorgeous day to day. On top of that, I had a chance to spend time with cousin and his daughters, another reminder of things I want someday.

A week passes before I get back to finishing this.

Nothing particularly introspective and wonderful here, just a little musing. I've found myself more and more existential as time passes. Even with this most recent weekend in Brownsville with friends, I find more situations that are desires - places, things, situations I want to find myself in. Really, with the amount of spectacular things in the world that you could be spending effort / attention on, it's amazing that anyone with a variety of ambition finds focus.

Most interesting is how you respond to those desires. Of course the purely logical approach (I'm an engineer, remember?) is to spend every waking moment working towards those goals, right? Even that can be / is destructive it its own right, because we need moments of calm, moments away from progression. Biologically, we are creatives that need sleep between our hours of moving forward. The question is the balance? I haven't quite found it yet, but it's something that always seems to be on my mind.

Posted at a later time, after I found an internet connection ;)

If you don't create change, change will create you

OldFriend: I look back on all of the positive influences I've encountered in my life, and in management, and I try ti emulate them. Rob, Paul, Bill, Tony, you. Not everyone did everything perfectly, but all of you did some things really well.
Vijay: well thanks man, I'm honored to be on that list
OldFriend: Vijay : Enthusiasm!
Vijay: and yea, it's pretty amazing to look back at all those people and really try and figure out how to take the best of everyone to do better
Vijay: lol
Vijay: :)
Vijay: constant drive to improve
Vijay: <3 it
OldFriend: from day one, at Sony, that's what you did. Lots of energy in your work.
OldFriend: that's why you deserved to lead the programming team after Ensemble broke down.
Vijay: thanks man :)

It's always fascinating to reflect on how you got to where you are today. There were a million different versions of self that adapted, broke, changed and rebuilt each day we grow older. Those moments almost always come up for me when someone I knew in the past reminds of who I am in their eyes. In so many ways, the band of characters I've met over the course of my twenty eight years each hold a snapshot of who I am, so much so that they collectively hold the most endearing photo album of my character. It's a little morose, but there are times when the shadow of my self that exists in their mind is so difficult to remember that it feels more like remembering a character in a book than reliving memories. Why morose? Because more often than not, I envy and am proud of that shadow more than I am the current version of me. That's not progress.

And at the same time I have amazing opportunity after opportunity, am blessed with the grace of wonderful people in my life constantly. Have had virtually nothing but good things happen to me especially in comparison to other people in the world, or even other people in my life. In so many facets of my life, I'm moving forward. I have a job tons of people would envy, good friends I see often, a home, a cat, hobbies, new desires and challenges overcome everyday. Yet I still feel like I'm barely maintaining a grip on the cliff of life instead of climbing up it. I still look back and admire the former self that tackled every problem with passion and headfirst. And I know that self still exists, I just haven't figured out how to get him out again.

Vijay : Enthusiasm!

Who said programming can't be beautiful?

Came across this really awesome open source project today. It's called codeswarm, and it's a visualizer for the changes on a project's codebase. What exactly does that mean? Well, it essentially looks at all the changes to a project a team has made (via their source control repository) and makes a video representing it. People show up as names, and the files that are changed are glowing dots that fly from person to person. Taken from his site:

I've been studying software projects for a while now. Not the programming, but the people -- the way they interact with each other through collaboration and communication. My investigations have always been visual: I've built applications that create pictures of what is happening within software projects. But they have always had a rigid structure to them. Organic information visualization, coined by Ben Fry, is a different approach to information visualization. It eschews traditional data confinement in space and lets the elements play together in freeform and unpredictable ways.

For an example of it in action, check out this video representing the Twitter codebase:

Twitter Code Swarm from Ben Sandofsky on Vimeo.

Totally awesome :)

On love.

Just a few awesome videos, spurred by a spectacular and inspiring Google ad that aired during the Super Bowl:



And an amazing and creative video (I've posted it before), but inspiring both in artistic technique and subject matter:

A SHORT LOVE STORY IN STOP MOTION from Carlos Lascano on Vimeo.

Finally, an absolutely gorgeous short film that embodies one of my largest inspirations in life: finding a way to create and express beauty and memories to the people you care about:

World Builder from BranitVFX on Vimeo.

Citizen Kane of Video Games

Everyone knows I love the Prime series, and recently some ABC News report named it the Citizen Kane of Video Games.

More interesting, however is Mark Pacini's (Director behind the series and one of the founders of Armature studios down in Austin, post Samus) response today.

Definitely worth a quick read.

How fanboys see other operating systems

Haha OMG hilarious. And true.

The story

I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine a few weeks ago that struck a fascinating chord. Somehow we got on the topic of dating and first dates and the awkwardness of the last moments. At one point after a sip of margarita he said, "I don't know - I'm just not the kind of person to kiss someone on the first date." Curious, I asked why. Very frankly, the shrugged slightly and looked me square in the eyes and said, "That's just not how the story goes." A few weeks earlier I had a drink with an old female friend from college who mentioned that she doesn't enjoy romantic comedies at all. Why? "Because they're so unrealistic."

Over the last few weeks it led to more introspection over a topic I've thought much about over the years - how much we fall in love and chase after ideals we've found in movies and fairy tales. To be totally curt on relationships: do you fall in love with the girl or with the story? The story varies by person but usually goes something like this: work hard in school, find love, graduate, find the job of your dreams, get married, buy a house with a white picket fence, a dog and a few kids, and they lived happily ever after. The steps may be slightly different and include other steps or in a different order, but I bet you've heard the story at least once before.

It's interesting to see how many people (including myself) have fallen into that - falling in love with the story they hope they can achieve in their current situation and letting that infatuation totally overpower the realities that are present. I think in a lot of cases it's what causes you to do things for seemingly unexplained reasons. Why do so many people work towards being an engineer or a pharmacist when they really wanted to be an artist or a photographer? Or date people that don't match them at all because one quality is exactly how they imagined? Usually because they cling onto the fairy tales they want out of their lives so much that they're not willing to do the hard work to mold the hands they've been dealt into something they may love even more.

I realize I'm not being as astute as I would want, but sitting here in my perfect little house with a perfect little Christmas tree and a perfect fire roaring in the fireplace, it all makes sense in my head how much this is just half of my fairy tale. So I'll go ahead and stop trying to articulate and end on the final words that came out of my tv from an episode of How I Met Your Mother:

Robin: How do you do this Ted? How do you sit out here all night, in the cold, and still have faith that your pumpkin's going to show up?
Ted: Well, I'm pretty drunk. Look I know the odds are, the love of my life isn't going to magically walk through that door in a pumpkin costume at 2:43 in the morning. But it just seems as nice a spot as any to just ... you know, sit and wait.