Year: 2012

A Message to My 11 Year Old Self

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I was thinking the other night about being 11 years old, and being afraid of my place in the world.  I was kind of awkward, super skinny, a little too smart for my own good, and yet not really committed to anything because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.  I felt like I was in a holding pattern, and one thing that really makes me antsy is being stuck in a state of limbo.  I’m not the kind of person who just “enjoys the down time” of routine.  I need things to change.

I thought about what I would say to 11 year old me.  How could I help him become the best me that I could be?  What advice could I give him that I wish had been given to me back then?  What could I say to him to reassure him that in the future, things are pretty kick-ass?

I think it would go something like this:

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Best Comics of 2012

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Adventure TimThis was the year that I went entirely digital.  It was also the year that my kids got more comics than me*

*physical comics from All new Comics only…I still get a lot of comics from Comixology.

Looking back at the end of the year, it was a pretty spectacular year for comics.  There was a bunch of awesome new stuff, some existing series got a shot in the arm, and the big two put out some really good stuff.

What surprises me the most about 2012 is how many comics I read regularly that aren’t from Marvel or DC.  More than half of my entire list now is comprised of stuff from Image or Boom! Studios.

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Awesome FREE comics for your new iPad, Android or Surface

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Saga
A splash page from Saga

So you just got a shiny new tablet for Christmas, well now it’s time to load that sucker up.

Luckily, ComiXology is available on all of the major platforms, and it’s the best way to read comics on a tablet.

Even better news is that Image has been putting out some of the best comics on the stands (digital or otherwise) for the last several years…and a ton of them are available for free on Comixology.

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I Live in the Future

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For most of my professional life the saying has been “Five years from now”, as in: “Five years from now bandwidth will be fast enough we’ll be able to stream HD video.” “Five years from now computers will be fast enough to render video in real time.” “We need another five years until a small … Read more

My DIG London experience

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I had my first ever speaking gig last week, when I spoke at the Digital Interactive Gaming conference on the subject of inspiring teams through innovation.  I was incredibly well prepared, well practiced, had kick assed slides, and had what I thought was a pretty killer interactive idea.

My talk, called “Innovation Days for Small Teams”,  was really about fostering autonomy, mastery, and purpose in software development teams.  It’s something that I’m passionate about, and I believe that Innovation Days are one of the key things that changed the IT Department at Info-Tech.

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My brother-in-law Chris

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This has been a trying week for my family.  On Monday my sister Annette’s husband Chris went in for an aortic valve replacement.  He had a congenital defect which was causing his heart to pump less blood than his body needed, and it was making him weak as a kitten.  Chris is a mechanic, so … Read more

The More Things Change

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I had the opportunity to go to Toronto to visit my old buddies John and Charles at 70 Main Street.  The boys from 70 Main Street did the redesign of TSN.ca back when we merged the TSNMax content back into TSN, and it was a sight to behold, still one of my favourite designs.  I got to talk to the guys about doing some major changes to Info-Tech, and bringing in an outside view (as well as getting an extra couple of pairs of arms working with me).

It was awesome.  Probably my favourite part of the day was the fact that because of FaceBook, we didn’t have the awkward “So what have you been doing for the last 10 years?”, conversation, which it would turn out was a crap ton of stuff.  Because the three of us are FaceBook friends, I know we’re all married, John has two boys around the same age as Kaylin and Maks, while Charles has a daughter just slightly younger than Maks.

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Digital vs Physical comic shops

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I came to a realization this week.  We may have hit the time where there are more people with iPads than there are people with access to comic shops.  I did a little math, and based it off London Ontario (where I live).  We have 350,000 people in London.  Adding in the places within 30 minutes outside of London with no comic shop in their home town, we get to about 425,000 people.

London has 4 full time comic shops.  425000/4 = 106,250 potential customers per shop.  Multiply that by about 3000 Diamond Accounts, which means that approximately 318 million people have access to a comic shop.  Considering though that the best selling comic of 2012 sold 318,000 copies (for Walking Dead #100), we can probably assume that 5% of the general population is an agressive number…but for fun, let’s make that 10%, which means 31.8 million potential comic fans have access to a comic shop.

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The Digital Comics List – October 2012

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I’m mostly off physical comics, with the only notable exceptions being stuff for the kids, and archived collections for myself.  By and large, just like with magazines, I’ve switched entirely to digital. With Digital, I also find I’m sampling stuff I never would have before, simply because I don’t have to deal with physically storing … Read more

52 Posts in 52 weeks

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I don’t blog anymore.  I micro-blog a LOT (Twitter, Facebook, etc), but I went months without a post this year, and the worst part was a gross picture of my innards was the highlight of my blog.  That ain’t right. I used to do at least one blog post a week, it was a summary … Read more