Jason McIntosh: January 2008 Archives

I've been meaning to note for a while that I am no longer in hell, and am once again happy with my work situation. I say this fully realizing that I also said this last summer before I fell flat on my back. But I know exactly what I did wrong then, and it's a mistake I won't make again.

In short, I ran a business with no marketing and a single customer, who was under no obligation not to simply wander off when they felt done with me. Leaving me with no income and no plan to attract new customers. It turns out that customers aren't employers.

After six harrowing, empty-cupboard weeks of full-time, unpaid work I had some marketing in place and a small corral of active customers. That interim was really rough, but knowing that I pulled myself out of it through my own strength (with assists from my excellent friends) is awesome. My confidence in my ability to do business as well as sling code shot up tremendously, even before I started actually collecting money again, just from witnessing my own success at finding and connecting with new customers.

Gord willing, I now have a heightened awareness of pitfalls that I haven't fallen into yet. Not too long ago I was talking with some friends on the train. One, who had just landed a lucrative full-time job, said he was tempted by my stories of the independent life, but was also made quite wary by my little time of troubles. I said that I had learned my lesson from all of that, and I don't foresee any other terrible things happening to me. "Unless someone sues me," I mused. Suddenly, I felt very cold. "Yes, that would count," said my friend.

So that is why I am moving forward with this reorganization plan, primarily as armor against any future legal blows. (No, I'm not expecting anyone to sue me. And really, that's the point.)

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I am seriously considering writing a book, or something bookish, about my experiences. There's a lot of spilled ink about becoming a consultant, and far more about embracing the freelance life in general. But I haven't encountered any works targeted specifically towards software professionals, coming to them with the message that there is another way and offering advice on how to break free and get started.

I discovered the lifestyle by accident, by way of launching an unrelated startup, and later looking for supplemental income without having to go back to a job. After a year of trial and error I finally have an idea how it works. And from this vantage point, I continue to feel surprise that I know tons of software people, but only one or two work for themselves. It's certainly not the life for everyone, but for me it is without a doubt the best job I've ever had. I probably could have started years before I actually did, had I only known it was possible. The message needs to get out more.

I have a totally bomb-ass mystery hunt plot idea. I have already shared it on my team's mailing list - somewhat ill-advised, since by the time IIF wins some of our current team is statistically likely to have migrated to other teams. On the other hand, any actual implementation of the idea will almost certainly end up looking quite different. (Julia and I have already been chatting about interesting variations.)

I'll just say that it's high time for another SF-themed hunt. ACME (containing, at the time, the core of today's IIF) did a bang-up Matrix hunt in 2003, and 2005 had a light-hearted superhero hunt. I really wanna help put one together in 2010!

There is a Star Trek movie teaser trailer coming out. I'm too lazy to link to it because it's basically nothing, just enough to confirm that the film's in production, and to signal the fanboys to commence the freakout. (Its audio is samples of Apollo mission radio chatter that you can hear in any dime-store trance mix, for pete's sake. OK, and Nimoy. All right, fine: here. Sheesh.)

If JJ Abrams can tell an entire SF story that has a satisfying ending in the length of a single feature film, all shall be forgiven. Until then, I'm skeptical.

Meanwhile I find myself really out of touch regarding movies. I saw a friend complaining in an IM status message that someone named Cloverfield made her feel sick, figuring it was a co-worker who should have stayed home.

Just ordered one of these honeys for backing up jmac.org, which currently has no backup plan at all. I plan on plugging this into Stilton (my desktop Mac), cronning up a little rsync, and Bob's your uncle.

jmac.org is hosted gord-knows-where by Tektonic.net, so this counts as an offsite backup, despite being in my house. Once it's set up, I'll upgrade to a better plan. AET has done a lot of research and testing for Volity's next hosting home, and we've decided on a middle-of-the-road Tektonic plan. I've currently got a super-low-end plan there, and results are substellar. I figure that if it's good enough for V, it's good enough for me.

For those keeping score: 250 gigs, external, respected name brand: $85.

Last data point, from ~30 months ago: 200 gigs, internal, middling name brand: $100.

It's fun, and I recommend it. It fails to reach the conceptual heights of last decade's Super Mario 64, but the games it plays with gravity and perspective and make it a unique and worthwhile platformer.

Galaxy's levels are surprisingly linear. For the most part, you start at point A, and bounce along a unidirectional graph - the tiny planetoids being nodes, and the fixed flight-routes between them the edges - until you hit the flagpole star at the end.

Several levels feature branchpoints in their routes where you can go grab a "hidden" star instead of the main one, encouraging you to play that level twice. Nice, but adding an extra arm to the graph doesn't make it less graphy.

It is not an exploration game like Mario 64. Your interaction with the environment is more like a tourist than an adventurer: land somewhere, admire the scenery, do whatever's on the itinerary for this location, and then move on to the next destination. There's no need to figure out what to do or where to go next, and almost never any backtracking.

The scenery, however, is beautiful, and those itinerary tasks are all perfectly fun, usually involving nosing around a little planet collecting things and exploiting the various crazy new power-ups this game introduces.

Small gripe: the game continues the Mario-game tradition of keeping track of lives, and awarding you with extra lives for clever exploration, valiant deeds, or just collecting lots of stuff. The trouble is that lives are meaningless to a modern platformer. You start out every Galaxy play session with five lives, and playing almost any level results in a net gain of two or three more. I typically had 15 or so lives every time I was done playing. I seldom bothered to go fetch 1up mushrooms placed in tantalizing locations. It would have been nice to replace these with something more appreciable.

You should still play it (especially if you can borrow a copy like me, ha ha). Wii owners who find themselves enjoying this game owe it to themselves to also check out the orginal Super Mario 64, which can be purchased and downloaded for $10 from the Wii Shop channel.

Today went past in an eyeblink. Slept late, made and drank my own coffee while lounging for an hour in my own living room, then trundled to the Hunt wrap with Amy for all of that. Had the traditional post-wrap dinner at the Uno's near me with half the team. Poof, dark out, and now its 8.

Hunt recovery will do that to you.

We fell short of making it into the endgame. Really, we didn't come close. Our pace was pretty good, but we were completely overwhelmed with unsolved puzzles by Sunday afternoon. They were hard this year, and there was a lot of them. I personally found it hard to concentrate on any one puzzle, and never really got interested in the whole structure, though that's an entirely subjective complaint that the rest of my team didn't reflect.

Sure I had fun, though - thank you, Dr. Awkward and company!! With a day between me and the coin getting found (congrats again to the Bombers) my appetite for solving's definitely come back. I think I'll be tearing into the latest P&A shortly.

It's almost noon on Sunday and we haven't been told to go home yet. The last couple have ended shortly after I caught the last T out of Kendall on Saturday night, so yes.

On the other hand I just got back to our HQ in building 26, after going home at 4am to sleep and warsh and eat. So, it's been an unusual hunt. I'll have more to say when it's over.

Thanks again to folks around the country that I bugged for the sake of one particular puzzle, on Friday night.

Wish us luck!

And so we move into my final year in this marketing demographic. (The U.S. Census Bureau will consider me middle-aged next year!)

Due to this week's nuttiness I may end up doing nuthin tonight, through probably I will do one thing or another or both tomorrow. And for years I have considered the mystery hunt to be my birthday observed, so that is excellent. (I think this is the first time the two events have happened more than a day apart, since I started hunting.)

The MIT Mystery Hunt is only a few days away. I'm determined to get as much money-work as I can done before then; there is a backlog, with end-conditions in reach. There won't be much Volity or Gameshelf progress, despite so much I want to do in both. (Though maybe I'll squeeze more in if put the video games away for now...)

Some of my team (Immoral, Illegal, and Fattening, Attorneys at Law) gathered at MIT Saturday night to practice, breaking up into groups of four and then running through a shorter puzzle extravaganza. (It was this one, actually, by Dan Katz.) I was on fire, solving three puzzles alone, and helping to finish up a couple more. My puzzle-fu has never been stronger, and I was pleased when another group still finished well ahead of us, suggesting that our whole team is really well poised this year. (That group contained a hunt veteran who is joining our team this year, so that's exciting too.)

I hope that we at least make it into the endgame, which would be a first for IIF. I was last night reading the 2006 hosting team's description of that year's endgame, and filled with fear and desire.

Starting today, I am eating resveratrol supplements with my breakfast.

I feel good about this. After following anti-aging developments for years, and flirting with some ideas like calorie restriction, this is the first time I have applied a promising technology to myself. I do not mind saying that I went ahead and made a little ceremony of my first dose, eating the pills with cold water while standing under a hot shower. From tomorrow on, they'll just go down with my morning coffee.

Effects so far: some of my burps taste funny. Stay tuned for updates.

My plan, henceforth, is to continue following the news about anti-aging treatments and applying the single sanest-sounding one to myself, letting it complement a lifestyle of varied diet, frequent exercise, low stress, high friendship, and all that good stuff. I suspect, though, that there'll only be so many more candidates before one treatment really blows the lid off.

Still, I can't help but feel a little self-conscious about this. Many of my friends are apathetic about, or even resistant to, the idea of clinical anti-aging therapy. I can understand where they come from, because it's based on countless generations of the shared human condition, and that's awfully strong stuff. It doesn't help that decades of advertising have confused the definition of "anti-aging" with the promises of beauty creams or plastic surgery. This can make the desire to truly eliminate aging seem like a shallow pursuit, when really it's no shallower than wishing to eliminate any other debilitating, degenerative disease.

The meme that aging is treatable started working its way into the mainstream just as I was turning 30. I don't believe in fate, but I do believe in auspiciously timed opportunity.

Here's to the future, eh?

Unix turns precisely 1.2 billion seconds old this afternoon at precisely 4:20pm Eastern time.

$ unix2local
Please enter the UTC time: 1200000000
Thu Jan 10 16:20:00 2008 (Boston)

(Jennie and Marc discovered this.)

Here I am. Created the account two months ago, and got around to filling out out this morning. I used the Gmail invitey-tool to blast out 23 completely impersonal friend requests. Feel free to friend me.

I could not have asked for a better opening to primary season. So relieved that Iowa and NH had such different results, keeping everything wide open.

I actually don't care much who wins in either side - I like all of these Democrats, and think they can beat any of those Republicans - but I love watching them develop as candidates. Nearly as much, I love watching the horse-race callers get proven wrong, and wrong again, about both parties. (Not that I actually waste time watching the horse race; I just read reactions to it in blog comments.)

A while ago I decided that the only final configuration I wouldn't like is Edwards versus Romney, if only because it'd look dead-boring. Objectively handsome white guy A versus objectively handsome white guy B, and I'm afraid that people would get confused and vote for the one with those super-presidential graying temples. I don't think that's crass of me; surface counts for a lot, in this. But we seem to be safe from that, for now.

I am eBaying my copy of Medal of Honor Heroes 2 for Wii. An impulse buy, mostly due to the allure of 32-person multiplayer (via Internet play). Mechanically, though, it's a full-on no-frills first-person shooter, and as such it's just not my cup of tea. I think I expected it to be more like Resident Evil 4, because it shares the mechanic of using the wiimote to aim, but now I see all the ways that RE4 is not a FPS.

It may be worth checking out if you do like FPS games and you want to see how they can work on Wii. Here is its MetaCritic page.

My friend Tom pointed me at this video for the song "Lollipop" by Mika, whom I hadn't heard of before. I can take or leave the music by itself, but mixed with this Peter Max-meets-Tex Avery animation from the French studio Bonzom, the result is three minutes of overwhelmingly positive energy (and just a little bit of naughtiness).

If you're like me, you'll watch it through, and then watch it through again, and the whole time feel a desperate need to see it through some channel other than YouTube's teeny tiny blur-o-vision. Here's one link to a less cruddy version. I ended up buying the video from iTunes for $1.50. I've vaguely wondered for a long time what would move me to spend ten bits on a music video, and now I know.

(Postscript: Have also taken to dropping two-dollah bills on Cartoon Brew Films' offerings, lately.)