It looks like my hosts are having a few issues in their data centre, and the site is intermittently down. While it’s obviously fine at the moment, there’s a chance it could go down again later tonight. I received an email from them earlier to let me know that they are going to be doing maintenance tomorrow. That means the site will be down fow a few hours again tomorrow night.
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Original Image from Lars K. Jensen
Over the last few weeks I’ve been evaluating my digital presence and deciding what services I still find useful, and what services I no longer have any interest in continuing with. This week I’ve begun taking some action with those that were no longer useful to me, and as I wrote in my last post, Facebook was the first account I deleted.
It’s not only services I no longer intend on using that have been under review. In doing this review I realised I had various email, and twitter accounts for projects I’d considered but then for whatever reason hadn’t actually began, and so they were deleted too. I had an email account that was setup for receiving emails from a few subscription lists that I no longer read, and so I unsubscribed from those lists and closed those accounts down too.
There seemed to be a remarkable number of accounts for various services that I created, but never actually used beyond the intial setup, or services I used once or twice, and then never used again. A very small handful of them haven’t been deleted yet as I’m still considering whether or not I’ll ever actually use them again. My plan for them is that in the next week, if I don’t have a clear picture of how I can use them going forward they’ll be deleted.
It’s a really invigorating feeling going through all of this stuff and being so brutal with my decision to keep them or not. It’s a very similar feeling to the one I get when I move house, and end up throwing out, or giving away, bags of items I’d completely forgotten I’d accumulated, and no longer used. This is the only good thing about moving house in my opinion. Removing all of this digital baggage makes me feel more organised and focused, and allows me to make greater use of the services I am keeping.
Though my focus to this point has been on the services that I’ve been removing, there were a handful that I still find extremely useful, and that I’ll continue to actively use. I also realised that because I had signed up for so many services that a few of the more useful ones had fallen through the cracks, and I hadn’t been using them to their full potential. There are now a very small number services that I’m going to focus my attention on and use them to a far greater degree than I previously had. They are:
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Tonight I took a step I’ve been considering for some time. I completely deleted my Facebook account.
Over the last year I’ve been using Facebook less, and less, and each time I logged into the site there would be more clutter to deal with. The constant application recommendations that I had no interest in, and the numerous pointless group invites that I spent about ten minutes clicking “ignore” to, were the straw that broke the metophorical camel’s back.
The site had one thing going for it, in my opinion, in that it let me reconnect with a few people I haven’t seen in a very long time. For those people I’ve taken whatever contact info I could get from the site, and I’ll email/call/IM them at some point soon. Other than that small plus point, Facebook had become something I no longer wanted to spend any time engaging with. I’m going through somehing of a digital presence reduction at the moment, that I’ll talk about in a later post in more detail, and Facebook become the first victim of that process.
I know a few social media people who will think I’m crazy for deleting my account, especially with what I have planned for my year, and to a certain extent I agree with that. However, the benefits that I could potentially receive from my account were far outweighed by the overall distaste I had developed for the service.
In the coming months I may change my position and create a new account, though I find that permise highly doubtful. I’m glad it’s gone. It’s the first step in a much more streamlined and focused online existence, and without doubt it will be the most satisfying account to delete.
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I’ve come late to the party in playing ‘Splosion Man on XBox Live Arcade, but I’m glad I finally got there.
‘Splosion Man, by Twisted Pixel Games, is an XBox Live Arcade game that was featured in Microsoft’s “Summer of Arcade” last year. It’s easy to see why. The game is a simple platformer, with the most basic of controls, (all the buttons do the same thing, they make you ’splode). The premise behind the game is that you were involved in a secret experiment that has gone wrong, and now you are trying to escape the laboratory using your new unique powers of exploding.
Or as described by Twisted Pixels:
Splosion Man is a life form made entirely of splosions! He was created in a laboratory by the careless corporation Big Science, who are now doing anything they can to stop Splosion Man and escape his splosive abilities.
Where this game absolutely shines is in the presentation. There is humour sprinkled around the entire experience, from the idle actions to the fact that when running, you occasionally stick your arms out like an airplane and then make airplane engine sounds. I couldn’t stop myself laughing the first time I saw it. The whole game just exudes a certain kind of insane joy, and the guys at Twisted Pixel must have had a great time developing it.
There are hundreds of madcap little touches throughout the game, and since I haven’t finished it yet I expect there will be many more to come. My favourite moment of playing the game so far, has been the “Donut Song”. It’s just such a random little moment in the game, but it’s a stroke of pure genius.
Have a listen:
I find myself humming it all the time at the moment, and since they have an MP3 version of it, I have a suspicion that at some point it’ll be my ring tone for a while. It’s just so silly I can’t help but smile whenever I hear it.
It’s a simple platform game, and just as with the best of that genre, it sucks you in and keeps you hooked. I constantly find myself thinking, “Just one more level, then I’ll turn it off.” before playing it for a few more hours. If you have an XBox 360, and an XBox Live account, I can’t recommend this game enough. It really doesn’t cost too much, (usually 800 MS Points, or about £8), and I guarantee you will have so much fun you’ll be surprised that it isn’t more expensive.
I really wish I’d downloaded it last year when I first heard about it, but I’m so glad that now I finally have.
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January is probably my least favourite month of the year. It’s usually around six weeks from being paid in December, until pay day in January. There are countless social events because of the number of birthdays of friends and family, (normally a good thing, unless you’re really stretching the monthly salary), and to top it all off I’m busier than normal at work. There seems to be a yearly occurence at work in January that I’m not going to talk about, but I am getting pretty sick and tired of having to do.
For the last few years I’ve been quietly saying that my New Year begins in February. January is such a struggle that it strips the soul, and makes doing anything for the sheer enjoyment of it very difficult. The brutality of this month is one of the other reasons I almost never concern myself with the standard concept of New Years Resolutions. I know I’ll never stick to them, because of the weeks ahead. Thankfully I’ve managed to write every day, though I haven’t wanted to half the time.
However, in under two short weeks this hellish month will be over and sanity will be restored. Febuary is a month filled with hopes and dreams; laughter and fun; productivity and achievements. It is a month where I can actually relax and work towards my long term goals without the extra stress that comes with the first month of the year. It has historically been one of my more productive periods of the year, and now that I have specific goals and milestones set for this year I’m expecting that productivity to be greatly increased.
This seems like a completely irrational thing to be talking about, but I honestly cannot remember the last January I’ve had where I wasn’t completely stressed out, and praying for the month to end… no wait, I do remember. It was in 2002 and I was backpacking up the Australian east coast. That was a fun January! It’s the only one I remember in my adult life though.
I think I’ve achieved about a quarter of the personal projects I wanted to this month, and that’s purely because I’m getting home exhausted and stressed almost every day, and my weekends have either involved working, or recovering. There hasn’t been a useful weekend yet this year.
So please hurry up and get here, February. January is evil, and must be stopped!
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I found this video by Ki’une last week and it had a profound effect on my mood. It’s been years since I’ve heard this song, and coupled with this video it managed to lift me out of a day of drudgery and irritation.
So if you need a little inspirational pick me up, I can’t recommend this video enough.
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