This weekend I visited my friends in Southampton and I wanted to make a couple of notes on what we chatted about.

We got to introduce a few people to the concept of Jumpstyle, the epic dance craze that is absolutely not sweeping any nations whatsoever, but is resulting in some fascinating videos:

A bizarre combination of riverdance and rave, jumpstyle is probably the best thing to happen to human legs.  We decided that we should all go to Antwerp to record a jumpstyle video.

I also want to mention small horses, and particularly the wonderful sausage pony of Southampton, who is apparently responsible for many 999 calls. Small horses are wonderful. I am sad that I am allergic to them.

Al, Rikki and I spent a few hours reliving our childhood with Nagano Winter Olympics '98 on the N64, which shows just how far video games have come since the Matrix was released.  Just check out this intro.

All in all, that was a very lovely weekend. Thank you, Southampton peoples!

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All I remember about the start of 2011 is work-related: it kicked off with us getting Billmonitor onto The One Show and finding out what happens when a tiny website gets mentioned on prime time TV.  Turns out that the website falls over - not a huge surprise.  That was in May, though, if I remember correctly, and I have no idea what happened before then. Fortunately, my blog is at hand with notes to correct me.

In March I released Texturecraft, which was something I expected to be a long term project, but despite a pretty good reception, I found that I didn't particularly enjoy working on it.  I guess the problem is that I don't actually use Minecraft texture packs at all, so I never actually needed the site myself. Oh well. I do keep it maintained but I don't really have any plans to add to it at the moment. It gets in the region of 800 unique visitors per month.

In June, I went to the Suffolk show, which was a lovely day out in a field with plenty of wine and food to enjoy.  I'd heard about it from my in-laws for quite a few years but had never had the opportunity to go until this year, and it did not disappoint!

On the 4th July I started my new job, only my second serious position, and I've been hard at it since.  It's a very demanding project but it is also very exciting.  I passed my driving test shortly after so that I could drive to work, and by far the worst bit about the job has been the drive, but really I don't mind it much at all.  I find that with enough podcasts queued up I never really think about it - I just miss the 2 hours a day that I spend in the car.  My running has suffered lately because after being on the go for 11 hours I never really feel like running, but I'm determined to get back to it this year now that I am coping a little better with the workload and the transport.

There was a lot of bad news in the second half of the year, which I don't think I want to go into online. Some things are better kept off the internet. I couldn't really do it all any justice anyway. Suffice to say it's nothing to worry about.

I got a lot of books read this year, and would have managed one a month (That's a lot for me, ok? Shush!) if it wasn't for the epic Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson which has been with me since about September.

I got round to writing a few more tiny little games toward the end of the year - nothing releasable, which is a bit of a letdown, but I learnt a lot, so that's ok.

I also achieved some degree of measurable success with a piece of code I wrote! My Dota 2 Stream Viewer is used by about 2,500 people around the world. I'm very happy with that, but I thought I'd be a lot more excited about it than I am.  I guess that's because it doesn't have much potential to grow - I can't really make money from it or add many features - so it doesn't offer many future possibilities. Oh well - I'm still happy about it, and it's a benchmark for my next project.

I think I did manage to spend some more time with people this year, so that's one resolution met, and although I didn't make any money from code (apart from my job, obviously) I did have some success. I ran a 10k too, so that got done.

This year, my resolutions are: get into some of my cookbooks and cook more stuff out of them, run at least 500k across the whole year (2011 was a 344k year), and find a project that keeps me interested for more than a few months.

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This is the first year since 2004 that I haven’t moved house, and I am delighted.  I find that I always settle into a place about 10 to 11 months in, so I usually start to feel at home just as I have to put that home back into a box.  Not this time, though!  Finally I am not dealing with man and van companies as Summer kicks in.

Summer, however, turned up rather early this year, didn’t it?  The rain returned just as I began cycling to work every day. Thanks, Britain. I love you too.

Rain aside, it is absolutely marvellous to be sticking in one place for a while.  I am closer to unpacked than I’ve been in a long, long time (although I still have a great deal of stuff in boxes, the boxes are now stowed in cupboards) and I really do feel settled in.  I even know where most things are around the house. Our towels even go in the airing cupboard! What a delight.

I have lived in many fascinating places since I moved away from Andover, and I don’t regret any of them at all, but I do wish I could have skipped the moving.  Turns out, I really don’t like moving.  I like having all my things in the right places.

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Lately I’ve been having a go at making a video game, and it is really fun!  I have had a few attempts in the past, but I’ve always fallen down because of the sheer scale of every project I attempt, or the realisation that I’m really bad at graphics, but every time I get a little bit further, and I’m really pleased with how Spacegame is going so far.

What’s nice about this project is that I’ve decided to make it, at least initially, just for me.  I know that games are hard to make, and even harder to make fun, so I’ve decided to just work on the bits that I enjoy and leave the rest for later.  For example, I can’t draw, so the graphics are all 2-minute efforts, and I started out writing a multiplayer game, to learn about it, but now I’m focussing on making it a fun single player game, so I can play it on my own.  By only working on things I like, it’s kept the project interesting, and I haven’t given up on it yet.  It’s actually my longest running project on Github now, clocking in at 15 weeks in total.

Games as indie projects have gone through a bit of a revival lately, which has been fantastic: before Quake, a game mod was a feasible one-man project, but the advent of Quake’s quality 3D modelling and sound effects meant that it was very time-consuming to create a good-looking, playable extension to an existing game.  Around that time, I gave up on the idea of ever being able to write games, but lately, indie development is coming back and 2D is becoming popular again.  The tools are also improving, and suddenly it seems like making a small game is achievable, and that’s really good for the industry.  These days, I spend more time playing budget games than I do triple-A titles, because I get a lot more hours of gameplay for my money.  It feels, now, like if I were to put enough time into it, I could come up with something that could at least get some players, and that’s encouraging to know.  The distribution channels are there, too, for people who are willing to put the marketing time in - the one-man game studio is a possibility.

Spacegame is not yet very playable, but if you know how to run ruby source code and feel like giving it a go, the source is available here.

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In the past, I’ve always worked on jobs that have had a definite end: temporary positions and limited work visas.  My last job was the first that I’ve actually had to quit, which is an unusual state of affairs.  On one hand, it’s great to have found an exciting new job, and you want to shout about it, but on the other, you feel like you’re abandoning your colleagues and friends by moving on.

Leaving Optimor was probably quite a difficult place to start.  I’ve been there since the company first opened its offices, and I was a quarter of the development team, so quite a lot of weight was on my shoulders.  Handing in my notice felt pretty awful, but I suppose it was that weight that made me do it, in the end.  I think that this sort of thing should be kept professional, and I should try my best to think only of the career opportunities and the future rather than the amount of work I’m dumping on my friends by leaving, but it’s difficult to separate the professional from the personal. 

I do feel bad about leaving so much work behind, but I think I achieved a hell of a lot at Optimor and I’m very happy with what I did there.  In the past three years we’ve built an incredible website that does a lot more than it should be able to, we’ve been in the news papers countless times and on TV twice, including a full feature on The One Show.  It’s been epic, and I hope that I can make my next project just as huge.

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A long time ago my friend Ben lent me a book, called Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy, after I expressed an interest in learning about psychology.  On the face of it, the book looked a little too much like a work of fiction to be a usual introduction to the field, but I’m not one to judge a book by its cover (har, har) and Ben knows his stuff, so I put it on my bookshelf and forgot about it for months.

Fast forward to sometime this year, and I finally found the time to pick it up.  In the foreword, Dr Yalom gets on with it straight away and charges through an overview of every conceivable problem that the human mind could possibly come up with, complete with plenty of “Oooooh, that’s why I think that” moments that I’m sure anyone reading it would find.  It then moves through 10 case studies, each detailing one of his patients.  The whole thing feels wonderfully intimate, leading the reader into the lives of both patient and therapist in a way that almost feels wrong: the revelations offered seem a little too private to be published. I was struck by Yalom’s ability to take a case and boil it down to its fundamentals to find a model that fits, but then build it up again to produce a solution that was tailor-made to fit the individual.  I suppose this is what psychotherapy is all about, and perhaps there are a million other books out there doing the same thing, but this book definitely isn’t one that I’ll forget about any time soon.

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I have a secret!  That’s rare for me.  I’m not very good at lying, y’see, guilty of every tell in the book, so I avoid it as much as possible.  Secrets are a lot like lying: it’s fine until someone asks, but as soon as I’m on the spot and being asked to reveal what I know, I’m lost.

So it’s actually a pretty big thing that, for the first time in 3 years of going out with my girlfriend, I have given her absolutely NO clues about what we’re doing for her birthday.  Not one. She has no idea what we’re doing. I’m so proud of myself!

One year, an old boyfriend of my sister’s planned a surprise for her that required her to have a certain amount of special clothing - I forget what it was, perhaps waterskiing - so, to cover his plans, he had he pack for all eventualities.  She arrived with wellies, waterproofs, wooly jumpers, the whole lot. Brilliant.  I have not done such a thing, as I’m just going to tell her what we’re doing when she wakes up.  One step at a time, Mac.

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Last week I went to the much talked about (at least, amongst my in-laws) and very exciting Suffolk Show.  Such a rural event might not seem like my sort of thing, but the quality of food and drink there would be quite enough to keep me happy, even if I didn't secretly enjoy looking at cows.

The show is a combination of craft stalls, farm equipment sales, and livestock shows.  Modern farm equipment reminds me of constructs from the Terminator movies, being many-armed and designed to destroy just about everything in its path at high speed.  Obviously we didn't hang around it much, but the sight of it all is pretty epic up close.  Farms are big places, obviously.  We didn't see many shows either, but we did get to see the shetland grand national, which was quite cute.  Tiny horses!

The big highlights for me were the wine and the food, though.  Incredible, farm-fresh bacon rolls and burgers!  Chocolate fondues!  Amazing pastry!  And a gaggle of friendly English vineyards.  I've never had the opportunity to drink more than one English wine in the same session, so it was a bit of a treat to try several at once, including some of the rapidly-becoming-famous sparkling wines that we're now producing as a nation.  Fantastic stuff!  The quality of the wine blew me away - England is truly a quality wine producing country.  I can't wait to see what happens with our wines in future.

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I've been playing a lot of Starcraft 2 recently.  I'm not naturally very good at games, and I don't tend to stick with any one game for very long or play a lot, so I tend to suck, but with SC2 I decided to really try to get good.  I played all through the beta, watched replays, watched pro gamers and read strategies, and came out into gold league when the first season rolled around.  At the time, the top league was diamond, and below that, platinum, and then gold.  I was pretty happy with it.  As the game matured I sank like a stone through gold, however, and ended up reclassified into silver.  It felt like the community was getting better while I stayed the same.

So, when the end of season 1 was announced, I decided to try to get back into gold before the end of the season.  I practiced hard and to my surprise, the more I practiced, the worse I got.  The more pro games I watched, the more I tried to work on my macro, the more games I lost.  It took until the start of season 2 for me to analyse my games and figure out what was wrong.

In every ladder game I play, I begin with a clear lead.  I am well ahead for the first half of the game, then, and you can imagine my face as I realised this, watching replay after replay, I do something stupid.  Every single game, I was doing the same stupid thing.

I was attacking.

It turns out that attacking is a messy thing in Starcraft 2.  If you're moving your army, and your opponent is standing still, it is reasonable to assume that they are in a better position than you, and most of the time in silver league, that means that they are up a narrow ramp, on the high ground, and you are floundering around below.  The pro gamers always attack early, but they can get away with it: they have the control to ensure that they move up the ramp carefully.  I don't.  Every single game, I was throwing everything away on that first attack.

So what do I do now?  I sit still.  I slowly build my army. I scout a bit, but essentially, I do nothing and wait for the opponent to screw themselves up.  So far, using this tactic, I've won 3 games in a row against gold level players, and I haven't lost at all.  It turns out that, in all the suggetions about working on macro that I've heard, the important bit for me was not the macro'ing, it's the concious decision to not attack.

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The best weekends are the ones that make you forget that you have a day job. You end up completely lost in a whole other world and live freely for a while, you do the things you want to do, you get away from it all.  Last weekend was one of those.

We started out in the pub on Friday night - just the local, just a burger and a quiet drink with close friends, but the door to the back garden was open again at last, letting a cool breeze flow in and making it feel just a little bit like Spring.  Our local gets surprisingly busy on a Friday, as it turns out, but that was alright.  Another month or two and everyone will be out in the garden.  Going out on a Friday is something I've always avoided, not intentionally, but because nothing I'm interested in ever happens on a Friday, but it's alright: it makes the weekend feel so much more separated from the week.

Saturday and Sunday were both beautiful days, with sunshine and all that, and I didn't get up to much: I read a bit, and I played Starcraft a bit.  It's rare that I have a weekend with nothing on my todo list.  The days just trickled away and by the time Monday morning came around, I felt a million miles away from my life.  It was lovely.

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Hello folks, just a quick post to let you know about my latest project, Texturecraft.  It's a site for hosting and finding Minecraft texture packs.  If you play Minecraft, you might find it interesting.

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I've been thinking a lot about productivity and the art of getting things done, and what that stuff is all about.  It's funny how what should be simple gets awfully complicated very, very fast.

First up, there's one simple way to get things done: sit down and do them.  As far as that goes, you really can't get around it.  If you look on Hacker News you can find a million feel-good articles on how to achieve, but you'll spend more hours reading them than actually doing things.  They all boil down to the same message: You just have to do it.

You can't just sit down and do things though, can you?  There's always something stopping you.  I know all about that.  I think that the main barrier is the idea of failure: by starting something, you open up to the idea that maybe you won't finish it.  That's a scary prospect, and yet, it's completely made up by you, in your head, at that moment.  No-one else cares what you're doing with your life.  The Cult of Done Manifesto tries to answer this one with a few ideas about how to give up on the idea of not finishing and just focus on the act of doing.  The theory is, if you keep hammering out ideas, it won't matter that your ideas are incomplete - you'll find achievement in just doing things.  The whole concept of 'done' goes right out the window and doing takes charge.

What about running out of ideas though? ZeFrank calls it Brain Crack: the theory that if you hold on to those ideas, you'll live with their potential, telling yourself that if you ever get round to them, they'll be great. You sidestep the idea of failure by never starting at all, but instead just telling everyone about all the genius ideas that float around in your head.  "I run out of ideas every day", says Ze.  What a wonderful thing to aspire to.

Another problem that I've run up against is what Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier talk about in one particular Smodcast episode (#154 Smundance) - the risk involved.  Sometimes you don't start things, or you abandon things, because the next step is something risky.  It might be that you have to sink money into it, or you've hit a critical point where people might reject your idea, but for some reason, you stop and think.  That wall is the good bit: that's where stuff gets interesting.  You have to commit at that point.  I can't repeat everything that Smith and Mosier talk about here, but there are some great comments in the podcast.  They point out that it's not the end of the world if your project fails, that it's just one part of your life.  They talk about how you would feel if you didn't take that risk, and how you'd always wonder.  They also say something that really struck a chord with me: there will always be waves.  Sometimes stuff is plain sailing but you'll always hit waves once in a while.  The thing is, do you want your boat in a paddling pool, or out in the ocean?  It's a bit cheesy, but I know the feeling: loads of my ideas get stuck in dry dock because I'm too afraid to push them out into the open waters.  Ok, ok, I'm stopping now.

There are a lot of ways to get over the fear.  Some will work for you, others won't.  I think that the most important thing is to just keep starting stuff, even if you never do finish it, because one day you'll start something that you love enough to keep doing.  Set tiny goals, achieve often.

You can tell I've been in the middle of a project for a while, can't you?

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On sunday (well, on Saturday and Sunday, technically) I had a first go at making bread.  Baking absolutely terrifies me - my girlfriend is a wizard when it comes to the art, but I can't make head nor tail of it.  I am an approximate cook - I like to do things by taste.  I hate measuring, despite my scientific tendencies, so when I cook everything is done using the universal measurements of "That looks about right" and "Just another pinch, I think".  Baking is all about precisely measuring everything, mixing it together, and then putting it in the oven and hoping, so it doesn't really fit in with my style.  No knead bread, on the other hand, is different, because it contains very few ingredients and gives you quite a bit of feedback as you go.  Baking for the less precise artist, I suppose.

Cups are a deceptive measurement, though, aren't they?  Especially when the recipe calls for 5/8's of a cup.  That isn't a real measurement at all.  And so, as is my way with things, I ended up making an incredibly runny dough which was a nightmare to work with.  A whole lot more flour added saved the day, but I am still washing the dregs of the mixture out of the teatowel.  I ended up with a very flat, heavy, but successful loaf that I am immensely proud of, even if the crust is rock solid.  The next batch is already in preparation.  I think I could get into bread making, especially if there are more ways to do it as easily as this.

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Well, look at that.  Daylight is here again, streaming in through my windows at unheard of hours like 7:30am and 5pm.  I love this time of year because while I'm not sure I'd pass for an SAD sufferer, I definitely get a lot more deflated over Winter.  Every year Kristy and I try to come up with ways to beat the blues, which have this year involved amazing hot chocolates, baileys, hot toddies, and for me, a hell of a lot of programming.  I've written three major projects since the nights began to draw in and I'm really proud of them all, and we've cooked a lot of good stuff, too.  I think the greatest find was Nigella's Mexican Lasagne (from Kitchen) which is a lasagne made up of cheese, beans, salsa and tortillas.  I think we'll be cooking that one a lot.

Anyway, enough of that! The light is coming again! Every day we gain over three full minutes of daytime to swan about in!  By the end of February I'll be getting home from work in daylight, and in March the clocks change and suddenly everything will be ok again, I'll be coming home to cocktals in the garden whenever the weather allows.  Fantastic.  This is what I spend winter waiting for.

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Sometimes I have these moments where I'm about to do something, and then I stop myself, and then I rethink and I say to myself, "No! You are an adult now! You decide on the rules! You do what you want! No-one can stop you!", so I go ahead and I do whatever stupid thing it was that was in my head.

So today I drank a litre of chocolate milk and ate a boost and a wispa, and drank 3 cups of coffee, and I'm not 100% sure if the nosebleed is related or not but it feels like an awful lot of sugar and caffeine for one working day.  On the plus side, I proved, once again, that being a grown-up is awesome, and I can do whatever I want, and no-one can stop me.

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