Tiny Subversions

So on the strength of the Team Fortress 2 class articles over at Rock Paper Shotgun, and the insistence of Darren, I went and pre-ordered The Orange Box in order to start playing in the TF2 beta.

I just played my first game, and I am just enamored. I don't like first person shooters in general; I particularly do not like multiplayer first person shooters. But TF2 does something that makes playing with strangers almost seem like playing with friends at a LAN party: it pops up little notifiers like "AwesomeDude2 is healing you" or "you were just killed by a turret built by EngineerTheGreat" or whatnot. I was also playing with Darren for this first game. He was basically my medic, following me around and healing me, while I did my soldier thing. Not only was it good teamwork, but the the game was actually recognizing the teamwork.

Anyway, I'll gush more about the game when I've played some more. Doubtless tonight!

Labels: darren, multiplayer, tf2

I'm attempting to redirect this blog's feed using Blogger's auto-redirect feature, mostly because I like to have more complete metrics on who's reading my blog. If you're reading this site on a feed and for some reason aren't getting an updated feed, please let me know.

Labels: admin, meta

I was on a business trip to San Francisco about six weeks ago, and I only got around to posting about it now. Oops. Since I was just talking about crashing on people's couches, I think it's appropriate to mention that Robin was gracious enough to host me. (Her couch is extremely comfortable!) I also had a nice lunch with Charlie and Max, and dinner with Gus.

Anyway, during my trip I noticed something peculiar. I was hanging around down by the piers on the Embarcadero, and I had a strange sense of deja vu. I've been here before, I said to myself. Which is true, I had visited there the year before. But there was something else. Something nagging at me. Then I realized: I've skated the shit out of this place!!

Labels: friends, travel

Here's an advanced networking tip.

I've written before that, by my weird definition, a weak tie becomes a strong tie when you're at the point where you could crash on that person's couch.

I like to use LinkedIn as a tool to help me with this kind of thing. When I'm traveling to a city for one reason or another, I go to LinkedIn and I do a search in my personal network of people who live in that city. (You can do this in Facebook, too.) Then, for each person who I feel might want to meet up with me for dinner, or maybe even host me at their house, I send a personalized email. Obviously you need to be careful how far you go: don't ask someone to host you if you don't know them very well or think they might be offended. But it's almost always safe to ask someone to lunch, especially if you've had a meal with them at a conference or something.

Labels: networking, networking tips, weak_ties

So I just got back from Austin, TX, because I spent almost all of last week at Austin GDC. I love Austin but rarely get a chance to go, so it was a treat to see locals like Sara, Damion, Brian, and Brandon, as well as catch up with folks like Joe, Jane, Austin, and Bill, who were in town for the conference. I even talked to Kim for about 15 seconds on the streets of Austin.

Got to go see King of Kong with some folks from Midway and MIT/GAMBIT. That was an awesome film. Believe the hype!

I also entered my business card into two drawings, and won both of them! The first drawing netted me a bottle of hot sauce, but in the second drawing I scored a free pass to SXSW Interactive! This is great, because I've never actually attended SXSW in any way. It's usually during GDC, but it's not this year. So I'm psyched.

Probably the most exciting takeaway from Austin GDC was that there were about five different talks about metrics in one way or another. I'll write more about that on the Orbus blog, though.