January 2010 Archives

Howard Rheingold has been diagnosed with cancer. He's probably the person I know who is most in touch with his mortality. Merci and I asked him to officiate our wedding because he has a good sense of the divine nature of everyday things.

So it's both sad and inspiring to see him wrestle with new pain and priorities. Sad because he's beginning an uncertain future within his body. Inspiring because its Howard and his irrepressible spirit is already filling the channels with what he's learning about himself and beyond.

I helped him set up @rheingoldsbutt on Twitter and Howard's Butt on Tumbler. He's using online community tools to update people on his progress. What else would you expect from the guy who set up the social media classroom?

In high school one year, I helped run my school’s Martin Luther King Day celebration. I studied up on Satyagraha and gave a speech about the lessons of nonviolent resistance to injustice, and converting your enemies to productive common cause. Immersing myself in those ideas was ennobling for me - I had seen some anger and violence in my life and I was happy to find great scholars and social change agents who embraced a way of peace.

What does Martin Luther King mean in 2009? Community service is a good start:

I got my first pair of glasses in first grade. I got lenses that darkened in sunlight. I remember running out of school and back into school to show my schoolfriends the magic lenses.

My uncle has been scanning family photos and sharing them with us. Today I found this photo of me in the pile, I think this is from my early glasses-wearing days, probably 1981 or so :-)

It's 2010! We've been living with the internet for over a decade now. There's so many ways to present oneself - forms we can fill out on social networks, or tiny status boxes for us to write a short sentence on our moment by moment affairs.

I started a personal web site here jeez like sixteen years ago. It seems dated to have a weblog! And write long things, expecting people to pay attention to them.

So I went looking for inspiration - people who have compelling personal web sites in 2010. I found Matt Haughey still maintains a nice, active personal site. He introduces himself in a friendly way, provides updates from his various streams, and the site is not too crazy or cluttered. Not too bad considering his archives go back ten years now!

I just installed Movable Type 5, because it will output hard files each time I write a blog entry. Hard files fit better with years of online publishing slag in my archives. Now I've got to figure out how to style this site, maybe using a slideshow in Japanese, maybe just using some elbow grease and HTML tables!!

So this is to thank Matt Haughey for some inspiration. He's going through a medical excitement recently, so it's great that he continues to share himself graciously with the web.

UPDATE 8 January: Besides his personal site, Matt has done some innovative web business work. He started a topic-focused weblog, PVR Blog, about Tivo-type technology, and he shared some lessons on fortuito.us. Fortuitous is good reading for independent web business work; now dated for 2007; fortunately his topics and advice are evergreen. And, he's the founder of MetaFilter a sustainable, content-rich online community. Good stuff, online!

2009: Love and business with my partner Merci Victoria Grace at our game studio GameLayers. Most every day taking the train with our small dog Pixley Wigglebottom to our office 76 2nd Street, San Francisco, CA, 94105, in the Financial District of San Francisco.

Every day we worked on games. Our goals changed from grow fast and raise money to hunker down and earn revenues. We launched three products during 2009: a rebranding of our Firefox toolbar game and two games on Facebook. To stay alive, we tried paycuts, layoffs, and insufficient attempts to make money fast online.

GameLayers was profoundly engaging employment. I am grateful to my teammates, investors, advisors and customers for their patience as they showed me how to be a better leader. I was fortunate to work with so many smart people who wanted to make a game out of the web.

By the end of 2009 it was clear that GameLayers wasn’t earning enough revenue to keep employees. After exploring investment and acquisition options, we elected to leave our game The Nethernet up and running as Merci and I begin 2010 looking for new employment.

Midway through 2009, we moved into a larger apartment in the Mission District/Noe Valley, San Francisco with our brother Justus. Good times, great eats! We hosted a number of family gatherings at our apartment, a few lit by the wide smile of our new niece Francesca.

We saw the four seasons, the five elements and the corpses of large seals as we ran with Pixley on the beach at Fort Funston, just south of the city. Merci, Justus and I swam in a cold Pacific Ocean there during the fall. Merci and I drove north of the city to eat oysters and enjoy the coastline in Sonoma and Sea Ranch, California.

By December 2009 we were no longer being paid by GameLayers. We cashed in frequent flyer miles for a belated honeymoon to Thailand. We intended to travel the country seeking adventure. Instead we ended up spending two weeks on a small tropical island reading, sunning, swimming, diving, eating, sleeping and being massaged on the beach. We pleasured ourselves like love tycoons at a beautifully reduced rate, creating a fond sense of our compatibility beyond our time working together. Hurrah!

During our honeymoon, I had a chance to read, mostly speculative fiction: Orphans of Chaos series, Mistborn, Collected Works of Lord Dunsany, I Martha Adams, Sarsen Place, Blind Assassin, Pillars of the Earth, Mordant’s Need Series, Tom Clancy’s Net Force. At home, during 2009, I completed Dead Space, Gears of War 2, Fable II, Far Cry 2, Lego Batman, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Fallout 3, Shadow Complex, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Beatles Rock Band, Borderlands, Dragon Age, and Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox 360, and GTA Chinatown on the Nintendo DS.

2010: I am catching up on games, poking at projects, exploring opportunities - figuring out what I need to learn next. And I’m dusting off http://links.net/ as a means to experiment with the web. Enjoying my fantastic friends and family and wonderful wife. Exciting times!

(Year in (p)review - thanks to Randy for the prompt, including last year 2008/2009).