Halb Mensch. Halb Ding.
Excitement at the office today, as we put to sea the public beta of our new platform, Squarespace 6. We’ve poured all of our care and attention into it, and if you build websites, or publish online, we think you’ll like it a lot.
On a personal note, I couldn’t be at a better place, at a better time.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to point to a few cool things I’ve been tangentially involved with in the past few months.
First up is The king of Apple talk radio on CNN’s Fortune Tech blog, which highlights episode 11 of The Talk Show (featured also in yesterday’s clip show), in which one of the subjects is my Chewie entry. Yes, I’ll take credit anywhere I can, especially if I can piggyback off of Dan’s amazing work, which accompanies me on my walks almost every day.
Secondly is Jamie’s last entry in his astounding filmumentary series on the making of Star Wars, Star Wars Begins, the result of several years of work, digging up and integrating rare interviews and behind the scenes footage from the making of Star Wars with the film itself. It’s the final installment in his trilogy, following up on Building Empire and Returning to Jedi, both in their own right well worth their time. I’m credited on it for a bit of feedback and some pocket cash I threw after him when he almost lost the entire thing to one of those “it’ll never happen to me”-harddrive crashes (because what is the internet, if not a place for obsessives to come together?).
Finally, I wrote a bit back and forth with Kirby, after his Everything is a Remix and my Chewie entry back in September. After we cheered to each others success and drank human blood to our fortune from the skulls of baby animals (don’t you judge me!), I showed him a video of my further work on the influences of Star Wars, something I’ve been working on intermittently over the last year or so, and he in turn drew inspiration from it, and focussed on Star Wars in his great second video essay, Everything is a Remix Part 2 (also be sure to check out the Kill Bill video). That was back in September, when I still thought I’d have my own project done in a matter of weeks. Months later, it’s turning out to be somewhat more… exhaustive.
The good news, is that I think I know how Lucas came upon the idea of turning Darth Vader into Luke’s dad…
Nerd out.
A few months ago, Anthony, the founder of Squarespace, asked me to fly out to New York to meet with him and a few others about a possible job; a very tempting offer, but at the time unrealizable due to circumstance.
Last wednesday we shut the door on our empty apartment in Copenhagen, left the keys in the mailbox and boarded a plane to Newark, all of our necessary belongings neatly packed into as many bags as you can fit into the back of a Lincoln town car, now effectively homeless.
Everything’s a momentary blur, but as reality and the practical measures of moving settles again, hopefully soon, I’ll be stepping into my new role as Interface Director at Squarespace and a new life here in The Big Apple.
In the scheme of things, it has been simultaneously one of the hardest, and one of the easiest decisions we’ve ever had to make. On the one hand existing obligations, jobs, friends and family, not to mention a place to call home and a daily routine are not easily shed. Yet on the other, a chance to try something entirely different, to have a go at the dream of living in roots of the worlds most iconic skyline and in a sense to try an alternate reality — if only for a time — and certainly not least, to have the opportunity to work for a company I have long admired, and which over the last couple of months, as I met with the people behind it, solidified as a force to be reckoned with, a mentality straight out of my most livid day dream and a collection of people the likes of which you’d be lucky to meet in passing, if at all.
Of course, a disruption like this doesn’t spring to life without sacrifice and broken plans, and we owe much to friends and business partners for their understanding and support. But here, at the tail end of it, it seems it wasn’t much of a decision at all as much as it was coming to the realization that we couldn’t not do this.
Which leaves us here, on the 10th floor of a Soho hotel bordering Tribeca, almost in eye-shot of the Squarespace offices, starting our scavenger hunt for a new home, and a life in the big city.
Pinch me.
Imagine my surprise, when as I was doing the dishes, mine and Chewies names popped up in Episode 11 of The Talk Show w. Dan Benjamin and John Gruber. It being live, I much to Gruber’s dismay (sorry John), popped into the chat and took part.
Yesterday I sent Rikke off to a party and hunkered down in front of my MBP to get some work done. Not content to let Gozer, my newly acquired iPad sit unused next to Vinz Glortho, my iPhone, I ran a couple of video podcasts on it, since most days I can’t seem to find time or in more practical terms actual screen real estate, 27 inches regardless, to do so.
I ended up watching The Big Web show at around the time my internals started sending signals up through the system along the lines of: “Hey moron, you know food? Have some, why don’t you…”
So I walked the iPad into the kitchen, docked on the kitchen counter, nearly flush against the wall, listening to sage usability testing advice while I got out and prepared a particularly scrumptious left-over burrito, of which I should have tweeted a photo, because after all that’s why we — we being someone else — built the internet.
Once I had finished messing up the kitchen counter, being a man’s man and all, I moved burrito and iPad in tandem to the table and proceeded to reenact a less trance-like and considerably less well-designed version of Dave Bowman chowing down.
Then I threw myself on the couch like the slob I also am, finishing The Big Web Show. Then I may have nodded off for a short while. But when I woke, I checked some feeds, answered an e-mail and bought Invincible #60 and read that.
Then I updated my Things todo list for the project I was working on, wrote a draft e-mail to the client and went back to… ehm.. continued working at the MBP.
The assholes were right, this thing is worthless. Especially without the camera.
I should’ve bought a netbook.
NOT!
It’s crazy how little time I have now that I have all the time in the world. I had after all originally planned spending a few months playing around with my own projects before I started up the whole freelance web developer business, but as it happens work came looking for me, and our quick London stop-over aside, I’ve been pretty busy working for the last few weeks, which has been a great way to ease into the mindset.
Monday I’m moving into an office in inner Copenhagen alongside @brianmeidell, @noscope and the @spacetimefoam boys, as well as several other minor game and web-centric companies (Limbo and Max and the Magic Marker are both there), and I’m pretty giddy about that. I haven’t started clawing at the walls yet, but there are definitely parts about ‘going to work’ that don’t work so well when all you have to do is get out of bed and there you are.
I hope to get some time to work on a ‘company’ site of some kind soon. I’ve got a name at least; but I’ll leave that for the unveiling.
Exciting times.
Having the entire day laid bare before me, my biggest problem seems to be where to begin? Talk about a luxury problem, huh?
It’s honestly not an easy thing to come to terms with.
On the one hand it makes sense to start working full time with something as soon as possible, to secure some funding for the lean times.
On the other hand, since I’ve got a handful of months funded, what better way to burn through them than on the things I’ve been daydreaming while I’ve been stuck in a 9 to 5?
And I’ve had a lot of those day dreams. I mean, a lot.
Yes, people of the planet Earth and outlying satellites, I am as a matter of fact a ‘free agent’, even if this blog seems as inactive as ever, which would be because I spend my days basking in the sun, reading long-overdue books and experimenting with various outlandish fruit combinations for smoothies that’ll blow your socks right off and send tears of joy rolling down your cheeks.
Alright, so I’ve started reading some books, the other stuff I’ve only dipped by toes into. But I’m working on it.
But a I am a free agent, having had the opportune fortune of ending my 6+ year stint at Io Interactive by being escorted out the door along with some 30 other people who for various reasons found themselves down and out in Copenhagen on the single most beautiful spring day in a decade or more.
No, I’m not entirely sure what happened. I don’t think any of us are, including friends and colleagues left behind, but considering that I’m the least experienced of the developers let go — most of them having 10 years or more behind them — I’m left to wonder on my own what the overriding idea was…
But, as is always the case, the bad memories fade and the good persist, and much as I’ll miss the excitement of working on large-scale games like the Kane & Lynch series — where I spent most of my time — I’ll miss my friends there infinitely more. The banter, the heated TF2 matches, the coffee trains and the overarching eagerness to prove our meddle and just create great games.
So hurray for Facebook, Twitter, blogs, mail and Skype. These things truly shine when you suddenly find yourself going it alone.
Lucky for me, I’ve had it in mind to quit for quite some time, having made several preparations for doing so, and this quite literally couldn’t have happened at a more opportune time. Add to that the timing of having spring making its way into Denmark and me getting to soar my oates on some of those vanity projects I’ve been wanting to do for years, while Io continues to pay me for a few months more…
Things could be a lot worse.
Beyond that, my plan is to hook up with friends of mine for a pretty cool project we’re all very excited about. After that I’ll go the way of the modern-day ronin: The Freelance Web Designer.
Hopefully, this also means I’ll be able to find the time to blog some more, not to mention bringing out the next version of K2 within a foreseeable future.
Oh yeah, and then Red Dead Redemption is coming up in May, so…
I’ll expound on my plans in the near future; for now I just need to get them more organized as well as learn this new routine of not having an office to go to for a little while, which is probably the hardest part about not being employed. It’s surprising how fast time flies when you’re just milling about the house.
Goodbye Io, and thanks for all the fishcake.
And thus ends another era in my life. 2010 is turning out to be quite the year.
Today was my last day at Io Interactive and I already miss my friends and colleagues something fierce.
So this is what I’ve been working on as a level designer for the last couple of years; the parts with the motorbikes and the burning cars and what not.
I met up for an interview with the gracious Tina Daunt in Santa Monica (oh wonderful Santa Monica) during our US roadtrip, first slated for the LA Times, before they started firing people left and right, now up at Huffington Post.
The new 2010 theme is slowly starting to take shape, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what that’ll be about. Meanwhile my, until recently, neglected second child, K2—a spiritual followup of sorts to Kubrick — just went 1.0 before the holidays, and we’re well on our way towards a great 1.1 release.
I’ve got a couple of other projects I should have started a long time ago coming in 2010, and I can’t wait to unveil them as we get nearer to summer. Yes, one of them is a new WordPress theme.
It was great, while it lasted, honestly pretty crazy for a while, and I very much enjoyed it; but its retirement is timely, if not overdue.
Kubrick, by the way, was born in the summer of 2004, which makes it almost five six years old this year. I would never have thought it could have lived for this long.
Thanks Stanley. And sorry.
Because I’m a far lazy slob, and it’s high time I get my ass in gear1, I paid my first visit in years to the fitness center yesterday2. Wait; wait, don’t go. This is really a tech-related post, just wait for it.
So I brought my iPhone, because that thing goes with me everywhere; and because despite the deafening music played by a live DJ (because that’s how the trendy people like to train, donchaknow), I was kind of hoping I could listen to some of my own music, or maybe even an audiobook.
I notice on the step-abdomenizer-leg-conjagulator-train-master-machine a wire with a plug that looks pretty much exactly like a dock-connector. “Hmm”, I think to myself, “that looks exactly like a dock-connector. I wonder…”, and plug in my iPhone. And sure enough, the touch screen turns into an interface through which I can choose my music or even play video.
That in itself is awesome (and the reason I need you to tell me what video podcasts you follow), but the coolest part is that it actually saves the workout data as a Nike+ dataset onto the iPhone. Go home, sync it and you’ve got your workout data right there alongside your usual Nike+ data (should you have any).
Aside from the fact that it’s a shame something like this has to happen on proprietary technology, it’s still very awesome and if nothing else extra incentive to get couch potato web-dev losers like myself down to the local gym.
Even though I intended to blog some more over the holidays, I instead spent most of the time glued to the computer working in various capacities on K2.
I feel I squandered the trust of the community, by having been too casual about K2 in the past. K2 has been first with a whole bunch of features and functionality, we had a rather large and very active community and a solid codebase, yet mostly due to me having other priorities it’s atrophied somewhat.
The good news is that we put out our 1.0 and subsequently our 1.0.2 over the holidays.
And the great news is we’re already up to having nine languages1 in our new localization repository which puts us well on our way towards the 1.1 release which is of course geared towards localization. We’ve got some pretty cool ideas in the pipeline for the roadmap after that, but more on that later.
Meanwhile, it’s been a while since I did any web design of significance, and I think I’d forgotten a little bit how fun it is (as long as Internet Explorer isn’t invited to the party that is). This has also meant getting reacquainted with the tools of the trade, old and new, and where I used to use TextMate for pretty much everything, I tried switching to Coda (I had a license, even though I’d hardly ever used it), and I’m now a full convert. Those Panic guys know a thing or two about software.
Cinch is another little app that’s been making my life a lot easier, especially since Chrome for OS X still doesn’t have the same functionality that the Windows version has had for a year or more, and since Apple refuses to acknowledge the need for a maximize button.
Now if only I could find a great app for resizing windows in a sane manner.
So that’s what’s been keeping me so busy, huh? The teaser site is up, and so is this, the first viral, which is close to my heart:
Spielberg, Hemmingway, Einstein, any number of presidents not named Bush, that guy at the gas station, the gal at the drive-in, you and of course, me. We’re all connected in that great human struggle: Our inability to chose books for travels.
Or so I like to believe.
It’s one of those things I spend the most time on when going traveling, and I often find myself skimming through and reading passages of about 10 – 15 books, stacking them this way; that. Trying to insure myself against that harshest of human realizations; the 80-page-in realization of “shit dude, this book sucks”.
Currently I’m leaning towards bringing a single previously unread book, which is currently Alastair Reynolds Absolution Gap, though Cryptonomicon has been drawing me for some time, it having been 8 years or so since I last read it. Also, I’ve got World War Z just sitting there, staring at me, begging me to prepare for the coming Zombie apocalypse…
Now, had I owned a Kindle, this wouldn’t be a problem, but this is Denmark, a country so small and cozy that Amazon wouldn’t touch it with a stick tied to another stick.
Ugh.
I know, I know, it’s starting to look more and more as if Binary Bonsai was reborn as a Star Wars and Droidmaker-reblog site after its hiatus, but if I merely updated the older entries with this information, it wouldn’t propagate, and dammit, when I have something to take credit for I’ll damn well use every excuse in the book to take it!
Then there happened to be an unusual series of events at the end of June, 2009, when a couple interesting Lucas stories were emerging. An old home movie from ILM in 1977. An older interview with young George Lucas from the BBC in 1972. My book gives some context to these items.
On June 30 I got a wild hare and generated a PDF of the entire book. I posted it on my blog and I made two public-ish announcements: I posted it on my Facebook page, and I emailed a note about it to a blogger in Europe who had just written something nice about Droidmaker a few days earlier. So I emailed “Binary Bonsai” – he posted it. And that was it.
The word spread globally in a few moments, and in 24 hours there were around 2,000 downloads of the book. A few weeks later there was another spike of interst, bringing the total downloads to about 13,000. In 14 days, more people have read my book than in the prior 4 years. And I finally feel like my work with this is done. #
Exciting for me, as I’ve been a fan of Droidmaker since it came out. I plowed through it in a few days, which is honestly rather rare for me. I hope to have the chance to meet Michael when we’re in California; a fitting encounter on a trip which is already taking us to see Pixar, Skywalker Ranch and a John Williams concert.
I honestly don’t know how all of this could get much better…
I’m hard pressed to come up with a topic as boring as ‘mail’, but I recently took a drastic step to counter my otherwise inate ability to never react to items passing through my inbox. This isn’t revolutionary as such, but it’s helped me tremendously.
I’ve hence found out that what I’ve been running is in essence a lite-esque version Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero. It’s ‘lite’ because — on purpose — I don’t receive a whole lot of mail on my private mail address, and at work mail volume isn’t really a particular issue. Privately I keep newsletters and mailing lists to an absolute minimum — I mostly end up in flame wars anyway, so… — and I’ve told most social sites to shut the hell up. In short, I make sure that what enters my inbox is important.
I used to leave all incoming mail in my inbox, except for whatever was filtered into various labels for organizational purposes. I left nothing unread, and if something needed following up on, I starred it. Then I’d forget all about the stars and it would get pushed down as more mail came in, and being lazy, I would happily forget about it. Goto 10.
A while ago I selected everything in my Gmail inbox and archived it. A complete reset of the inbox was needed to start anew, and from that moment on, anything that entered the inbox was either deleted, responded to immediately or left in the inbox. If an item is in the inbox, it’s because I’m not yet done with it, but recon I will be within a day or so. Anything with a longer horizon than that goes into my task list (just out of labs, press SHIFT-T on an open mail to create a task from it), which is hooked into my calendar, and thus under a great deal more control.
Now, when my inbox is empty, I can rest easy, knowing everything is taken care of.
PS: To make this easier for yourself in Gmail, go to the labs tab in settings, and turn on the ‘Send & Archive’ button; this allows you to reply to a mail and automatically archive it when you send it, which speeds up the process.
Disk space, like puberty, is a problem that’s unlikely to disappear until we see some major technological revolutions (holocubes and voice-modulators, respectively), and for my money, again, as with puberty, life’s too short to worry about these things when there are other, bigger and better things to focus on. Like food.