Weekly Project Update (August 1 - August 7)

Here's the creative projects I worked on this week (August 1 - August 7):

• Monday - Nothing
• Tuesday - Nothing
• Wednesday - Blogging
• Thursday - Blogging
• Friday - Blogging
• Saturday - Nothing
• Sunday - Nothing - And I posted this.

Project 1: The Blog, Season Six

Apparently this is the first time I've actually written the post late, but here we are, I'm writing the "Happy Blog End and Start" post.

So Happy belated Blog End and Start!

I've been happy with the "blog as project" this year and I'm happy to do another year of it.

I think this last year has been pretty good, although it was a lot of "Favourite YouTube Videos". I'm hoping to step up the types of things I blog in the coming year and I'm hoping my new plan of "do one creative thing a day" will help with that. (It will double the number of posts on the blog at least since I'll be posting a creativity update each week.)

On the topic of Favourite YouTube Videos, I'm still really enjoying posting them since it gives me a chance to go back through and rematch all of my old favourites (since the series pulls from my own favourite's list on YouTube, remember when that was a real thing?). It's an interesting journey into two years ago and I think at the moment it's going to stay about that far behind with me posting about three videos a week.

I will also be updating the video games I've played this year. I've managed to keep on keeping track, I just need to put the posts together and I'll try to do that over the next little while. I think that's been an interesting project as well and it's made me think a lot more about what and how I play.

"Monthly" posts on what I've been playing also cut down on the number of "Video Game Thoughts" posts I've been thinking of making. There's a lot of games that I won't (or can't) finish and some that I just don't have that much to say about. So hopefully I can cut down on thinking about things that I don't want to spend too much time thinking about. It will also hopefully open up time for me to come at the games I'm thinking about in a different way (and hey actually maybe get off my ass and start making some too).

I've also had fun with a spreadsheet of my blogging "progress".
You can find a permanent link to the blorgress page here.

So, over all I'm happy, the blog is staying nominal and that's about it until next August.

Thanks for reading if you do.

Oh and I also figured out how the automatic scheduler works, so I'm pretty happy.

January 2016 Project Update

Somehow, it's been six months since my last project update. I've been pretty busy for the last six months, but mostly on things for the PhD and teaching. Around here I haven't managed to get much done.

As far as the "actual job" goes. I'm hoping to finish the PhD this year, although it'll be December if I do get it all done this year. I'm getting closer though and I've reach the point where I really just want to get it done and and get on to anything else.

The teaching has also been interesting, since my last update I've been working primarily on new ways to teach new computer scientist the basic tools that we expect them to be able to use (like text editors and the Unix command line). That has been a lot of work but I think may also lead to some things that I'd like to do in the future. You may even see me talk about it more here in the next little while.

As far as getting projects done, I haven't. I've managed to do a little work but really haven't managed to put anything to bed. Finishing things is definitely not my strength.

Granted finishing things is never easy:

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.^[1]

— Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

(Stolen ... borrowed ... excerpted ... from Wikipedia)

I think I also sometimes distract myself by giving myself too many options about what to work on *looks at the two page todo list*.

I'm going to try for the next little bit to focus when I'm working on my project stuff. I'm also going to try to make sure that I put the bulk of my time into getting the PhD done.

To manage that I'm going to try to have one active project at a time (well two, but hold onto that thought). For now, I'm going to focus on finishing the sketch fiction first. I'll get to the perler projects (coasters and sprites) when I have a little time, but for now we can call them "on hiatus".

Also I have absolutely no idea what those other two and a half projects were going to be. I should really consider writing things down. On that note, if I come up with more brain crack*, then you might see a project post for a project that I'm not really going to start on.

The "other" project is going to be "blog as blog project". For the last year I really tried to get two posts out a week. Over all I haven't done too badly, but I feel a bit like I use the blog as an excuse to not work on other things (like my PhD and other projects). I'm going to scale back to only one "YouTube Favourites" a week (on Friday). This was always technically the plan with the assumption that I'd be filling Tuesday and the other days with other posts, but that hasn't been the case and that's okay.

I'm going to set the deadline for the sketch fiction for February 9th, 2016 and in the mean time you'll have a fresh batch of favourite videos on Friday.

* he says if as though he didn't have another page in the todo list of "long term" projects in the book with the todo list.

Project 1: A Fifth Season of Blogging!?

Happy (belated*) Blog End and Start Day!

Apparently, I've been at this for a while now. As a quick reminder this blog is actually a blog in two parts. There's the "Blog as Project Discussion", which is actually the "point" of the blog and there's the "Blog as Blog", which is a project in the blog (Project 1 in fact). (And yes, that it's the most times I've written the word "blog" in a single paragraph.)

For the fourth season (from August 2014, to July 2015), I mostly posted blogs about YouTube. I've posted them because I'm excited to share the cool things I've found on YouTube over the years and it's fun to see old videos again. They're also quick and easy to produce, so they allow me to get a feeling of accomplishment. I also just want to see if I can "finish" the project now, we're down to about a 2 year gap and it is slowly shrinking.

Thoughts about video games, are also fun to make but they take me a lot longer to write and produce. I also like the practice of thinking about how a game works while I'm playing it, although it's taken a little effort to make sure that I'm still actually having fun while I play.

I've wanted to look more at the history of video game making from both a historical and technical point of view. So, if I can spend more time blogging, then you can expect to see something that looks more like that, although those will also take some time to produce.

Right at the moment my PhD work, both the research and the other things I've been hired to do while I finish my PhD are taking up quite a bit of time (it's like it's a job or something). I've also hit a point where I'm ready to get my things in order and finish. So above all of my projects, for the next year, my focus will be on finishing my PhD.

So there will be a fifth season of the blog. It may be sparse or it may be dense, depending on my focus, productivity and how creatively I can procrastinate. In the few months I've decided to try for two posts a week (Tuesday and Friday) even if they're both "Favourite YouTube Video" posts and I will try to keep that up.

Thanks for reading!

* Good work automatically posting Blogger. And actually I, rewrote this post just now and like it better so, thanks for not posting my post Blogger! But seriously, I need to figure out how the scheduler works for any future trips away from the Internet.

Project 1: Fourth Season of the Blog

Happy Blog Start and End Day!

Yup, it's August 1st again and that means that the Third Season of the Blog draws to an end. It also means (as you might have guessed from the title) that it's the kick off to the Fourth Season of the Blog.

As a quick reminder this project is the Blog as a Blog part of the Blog. The Blog as a discussion of Projects part of the Blog is a separate thing, which I will post an update about shortly.

For the Blog as a Blog project, I didn't make my goal of a post every two weeks, although I've managed at least five posts a month since May, which I'm fairly happy with. I've also managed to refine my process for producing my favourite YouTube videos posts so that I can make them relatively quickly and painlessly.

I haven't done as well at other posts. I have a backlog of thoughts on video games posts that I'd like to put out there, but this season I only manage to produce two. I also haven't wanted to blog about too many other things since, I'm fairly busy and there's no shortage of opinions about things on the Internet.

Overall I'm happy to keep doing what I'm doing on the blog. For the time being (for the next year) my goal is still to put up two posts a week. Once I feel like I've worked out a system where by I can regularly put up content, then I'll think about expanding what I do.

Project 1: Third Season of The Blog

Happy Birthday!

Well, not birthday. Happy Project Ending Day and Happy Project Start Day. More precisely, Happy Blog Start and End Day!

Today is the last day of the Second Season of the Blog. Today is also first day of the Third Season of the Blog.

The Second Season of the Blog was not all I'd hoped it would be. I wanted to be really good about regular updating, which I haven't really been. I've managed to post in every month of the second season, ranging from 1 post to 11, but not as regularly as I'd hoped.

By far and away I've been best about posting my "favourite YouTube videos", managing 27 of them in total. I've also managed to post 5 "Thoughts on Games", which is fewer than I'd hoped. Finally I tested out "Cool Things of the Week", before deciding that it would be better served living on twitter.

I'm glad I've managed to post as much as I have, although I would like to write more and more regularly. I did manage to finish my PhD coursework and my candidacy during that time, which certainly has more priority.

That being said, I've managed to keep up with the blog for a whole year and for that much at least I'm pretty happy.

The Third Season of the Blog starts now. I'm not planning to change my content that much although I'm hoping to change my schedule/quantity and improve my quality.

Ideally I want to post twice a week for the foreseeable future. This would mean one favourite YouTube videos post, probably on Friday and one other post sometime during the week (hopefully on Tuesdays, but no promises). This other post will be thoughts on video games or something else, if I happen to have a project update (and ideally I'll have more of these than I have so far) then that will count too.

As far as quality, I'm hoping to spend a bit more time writing each post. I also hope that my quality will naturally improve simply by getting more practice.

Hopefully I can keep this up for another year. So the third season will last until August 1, 2014.

Thanks for reading, and keep getting excited and making things.

Project 1 : A Blog - Wrap Up / Update

A year ago I started the "Blog as a Project" project (not to be confused with the "Blog as a Blog") and today is the day I'm supposed to wrap it up.

Let me say first that I'm planning to start a "second season" of the blog, but that I'm still not sure exactly what form it will take.

When I first started out to blog more I had a list of things I thought would be interesting to blog about. I even have a nicely organized file that lists them all. I'll include that below so you can see what I had been thinking about before I started.

Idea	Date Added	Date Published
Intro	06/08/10	01/08/11
Windows Shutdown	06/08/10	-
Thesis	06/08/10	-
We are all going to live in public	06/08/10	-
Thesis Wordle	06/08/10	-
Ad incentives (omgpop vs tetrisfriends)	06/08/10	-
Why everyone should be a polymath	12/08/10	-
Not all collections are created equal	12/08/10	-
Clean Desktop	13/08/10	-
Nerd Fighting / Proactive Nerds	14/08/10	-
My Pockets	14/08/10	-
Black book ToDo List	14/08/10	-
Enjoying Wear	14/08/10	-
Pomplamoose Videos expertise in sound crafting	15/08/10	-
Closet	28/08/10	-
Water Bottle Spigot	28/08/10	-
Garfield / Adding more to the given story	18/11/10	-
I don't really like Harry Potter	18/11/10	-
I don't really like Robots	17/12/10	-
Fan Chants at Hitmen	31/01/11	-
Peanut butter pizza tutorial (Video)	03/06/11	-
"Future" - (Corning Glass) (via Terry O'Riley)	03/06/11	-
Derek K. Miller	31/07/11	13/09/11

So what can we see? Mostly that I only managed to get two posts done from the original list, the Introduction (which I split into two parts, the intro to the "The Blog the Blog" and the intro to "The Blog the Project") and my memorial post to Derek K. Miller. The others haven't been done for a variety of reasons.

By far the biggest reason is that the me of 2010 just doesn't have the same concerns that me of today does. So, while I could write most of these posts still, I'm not sure I'd feel the same push I would have had I not been procrastinating back in 2010. A few of these I have no idea what I was supposed to talk about (Closet? - mine should be be cleaner but what was my point, Garfield? - I don't even know) and some I don't really have anything to say on the topic (Harry Potter, Robots and Hitmen Chants). A few actually require me to learn new skills (how hard should it be to mock up Windows Shutdown Screens? damn hard if you aren't trained in it, it turns out).

Some of them may still be interesting, but I don't know that they match as well with the things I'm thinking about now, nor the things I'd like to focus on. Over all, at the moment, I feel that this blog should support all the other projects that I'm working on (and yes I know I'm not doing much right now, that'll be followed up on in another post). That's why I've been writing (a bit) about video games since at the moment I would like to focus more on learning to be a good developer of video games.

July is really the first month in which I've gotten any traction at all blogging, and that mostly through my Favorite YouTube Videos series. While the YouTube series is not exactly an amazingly deep set of posts, they are fun to write (and hopefully fun to read) and they give me some practice in getting things written and sent out. Given that my career requires (for the next 3 years at least) that I get better at writing and and presenting my work, any practice I can get doing this seems like a good thing.

With a "year" of blogging in hand, I feel excited to keep going (and actually more excited having written this post). As I mentioned, I would like to focus more on blogging about things that support the other projects I'm doing. This means in the short term I'm going to keep posting thoughts about different video games as a primary topic, but I'll keep posting about anything that I think is interesting and slowly flooding everyone with the videos I've favorited on YouTube (incidentally that should take about a year to get caught up on).

As I've said before I think that there should be a pre-determined end date for any project. I'm calling this the second season of the blog and it will run from now until August 1, 2013.

Project 1 : A Blog

So, while I've already said that this blog is about the projects I'm working on, I also intend to cheat a little and use this as a place where I can write about some of the things I'm thinking about.

For the most part this will include discussion related to the fields of software design, user experience and software development (non of which I am actually an expert on, but I certainly spend a lot of time thinking about these things), but might also expand further into academia or what ever else brings itself into my head.

The blogging here will be a project, this means that I'm only going to undertake it for a certain length of time (one year in this case)* and will, I suppose, have some project posts about the progress of it as well. In addition to simply giving myself a platform, I'd like this project to allow me to spend more time writing, which will hopefully make it a less arduous process for me (and make the reading the writing a more pleasant experience for you).  As part of the project I intend to post one blog post a week, usually late in the day on Wednesdays (Mountain Time).

I do intend to keep the blog posts here in Getting Excited, Making Things, but will tag them all "blogging posts" (as opposed to "project posts") if you wish to avoid them.

Go Make Something!

*I think one of the number one reasons many creative projects fail is that there is no end goal. While not universal, this does lead to a lot of people burning out on their projects leaving the audience (or at least me) unhappy that they're not getting their new content regularly. There's a reason that most television shows have seasons.