Category: Technology

I’m getting far too intimate with people. By my standards, that is…I’ve never really connected with anyone at a job before now, since I often just went home, smiled at everyone just enough and kept to myself at all other times. So yeah, not so much of the social interaction. Now I’m going away on company retreats and a feel fine with it. It’s no good. I have to start withdrawing…yeah, for those mysterious reasons again.

Maybe I should get a digital antenna. Companies in Melbourne that do that kind of thing are always around, and I can even see a few on the rooftops from where I live. I really should be learning about a whole lot of things, and that’s difficult when you come home and all that’s on are reruns of Week of Our Lives (don’t really see the appeal) and some old movies. I’ve already memories the entire bi-monthly schedule just from seeing it twice, and once you analyse things to the depths I have, you start to realise that all plots are the same. Even soap operas abide by the hero’s journey; it’s just that multiple storylines are happening at once, over a longer period of time. It’s harder to notice, but definitely still there.

Honestly, I don’t think digital TV will be all that different. A little antenna isn’t going to teach me everything there is to know about the human race, even if there are fifty channels. I’ll have the broadcast schedule down in a few hours, and then it all becomes so predictable. I just have to hope that somewhere, there’s a show that ends up being more than mildly distracting. I doubt it. But it’s not like I’ doing much else with what I get paid, so I’ll consider tv antennas. Companies in Melbourne are pretty good at installing them, digital antennas that is. So at least it’ll help to make people think I’m normal.

-Mack

Had to deal with a minor protest today. They were actually blocking my way to work, and while on a motorbike I can usually just dodge around people, they were protesting just a few blocks down from our office. That means that OTHER people would be late, and that would lead to a loss of productivity, and so you can see why I had to put a stop to things.

I’m still a bit unsure what it was about, mostly because they themselves didn’t need to know. One guy was holding a sign that said ‘Melbourne App Design Courses Deserve Respect!’ but someone else was holding another sign that read ‘Down With App Design!’

So they don’t really seem like they’d go together. Eventually I managed to work out that the building was a tech start-up that had been developing custom apps, but they’d been accused of hacking into the university database and stealing prototype apps that students had submitted for assignments. The police had dismissed the case, but a lot of the students were still angry that their work was being commercialised. Whether or not any of it was true was another matter entirely, but I had to clear the blockage. So I did, with a bit of a rousing speech that came out of nowhere…I just have the right words to say sometimes, I guess. Still, I kept thinking about the case for the rest of the day. Apparently there were also web and software design templates stolen. I looked into the start-up and they seemed pretty clean. But then I looked into the website set up by the students, and it all looked a bit shady.

I’m no internet justice warrior person, but no student should have their future stolen away and used for profit. So I might have…ah, aroused a bit of affirmative action on some select forums. Pretty soon, all the best  web development course students from across the world were looking into the case and signing a petition. And just like that, the start-up’s website vanished and was replaced by something that didn’t look quite as good…but at least they made it themselves.

-Mack

Some people grow up with all these skills in a certain area, because their parents did something or another. You see it all the time on TV, like when they need someone to solve a particular case or whatever, and it turns out that their parents did that specific thing as a hobby so now they know how to do it too. I’m not sure it really works like that…I mean, I know people who had medical people for parents and they have no interest or knowledge of medical stuff. Some parents just don’t talk about this kind of thing with their kids, you know? I mean, not that I have experience, because my parents are dead and I never met them, but that’s just how I think it goes.

I’m guessing if you had parents who did like a game design course, you’d be more likely to get into that world because…well, games are just that kind of thing. You want to share the joy of gaming with people, so if they were game designers they’d want their kids to be into the same thing. Actually, as weird as it is that two parents could both be working in the gaming industry, it’s becoming more common. It’s not a ‘boys only’ field any more, so maybe spouses can make games together in the future. But then it might become a flipped case of the child hating video games and wanting to do, like…an IT course. Or they could want to do something TOTALLY different, like medicine. Wouldn’t that be weird? Nowadays, there are so many kids who finish school and want to work with video games because it’s a passion, while their folks try to persuade them to do something sensible…like medicine.

So things could very easily flip around in the future, you know? Tech is becoming a big deal. Not that I’m some future prediction person, but I just feel that’s where it’s going. Meanwhile, I’m not hugely into games, because…well, time. I’ve dabbled, certainly. Had a good time with Airedge, that big open world game with all the dragons, but once I completed it a few hours later I sort of lost interest. Someone doing a video game course in Melbourne needs to make me a game that’ll last!

-Mack