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.

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.

Services That Made the Cut

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:

Twitter

I never really made any conscious effort to use my twitter account in a consistent manner. I go through spells of using it constantly, which is then followed by large spells of inactivity. My aim with my account there is to use it not only more frequently, but to make better use of it than I have been. This will involve me going through the list of people I follow and organising it to a greater degree, unfollowing a few people, and adding a few new people. It also means I’m going to have to look at the way I access Twitter and see if I can make that process more efficient and much easier to extract useful information from others.

LinkedIn

My usage of LinkedIn until now was never really thought out in any constructive way. I essentially created my account on the advice of a colleague a few years ago, and then after the initial setup I hadn’t really updated my profile in any meaningful way. I would on occasion add a new professional connection to my network, but it was a sporadic thing. LinkedIn took a backseat for me because everyone seemed to be using Facebook, and that became an easier place to make these connections. Of course Facebook became a site I despised visiting, and I came to realise that LinkedIn was exactly what I was looking for from Facebook. I’ve only recently started using the site again, and so my profile is still something of a work in progress. I can already see many potential uses for the service that I hope to take advantage of in the coming weeks.

Delicious

I’ve used my Delicious account for a few years now and always found it extremely useful. However, as I’ve recently stopped using my own personal laptop as a work machine I’ve found it’s usefulness to me increase dramatically. When I used my laptop for work I never really had to concern myself with saving bookmarks to a central location. I would just bookmark them in Firefox and know that I would always have them there if I needed them. This left my delicious account as a resource to share links I found interesting, and that I thought contacts on my delicious network might find useful. While I still do this, my usage for delicious has now become much more important to my day to day workflow. No matter which machine I end up using I can still access those bookmarks quickly and effortlessly.

Flickr

My Flickr account is one I am not 100% sure I’m going to keep. I really like the service, and I think it’s a fantastic resource for finding and sharing photography. The only reason I may end up closing this account is that I wouldn’t mind hosting my photography here on the site. As that’s a decision I change my mind on every other day, I’m going to keep my account there at least until my Pro status expires. At that point I will make a final decision and either move all of my photography into a gallery here, or renew my Pro Account for another year.

AIM/Skype

I find myself using AIM (via iChat), or Skype more and more these days. I use both services during the day at work, and I’m beginning to use them for other projects I’ve began working on, and speaking to various friends. I had accounts on a whole bunch of other IM services, but now these are the only two you will ever find me using. I’m not going to post a link to my accounts with them here, but if anyone wants to connect up over either service drop me an email.

Going Forward

With my digital footprint completely pared down to a much more useful and manageable degree, I need to make sure that I take full advantage of these remaining services and avoid adding anything new unless it fills a specific need for me. I can’t fall into the trap of creating accounts because I think I may, in the future, possibly use them. This has been a very useful process for me, and I would highly recommend everyone take a look at their digital lives and seriously consider a ruthless uncluttering session to remove all of those old accounts you know you’re never going to use again. It’s definitely worth it.

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.

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.

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!

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.

This is the time of year where most people create New Year Resolutions, and promptly give up on them after a few weeks. Resolutions and goals made at this time of year are always doomed to fail because they tend to be generated by guilt from the holidays, usually aren’t particularly well thought out, or something that people tend to stick with for the long haul.

My preference is to work on already established goals then review and revise them as the year goes on. At the moment I have a list of goals I created throughout the last couple of years that I’m trying to progress towards their next milestones, and at the end of January I’ll sit down and review them all to see which ones I need to do more work on. My take on the specific “New Year Resolution” is to take something from my list of long term goals and give it a little extra focus. For example, this year I’m going to focus on writing every single day. Not necessarily on the site, but to write something each and every day this year. It’s something I should already be doing, and is in fact a major item on my list of goals, but last year I had points where I knew I should have been writing, but did something else instead. I don’t want that to happen this year, and if I’m to reach the milestone I’ve set for six months into this year, writing every day is a must.

The list of goals I created throughout last year contain items from the many facets of my life, and are categorised under various heading such as “Career”, “Health”, “Finances”, etc. I currently have one of two items under each category, and then break those items down to various milestones that make sense for each of them. Those milestones cover six months, a year, three years, and one or two have a five year milestone. Even though I’ve set these goals out in detail, it doesn’t mean I won’t change them as the year goes on. The key, I’ve found, to successfully working with long term goals, is to write them down, and then review them every month or two. That lets you know how far away from your target you are, and whether you need to revise any specific goal for whatever reason. You need to have a solid overview, but also stay flexible with a lot of the details and willing to change them to make others work. In the past there have been goals I’ve completely changed, and others that were completely removed because they were no longer in the direction I wanted to go. It’s all about balance and knowing what you want from life.

I decided to refocus on writing every day, because writing is very important to me but at some point throughout last year other things began intruding into that part of my life. I picked up a few new hobbies, I got a promotion in my day job, and I had a lot of other things going on all at the same time. I stretched myself a little too thin and spent a lot of time last year feeling completely over run and burnt out. I lost my focus and because of that I missed several milestones I had set for the end of the year, and had to rework them. When I reviewed my goals at the end of the year and saw how many targets I had missed, I have to admit it bothered me.

2010 is the year I increase my productivity by working smarter, and make sure I get to exactly where I want to be in my life.

After a month long absence from our weekly 5-a-side footy match I was finally given an opportunity to take one of the newly available spots. I responded to the email announcing a place in matter of seconds, and only had to wait five more minutes to be told that I was going to be one of the ten players that make up the game. When you have to drop out of the weekly game it can take months to get back in, and when you’re in, no-one wants to drop out. We have around twenty five people, all trying to get one of the ten available spots, which keeps everything very competitive.

The one worry I had however, was that over the last month my exercising habit has fallen apart. It was due to a combination of illness, the dramatically colder weather, and the fact that I’ve just been a little lazy. I’ve been out for the odd run, but not enough to counter the evenings in the pub, or the lack of a decent diet. I realised over the weekend exactly how lazy I’d been and forced myself out for a five mile run, which I’ve just realised I still haven’t uploaded to Nike+. It wasn’t the easiest of runs but it wasn’t terrible either, which simply meant I had caught my laziness before it had gotten too far. I had planned on going for another run tonight until I received the option to play footy, which more than covers what I would have done due to the intense hour long game, in a very hot gym hall.

After being out for a month or so I wasn’t expecting to be able to play to anything like the standard I would like, but I was surprised with how well I managed. My finishing was pretty decent once I got going, there were a few bad misses, but I scored enough to make up for them. My passing was sharp and I setup a decent portion of my teams goals. When I had to take my turn in goal I played… well actually lets not talk about that too much. Let’s just say I was a disaster in goal, and that may have contributed to the fact that we lost the game. By a single goal. In the last minute. When I was outfield though we dominated long stretches of the game. So I’ll take the positives from tonight and try and forget about the goalkeeping.

It felt good to get a run out again, and I didn’t realise how much I’d missed playing over the last month until we actually started the game. I setup our first goal with a nice little flick with the outside of my right foot, and it got me excited for the rest of the hour. With the exception of the two terrible spells in goals, I thoroughly enjoyed myself tonight

It wasn’t my best performance by a long way. My touch was a little dodgy at points, and it took me a while to get my scoring boots on, but it was a satisfying performance that had a lot of positives, plus I wasn’t as rusty as I expected to be. Now I’m really looking forward to next Tuesday and you can bet I’m going to be going all out to win after losing the way we did tonight.

Usually when you get a group of people together to indulge in a little gaming session, the initial expectation is that this is going to happen on a gaming console like the Wii, or the Xbox 360. It’s rare these days that people get together to play a board game, or card game other than poker. My friends and I like to challenge that trend and frequently get together with a few bottles of wine and play a board game from our youth. This year there have been games of Risk, Lost Valley of the Dinosaurs, The Settlers of Catan, Scrabble and many, many others.

This weekend we decided to try out a new game that none of us have ever played before, but one that I’d heard great things about. I ordered it from Amazon a few weeks ago in preparation of this weekend, and so early on Saturday evening we found ourselves sitting around a table, with beers and wine flowing, and played our very first game of Munchkin.

From the Munchkin website:

“This award-winning card game, designed by Steve Jackson, captures the essence of the dungeon experience… with none of that stupid roleplaying stuff. You and your friends compete to kill monsters and grab magic items. And what magic items! Don the Horny Helmet and the Boots of Butt-Kicking. Wield the Staff of Napalm… or maybe the Chainsaw of Bloody Dismemberment. Start by slaughtering the Potted Plant and the Drooling Slime, and work your way up to the Plutonium Dragon…”

In our group there are only a couple of geeks who were really excited to play the game, myself included, but we have a few people who are not exactly keen to get involved in anything that remotely sounds like an RPG. We had to be very convincing to get them to give the game a chance, and we only managed that by making them agree to play one game, and if they didn’t enjoy themselves we wouldn’t play it again. In the end they relented and agreed to play it once.

Thankfully, my friends that were sceptical of Munchkin ended up having a fantastic time, and actively asking to play a second game that night. Our first game took a little longer than it probably should have as we figured everything out and got to grips with the game dynamic. As the game progressed and we all got more comfortable with the style, and general principles of the game, we all started having a great time, and especially one of my friends who was the most sceptical going into that evening. I think it helped that she was completely destroying everyone, and no matter what we did to stop her winning, we couldn’t. At one point two of the guys threw everything they could at her to stop her winning, and she casually took a card from her hand, turned it to show me with a grin on her face.

“I don’t think I’ll fight this monster, I think Rob will.” She said before placing the “Transferral” card face up on the table.

That card basically let her nominate anyone else to fight the monster in her place, and after the guys used half their own cards to make the thing unbeatable, were now in a position where one of them had to take on their own creation. I couldn’t help but applaud her style, and it was at that point I knew she was completely sold on the game.

I think Munchkin has now officially been added to our rota of games, and from the conversations we’ve had since, it’s going to be a game we play frequently from now on. I may even have to look at buying a few of the expansions to make things interesting.

If you haven’t played Munchkin before, I advise you to buy it, and then sit down with a few of your open minded friends and give it a go. I can’t see how you wouldn’t have fun!