Oh boy. I feel another productivity rant coming on. Reader beware.
It’s pretty hard to be productive – trying to maximize the amount of work done in a minimal amount of time requires serious discipline, process, and fairly in-depth knowledge of all the moving parts (including, in a lot of cases, people). Though, there is a sweet solace which comes from the extra time saved and accompanying relaxation.
So why don’t more people try it?
In my ongoing rant against idiots in general, let’s spend a little time to talk about…idiot gamers.
If you haven’t heard, we at LOLapps have started experimenting with gaming, specifically social games on Facebook. I’ve made the lateral move into our gaming division, and of course with that comes plenty of complex front-end graphical and UI responsibilities.
It’s a measuredly harder task than building a blog or simple one-time apps on Facebook. Implementing rich, engaging, user-friendly interfaces is hard work.
My daily trek from home to office and back tend to be fairly educational. Between the likes of Buzz Out Loud, gdgt, and TWiT for tech with American Public Media and The Economist for news, I listen to a whole collection of podcasts, though with a fair amount of coverage overlap.
Occasionally, a host will acknowledge the presence of an echo chamber – that is, a number of media outlets express the same viewpoint without much critical thought, sometimes repeating the PR selling points without rebuttal. More often, though, journalists sound like company fanboys, especially some tech podcasts; they give really positive (sometimes, also negative) testimonials of features or products from the “cool” companies, convince themselves that something useful to them may very well be useless to the listening public, and repeatedly route conversations back to the same hot topics.
We geeks are a loyal and long-winded bunch.
I was going to type up a short post on some rather badly taken pictures of my new computer parts; I upgraded my computer recently, and a few friends asked for specs and pics:
It was a long-overdue upgrade; I have a fairly recent graphics card, but coupled with a CPU four years young, the card’s graphical prowess had been going to waste. With four cores and more RAM, this machine’s has been making Vista 64-bit fly.
As a matter of fact, it was surprisingly easy to put the parts together, and every time I build a box it seems like the manufacturers take the time to put in additional labels or helpful hinges to make the process as simple as possible. If only they’d stop making new standards on connectors every few years to force customers to buy adapters or shiny new gadgets.
You’d think that software – especially free software – would avoid these hardware follies.
Hm, it’s been a busy couple o’ months. Post-home-purchase, I’ve been occupied with work, as we ramp up additional engineers, projects, and ambitions for this new year.
The experience of working for a real startup – to be more precise, a startup still in its infancy – has been enlightening, though not without stress and mental fatigue. My previous stints at Factset and Tagged were substantially different; these companies were well-established and enjoyed maturity in engineers and processes, something that I find myself in the midst of shaping at LOLapps.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is a ridiculously good game.
Even by itself, it’s an awesome experience just previously unseen in video games. Global conflict has become the sole economic pillar. You play as Old Snake, a grizzled battlefield veteran with one final mission: assassinate the leader of the world’s private military corporations (i.e., mercenaries), who happens to be your genetic twin brother. Nuclear deterrence, nano-machines technology, genetic manipulation, and world superpower conspiracies, they all weave into an alternate universe with events drawn from the annals of modern history.
Forget the princess in the other castle.