Sweating

2013-08-10

I've sweating a ton! It's annoying. I don't know if I'm sick or have some other issue or if I'm just out of shape or if something about the air here in Scandinavia. The weather has been relatively mild. Google says it was 68f/20c today in Stockholm. It was mostly cloudy. It's been around that almost every day. A couple of days have been sunny. Several days have been cloudy with short under 30 minute showers. Regardless if I walk 5 blocks I'm sweating. I have to wipe my forehead, my neck, my back is dripping or close to it. It's really annoying. I feel like I can't do anything. I have to walk really slow and take a break every few blocks. This morning just walking from my room to the lobby and then around to the back of the hotel building (up 2 flights of stairs) and I was sweating.

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Lost, Jaded, and without Direction

2013-02-20

I feel like a dork writing this post. It's certainly #firstworldproblems and I'm certainly lucky to be able to do this but ... I'm kind of freaking out.

I mentioned I quit my job and decided to travel. But now I'm finding travel is kind of .. um, overrated? I guess that's a personality thing. Some people might find it invigorating to travel long term. Me, not so much. Elizabeth Dunn claims long vacations don't make you more happy than short ones. The advice seems to be take lots of short trips rather the 1 long trip. Sitting on a beach watching the sunset is great but after a while everything gets old? I don't know if that makes any sense. Maybe a more common example is going to say 5 different cities in Europe and after visiting the biggest church, market, museum in the first 3 cities not really feeling like visiting the more churches, markets, and museums in the remaining 2.

Another thing that's happened is my burn rate is higher than I expected. I don't like naming numbers because it makes people jealous and reveals how lucky I am and how whining about it so messed up but ... as I mentioned I was paying certain amount a month in San Francisco for rent. So, my goal was to spend not too much more than that for hotels while traveling. That means staying at places under a certain amount a night. Except for hostels though that's a really hard goal to meet in certain places. I managed it in some cities in Europe but London? Not a chance. Singapore? No way. Honolulu. Not even close. Tokyo I managed to rent a short term apartment within my budget but only because I committed to being there several months.

I guess all of that is basically the long way of saying I feel pressure to choose a place and live there to lower my expenses. And that brings up my issue. Where? I still have no clue what I want to do. Indie games? I need partner🌙. Do I really want to do make indie games? I don't know.

Teach? Clearly I've written several educational articles on my other blog and I've been answering questions on stack overflow which makes me feel good but teaching sounds like a very low−paying job and I'm not sure I'm willing to go there. Also teaching sounds like a highly political job at most schools. Maybe I should start my own? But I have no clue how to do that or if I'm motivated or skilled enough to do it, or if I'd even find it fulfilling. Even scarier is trying to keep up with tech while teaching.

Maybe make some kind of web app? I have no idea what that would be. Better forum software? A better dating site? (not even sure how to make it better. My sole idea is to try to brainstorm a way to get rid of the aholes and still manage to get people to sign up.

A mobile app? Like what?

Just go back to work? That feels safe but dumb given the opportunity now to do my own thing.

Something else entirely? No ideas there.

But that's just it, where do I settle? SF? LA? NYC? Tokyo? Singapore?

And −−−how−−− do I find motivation? I don't feel like traveling has helped that at all, except maybe to make me realize I'd rather be somewhere more permanent and doing something productive rather than just sightseeing. Maybe I should go to a bunch of tech conferences, hack−a−thons, or game jams? The #1 thing that dissuades me from doing that is just how big a sausage fest each one of those is. It's depressing for some reason. It feels like choosing to be alone and nerdy by choosing to do stuff where there are generally only men. I know that's irrational ... or is it?

Another which I also mentioned before is I'm just not as big a gamer anymore. A play maybe 4−5 games a year to completion? I'm not addicted to Candy Crush Saga or Puzzles and Dragons, I never got into Pokemon, Everquest, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Counterstrike, Skyrim, or any fighting game. I haven't been able to get sucked into an RPG since the mid 90s. I appreciate new ideas like Portal, World of Goo, Braid, FTL, Anti−Chamber but I've rarely gotten into them. I've never played DOTA or League of Legends. In fact until a year ago I had never heard of it. I guess what I'm saying it's it's hard to work up the motivation to start an indie game studio if I'm not actually feeling it anymore. Maybe hanging around other gamers would bring back that love of games?

I also need social support, as in friends. If that's my goal I either have to pick Tokyo or else make a serious effort to make some new friends, something I've never done in my life. All of my friends up to this point have been naturally occuring for lack of a better way to say it.

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Conversion to Wordpress, Epic Fail!

2010-04-26

So I moved this blog to WordPress because I didn't want to write spam moderation code for my old site code. That part works, I can now moderate spam comments before they get posted, something I couldn't do with my old site.

But......................My old site got 10−20 spam comments a week. My WordPress site gets 500 A DAY!!!! At first I was using the wp-reCaptcha plugin. It was catching the spam but after I noticed no comments for a couple of weeks I realized it was just marking everything as spam which suggests it wasn't actually working. I use the Akismet plugin as well and I think that's what's marking the spam which in truth means the wp−recaptcha plugin wasn't working at all. That meant I had to scan through 500 spam messages a day to find 2 or 3 false positives. That's un−workable.

So, I recently installed wp-spamfree plugin which kind of takes some of the tactics my old site did. It's doing better than wp−reCaptcha in that now only 100 spams make it into my moderation que but I still have to go through them for the 2 or 3 false positives everyday. That's still un−workable.

I don't know what to do at this point. Maybe there's another plugin. Maybe I should right my own although if I go that route I've hardly gained anything by switching to wordpress.

Spammers fucking suck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Switched to Wordpress

2010-03-01

Well, I finally think I got most of my site switched over to WordPress. I'm sure there will be some glitches and I'm sure there is still stuff to do but for the moment it seems to be mostly working.

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Back to Baltimore

2009-10-12

Today I went back to Baltimore. I hadn't been there in 23 years. I lived there at 19 when I ran away from college with my first girlfriend. I lived there 3 years from 84 to 86 and worked at M.U.S.E. and Microprose.

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Blogging Software

2009-07-11

It's come time for me to do something about my blog because lately I've been getting a 15 to 1 comment spam. That means about for every 1 real comment get 15 comments that are spam. The really annoying thing is they are typed by live people who attempt to leave a comment that sounds relevant, but then they leave a link to some website that makes it clear it's not a real comment. That it's just spam.

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What I've been working on

2009-04-21

If you want to know what I've been working on, see this blog entry in the other part of my website.

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Googling my life away

2008-09-11

As of May 5th I started a job at Google in Mountain View. I can't say what I am working on as it is still top secret but I can say it REALLY REALLY wanted to work on it which is why I took the job.

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Adult Story #4

2008-08-01

To be honest, I don’t know if this is really an "Adult" story but whatever.

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Adult Story #3

2008-04-14

I’m not sure this is really an “adult” story and the names have been changed even though anyone who this story might affect already knows this story

Once upon a time, I think in February 2003 I was living in Tokyo.

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