The day begins at 10 pm

I wonder how many other folks out there "start" their day at 10 pm. I dont mean the "official" day - that's the one you do when you wake up in the morning, go to work, spend time with children or other family and friends. I mean that special part of a day when everyone else is asleep, and it's just you and the glowing monitor...

For me this is the time when I keep my sanity. I can catch up on blogs, dream up ideas, or just follow web threads across the net. Do you know what I mean? Going to a site - moving to another, following that idea further, that idea leads you to another, then you hop over to google, then to some obscure site, etc. etc.

It's a great part of the day - but frustrating. I want to record some sounds and things, and instead I have to muffle my typing as to not wake up the wife and kids :).

I have a goofy idea which I really hope to make progress on this weekend. Here's to time...

BTW does anyone have a name for a good host for podcast mp3's? I want to create a podcast, but I'd max out my isp's disk space really quickly...

Indie Game: Glace

Here I sit, early in the morning, tons of things to do today, plus I'm on the clogged straw that is dialup access while my cable is being worked on. However, even being on pokey slow dialup access, I still downloaded and tried out Glace, and so should you. It's a fun platformer that has a cute storyline and stylistic graphics. The interesting thing about the character is that you have all the "powers" you need at the beginning. The development of the character is actually you learning how to control the little guy. Very interesting, and fun. So, I'm off to call my cable company and beg for access back - you go download this game and try it out. It's perfect for your 7-10 yr old who's looking for a new game to play as well.

i-piphany...

Gosh, I just had a major brainstorm on the way in to work today... thoughts of podcasting, the new wired cd, adventure games, choose-your-own adventures, Jack Flanders, and I stumbled across this great CD from Dieslboy called "The Dungeonmaster". It all coelesced into something amazingly awesome. Now I just gotta DO IT. More soon.

Infoblox demo

From Dr Dreff comes a link to a way cool new laszlo widget from Antisleep. Pull together your bloglines, del.icio.us, technorati, flickr, and wikipedia information together in one view. Killer!

Researchers detect Methane on mars

This is very good news! It can only be 1 of two things. Boring geothermal stuff or life! My bets are on the second option...

On the train

Once again I sit on the train, typing away in WikiDPad whilst listening
to podcasts. It's funny, since I've been listening to podcasts like Adam Curry's
Dail Sourcecode, the train ride has gone from insufferably long, to not nearly
long enough. Dont worry, I'm not going to wax philosphical like yesterday.
Today after getting work done, I spent some time thinking about my nascent
online game, poking around the net, learning some new things, and
getting upset that del.icio.us kept going down whilst I was trying to add some new links.

Here's some random ideas I'm kicking around:

1) laszlo-based Mud/MMORPG (duh)
2) PodQuest - a which-way book style series of sound clips which go together to
make an adventure.
3) Add - on adventure - imagine an old fashioned serial where each episode
is created by a different group of people. Or people vote on what
happens next. Then each week you get a new podcast with the next episode.

Do it yourself ticketing

Scott Andrew talks about a nifty service that allows you to create tickets for your own event - even with refunds, etc. And a few weeks after the event they mail you a check. Cool.

My Enemy, Time

Here I sit on the train listening to a podcast by Adam Curry.
I have so many ideas, things to do, things I want to do, and it's just
incredibly frustrating. I've been here in the Bay Area long enough to know that
you can realize your dreams - if you just stay up till 3am , coding, composing, writing,
or whatever. If you are a dad like me who walks home from the train, hugs the kids
and wife, then putters around on the computer for a few hours before
getting guilty and sloughing off to sleep - only to do the same thing the next day - things are much more difficult.

My challenge is not coming up with great ideas, or being smart enough to bring them
into reality, its just having the stinking time to do ... anything.

With that in mind, I'm sitting here on the train thinking about what to focus on.
I have an idea for a great game - and for helping create a community for Laszlo, and
for a plethora of other interesting things. And it's great to see a meme
evolving. I came up with an idea to bring together podcasting and geocaching - and Adam Curry mentioned it on his podcast a while back (coool!) and now other people are
taking the idea and evolving it further with concept of having hotels or
travel agencies offer a podcast of all the places you might visit on some planned journey.

Gosh - time time time! Where to get time. Time to play video games, time to spend with kids, time to think about great big ideas, time to meet with cool people, time to think, pray, sleep, eat, love. Time is my enemy, friend, partner and adversary.

What to do? My only choice is to focus. Get the scattered sunbeams focused into a tight point of light, and burn your initials on that dead leaf like you did as a kid with a magnifying glass. Eliminate everything thats a distraction or sucks away valuable time.
Find something to go deep with - to take to completion.

Okayyy, you're saying. He's finally lost it. Posting this long rambling blog post about what? Time, ideas, focusing. Well, go ahead and skip on to the next newsfeed or link, for me this is helping me figure out where to take my life, career, whatever.

Back to reality. This week I'm kicking off planning of my 2d
laszlo-based zelda-style mmorpg/chat app. Look for a prototype in the next few weeks.

Chat with other Laszlo Developers on IRC

If you are poking around with the sourcecode for Laszlo, or are interested in finding out more about it from "real" people, you might fire up your favorite IRC client (perhaps "dust off" might be a better phrase?) and head over to #laszlo on freenode.net.

Game Neverending --- ending

From the site:

Game Neverending is being put up on blocks indefinitely. Flickr, Ludicorp's online community and photo sharing site, is on fire, and as a small company we don't have the resources to build both simultaneously. And so, we have to shut Game Neverending down. We love Game Neverending and wish we could do both, but it has been a struggle.

It makes me very sad, since that site's been the impetus for many things for me, including some cool ideas like Playful Applications.

However, it's given me a new thought - which involves creating a new game world of my own. Can I do it? Will it be another endlessly put-off project that goes nowhere? Or can it become something cool? Stay tuned and see for yourself.

SlayerOffice - bookmarklets and insanely cool js

I've probably blogged about SlayerOffice before, but it's simply too cool to miss. If you've not already clicked the link above, then do so. Stop reading now. No. Go on. Well, shoot. You're still here. Slayer Office has some really insanely great bookmarklets and other nifty examples of using the DOM, js, gaming, and other things. But if all you do is go to the site and grab the [favelet suite] you'll be doing well - especially if you are a web developer and have needed these tools for a while and just didnt know it :)

Back from vacation...

Gosh, it doesnt seem like vacation. I took two days off last week to let my wife go to a conference while I watched the kiddos. Instead of a relaxing time, it was non-stop work. I hardly even logged on to check out the state of the world. Gad. Funny that I'm now thinking that coming in to work today is my real vacation...