Monday, December 19, 2016

How EVE Online and a Passion for its Community led to my Career Makeover


(This post was originally published on LinkedIn on December 14th under the title "How Internet Spaceships and a Passion for Online Communities led to a Career Makeover")

What does an online multiplayer game have to do with a career makeover you ask? Bear with me for a second.

A bit of background first.

For as long as I can remember, I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. It seemed to me that all my friends in high school or college were working hard studying to become engineers, marketing professionals, teachers or whatever was driving them.

Me, not so much. Nevertheless, I worked hard in school and always kept my options open. After 6 years in university, I had a Bachelor's degree in History and a full time opportunity to work for a major technology player. Off I went to work at IBM in Toronto, as a Customer Relations representative. The role would eventually lead me to work in digital media, in various Sales and Business Development positions for the next 15 years.

That career path allowed me to travel the world, meet extraordinary people and build long lasting relationship, which I cherish to this day.


But deep down inside, there was a void. A void that would soon get filled with by a community of internet spaceship pilots.

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Friday, April 29, 2016

EVERPSACE: You've just been promoted to Space Optimizr!



Yesterday, I got a DM from Michael of @everspace_game promoting me to Space Optimizr and Alpha pilot. It's been a blast of fun ever since!

Expect more updates on my progress!

Sunday, February 07, 2016

The 5-Bullet Weekly Wrap-Up

Artwork is "Sleeping Beauty" by Exidium Corp - via ArtStation.

I've been reading and following Tim Ferriss for a number of years now, and I'd figured that I'd leverage his idea of the "5-Bullet Friday" and do some weekly wrap-ups.


Robots and Murder
What I'm reading - "Robots and Murder: The Caves of Steel/ The Naked Sun/ Robots of Dawn"
I've finished rereading "The Caves of Steel" and am halfway through the 2nd Robot novel. As always I loving the literary style taken by Asimov and his strong dialogues. But I can't deny that the little (and sometimes major) technology fumbles aren't pulling me out of the story from time to time. Still, I'm enjoying the story and the concept of AI and humanoid robots.





Dual Universe
What I'm listening to - "The Dual Universe Soundtracks from Maxime Ferrieu"
I've been following Novaquark and their Dual Universe game development for a little over two years now. In their most recent newsletter, they mention the release of six new tracks. I've got to say I'm loving the ambiance and galactic breadth of the track - perfect for immersing yourself in a good sci-fi novel.





LG LCD Monitor
What I've recently purchased - "LG Black 27" 5ms HDMI Widescreen LED Backlight Monitor"
It's been quite sometime since I've wanted to upgrade my current monitor. So at the end of 2015, I made the move and purchased the gorgeous 27MP77HM LG 27" monitor and haven't looked back! The previous 23" monitor I had for the last, what 4 or 5 years, now seems tiny in comparison. And the new monitor allows me to plug in both my PC and my Xbox360. Call me a happy camper!



G.SKILL RAM
What I've got my eye on - "G.SKILL 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2"
So now that I've got a bit more real estate in terms of visuals, my next upgrade to my old 7 year old PC gaming rig, is upgrading my RAM from 8GB to the maximum allowed by my mobo, a whopping 16GB of RAM, thus DOUBLING what I currently have. The only issue, the price: a big fat $470! Ouch.



My most popular tweet over the last week - "The one about activating my EVERSPACE Forum account"

Saturday, January 02, 2016

Weekly | Monthly | Yearly Wrap-up :: W52 - 2015


Well, though we are technically in the new year, this IS the end of the last week of 2015, the end of the month and year. As such, it's an opportunity for me to review things and get the house in order as we set forth into 2016.

Let's run the number for this blog, even though some of them are pretty shameful:

  • 7 posts in 2015
  • 3 failed attempts to restart this blog over the last 2 years
  • 1 EVE Blog Banter Participation
  • 1 Weekly Wrap-Up (2 if you include this one)
  • 521 pageviews - 344 visitors
    • food for thought: to put things in perspective my last active year - 2011 - this blog had 152k pageviews. 
Yeah, this stinks!


On  the positive sides of thing, I've been focusing most of my activity on Twitter, where a lot of the conversation is taking place these times. And here, the numbers are much more interesting:

  • December 2015: 109k impressions - 231 tweets - 1,676 profile visits
  • November 2015: 70.3 impressions - 120 tweets - 1,131 profile visits
But I'm finding more and more the need to go beyond the simple 140 character limit of Twitter and use a platform such as this blog to elaborate on various topics, aggregate interesting content, share and review films and books, and write about other matters. 

As such, I'm setting a goal - it's that time of year isn't it! - for January and promise to do my darn best to post once a day. I started writing this post on January 2nd at 11:47pm and though I'll be posting it a little past midnight, it still counts!

What I've got in the works:
  • Gaming goals for the year
  • Book reading goals and monthly review
  • Teaching MiniMe (who's now in first grade) and his older sister all about PC Gaming - and writing about it
  • Writing about my passion for "The Art of" books, and the Concept Artists behind them
  • Movie, Book and Game Reviews
  • Cleaning up the mess I made by letting CrazyKinux.com go and having to register and use instead CrazyKinux.ca (will need to go through every post on this blog and manually update any reference pointing to .com and switch it to .ca - Go me!!)
  • Coming up  with a new Blog Banter
  • Writing about the slow and painful upgrade of this 6 year old gaming PC
  • And much much more...

Expect the regular weekly wrap-up to be back next week-end.

See ya tomorrow you ol' farts!