LifeUpdate
I realize I don't post very often, and that's not likely to change, but here is an update on what's going on in my world.
Work
This phase of my life is still work centric.
For the last 1.5 years, after being a normal employee. I have been mostly happily self-employed doing mostly hard-core flash programming for myself (http://www.troyworks.com) with clients primarily in the online video and educational sectors. Despite being a flash guru for close to a decade, I only started blogging professionally about a week ago (http://www.troyworks.com/blog).
The move to self-employed has been a good one, I have freedom to explore ideas as they pop up spontaneously, a very comfortable working environment...no commute. While I was worried, I quickly went from no work to completely saturated. Even took on a major client that I used to work for at Schematic..my hourly rate is 1.5-3x what it was it was working for someone else.
It's been an interesting and challenging year, learning deals, paperwork, taxes, Flash has gone through a major change from AS2 to AS3, being acquired by Adobe. Releasing AIR. Massive changes in workflow.
In April after reading the great book the hour work week (http://www.the4hourworkweek.com), I've shifted gears into developing products/services which don't require my involvement to increase passive income, so I can scale to bigger more interesting projects and less coding and more fun architecting, directing..and playing. I've started a website/blog covering aspects of the GTD, 4hour workweek my strategies, at a new blog http://www.thoughtfront.com/blog/
My 3 year goals are to 'work' less (right now it's intense..there are weeks I don't see my housemate/neighbor) and spend more time traveling, or on crazy artist and mad scientist, and family endeavors..maybe even time to read the final Harry Potter book. I'm not truly happy unless my hands and mind are occupied. Part of this is motivated by there are only so many in the world looking at the problems and risks that interest me: useful applications of AI, longevity, electromedicine, nanotec, so to me it makes more sense to spend my limited life, in striving to make improvements in those areas instead of just building better mousetraps for others as fun as that can be. I don't know necessarily which ones will pan out so I've trying many.
Among the many facets, one major in the last year, I've focusing on developing children's educational content primarily for http://www.kidthing.com, which is still in alpha, but is going to be cool!. It's looks todo for educational content that iTunes did for music, and YouTube did for user contributed content.
While I develop products for them. My own personal product line is aimed at kids at ground zero assuming no knowledge of a pc (potentially interfacing with drool and pounding), upto about age 10. It's fun! and I'm even working with friends in the process to develop some content. The lessons I remember in teaching/training AI when I are proving useful. My hopes that within 5 years, like with the $100 laptop, every kid can have a laptop/ipod/phone, with as mall AI with a sophisticated model of the user serving as a mentor, understanding their moods, learning styles, likely hood to forget material just learned, and a continous roadmap of things to teach them in an optimal and fun fashion.
Though not typically a gameplayer, I've been studying what makes games fun (play is THE natural learning state!),and learning lots. I've been outsourcing much of the development and research, which has allowed me to be far more productive than solo as I tend to do when left to my introverted. Feedback of the work so far has been very positive.
I keep learning completely new areas, I had no idea I'd be learning a few months ago:
This week is server virtualization. I'm looking at server appliances using VWWare and Amazon, to allow me to scale in minutes without dealing with hardware/IT. This is to support other endeavors.
A month old facet for me is online marketing, notably affiliate networks and adsense advertising. Online marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry and growing, and much cheaper than other distribution/marketing channels especially viable for the longtail/niches, of which many of my products are in. I am developing spiders which evaluate how good a product sales page is and keyword density routines to help both summarize a page/site and help generate the clustered keyword groups necessary for an optimal AdSense campaign. Much of this experience is still relevant to my own products when they hit the market. My long term goal is to use an agent/evolutionary approach to selecting candidates and optimizing costs.
One of the recent tools I'm proud/excited about I'm calling Cogs,it's at the foundation of most of my new projects. It's named after the mechanical cogs the 'teeth' of gears, that when meshing well, power inside engines which power pretty much every mechanical item in the world, and secondarily cognition aspect which is similar in that it's interlocking neurons instead of gears. It'sa relatively small library that helps build software brains, from the microscale (a toggle button),to game AI, to application frameworks. The Brains, allows behavior to be nested,and transitions between states/contexts discovered automatically. e.g you are currentl 'reading' state, which is nested in the 'awake' state, in the 'alive'state, if a 'nap' request were to occur. The transitions from exiting reading,to exiting awake to entering nap state (but still in the alive state) would occur without manually specifying things. Identical stimuli e.g.("how are you?") in different states respond appropriately, e.g.asleep=ignored, excited "great!",busy="I'm sorry what?"
This has broad applicability to component development, gameAI, parsing etc, and can allow products to be prototyped faster, more iteratively, and scale better. Especially good for flash where people are constantly reinventing the UI. The techniques have been known for years, sadly the people who write about this are mostly super geeks that tend to obfuscate in the process of talking, when the basics are easily visualizable and approachable with the right metaphors. I'm working on the realtime visualization and developing gamelike curriculum on how to understand/use it, with eventual goals to present on the some Human Computer Interaction and Flash Developer Conferences. My goal here is to get it in the hands of design firms and programmers, as it's well suited to prototype development,and communication between the design, management and engineering teams. It's also MIT licensed and hosted on googlecode so that others can participate and improve. Though I haven't uploaded it yet.
Plus a neverending bubbling of new ideas.
Health
Still on limited Calorie Restriction,recently finished juice fasting for 10days~ 0-300 calories a day. Feel good. It's amusing to think I just had lunch that was more calories than I ate most of that week.
Relationships
Been dating Teresaeg since October, she used to be a dance store owner, now she's a nanny and a math tutor. We met through Sifter.org a social group down in SanDiego. She currently lives in San Diego, but tentatively is moving up to LA sometime before the new year, hopefully into the same complex that I and several other friends are slowly taking over. We've got 3/4 of the 8 units covered. Our own little intentional community!: brownAscention lightling, inimitable_l + Bjorn, metaeducat10n
Teresaeg and I are going to go to Chicago (where her family is an the MAX conference is) in late September and Hawaii for a month in October. It will be my first time on the island.
Art/Music
I still write/compose music, perform live-looping a few times a year, still write music on startup culture, introspection, across a wide variety of genres. I continually try new interfaces nextshow I'm going to try controlling the show via a pair of Nintendo Wii and a FrogPad controllers! At somepoint I'll do an art show as well, primarily pencil and ink in very intense colors trippy surreal patchworks. Even acquired some great -now discontinued frames for cheap while metaeducat10n was working at Aaron brothers
Work
This phase of my life is still work centric.
For the last 1.5 years, after being a normal employee. I have been mostly happily self-employed doing mostly hard-core flash programming for myself (http://www.troyworks.com) with clients primarily in the online video and educational sectors. Despite being a flash guru for close to a decade, I only started blogging professionally about a week ago (http://www.troyworks.com/blog).
The move to self-employed has been a good one, I have freedom to explore ideas as they pop up spontaneously, a very comfortable working environment...no commute. While I was worried, I quickly went from no work to completely saturated. Even took on a major client that I used to work for at Schematic..my hourly rate is 1.5-3x what it was it was working for someone else.
It's been an interesting and challenging year, learning deals, paperwork, taxes, Flash has gone through a major change from AS2 to AS3, being acquired by Adobe. Releasing AIR. Massive changes in workflow.
In April after reading the great book the hour work week (http://www.the4hourworkweek.com), I've shifted gears into developing products/services which don't require my involvement to increase passive income, so I can scale to bigger more interesting projects and less coding and more fun architecting, directing..and playing. I've started a website/blog covering aspects of the GTD, 4hour workweek my strategies, at a new blog http://www.thoughtfront.com/blog/
My 3 year goals are to 'work' less (right now it's intense..there are weeks I don't see my housemate/neighbor) and spend more time traveling, or on crazy artist and mad scientist, and family endeavors..maybe even time to read the final Harry Potter book. I'm not truly happy unless my hands and mind are occupied. Part of this is motivated by there are only so many in the world looking at the problems and risks that interest me: useful applications of AI, longevity, electromedicine, nanotec, so to me it makes more sense to spend my limited life, in striving to make improvements in those areas instead of just building better mousetraps for others as fun as that can be. I don't know necessarily which ones will pan out so I've trying many.
Among the many facets, one major in the last year, I've focusing on developing children's educational content primarily for http://www.kidthing.com, which is still in alpha, but is going to be cool!. It's looks todo for educational content that iTunes did for music, and YouTube did for user contributed content.
While I develop products for them. My own personal product line is aimed at kids at ground zero assuming no knowledge of a pc (potentially interfacing with drool and pounding), upto about age 10. It's fun! and I'm even working with friends in the process to develop some content. The lessons I remember in teaching/training AI when I are proving useful. My hopes that within 5 years, like with the $100 laptop, every kid can have a laptop/ipod/phone, with as mall AI with a sophisticated model of the user serving as a mentor, understanding their moods, learning styles, likely hood to forget material just learned, and a continous roadmap of things to teach them in an optimal and fun fashion.
Though not typically a gameplayer, I've been studying what makes games fun (play is THE natural learning state!),and learning lots. I've been outsourcing much of the development and research, which has allowed me to be far more productive than solo as I tend to do when left to my introverted. Feedback of the work so far has been very positive.
I keep learning completely new areas, I had no idea I'd be learning a few months ago:
This week is server virtualization. I'm looking at server appliances using VWWare and Amazon, to allow me to scale in minutes without dealing with hardware/IT. This is to support other endeavors.
A month old facet for me is online marketing, notably affiliate networks and adsense advertising. Online marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry and growing, and much cheaper than other distribution/marketing channels especially viable for the longtail/niches, of which many of my products are in. I am developing spiders which evaluate how good a product sales page is and keyword density routines to help both summarize a page/site and help generate the clustered keyword groups necessary for an optimal AdSense campaign. Much of this experience is still relevant to my own products when they hit the market. My long term goal is to use an agent/evolutionary approach to selecting candidates and optimizing costs.
One of the recent tools I'm proud/excited about I'm calling Cogs,it's at the foundation of most of my new projects. It's named after the mechanical cogs the 'teeth' of gears, that when meshing well, power inside engines which power pretty much every mechanical item in the world, and secondarily cognition aspect which is similar in that it's interlocking neurons instead of gears. It'sa relatively small library that helps build software brains, from the microscale (a toggle button),to game AI, to application frameworks. The Brains, allows behavior to be nested,and transitions between states/contexts discovered automatically. e.g you are currentl 'reading' state, which is nested in the 'awake' state, in the 'alive'state, if a 'nap' request were to occur. The transitions from exiting reading,to exiting awake to entering nap state (but still in the alive state) would occur without manually specifying things. Identical stimuli e.g.("how are you?") in different states respond appropriately, e.g.asleep=ignored, excited "great!",busy="I'm sorry what?"
This has broad applicability to component development, gameAI, parsing etc, and can allow products to be prototyped faster, more iteratively, and scale better. Especially good for flash where people are constantly reinventing the UI. The techniques have been known for years, sadly the people who write about this are mostly super geeks that tend to obfuscate in the process of talking, when the basics are easily visualizable and approachable with the right metaphors. I'm working on the realtime visualization and developing gamelike curriculum on how to understand/use it, with eventual goals to present on the some Human Computer Interaction and Flash Developer Conferences. My goal here is to get it in the hands of design firms and programmers, as it's well suited to prototype development,and communication between the design, management and engineering teams. It's also MIT licensed and hosted on googlecode so that others can participate and improve. Though I haven't uploaded it yet.
Plus a neverending bubbling of new ideas.
Health
Still on limited Calorie Restriction,recently finished juice fasting for 10days~ 0-300 calories a day. Feel good. It's amusing to think I just had lunch that was more calories than I ate most of that week.
Relationships
Been dating Teresaeg since October, she used to be a dance store owner, now she's a nanny and a math tutor. We met through Sifter.org a social group down in SanDiego. She currently lives in San Diego, but tentatively is moving up to LA sometime before the new year, hopefully into the same complex that I and several other friends are slowly taking over. We've got 3/4 of the 8 units covered. Our own little intentional community!: brownAscention lightling, inimitable_l + Bjorn, metaeducat10n
Teresaeg and I are going to go to Chicago (where her family is an the MAX conference is) in late September and Hawaii for a month in October. It will be my first time on the island.
Art/Music
I still write/compose music, perform live-looping a few times a year, still write music on startup culture, introspection, across a wide variety of genres. I continually try new interfaces nextshow I'm going to try controlling the show via a pair of Nintendo Wii and a FrogPad controllers! At somepoint I'll do an art show as well, primarily pencil and ink in very intense colors trippy surreal patchworks. Even acquired some great -now discontinued frames for cheap while metaeducat10n was working at Aaron brothers