What I'm Into: Friends' Kickstarters

Crowd-funding waxes and wanes in public mythology. The drama around Double Fine's first Kickstarter run with the $1M raised in 24 hours seems like so long ago now. I remember everyone crying from the rooftops how crowd-funding would democratize development and change the world. Then a few years later, the moaning - handfuls of high-profile failures and a myriad of slipped dates, with Double Fine like the cherry on top coming in tremendously over-budget and over-deadline just like any other AAA project.

There was a period of saturation, with everyone and their dog asking for money, and then a period of ambivalence as indie creators and punters alike realized crowd campaigns were not a universal salve or automatic ticket to funding.

I don't have any data to support this feeling (there's your first bullshit flag) but it seems to me that crowd-funding is only now reaching a period of maturity - fewer copycat or on-the-fly campaigns, more infrastructure for manufacturing and delivery - and that's pretty cool.

I've backed 2 campaigns in the last month that I want to share, both games, both by friends/acquaintances, and both fully funded within the first few days:

Dreaming Spires

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/949153718/dreaming-spires

Jeremy's Oxford-themed board game is rich in history, characters and a gorgeously scholastic aesthetic. They say "write what you know" and as Jez is an Oxford alum and consummate board game geek, Dreaming Spires most certainly comes from an authentic (and well-researched!) place. It also looks fun to play - strategically building a college up from the medieval era, attracting scholars and competing in historical Oxford events? I can get into that!

Everyone who knows me as game developer also knows "I hate games" - especially board games, which I perceive as a hindrance of social gatherings. I'm decidedly a single-player gamer. At parties I prefer to, you know, talk about shit and drink alcohol.

Jez has often assured me you can do both while playing board games, as has Gracie, but I've never quite been sold. However, Dreaming Spires appeals to me in a way other games haven't due to the solid biographical emphasis on characters. I can get attached to characters. They are the heart of storytelling for me. I may not be interested in leading a faceless army or civilization but I want to attract Oscar Wilde to my college, damn it!

Also interesting about this project is that it's being run in partnership with board game publisher Game Salute, veterans of the Kickstarter business. To me this is a fascinating signal of the maturity of the crowd-funding platform - indies working with publisher support for logistics, especially in a physical goods space like board games, just makes sense.

Night In The Woods

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1307515311/night-in-the-woods

From Alec Holowka of the venerable Indie House back home in Vancouver comes an adventure game that I actually want to play. Plus, it is beautiful.

Everyone seems to be into adventure games nostalgia. For many years I thought I was too - until I realized most people's nostalgia, adventures and fantasies didn't match mine. I crave new game worlds where I can explore aimlessly, with deep characterization to immerse myself in. I don't give a shit about puzzles or normal "game stuff" which is perhaps why I enjoyed Sworcery so profoundly while none of my gamer mates rated it. I love it when the mundane aspects of life are reflected in alternate universes. I am one of those people who relished every moment of waiting for the bus to my forklift job in the original Shenmue for Dreamcast.

So Night In The Woods looks well up my alley. In some ways it reminds me of Cheap Thrills the webcomic - except with mystery. I'm really drawn to all of the character concepts and designs, the world aesthetic, and the fact that the main character is female and that her femaleness seems to be of absolutely zero consequence. (That she looks like a punk cat and is therefore totally unsexualized may help on this front.) Also, I love things that are darkly, hopelessly sarcastic and I love to play bass and break stuff.

There is a lot for me to potentially love about Night In The Woods. But even if the game doesn't turn out precisely how I'm envisioning it, I'm happy I can do my small part to support some artists I respect to create work of their own imagining. And maybe that's the real point of crowd-funding in the end.

Have you backed anything recently?

Cert, Then and Now

 
This Friday my team hits code freeze - which, in case you don't work in software (looking at you, Mum & Dad) is kind of a big deal. It means we've only a day or two left to make any fixes or changes to our app before we branch - or "freeze" - a Release Candidate build.

This "RC0" build then gets tossed over the fence to the certification and regression testing processes required to sign it off for launch. If all goes well (pro tip: things never go well) this build will be the final 1.0 software that gets released to users when the new Xbox launches on Nov 22.

More likely, Cert and QE will find a shipstopping issue that we've somehow missed, and the team will frantically fix and spin up new RCs until one is deemed worthy of public release. (We've started an office pool on what RC number the Xbox final OS will ship with - but that's probably not something I ought to say on the Internet!)

Cert is always a weird time in the lifecycle of a product and it's one they rarely teach you about in school. Having a build in Cert means you are essentially on-call - it's limbo-like but you have to be on your toes ready to fix a shipstopper at any moment. I have fond memories of my first ever Cert on the Madden game back in 2008 - I was a lowly junior engineer so none of the really tough ship-blocking bugs came to me. So for me, life was pretty damn chill. Our entire dev team of 11 engineers piled onto one sofa together and spent 12 hour days playing Wario Ware and Boom Blox on a retail Wii kit while we waited for bugs to roll in.

Of course that was the old days - because this industry moves so quickly I'm basically a granny. Now the world has shifted from box products to digital delivery, there is usually a 1.1 release to start work on immediately. No time to take a big holiday or comp leave while the discs get manufactured. Users expect you to push them an updated version at least once a month! And that's not a bad thing.

The larger software industry's paradigm shift to Agile has also helped. Hopefully, if your team has been following Scrum methods they'll be working at a sustainable pace and won't be burned out in need of a rest come launch. They'll also have been releasing every sprint (even if just to soft launch or internal dogfooding) and have automated testing so the build quality should be high - meaning fewer issues to find in a certification pass.

In fact, it's possible to make the argument that Agile precludes the need for Cert and that it's a sad old relic of the console waterfall era. I'm not going to make that argument, as there are enough people discussing "bug sprints" and "stabilization" or "integration" sprints to indicate it's still a common enough problem at the end of a project. And certification continues to be required in one form or another on all closed platforms from game console TCRs to the Apple App Store's submission process.

So while I miss the weeks on weeks of Wario Ware, I think dev is generally changing for the better. Our Cert period beginning next week will be a interesting time, with attentions divided between 1.1 development and urgent fixes on the 1.0 RC. Cross fingers there aren't too many of the latter!

What I'm Into: Lash Extensions Lifehack

Bit of a girly post here. Let's talk eyelashes. 

I've got a complex about my natural lashes. They are short, mousy brown and generally unremarkable. It wouldn't bother me half as much if my partner, a big hairy Brummie, didn't have the same freaking genetic disorder as Elizabeth Taylor which gives him two rows of gorgeously long black lashes. What a waste.

So to make up for my lacklustre lashline, and generally being a lazy cow with no time to do makeup properly, I've been faking it since 2009. 

I started out with individual Duralash bunches:

Many women start with the temporary caterpillar strip falsies for special occasions, but those intimidated the fuck out of tomboy little me at first. Not to mention they defeat my whole purpose of extreme laziness - so inspired by this Kingdom of Style post I reached straight for the permanent glue.

I wore them on and off through my last two years of uni, although they are fussy to apply and while fine in the winter, seemed to just melt off my face in the summer months. I finally gave up the grudge when I realized they were taking so long to stick on each week it was hardly worth the time saved on mascara daily. That, and they look completely ridiculous up close:

I had my first real set of salon extensions done when I was working in Tokyo. Everybody gets everything done in Tokyo, and I was spending a lot of my free time enjoying the aircon and practising my Japanese with the gals at Nail Bee Roppongi, so it seemed the logical thing to do. Although describing what lash curve I wanted in Japanese not to mention explaining that one of the girls had glued my eye together was a bit of a challenge.

That first set worked out ok:

Unlike strips or bunches, real extensions sit 1:1 on your natural lashes, have no seams and last until the real lash grows out. I was hooked.

For the past year I've been getting mine done every 5-6 weeks at Lash Lab on Brick Lane and they fucking rule. It's £50 a pop and my eyes look like this without makeup:

A colleague of mine did some extensive market research on character designs for a fashion game last year, trying to find out what art style appealed most to girls and women and what type of aspirational images they identified with. She found that women reacted most favourably across the board to characters with thick black upper lash lines - we intuitively love that shit.

Nowadays I'll pop falsies on top of my extensions for a special do, inspired by HRH Nicki Minaj from who I learned you can wear multiple rows: 

Excessive? Perhaps. But I've got Gracie's fluttering genetic mutations to live up to.

Codess Stockholm

I was in Stockholm last week for a whirlwind 24-hours, to speak at Codess Engineering Forum for Women.

Not a hardship, since I'm kind of in love with Stockholm - it reminds me of Canada in a lot of ways. Friendly people with a casual, outdoorsy vibe. The city is surrounded by water. You don't have to put the word "ice" in front of "hockey" for people to know what you're talking about. 

But the Swedes have much better taste in fashion, interior design and sweet pastries than Canadians do. And I get to eat Kalles fish eggs on my eggs for breakfast whenever I'm in Stockholm - what is not to love?

The event was a huge success (check the video!) and I met some fascinating ladies in a room full of almost 100 female engineers. But I had a lot of trouble preparing my talk. It doesn't help that public speaking is like a small form of torture for me, and on top of that I was asked to speak about myself.

After much wringing of hands, I decided to go with a very personal talk about my career so far, and end it with 3 pieces of advice to share with women starting careers in tech.

Lesson 1: You're Probably Better Than You Think

More than just an excuse to use a quote from Winnie the Pooh, it's objectively true that women and minorities in the tech sector suffer from a myriad of cognitive biases. We are susceptible to everything from Imposter Syndrome to Stereotype Threat, and we're convinced that boys start out with a major advantage in maths and science.

That said, the Unlocking the Clubhouse research on Carnegie Mellon CS students indicates that despite these biases and feelings of inferiority, women tend to perform at the same level if not better than their male peers. It's mostly in our heads.

Lesson 2: Use Your Unique Perspective

I love the technique of gender swapping to reveal stereotypes. Anita Sarkeesian's "Tropes v. Women" video on the Woman in the Refrigerator trope calls out Wreck It Ralph's Sgt. Calhoun vowing revenge for her boyfriend's murder at the altar by a giant Cyberbug as a reversal so rare as to be comically absurd.  

Being a minority in a male-dominated industry affords women a unique outsider perspective. It's often tempting to try to be one of the boys. But by being ourselves, we can sometimes turn assumptions on their head and show things for what they really are.

It's also a common theme in the research that women have broader interests and a wider range of reasons for entering Computer Science than most men. That's not to say that women can't be hacker bros who love code for the sake of code, or that men can't be well-rounded. 

But the tendency of many women in Comp Sci NOT to be pure hacker bros presents an amazing opportunity - not just to integrate engineering with disparate fields like fashion, medicine and biochemistry, but also to explore different paths within engineering such as Product Management, Quality Engineering and User Experience.

Lesson 3: Help Your Friends

People tend to be friends with people who are similar to themselves - and they tend to want to work with people like them too. This is how Old Boys clubs are formed in the first place. It's also how I became so close with fellow female game devs Laura and Cici that we ended up together in Mexico on Laura's wedding day.

I think helping your friends is especially important when you (and likely your friends) are minorities within an industry/culture. This means making introductions, referring your friends for jobs, mentoring younger women and just generally being willing to give your time and knowledge to others.

I guess it also means standing up in front of a room of women to give a speech, even though you'd rather jump into the Baltic sea.

I strongly believe the more I can help out the people I know, the stronger the women in tech community will become and the better the industry will be for everyone, male and female alike.

Inbox Zero

Inbox Zero - it does exist!!

I'm on a Getting Things Done kick this week, attempting to organize my brain and my life so I don't feel so fucking overwhelmed and stressed out all the fucking time. Ahem.

Gracie and I spent two glorious days in the Brecon Beacons the weekend before last, without any data or mobile reception. As soon as we drove back toward civilization both our phones exploded with hundreds of new emails. Just what I wanted to deal with at a dirty Welsh truck stop with an epic wedding-guest hangover. I couldn't tell if it was the prospect of wading through my inbox or the impulse-bought Burger King mozzarella sticks that made me more nauseous.

I've been using Outlook Tasks and my inbox as a to-do list, and had primitive rules set up for inbox filtering - a system that was clearly not working as my Outlook Tasks contains pages of quasi-relevant emails from as far back as April.

Gracie has been using Mailbox for six months now and swears by it. I love the idea of triaging email once - do it now, delegate it or defer it. I often find myself reading the same email multiple times which is utter bollocks. Unfortunately Mailbox only supports Gmail accounts and I have to sync corporate mail across five devices.

I figured Outlook has to have solved this problem, even without the pretty UI interactions. And behold, it is good.

What I have done is basically this method of emptying my inbox using the Trusted Trio, but with a couple extra hacks:

1.  Rules. Mine weren't working. I filtered JIRA notifications and some other auto-spam folders but I still had 100+ messages a day from distribution lists clogging up my inbox.

For the past couple of days I've sent all my DL mail (except for my direct team's low-volume DL) to a single DLs folder, which I check a couple of times a day. It is ridiculous how much this decreases my inbox load and the time and headspace this has saved me already.

2. Follow Up - the first rule of inbox triage. I call this folder Tasks, not Follow Up, because whatever. A Task is anything I receive that needs an action but can't be completed in under two mins. Because otherwise just do it, right? GTD style.

Tasks is my To-Do list. And awesomely enough, I get close to zeroing it out most days. When a task is complete, of course it gets moved out of Tasks into another folder. Otherwise shit would be bananas!

3. Hold - this is the stuff that doesn't require action from me, but that I might need to keep track of. Maybe it's an ongoing thread with some key info, or an answer I'm waiting on from somebody. I plan to review this folder regularly so I can chase things or delete/archive them once they're no longer active.

4. Archive - everything that I read that doesn't require action gets moved out of the Inbox to this folder. I don't really delete anything except OOO mail so this is essentially trash/storage combined.

This is the biggest difference for me and what has allowed me to reach Inbox Zero for the first time EVER. If I read something and don't need to act on it, I move it so I don't have to look at it or think about it again. The commitment is not to leave read shit polluting your lovely inbox whitespace.

5. Category searches - I've added a few Outlook categories to make it easier to search for things. Of course this should all be stuff that requires no current action so it probably lives in Work Archive.

So far I only have reference tags and a tag for product ideas I may want to revisit somewhere down the line, but I can see the potential for other tags like "Learning", "Worth Reading" and project specific reference categories.


This is pretty basic lifehacking, but it's a step in managing the firehose that is my email. I'm excited to mess around with other GTD hax as I go, like calendar reminders and syncing to OneNote.

Have you ever seen an empty inbox before? What's your system like?

And how do you manage to sync it across different devices? I have an iPhone, a Windows phone and an Android tablet as well as a couple of Win8 and Mac laptops - hey! I'm a platform agnostic! - so it should be fun to see how this method scales cross-OS. Thank the lord (Ballmer?) for SkyDrive.

What I'm Into: Pinterest "Crap I Like To Eat"

So after that takeaway blip a while back we're back to cooking at home 4-5 nights a week. It's not easy. As a foodie, living in London, there are far too many temptations to eat out.

I say that like "oh you fancy, huh", but the number of new restaurants we try each month is tiny. The list of places I want to eat at grows much faster than I can knock items off it. Most of the time when we eat out or order in it's a case of sheer exhaustion or boredom.

The thing is, home-cooked meals are almost always way better tasting than takeaway (let alone cheaper). Yet somehow, when I'm feeling tired or apathetic it's hard to remember how awesome my own cooking is. Which is why I got inspired by this blog post and the idea of making a "Crap I Like To Eat" list - to reference in precisely such moments of weakness.

So I thought this was a perfect opportunity to finally use the Pinterest account I started 2 years ago and never pinned anything to.

Feel free to tell me I am doing it wrong. I get the feeling I'm totally doing it wrong. Pinterest seems to be a place to keep pics of sexy, aspirational food porn - more along the lines of "things I'd cook in my fantasy life where I'm an organic hipster Martha Stewart" rather than "things I have cooked loads of times for weeknight dinnerz". Speaking of things I've cooked loads of times for weeknight dinnerz, the above pic is one of our regular standbys - soba, eggs, asparagus and prosciutto, 5 minutes, easy.

I don't particularly care if I'm doing it wrong though. I've been misusing social media for my own needs ever since I started using Twitpic then Tumblr as an Instagram a few years before Instagram existed.

With that in mind here is our regular dinner food board - all tried and tested recipes in the Gracie Herst household. Though we do tend to put our own spin on them, as neither of us are into following recipes and we're both obsessed with adding chilis to everything.

It's not strictly dinner either as I've put a few of my favourite puddings in there. I have a mad sweet tooth, but I also take after my mum and often bake as a self-soothing project. Usually late at night. The jam tarts are a go-to.

I'm interested to see how this evolves and if I keep using it. This summer we are really into making South-Asian wraps and pancakes, from summer rolls to ssambap and banh xeo to pa jeon.

Do you have a "Crap I Like To Eat List"? What is on it? Are you a Pinterest food pornographer? Please share!

Insights

Last week I went on a work offsite - one of those team building events where you have to run around with people you don't actually work with, taking scavenger hunt photos of yourselves on Boris bikes and such.

I've never been a fan of these structured team-building exercises - if I'm honest, they fill the introverted side of me with dread. It feels like everything I hated about PE class. I probably sound like a real ray of sunshine right now.

But we did something interesting this time, which proved to me objectively and quantitatively that sunshine will never be a major part of my personality - we ran our Insights colour profiles. 

Insights is based on Jungian personality type theory and as such is similar to the Myers-Briggs Type Index. I've known since age 16 that I am an INTJ - the scientist/strategist type, great at assimilating reams of data and ideas into long-range plans and systems, not so great (read: awful) at doing detailed work with my hands or connecting warmly with others. If you've never taken the MBTI test, I really encourage you to do so as the profiles tend to be eerily accurate. Exhibit A: "When under a great deal of stress, the INTJ may become obsessed with mindless repetitive, Sensate activities, such as over-drinking."

So it wasn't a shock to discover my Insights colour energies are primarily Cool Blue (analytical, organized, objective) and Earth Green (encouraging, reliable, trusting) - both of which fall on the Introverted side of the spectrum. I have slightly less than the average amount of Fiery Red energy (demanding, driven, competitive) -- and unsurprisingly, almost no Sunshine Yellow (enthusiastic, creative, outgoing).

As wretchedly hand-wavey as this all sounds, it becomes a lot less fluffy when used as a tool to discover what motivates the members of your team, and to apply explicit strategies for relating to and influencing them. My boss is Blue/Red, and while I know we are both highly analytical, I have difficulty relating to his demanding Type A side. Insights recommends being brief and standing up for yourself when dealing with Red folks - "Be confident, strong and direct. Don't mistake Fiery Red's assertive manner for a personal attack." All good strategies that I've been figuring out for myself, but it's nice to have them spelled out.

I actually sprung for the spousal discount program to get Gracie's Insights report (he's Green/Yellow, the polar opposite of my boss). Glad I did, as the report gave me a lot of insight into the feelings and behaviours of the person I live with and thought I knew best. Maybe I'll write a post about Insights and relationships sometime.

For me however, the hardest part of this was seeing my weaknesses confirmed so openly in a 20-page report. 

• Others may find her cold and distant
• Can miss opportunities by being cautious around strangers
• May project a weak image, thus her invaluable contributions may be overlooked
• All work and no play
• Usually puts facts before feelings

"Felicity tends to withdraw when stressed. She may be seen by others as distant, unfeeling, sceptical, not interested in people and even arrogant - a perception that she finds difficult to understand. She uses her thinking to analyse the world, not to control it, but her reliance on thinking makes her appear impersonal and critical."

Slap in the face, much? It sucks, but especially after moving from engineering into PM, I've feared this was the case. I am a stone cold Blue/Green bitch (and I don't even want to go into how being a woman complicates the situation further). 

It's hard not to get depressed reading that account of yourself. But in the interest of kaizen and "waking up smarter", being aware I have this problem is the first step in fixing it.

I've come up with a few rules for myself:

1. Ask open-ended questions.

Just asking people questions at all is something that doesn't come naturally to me. Yeah, this sounds crazy for a product person who is keenly interested in people, behaviour and psychology. But I'm an observer. I worry an inordinate amount about prying into the personal lives of people I don't know well, and I can get most of the information I need if I watch and listen closely enough.

But I am genuinely interested in others, so I've been trying very hard to ask more questions. Sadly, they almost always come out closed-ended - "Did you have a good weekend?" "How long have you been in London?" Conversation killers, unless the other party is considerably more out-going than I am.

I once worked with an amazing designer and all-around lovely guy who had a habit of asking everyone "So, how does that make you feel?" We used to tease him about this pop-therapist quirk, but honestly, it works.

2. Greetings

The importance of proper greetings in Japanese society can't be overstated - working at a Japanese company forced me into the habit of greeting everyone with a "Good morning" and never leaving the office without speaking up to say "Osaki-ni shitsurei shimaaaasu" (sorry for leaving before you :p)

Now I'm back in a Western office environment, I find myself slipping back into lazy Western habits. Sitting down at my desk in the morning tired and undercaffeinated without a word to my colleagues and sneaking out the door quietly at 18:30.

I am trying to make a point of greeting everyone correctly whenever I can. Even the security dude at the door of our building gets a cheery "Good morning" from me, despite the terrifying amount of effort this takes.

3. The answer to lunch, coffee or beer is always Yes.

It's so tempting when you have a lot to do, just to grab a quick sandwich or sushi and head back to your computer. But conversations outside the office are crucial so I have a rule that I will always join in when invited out. 

I don't always follow this one - partly because I hate coffee. At least I love beer enough to make up for it. Next level shit would be actually doing the inviting but... baby steps, ok.

Am I the only one who struggles with this stuff? What colour energies are the strongest in your personality? If you don't want to spring for the report, you can usually figure it out roughly yourself - most people have "tells". Try it on your friends and colleagues. It's a useful exercise, if nothing else!

What I'm Into: Muscle Rescue Neck & Shoulder Cream

Found this in Boots earlier today - the better smelling cousin of the serious Deep Heat range of muscle creams. 

To be honest, they had me at rosemary. I am a rosemary fiend - eating it, smelling it, and apparently rubbing it on my neck. Jo Malone put out a £40 Rosemary and Rose scented charity candle a few months ago and I ordered it within seconds (no regrets). Rosemary is supposed to be incredible for stress relief. Not sure how robust herbal remedies are, but working in software development across distributed teams on pre-launch hardware you'll try any stress-buster you can find.

Like most sedentary computer workers I have neck issues. Neck issues that make every masseuse, physio or esthetician I've ever been to recoil in horror at the ropey knots beneath my skin, issues that make me want to take a meat tenderizer to my shoulders.

These issues are somewhat exacerbated by headbanging - good thing I am all grown up and don't do that anymore. But on this rainy Monday after Sunday night's Iron Maiden concert at the O2, I found myself in Boots desperate for some relief.

Lucky I found this, as it really does what it says on the tin. A doddle to apply, nice and warm and deep soothing, with no nasty icy-hot smell. It definitely saved my day today. Gonna keep this sucker in my desk drawer I think.

Zen Wallet

Hey, what a good looking purse! (UK English lesson for my Canadian buds - "purse" != handbag, "purse" == wallet)

I've just cleared out all the coppers, receipts and expired loyalty cards in an effort to achieve what my money coach Nancy Zimmerman calls "Zen Wallet".

Backing up, in 2011 I won a blog contest to get free financial coaching through a program call Your Money, By Design. I've never been good with money. Despite earning a lot of it, and being ostensibly good at maths (I have a degree in theoretical computer science), most of the time I have literally no idea how much is in my bank and no concept of the relative cost of anything - is £50 a lot for dinner? A little? How much is a pint of milk?!

The Your Money, By Design course is designed for people like me, getting their personal finances on track - creating a budget for the first time, making a plan for paying down debt and starting to save. This may sound like basic bitch shit to a lot of people with investments and mortgages, but for the rest of us lazy 20-somethings (hehe, gonna refer to myself as a 20-something as many times as possible in this final year of my twenties) just having a realistic picture of how much is coming in and going out is a big step.

I made it halfway through the course back in 2011, but then, in early 2012, I moved to London - rendering all my pretty new spreadsheets obsolete.

It's a bit of a travesty that it's taken this long for me to revisit my budget, but in my defence, moving is hard! You try juggling international bills and bank accounts, okay! (Not you, Dad - I know...) I've changed jobs and houses a few times and my finances have been continuously in flux.

That said, things have stabilized a lot for us since moving to our new place in May (I even changed the label on the buzzer, 3 months in...)

So I've decided to start the course over, beginning with the first step - Zen Purse/Wallet! Nancy calls this a "super-simple, introductory step that sets the stage for how you will improve your financial life." Ok cool, what do I do?

1. It should be orderly

Straightforward enough - got cash on one side, cards on the other. I hardly have any loyalty cards (Nancy recommends hole-punching them and twist-tying them together if you have an unwieldy bunch, and leaving them at home as a rule, but I'm cool for this one. Boots card and a couple of salon stamp cards only)

2. It should contain your essential items, but no more

Essential items - do my membership cards for both Arsenal and Aston Villa count? It's too hilarious to take them out and the purse is quite roomy, so I've left them in there side by side for a laugh.
I've emptied out all of the change - Gracie is pretty adamant that I do this regularly because it weighs a tonne, not that he ever offers to carry my handbag - except for pounds and 50p coins. Would likely be loonies and toonies if I were in Canada.
Other than money and cards, I use my purse to hold my pills and HSBC e-banking fob. I think being able to pay my bills and not getting pregnant are pretty essential.

3. It should be in excellent repair.

Not a problemo - I just bought this Deena and Ozzy fox purse from Urban (cough) before Christmas and it doubles as a cute clutch when I'm not carrying a bag. My BFF Melissa and I have had identical best friend wallets for at least 7 years, and even though we now live on opposite sides of the globe and can't go shopping together, she just bought the same one so I think we're set for a while.


Next up is gathering my financial info to tackle the actual budget spreadsheet, which takes a long time to do but is pretty worth it. YMBD has a great template - I went through about 3 or 4 on my own before starting the course the first time around, and Nancy's is rather superior.

Do you have a preferred budget spreadsheet template solution? I'm looking forward to the data nerdery of it all - wish me luck.

Bad Ideas

Tonight I worked late, then came home and poured myself a glass of wine before collapsing on the sofa for 2 hours. This in itself is a totally unremarkable occurrence, but for the fact that I was registered to attend the ProductTank meetup over in EC2 earlier this evening.

I put myself on their 26-person deep waiting list just yesterday. I had no plans tonight, my boyfriend is out of town and I've been wanting to attend ProductTank all year. It seemed like the perfect chance when I got the email this morning that enough people had dropped out overnight to confirm my RSVP.

And yet. Work. Sofa. Wine.

I can count on both hands (and might even need to throw in a few toes) the number of meetups, hackathons and game-jams I've registered for and bailed on. I'm a total RSVP hog. It's inexcusable.

Actually, I'm hard pressed to think of a single meetup I've been to - outside of Full Indie in Vancouver which doesn't really count (because I knew everyone there and it was mostly about drinking which is a thing I am good at).

But I can't stop myself from signing up! The topics are interesting! I don't know that many people in London! I have way too many hobbies!! There are always so many good reasons to go to these things that somehow I neglect to remember that I'M A FUCKING INTROVERT.

When confronted with the choice between going alone to an event full of strangers after a long day of work or going home to wine and not having to talk to anyone, home wins.

Continuing to sign up for meetups is a bad habit of mine, based on a flawed idea (that I will or should enjoy going to meetups). So this morning I was reading James Altucher's blog on counterfeit living and was struck by this quote:

"Today, throw something out. Maybe even throw out a bad idea you once had. Phew! It’s gone."

Okay then. Today I am throwing out the idea that I am a person who goes to meetups. Phew! I have better things to do with my spare time, like recuperate from the strain of being high-functioning and people-oriented at work. Why not give myself a break? I can avoid the stress of thinking about going and the guilt of not going in one fell swoop! They post all the ProductTank videos on Mind the Product after the fact so I'm not even missing anything!

Now that's sorted, I suppose I should mention that Gracie and I first met at a meetup - one of the precious few I actually attended. It was a painful affair in Gastown I was dragged to by my old boss - who I miss profusely now that she's no longer dragging me anywhere. We had fun. I ate too many (delicious) mango brie canapes and utterly failed to network. (I also failed to exchange more than 2 words with my boyf-to-be so it was lucky we met again at a conference a few weeks later.)

Let me clarify that I'm not saying I won't ever go to a meetup or networking event again - that's improbable as hell. I'm just rejecting the notion that I need to sign up for these things because I find the subject interesting. Consider it a scope decision, on my life. The value proposition does not outweigh the cost therefore the idea of "going to meetups" is cut to free up resource.

Good thing I'm in a happy relationship, because my meetup days are through! What are you going to cut today?

Embrace the Job Hop

The company I moved to England to work for has closed their UK operations. This picture is still on the top of their corporate jobs page.

While I'm gutted for my friends and colleagues who have been made redundant, it wasn't altogether unexpected. Over 25% of the folks in the photo above had already left at the time of the closure announcement - myself included.

Leaving the company that relocated me to the UK was a difficult decision, though with hindsight a good and obvious one.

Part of what made quitting tough was the multitude of warnings and lectures about Gen Y job hopping, and I'm not just talking from my Dad. The idea still exists that frequent job-switching somehow marks you as "disloyal". Since when were employees noble ship captains, expected to hang on through bad pivots, icebergs and apathy until they are given fat severance packages?

Ignoring the obvious anachronism (loyalty? employment? psh!), it seems the scales have been quietly tipping in the favour of those of us with long CVs for a while now. Wouldn't you know, diversifying your network may be the key to career stability in a hostile work climate and that it's actually better for your career to cut losses and stay passionate while you are relatively young and still figuring out your best fit.

And yet somehow, I'm aching to find a place to settle down. Though I have never lost a job, I've had 4 positions at 4 different companies in the last 4 years. If job hopping is like dating, I'm a serial monogamist and I am well ready to put a ring on it.

Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate the ways in which changing jobs has helped my career. I've travelled the world and had a wide range of opportunities, experienced the difference between big multinationals, tiny 3-person start ups, and growing companies in between. I've written code and written specs, had a taste of managing people, products and projects, and learned a tremendous amount in the process - not least about who I am as a professional. I have a much better understanding of my own strengths, weaknesses and interests than I did as a new grad. And I'm still learning heaps every day.

But now that I know a lot more than I did at 22, isn't it time to hunker down for the long run?

This is a particularly raw question for those of us who've grown up in the games industry - a machine renowned for both burning out talent and ruthlessly firing the rest in the short gaps between development cycles.

I've worked in games a mere 6 years, which is actually a lifetime, if you consider the traditional game developer career length averages around 5. My current job is the furthest from games I've ever been and while that's a topic for another post, I do wonder if the cyclical and disruptive nature of the games industry will ever lend itself toward long careers - for employees or founders.

In the meantime I wish my ex-colleagues luck in their job hunts - been writing a lot of recommendations and referrals lately - and encourage them to embrace the job hop! A change is as good as a rest - and a hell of a lot better than stagnation.

Takeaway Living

I promised my next post would be about takeaway - that's because we've been eating so much of it. See above.

We don't usually order pizza - we usually get Indian, Nepalese or Chinese, sometimes a nasi goreng, chippy or kebab - so you can tell we've been hitting the takeaway menus a bit too hard and have ended up at Pizza Hut "for a change".

It's the end of the line.

I shan't bore you with my excuses for not cooking (although we have some good ones! Broken fridge, heatwave & summer fllu are among them) but suffice, it's been bad.

Tried to get back into the swing of cooking at our friends' BBQ on Saturday night:

Gracie made some fantastic ribs. I didn't even know I liked ribs. Everyone was taking the piss over how much he was basting the things on the grill, but we had the last laugh. 

(Yes that's our corn in the background too. No stinking chipolatas here we come correct to the 'cue)

I whipped up an Eton Mess based on this recipe. Was too lazy to make meringues though - what do you want, Waitrose does them just fine. 

We've been getting amazing strawberries all summer (THIS IS ENGLAND) and I've been obsessed with macerating them and combining with balsamic vinegar. Yes way.

One of my fave ways to do it is make a balsamic syrup to toss the berries in then serve with ricotta cream and fresh shredded basil that we grow in our kitchen. Sometimes I use mint. It's complex and really fucking yum.

Almost good enough to make me stop ordering takeaway... But we'll see.

Homesick

I went to a psychic last weekend. Long story, not something I would have normally done of my own volition, but it "became a good experience", as you'd say in Japanese.

A good experience, if a little creepy - she didn't tell me when I was going to die (thank fuck), but Lady Lilac pulled the names of both my parents and my boyfriend out of thin air as if she'd lurked me on Facebook rather than heard them from the dead relatives lurking with us in her strangely ordinary office above Great Portland St.

That was all very disconcerting. But I think the biggest kick to the gut was when she looked me in the eye and said confidently "You're homesick". Which is not a word I have ever associated with myself, bar that very morning before seeing Lady Lilac when I said to the boyf in tears "I don't know what's wrong with me baby maybe I'm HOMESICK or something".

Weird to be homesick living in your hometown. I was born in London. My parents met in London.  London is the city that my grandfather earnestly believed saved his life in 1939, the city where I learned the C-word and how to do long division, the city where I first fancied a boy, first programmed a computer (an Amstrad, obviously), where I met my little sister and first had an inkling of who the hell I was.

But I grew up far away from here and learned how to speak with a foreign accent, and coming home is a lot harder than you'd think. So I'm feeling the need to write about it now - well over a year after moving home - and share it with the other side of me on the other side of the pond.

I don't have a remote idea of what to start a blog about - Programming? Not programming? Japanese, Feminism, Music, Comics, Nails? Food? I used to have an anime blog - those were the days ha. If I even write a second post, it will probably be about takeaway. Livejournal redux - so it begins.