Oct. 9, 2012
I think about this video all the time:
What an incredible moment. Humans defying the crushing immensity of the gravity well of our 4 billion year old world. Filmed onto an incredibly powerful turing machine that fits inside your pocket and allows you to communicate with almost anybody on the planet at any time and can perform millions of mathematical operations every second. Shot from the air in an invention that allows us to collectively travel great distances, and holy shit, while there - 8 kilometers up in the sky - you can still be connected to a pan-planetary network that lets you share the video before you even land.
Wow.
"The future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed." --William Gibson
None of those things would be possible without the anonymous people who have dedicated their lives to doing the druging hard work of science every single day. Those people are my heroes and I am lucky enough to call some of them my friends.
Segue: my friend Dave came up with a great analogy for parenthood soon after the birth of his first daughter. Parents are the genetic equivalent of the boosters on a space rocket. The booster rockets get all used up, out of fuel, and then fall away into the ocean before the rocket breaches the atmosphere and enters space.
As a parent you know this to be true. You can feel yourself burning up all of your resources to launch these little people into the world. You burn harder than you've ever burned before, age faster than you've aged before, and sleep less than you ever have before, because you're now a privileged link in the chain of humans going down through the generations. You feel with absolute certainty that you are expendable now because you've created something greater than yourself.
I don't think I've ever been happier than in my role as a booster rocket. I feel so lucky.
Aug. 8, 2012
Photo by John Leonard.
Warning: post contains serious navel gazing.
Lying around in the dark trying to get my sleeping patterns back into Western Australia time from Western Scotland time has got me thinking a lot about focus and priorities.
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I used to spend about twenty hours per week in my spare time doing Free-Libre and Open Source Software. I currently manage to allocate about zero hours per week to FLOSS.
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Almost all of my time is now taken up with commercial work, social life, and family time. Although I would love to write more Free Software, I am ok with this balance for now because spending time with family and friends is definitely not the worst thing to do with your life.
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I am officially orphaning the Infinite 8-Bit Platformer project. If you are a Free Software developer interested in taking over that project please contact me! There have been a ton of irregular users but the codebase badly needs some love. It's written in Python and Pygame and is GPL licensed.
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I still get to contribute a bit to Free Software projects during the course of my commercial work - I just don't have the luxury of pioneering my other vanity projects any more - except maybe jsGameSoup which gets used by one of my clients.
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This whole shift is in general probably a good thing as it is turning me into more of a team oriented and social programmer. It forces me to re-use other people's code and work on other people's ideas more which is a good and efficient way to roll.
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I have a plan to recover some of my commercial time for specific use on Free Software again in future. This basically comes down to making a way to fund some of that time myself and still keep my family in sustenance. Hopefully that pans out!
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The one thing I wish I had more time to do is make music. I guess if I wanted this bad enough I would just make it happen but right now, no.
None of this is really a bad thing, just a fact of life. Friends and family are super-important to me right now, life is happy, and I still get to write a crapload of code for my wonderful clients and the very interesting projects they have created. :)