Year: 2012

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:

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 hand held computer is actually a useful thing”
• “We’re still five years out from having a computer that can go all day on a battery charge.”
• We’re about five years away from not needing all of these wires.
• In five years I’ll be able to take a credit card from anywhere.

I don’t know when it happened, but five years from now is here.

I watch HD YouTube streams on my 55″ TV all the time, I beam my desktop from my Mac to that same HDTV without the need of wires.  My wireless internet connection is as fast as I need it all the time.  I carry around the equivalent computing power to my desktop computer from 1999…in my pocket!  I regularly use a tablet that can do 90% of the things I need to do in a day, and which yields me about 8 hours of battery life easily.  My laptop gets me a good 5-7 hours of battery life most days.  I don’t worry about my data anymore because it’s all around me in the ubiquitous “cloud”.  I still carry a USB key on my keychain, but I barely ever use it.  I have an elaborate backup system at home, that failed me recently…and which “the cloud” saved me from without me ever knowing that I was in peril.

I get comics, magazines and books digitally, and when I want to read something, I can do so without ever leaving my chair.  We don’t have video stores anymore, if you want to watch a movie you rent and download it (either through a device like AppleTV, or your cable box), but more often than not I stream it from a streaming service like Netflix, where for about the cost of a couple rentals a month, I get a firehose of content.

That’s the thing about the future, it kind of sneaks up on you.

This week’s Best of List:

• Album of the Week:
• Comic of the Week: All New X-Men #2 (Bendis and Immonen are revitalizing the X-Men in a big way)
• Book of the Week: Blah Blah Blah – What To Do When Words Don’t Work (Dan Roam)
• Podcast of the Week: Quit from Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 network is pretty inspirational
• TV Show of the Week: The Walking Dead mid-season finale once again leaves with a “holy shit” moment.
• Website of the Week: 24 Ways (To Impress Your Friends) – Web Design Tips

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.

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.

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 of cool stuff I found, and what I was doing.  Looking back on those blog posts now is a cool look at who I was.  I want that back.

There’s no reason why I can’t get out 52 posts in 52 weeks, so this is the start of that.  Every Monday Morning you can expect a new blog post for the next 52 weeks.

Starting this week, I’m going to post the same thing, once a week, with the same format.  A little paragraph blurb, followed by the same stuff in the same format:

• Album of the Week: (What I’m listening to)
• Comic of the Week: (Best comic I read that week)
• Book of the Week: (What I’m reading)
• Podcast of the Week: (What I listen to on my way to work)
• TV Show of the Week: (Best moment from TV that week)
• Movie of the Week: (What movie did I see that week)
• Website of the Week: (Best site I went to that week)

If I don’t have something in a category, I won’t add it.

Here’s a “for instance”, for this week, here’s how that looks.

• Album of the Week: Muse – The 2nd Fall
• Comic of the Week: Lookouts #2 – From the minds of the Penny-Arcade guys.
• Book of the Week: Old Man’s War – Part of the Humble Ebook Bundle until the end of the day!
• Podcast of the Week: Tech News Today
• TV Show of the Week: The Walking Dead Season 3, Episode 1 – Seed
• Movie of the Week: Moonrise Kingdom – Wes Anderson’s latest movie, now on iTunes
• Website of the Week:  The Humble Ebook Bundle