With these weeknotes I publicly track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.
This week was shorter than usual, as my daughters had an extra day off on Monday, and we all went to Sea Life in The Hague.
After two weeks of writing in Amsterdam and one in Frankfurt for the Buchmesse, things finally went back to normal. So I took the time to clean up and organize. I moved my to-do backlog from the back of my Kanban booklet to the doors of a cabinet in my home office, getting my projects up to date and setting OKR’s for the current quarter. I did some design work on Geometry Girl and organized my writing, and sent out a bunch of Frankfurt follow-up e-mail.
The last two days of the working week were spent at Two Tribes, as co-founder Collin will leave the country soon and I’m taking over some of his duties. It’s a lot to take in, but it’ll be quite educational to do even more on the marketing and development side; yes, RIVE is out, but we’re still working on some updates and other things.
What else? Not too much, really. It was a rather easygoing week, which I think is important to have sometimes. In closing, here are three things I’d like to discuss briefly:
- I’m really jealous of Black Mirror, I wish I’d made something like it. I’d been waiting for the six new episodes to come out on Netflix last Friday, and watched them in a few days. I love how real the characters feel, and how different each episode is. It turns out creator Charlie Brooker is a former games critic, which explains the many game references and consistent game ‘feel’. My favorite episode is San Junipero, one of the less gloomy ones.
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Last week I didn’t mention Nintendo’s Switch announcement, but driving home from Germany I actually stopped at a Raststätte to watch the video as it came online. I’m really happy that Nintendo’s hardware seems to be converging, so its game development teams can focus on just one platform ultimately. The supposedly ARM-based architecture is tied more to the smartphone market, which should help both financially (as prices come down over time) and technically (including power-efficiency). I have a lot of questions, though, especially about price and software services (give me a subscription-based Virtual Console!). Hopefully it’ll be the ultimate social Nintendo machine that fits snugly between the ubiquitous, surface-level smartphone and in-depth solitary console experience of the PlayStation 4.
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This week I watched Apple’s keynote. The new MacBook Pro looks great, if I had the budget I’d probably leave my ultra-portable MacBook for it. Overall though the feeling grows that Apple grinds ever more to a halt in the Mac department, especially in the desktop segment, compared to Microsoft’s recent hardware announcements for example.
Average step count per day: 8.735
Average staircase count per day: 11
Average sleep per night: 7:09
Average weight: 88,0