Here’s the full video – a little Jim Jarmusch-y, but you get the idea. Might not be safe for work. Can’t really remember.
The Language of Game Development, Spoken Here
Archives for posts with tag: caribbean
I’m staring out at the winglets of our 737 to Chicago, all the dramatic weather that followed our group in the Caribbean now gone away below, replaced with perfect teal sky, erasing the ever-changing, emblematic mixture of winds and wet that made this my most dynamic BVI sailing trip to date: every day an adventure, for better or worse. We had heavy winds punctuated with dead quiet, rainstorms alternating with scorching sunshine, near-hourly wind shifts, but through it all a sturdy boat and an excellent crew. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve wrestled for years with the concept of delegation. I’ve had clear pictures for the ideas in my head and feel solely responsible for carrying them out. On this trip, it’s become obvious I can no longer expect to live and thrive under the comfortable umbrella of solipsism. The crew on this boat has knit together and done amazing work. Read the rest of this entry »
Calendar year, fiscal year, broadcast year. These days it seems more convenient to count time as sprints between intermittent trips to the Islands. San Juans up north, British Virgins down south, I’ve made it a yearly habit to hit one hot spot or the other, both if it’s a particularly banner year.
Seventeen months since the last trip, and the time’s come around again. In a little over 60 hours, I’ll be boarding a plane bound for the tropics, to relax with Alicia and eight of our closest friends aboard Voyage’s finest 440 catamaran. They’re going to be a great crew: sharp, eager, cohesive. I’ve missed the usual suspects of the island-hopping lifestyle, of course. The sunshine, the saltwater, the rig-whistle under sail.
Evolution
I have another, more recent appreciation for the art of sailing that’s come from an examination of my daily life in this last sprint. You saw that duct-taped PM email system I penned to pull my information management out of a nosedive. You’ve seen me come up for air in bursts on Twitter and Facebook to bemoan my fate of being eaten alive by Excel and PowerPoint.
I’ve never spent so much condensed time in a constant swirl of prototypes, presentation, deliberation and expert judgment as I have in the last year and a half. I’ve served on more committees, sat in more meetings, sent more prioritization emails, scheduled more sync-ups, and designed more presentations and worksheets in the last year than I have in the previous nine years of my career in this business.
The greatest psychological and social shakeup is the move from the hard track to the soft; management, instead of line-level execution. And at the end of each working day, I can’t even point at a widget that makes it off the factory floor, because we don’t do that sort of thing. It’s soft science to support software.
Even my own projects this sprint:
- Industry
- Text4Dead
- Node.Hack, my Windows Phone 7 game prototype
- Hash, my novel to pitch to Angry Robot
- Limbs, my short story
- My TED talk pitch
They’re all soft, all deliberative, all made to be chewed on, commented on, feedback’d into near oblivion.
I’ve reached my quota. I’ve done enough, I’ve asked to be judged enough, I’ve For-Your-Consideration’d until I’m blue in the face.
And if that’s not enough, it’s Annual Review time here at Microsoft.
It’d drive me mad if I kept thinking about it.
The Antithesis
Touch a canvas sail. Dip your finger in engine coolant. Strap on the fins and jump off the sugar scoop. Crank up the propane and grill.
There’s no committee. No council. No feedback but the molecules singing an ancient tone against your skin.
I’ve hit my quota, seventeen months without a boat is my limit.
I’m going sailing.
The close of the tour.
Charles:
We’ve got only a few cycles left before we catch the taxi back to the airport, our boat safely in harbor, stalwart against the building dark of the next cold front. To the BVI, a cold front means a drop in winds, rain showers that would be described by most as “a pleasant distraction”, and a decrease in temperature of about a degree. That’s a fahrenheit degree.
In fact, it’s been stuffier today than any other day since we started our trip – the recycled chill of a 757 cabin in flight actually sounds agreeable. I’ve gone crazy, I know.
We spent the last two days making our way back to base – sort of. No trip is complete without a stopover at Soper’s Hole and the gift shops that dot the eastern quay. We got a few odds and ends for Christmas, then fired up the grill to cook the last meal on the boat. The next day, the swell was building again, and our final run back to Road Town was reminiscent of the first day, when our legs still had learning to do about the pitch and roll of the sea.
Charles:
We’re tied up at Virgin Gorda Yacht Harbor now, with two full days left to enjoy the rapidly-calming weather. Though it costs a little more, a slip at a marina affords the luxuries of power outlets, air conditioning, WiFi, showers, and a significant reduction in that terrible feeling that your boat is going to swing right off its buoy in the middle of the night and bury nose-first in a nearby reef.
The downside is that – at least here in the BVI – these slips are a royal bitch to get into. I’ve already scratched the paint, bonked her nose, and knocked a navigation light cover loose trying to back this boat into a twelve-foot slip in crosswinds. In Tacoma, it’s no trouble. Here – well, it’s humbling; Alicia has kept my spirits up and has always been there to throw lines and re-rig as necessary to get us to safety. She’s a natural at this.
We’ve still been motoring – at this point, sailing her just feels like too damned much work. This is supposed to be a vacation. We’ve done nearly everything else, including cooking our first dinner aboard tonight – baked some-kinda-white-fish with garlic bread and rum carrots. It’s the cap on a heck of a day – they went from red-flag to yellow-flag at The Baths today, which means we were allowed to come ashore, swimming nearly a mile today to-and-from the boat and ashore.