I’m working a lot of hours right now.  But why?  At some point I think I should do some research on this.  It’s been years since I’ve “needed” to work from a financial perspective.  So what is the motivator?  Heck, I don’t even have a salary anymore but yet I love to work.  Clearly, I’m insane.

Bailey and her mother Hara and 8 siblings.

I play MP online and I hate to say it but it sometimes brings out the worst in me. I am a big believer in being a good sport but if someone’s being nasty enough online and they’re winning, I know how to drag it out a very…very…long time.

Over the years I’ve found out what I’m good at: Business. At the same time, I know what I like to do: Software and game design. For awhile, I held the conceit that I was pretty decent at game design. But since hiring Derek (Kael) Paxton and Jon Shafer, I’ve come to realize that my skills at a game designer are much like my skills at graphics design or software development – I can do it in a pinch but I’m out of my league compared to a specialist. It’s a bit of a bummer. Actua...

Our family recently moved to the house I’m typing from. It’s not quite done yet and nothing is bigger reminder than that than the constant sound of contractors pounding on things from various distances. Our IT guys got me set up so I can do AI coding from remote via VPN and Incredibuild (which lets me use all the lab machines at the office as slave boxes for compiling). The main thing I miss when working from home are the people. Stardock really is a different kind of company. The peop...

Day 1 of the sabbatical has begun. Apparently I have 3 children. Today we took a walk in the woods.

One of the biggest problems I’ve run into as a business person is that I’ve never treated the PC game industry as a genuine business. It was a hobby side project.  I’m one of those guys who want the game industry to work better and I want to make games for those vocal people on net. When Elemental: War of Magic didn’t live up to the standards we had hoped for, it was pretty stinging to my “my people” turn on me so quickly and so adamantly.  It was a bitter lesson that required me ...

In no particular order, here are some of my favorite memories of being a very small child. Blue toilet water The theme song to Bewitched Catching Locusts (Ciquadas) Eating angel food cake made by our neighbor Beverly Going to the Great Sand Dunes with my parents and thinking the clouds were where we were going. Getting a TCR track delivered by Santa after Christmas Catching lizards in my neighbor Betsy’s back yard Looking for snail shells with my Unc...

This is the chair I want.

Sometimes you get pictures from friends and family that really do justice to the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words”.

Now that I can stream movies in HD, I just don’t have it in me to go out and go to Blockbuster anymore. I can’t find Gran Turino on Zune (xbox360) or comcast so I’ll just go without it.  I’m just that damn lazy now.

Coming up with crazy new hobbies in your mid-30s provides an interesting challenge. 2007: Radar Detectors / Radio scanning. 2008: Beekeeping. 2009: Dietary Supplements So looking forward, I have some new hobbies I’m looking at taking up. 1. Bats.  That is, putting up bat houses and such. 2. Gardening. Though more specifically, conservation and natural restoration. 3. Guns.  I’m having a hard time with this one because in the age of video games, guns l...

Tomorrow is the 20 year class reunion for my high school. I can’t believe it’s been that long. For me, high school was not fun. Even with the benefit of hindsight the best I could describe the overall high school experience was “horrible”.  That it was horrible wasn’t due to my classmates (though certain classmates did make a bad situation worse but my main pain from high school is in prison serving a life sentence) but just the situation overall – I was a total nerd and HS isn’t...

I was too lazy to do a clean install of Windows 7 on my Thinkpad T400.  I didn’t want to monkey arounhd with reinstalling all my software.  In hindsight, I probably would have been better off doing so as there’s so much crud on my system sucking away its life that I am regretting my decision not to just start from scratch.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091103121605.htm So it increasingly looks like sugar is really really bad for you – at least in the quanitites that the typical American now consumes. I consume more than my share of sugar and I hate to sound unconcerned about my own health but you know, I might lose some years of life becaue of my love of sugar but I’d rather have sugar than a life lacking in sweetness.