Avocadia

The death of Phillip Hughes is one of those things that just fails to be processed. I’ve spent the better part of the year outraged at rugby league for the reckless indifference of the ruling body and the players towards safety. Ever since Alex McKinnon was left a quadriplegic as the result of a tackling technique that the sport tut tuts at, but then drives itself to distraction to excuse and ignore. I expect further life-altering injuries while a culture of false masculinity rules within the sport, from the influential voices in the media, to the ruling bodies, to the player themselves who treat any attempt to protect their long term health and safety as a unmanning. I expect one day in the near future we’ll discover the same wide spread brain injuries in NRL players as they are finding in American NFL players. I expect one day a player will be killed from a dangerous tackle.

I did not expect a cricket player to be killed, even to a bouncer.

Maybe that’s naive. Helmet manufacturers used to proclaim the impossibility of fully protecting a player from a cricket ball moving at pace. Batsmen always seem to manage to get, if not their body then at least their heads, out of the way. Except when they don’t. As little as a month ago another player had his jaw broken by a ball getting under the face guard. And of course the celebrated menace of Mitchell Johnson in the 2013-14 Ashes series resulted in one injury - albeit from a yorker not a bouncer - but was lauded for it’s intimidatory effect on the English.

It was a tragic accident that befell Hughes. He was struck in the back of the head at the right location to cause such an internal bleed into his brain after failing to connect with the bat. How many thousands of balls have been delivered without something of the likes of this occuring. People have been hit, but protected by their helmet. People have been hit, but with just bruises or broken bones. People have swung and missed and been struck in the body or had a near miss. It was an extremely unusually uncommon pattern of events. But it wasn’t freakish. It was an outcome that a relatively serious observer could predict or fear, even if imagining the chances of it happening were vanishingly small.

But. They call it chin music in some places, because we all know the bouncer is by design intended to pass right in front of the batter’s face. It’s impossibile though to ask a bowler running at pace to place a ball in the right spot from 22 metres away with an indirect action. Even if they could, the unpredictability of a ball bouncing off a pitch is one of the defining characteristics of the game, what makes it so different to baseball. Modern professional players can hit a single stump reasonably accurately at that distance, but they are throwing, not bowling, and they tend to be hitting on the full, not the bounce. Bouncers are menacing not because a bowler intends to hit a batter, but because they cannot possibly promise never to hit the batter. That’s the raison d’être of the bouncer; if the bowlers could make such a promise, they wouldn’t bother with the bouncer. Because it is intended to intimidate by its threat to hit the batter. So the batters where padding and helmets and generally make very quick decisions about when to play and when to duck.

I didn’t for a moment think Phil Hughes would die after he was struck. I thought he would recover, perhaps with a fractured skull. Perhaps he wouldn’t play again and I certainly wouldn’t have judged him for gaining a healthy respect for the risks after such an injury. Perhaps he would play, but be so haunted by the bouncer as to become unable to focus on anything for fear of it. Perhaps he would have come back and overcome it all. We’ll never know. When I heard the news I was struck to my core. I couldn’t properly process it. I was able to carry on as if nothing had happened for a few hours, as if I hadn’t just heard that someone was killed as a result of the sport I was so eagerly anticipating watching a again in a matter of weeks. It wasn’t until later that evening that I even questioned what it might mean given my all-but-abandoning of rugby league.

It’s not entirely fair to make this comparison, because of course Alex McKinnon didn’t die, he was merely crippled. The NRL wouldn’t have cancelled fixtures, wouldn’t have juggled an entire schedule, in reaction to McKinnon’s death. There would have been black armbands worn, and some speeches. Channel Nine would have aired a five minute piece during halftime, featuring McKinnon’s highlights reel and some community figures, Tony Abbott, Gould and Sterlo, and some random Channel Nine personalities delivering a few sentences each on what whatshisname meant to them. But in the end, the competition would have continued, just as it did. In the weeks afterwards the usual suspects in the media, including some of those from the testimonial piece, would written their columns denouncing efforts to modify the rules to safeguard the health and safety of players, calling it a freakish accident as if hoping something won’t happen adequately protects against the inevitable. In other words, the death of Alex McKinnon would have been indistinguishable from Alex McKinnon crippled.¹

You can certainly bet the farm that there would not have been a repetition of Teddie Roosevelt calling from the bully pulpit of the American Presidency, for a game to check itself². Not with this Prime Minister, not with this government. Not with a “professional” game. They would never have dreamed of telling a private company how to run its own affairs, despite all the privileges offered it. In any other industry, any organisationconstantly exposing its employees to constant danger would be fined out of existence.

I’m bitter towards the NRL.³. There is not the same poisonous culture in Cricket Australia. Obviously the risks within the game are not so often taken as they are in rugby league. And efforts are made to mitigate those risks. Bodyline still haunts the game despite the liklihood the modern player could play against it. The bouncer wars resulted in restrictions on how many times the ball can be bowled. Protective gear has progressed from the rudimentary helmets of the 70s. I’ll wince when I see the likes of Johnson’s intimidation tactics and I’ll never derive cheer from seeing it utilised even against the English⁴. But I remain confident that I’ll never look back at a life of watching cricket and feel that I have contributed, however indirectly, to the sacrificing of young people’s health and lives for entertainment.

1. Except for the grotesque spectacle of Alex McKinnon actively defending the actions of an organisation that willfully contributed to his injury through negligence. But he’s in his early twenties and thus clearly immortal; what’s their excuse? We all know what their excuse is.↩

2. 

“Brutality in playing a game should awaken the heartiest and most plainly shown contempt for the player guilty of it.”

Roosevelt ↩

3. Can you tell?↩

4. Despite how much I just like to see them lose.↩

• life

Did I ever mention that D and I bought property? Cause we totally did. We even built a house on it.

Honestly, I can’t remember if I mentioned it here. I’m not very good at blogging. I made that joke in the precis on Twitter, or at least one very much like it, and I probably mentioned it on Facebook while I was still using Facebook¹. But I can’t see it in my archives here, so I guess I never did mention it.

We lived in our previous rental villa for fifteen years. It was small and pokey, too small for a couple with a teenager, really, let alone one with a young adult. The kitchen was cramped, the carpet and walls were tired and worn out when we moved in, so imagine what they were like after fifteen more years. The backyard was a failed renovation by the landlord’s son. We’d out-grown it. So we decided to buy a house. We’d paid our dues, it was time.

As if it is that easy. We saw a bunch of properties that were either knockdowns or grabbed sooner than instantly. I walked through a house with holes in walls, filthy washing in the sink, tenants moving around ignoring the people viewing the property complete with a sullen teenager glaring out her room. I tried to view properties that had already under contract but not taken down off real estate sites, presumably because the contract might not survive the cooling off period. Which I understand, intellectually. The final straw was a property I tried to view on the day of the last federal election, but was under contract before the open house could occur. The agents were apologetic when I arrived, and good work them for selling the property so quickly, but it was so deflating and emotionally draining.

But what about building? We’d been dismissive of the idea before hand, but as D and I drove to Canberra that afternoon² we decided that we needed to give a new house and land package some serious consideration. D being D did a ton of research on the road, and picked out a few possibilities not far from where we were already living. We actually looked in on a display home the next day after returning from the smoking wreck of our nation’s capital before we even went home. It was definitely a thing we could do.

Almost a year to the day after that trip to Canberra, we moved into our brand new home. It’s fantastic. D did an amazing job doing the interior decoration. It was completely her, all I did was not find a reason to object to particular choices. She insisted on certain upgrades and she made all the right choices. Even the value appraiser from the bank cooed over our kitchen top. We also replaced almost all of our old funriture, and again almost to the item, D picked out that as well. My sole contribution was putting it together.

It’s such a massive change to our lives. So much space; now when I lose my keys it takes two, three times as long to find them again. The day our new furniture was delivered, I got up early because the truck was scheduled to arrive between 7am and 3pm. I was waiting in the front room, D’s craft room. One of the smaller rooms in the house. I was sitting on the carpet looking around and it struck me - this ‘smaller room’ is as big as the living room in the villa. D and I need to be careful these days or we could both drift into different rooms - formally or informally designated as her room or my room - at either end of house and not see each other. In the villa, you couldn’t breathe without the other person hearing you wherever you were in the house.

Every night I come home to a house I own³, that I can choose to do with as I please, that allows me to stretch out. Things I don’t want to see are hidden away, because there is a place for them, not a place they occupy because there is nowhere else. Really, I’m pretty pleased with myself right now.

1. Did I mention I stopped using Facebook? Yeah, I did that too.↩

2. It was clear Tony Abbott would win and we were going to pre-emptively burn down the joint rather than give him the satisfaction.↩

3. Ssh, the bank is letting me delude myself↩

• meta

I did a short - 5 minute - presentation at work on Swift. It seemed to go over well. I uploaded it to the cloud.

Meanwhile, TIL that two of the slide deck sharing sites I knew, slideshare and slides, are just The Worst. 200 char limit for speakers notes? I’m sureprofessional speakers have no interest in sharing a transcript of what they said, but I do. 200 characters? Pah!

(I am on a free account, of course :-)

• code
• work
• apple

Interviews

What I Learned Doing 250 Interviews at Google

I’ve done some posts on interviews, which I more or less still agree with. I’m not working in Google or Microsoft, I’m in an agency with considerably fewer engineering standards. Still, there’s a lot here that still works outside the mileu of 7 or 8 1 hr interviews in a day per candidate.

In particular asking questions that can be drilled down into. The Number Swap question really is a Junior Dev kind of question - despite the depressing number of people who couldn’t give even the naive/best solution.

Meanwhile, Etsy, eh? I was vaguely aware they were doing a lot of developer community outreach - I’ve seen a lot of Code as Craft fly through my feeds - but it has taken some time for it to dawn on me they are just an interesting dev shop as Facebook/Google/Amazon. More so than the first two, I suppose, from a ethical point of view.

Rugby League

1. Brent Tate’s post-State of Origin comments anger NSW players
2. Brent Tate’s critics should hang their heads in shame

Meanwhile, I did watch the first game of the State of Origin series. Oh and look, a pair of fucking dickheads lifted another player into a dangerous postion and dropped him. I’m biased though, right, because it was a Queensland player and I support Queenslander. Oh, but it’s all okay, because Wally Lewis - the Queenslander’s Queenslander in the 80’s - said mid-game there was no malice and he’s a one-eyed Queenslander.

And, and the guy escaped suspension with sufficient downgrading of the grading of the offense. So yeah, fuck the NRL. I don’t see myself staying away from the Origin games, but I won’t be watching the NRL competition itself any more.

Swift

WWDC tends to leave me reasonably buzzed anyway, but I almost paid the $99 to become an Apple Developer just so I could pull the XCode beta just to play with Swift.

I didn’t, because the chances of me doing anything more than playing are vanishingly small.

D&D

Won’t buy. Will download the free “basic” intro PDF. Still want to play Original or 1st ed again. Still not looking for a game, because I still have a very jaundiced view of Skype+computerised-tabletops.

• work
• code
• sport
• D&D

I switched from using Sublime Text to Atom for a time to try it out.

One thing was annoying the hell out of me - no package to add footnotes with a key-chord. I had gotten used to shift-cmd-6 to insert footnotes in Sublime Text.

It’s the usual open source story. I waited for one to show up, and it never did. So I wrote my own and published it¹.

Search for ‘footnoter’ if you can and wish to use it.

And fix it as well, if you like.

1. Cue me finding out there is something already built in. ↩

• meta
• code

A series of tweets by Film Critic Hulk caught my interest ¹.

WEIRD THOUGHT OF THE DAY: THE PHANTOM MENACE IS THE "WORST" OF THE PREQUELS AND YET IT HAS THE MOST GOOD STUFF IN IT.

— FILM CRIT HULK (@FilmCritHULK) April 22, 2014

BUT REALLY, LIKE DAMON SAID, IT'S THE EARNEST ONE. REGARDLESS OF EVENTUAL RESULT, EVERYONE SEEMS TO BE DOING BEST WITH THE IRRECONCILABLE.

— FILM CRIT HULK (@FilmCritHULK) April 22, 2014

The direct opposite take to most fan opinions, such as Machete Order, which leaves out Phantom Menace entirely, a point that Hulk specifically calls out as the reason for his scare quotes when describing it as the worst. Until he made me think about it, if asked I would have agreed with the general populace. However I have been thinking about the prequels on and off the last few weeks. I’ve been thinking about them on and off for months, really, although I’ve mostly abandoned ideas I had of creating treatments of my own Star Wars prequels. I was fine doing something on the level of an elevator pitch, but once you scratch the surface and look at what Lucas was trying to do, you really can’t fault many of the ideas, just the execution. Prompted by The Hulk, I decided to start watching the prequels for the first time since the cinema releases and now I find that I think he is right. From a certain point of view.

My conclusion is that The Phantom Menace isn’t actually all that bad. I don’t even feel you need to change much, and the only things I think should really change are for story requirements in the followups. I wouldn’t bother changing with some of the things that people love to hate: Jar-Jar stays, the Trade Federation stays, even the midichlorians can stay ². However, posit this: I travel back in time to 1994, taking back with me the script to some critical success - something without much CGI, obviously, but I neither know nor care what it is - and establish myself as a film wunderkind.³ I then arrange for George Lucas to be killed - without getting caught, duh - while he is finalising his drafts. I am then invited to complete his drafts. In this scenario, I could make do with nothing changing, but if I can, I will change just three things:

• Anakin and Padme are both eighteen.
• Padme really is a handmaiden.
• No Palpatine.

Anakin being eighteen unfortunately gets rid of Jake Lloyd, but that’s not the reason for it. I say unfortunately because yes, he was grating but that’s the dialogue - and almost certainly the direction - more than the kid. There’s not a human alive that wouldn’t come across as annoying when directed to say “Yippee!” that often much less a nine-year old. The reason for the age bumps, and for Padme’s change in job, is to remove the imbalance between the characters. I feel the relationship is more credible if Padme’s memories of Anakin aren’t - in her own words - “that little boy I knew on Tatooine.” This changes derails the arc Lucas sets up for Anakin’s fall in the following movies. Worse, it requires a bit of modification in the scenes to prevent Padme being pushed into the background beginning with the scene in which she persuades the Gungans to ally with her. Somehow the Queen needs to be pushed into the background instead. Perhaps it is as simple as the Queen makes the speech that persuades the Gungans and then stays behind with Boss Nass, or is separated, the camera staying with the Jedi and Padme. It should also changes the role for Anakin in the same section of the film, but that really just needs to be making his participation in the space battle deliberate. Agency is much more heroic anyway.

Leaving out Palpatine is easier, just replace him with some other Senator. Maybe a single shot of him in a background, but his role in the film is played by another Senator, and we never out the outcome of the No Confidence vote. That makes Darth Maul the eponymous phantom menace. He has all the instruction giving scenes with the Trade Federation and is the main villain in the film. But the real menace is Palpatine, setting things up, but we never see him, except for perhaps right until the end, when one of the Trade Federation, escaping at the end of the space battle, puts in a call to report - to someone we don’t see - “Your apprentice has fallen.” I’d let that replace the ‘always two’ conversation between Mace Windu and Yoda at the funeral.

Given the amount of capital I am about to spend, if I was pushed I would leave the film as is. I could live with none of these changes being made, despite the improvements I think they make to both it and the followups. Because the real changes start with the next two films, and if I have a ‘change budget’, I’d much rather blow that budget on Episodes II and III. I can’t really say what those changes are quite yet though, but I feel the slavery sub-plot has the seeds for a much more convincing and powerful fall for Anakin than his seperation anxiety and petulance at not being listened too enough. I’m not sure just how much of “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith” get thrown away. My knee-jerk reaction is all of them, but it would be nice to retain just enough of them that we can salvage The Clone Wars series.

Also, I probably need to protect myself from whatever creatures swim the time streams protecting reality from paradox. Because I am really pushing the envelope.

None of these ideas are particularly original. Probably allowing Jar-Jar Binks to survive is, but whatevs. By way of a bibliography, there are two more important influences:

• I originally planned to have Darth Maul survive. I was convinced otherwise by this article on why he had to die, in particular the last page.
• John Siracusa complained - *gasp* - about the age discrepency in The Incomparable’s Attack of the Clones episode as well as how creepy the dialogue is. I didn’t really grasp that there was more to it than just the actor being bad; once he pointed it out, it was all I could see.

• culture
• star wars
• geekery

A fortnight ago a rugby league player was lifted in a tackle and at the same time he tucked his head in. The result of this combination of movements is a broken neck between the fourth and fifth vertabrae. He may be a quadriplegic for the rest of his life, maybe only for months. The rugby league community has, with some exceptions I found surprising¹, passed it off as a freak accident. It was not a freak accident. It was an entirely forseeable accident. It was a result with a very low chance of occuring, but not no chance of happening: repeat an action often enough and the low-chance events eventually happen.

I first started watching rugby league in the mid-eighties. 1985 or 86, I guess, although it could have been 1984. Whatever year it was, it was the State of Origin games I started watching. I had no idea what State of Origin actually was, but a classmate had announced he was going, and I’d probably asked my Dad about them. Or maybe I just sat down and watched them because Dad and our neighbour were watching it. I forget the exact circumstances, it was more than quarter of a century ago. This was an era of some pretty rough play, albeit nowhere near as rough as mid-century games.

I’d seen games of rugby league before; my Nonna was a keen Wests supporter - Brisbane Wests that is - and I had been to a few games with her. I wouldn’t say I had watched them though, not appreciated what was going on. About all I got from those games was tribalism. She cheered for Wests and didn’t like Brisbane Easts, so I liked red and black teams and didn’t like black and orange teams. Whoops, sorry. Black and gold :-P ² She gave a cousin and I NSWRL themed jumpers one year, he got Rabbitohs colours and I got, with many apologies, Balmain. Black and gold.

So I have history. I’ve watched every origin series since that not-quite-remembered year, even the games when it was very, very hard to watch as a Queensland supporter. Game 3 of 2000, I am looking at you. I will never not hate Bryan Fletcher for his “hand grenade” post-try celebration. The tribal attachment to Queensland ebbs and flows. It’s faintest when knowledge of Clive Palmer, or Campbell Newman, or Bob Katter bubbles up from the tar pit. Three nights a year it roars to life like a lit up Pratt & Whitney J58-P4 clad in a jersey that can never be washed, because it would be bad luck.

I think this year though, Origin may end up the only games I watch. I think I am done with rugby league. It’s been building for awhile, a half dozen years since I first started becoming jaundiced when it started becoming obvious just how damaging a career in the American football can be. It prompted me to take a long hard look at this sport I was following. I didn’t like what I saw.

It’s a thuggish game, hence that sneering monikor from the AFL states: thugby. That section of the league community that like the violence prefer to call it “a collision sport”. And it is, it is more than a contact sport, it is a sport of players deliberately colliding with other players seeking to shock and cause pain. It is a game in which large men in the attacking side will, as a tactic, serially seek out the smaller players in the opposition, the ones on the field for their skill rather than their size, in order to wear them out and reduce their ability to practice that skill ³. It is a game when those large men will charge at a kicking player seeking to hit them while they are exposed and unbraced for collision.

There has been progress over the decades to improve safety. The head has been been made increasingly off-limits, making even careless strikes illegal. It’s illegal to use the feet to prevent the ball being put down, it’s illegal to attack the legs of a kicker, or hit them late. These have been accepted fairly widely, although there are still complaints made about head high rulings. Shoulder chargers were made illegal after a number of hits to the head and a number of individuals complain and complain about it, players, coaches, and media. New concussion rules are in place and one high profile coach complained that it was too far, suggesting there was an hysteria. There was an outcry when it was made a offense punishable by being sent from the field for punching someone. Punching, not accidentally striking while tackling, but striking out with a closed fist to punch. Banning this was protested as turning the game into touch football.

There’s hysteria, but it’s not from the community trying to reduce thuggish violence.

People get injuries all the time in the sport. Broken bones, ruptured tendons and ligaments, muscle tears. It’s a collision sport and the inevitable consequence of large men trying to hurt other men is that there will be injuries. I’ve been leery about this business that feeds off young men risking their post-career health. It would be absurd to compare this to a blood sport, because no one is intending to permanently maim anyone. But they do act in a manner that recklessly puts themselves and others in danger of that. And the sport’s ruling body is two-faced on the issue. On the one hand managing the public reaction by reducing the more blatant risks, on the other promoting the State Of Origin with television ads highlighting the kinetic violence. There is a traceable history in the promotional material for State of Origin matches that the sport’s ruling body has to keep hiding away from public view because of what it says about the sport, the risks in playing, and how much the business of rugby league relies on the thug element.

For example:

The tackle shown, an out-and-out speak tackle, was illegal in 1987 when this posted was created. It would have resulted in a four match suspension. And yet the ruling body used this photo from a lower level game and used it to promote a one off game of rugby league, played in Long Beach, to the Americans. Roy Masters says that nowadays this poster is hidden away from public view because the NRL is a little ashamed, or at least aware what a PR disaster it is. Just dwell on that penalty. Four matches. What do you think the odds are of crippling injury from that spear tackle? Greater than a tenth of a percent? And for that, a four match ban? The tackler most responsible for making a player a cripple a fortnight ago got a seven week ban. This has been criticised as excessive.⁴

I just don’t think this game has a sound ethical basis left.

• sport
• principles

Weird behaviour encountered in a build today, and I want to write it done. Chances are I will see it again one day. No doubt far enough in the future that I will forget specifics, particularly any solution I might come up with.

I have a website that has been put together in an odd way that made sense at the time. We can’t build a single package that can be used to deploy the site, it has to be built on top of a known working copy. That alone has made us at home to Mr Cockup a couple of times. So we are fixing it. Months after we should have but better late than never.

We’re transitioning to a tool for deployments called Octopus Deploy. It means I am busy making the new build scripts for all our work. It has mostly been straight forward, except for this one project, this previously kinda, sorta-unbuildable project. It’s not as simple as the others, it makes a few steps which means we have to put a bit more detail into the build script - a nuget spec - to ensure it gets everything. One of those steps is getting a bunch of files that aren’t in source control in there, ensuring they get picked up so we have a single package for the whole site. And here is where the weirdness begins.

There are eight libraries that are exhibiting an odd behaviour; when they are included in a lib folder, the build script copies them to the bin folder. At first I though there must be a reference to the files somewhere else and some of the older build script fragments are picking them up, but after grepping I have flensed away everything bar the references including them in the Visual Studio project, treating them as just files, no copying to output dir. And there’s not a command somewhere to copy the whole directory; it copies only eight files of many. Also, I can rename the lib directory to something else entirely, and it still picks up those files.

They are dependencies of direct dependencies but they aren’t being pulled from a remote server because of dependency definitions. They are definitely being copied from the lib folder and if they aren’t in lib, they don’t show up in bin. I wish I could believe msbuild is AI powered and is picking up the files because It Knows!

Now, this is only a problem because the nuget spec building the package is being told to package all files in the bin and lib directories. It’s not a very sophisticated packaging format so when it encounters these duplicate files, it blows up.

I’ve burned a few hours with my mind blown, to no avail. The only reference I can find on Google is, oddly enough, the opposite problem, the files being deleted from the bin folder, not mysteriously showing up. I’ve spent more time than I can really afford, and I expect when I get in tomorrow I am going to just go with it, make these files dependencies so they get jammed into bin because I asked for it, and remove the duplicates. But it will nag at me, this issue, until I work it out, because really…what the fuck?

Update 20/03/2014

Friend of the show and former partner in crime, So Su, reminds me that:

You and I have seen something very similar to this issue before. It turned out to be Resharper adding references to dependencies of dependants.

That sounds familiar. I can’t quite remember the circumstances he’s referring to, but I can verify that at least one of the dependencies of dependants shows up buried deep in Resharper config. Hmmm.

• Work
• wtf

Consciously, no shamelessly modelled/stolen from Medium. Well, full bleed image up the top and a column of text down the middle with wide margins (depending on your screen size, of course), that’s what I liked and worked into my design here. Even the limited-width column is hardly trademarked by Obvious Corp, that’s been around for years. Pretty sure Jakob Nielsen banged on about it, and if not he then others.

No, it’s the full bleed image that I fell in love with at Medium and will mark me as “inspired”. I love their fonts as well, but I fear I just don’t have the taste to apply to the problem. Maybe nxt time I have other things I want to do and need something to do in order to procrastinate.

So obviously credit goes to Obvious and Medium for their style and taste which I aspire to. Additionally, credit to Qing Wang from whom I took the YinYang theme as a starting point. I found the theme while specifically looking for something Medium inspired, and while not what I was looking for, it was something to work with and was pretty quick to get 80% of what I wanted.

As always, the final 20% takes all the time, and that is still ongoing. The archives template is pretty gross, and as suggested above, the typography needs love.

Mostly this was an exercise in learning the basics of responsive web design. Before I knew almost nothing about the finer details; now, I almost know something about it. The mechanics of making it work are there to grasp, and I reckon I may just have that grip. But again it is design itself, that component that requires taste, that eludes me. I once fancied myself a web designer, but I pretty quickly realised I was merely a web developer, best utilised at implementing the designs.

So go forth into the world, young and fresh UI. Slay me dragons and lay them before my door.

• design
• meta

At the risk of this blog turnng into the Adventure Capital making of, it turns out I am going to write this damn thing. It’s already made it off my local system out to Github.

I doubt it will ever be more than a toy I play with occasionally, but if it were, that’s almost certainly a prototype. Porting it to c# would give me more flexibility, such as mobile device apps. Ha! Look at me talk.

• games
• adventure_capital