Cannot Sleep; Pondering Life
At 0435 on Monday morning in Stockholm, the sun shines brightly through fissures in my makeshift towel-drapes and keeps me from further sleep. I blame the reaching fingers of Sol, who rose over Terra almost two hours ago, for my consciousness, but likely ought to assign fault only to my rabid mind.
I am awake, thinking of life and the role of work in my life and escalating points of diminishing return for raw effort, time and self expended towards professional productivity and achievement.
Change, as well all know, is a constant. We can never really appreciate a zenith or nadir until the point has passed and there’s room between now and then for reflection.
I lie awake now, reflecting. There’s so much to say about the change and the aftermath of change and the rippling effects of all those pebbles dropped into my pond of ersatz tranquillity, but there’s so little I actually can say for so very many reasons.
I think it will make for an extraordinary tale one day, perhaps reserved as a sub-plot in a future novel. The dramatis personae and their motivations, interlaced with cascading decisions of questionable commercial acumen and widely varying people-chess skill, will make for a dynamic play full of intrigue, colour and joie de vivre.
That, however, will be a story that needs greater reflection before it is told. After all, the cliché rings true: Only time will tell.
Or, maybe, in time, I will.
I could perhaps concoct the story with multiple media while dissecting the conversations filed in my head. Carefully, I would reach inside them with cold pincers and extract crawling agendas. These I would then drop into boiling water with the hope they could be distilled to find the warm essence of truth and reason.
Alas, I say too little with too much art. I encourage you, dear reader, to simply delve between the lines.
Speaking of storytelling...
I’ve had a tremendous number of conversations recently about the origins and future of the online gaming industry, particularly at GIGSE two weeks ago and afterwards in Toronto. I’m frequently amazed by how shallow most of my peers’ knowledge and speculation is about these things. How can people move forwards without extensive prognostication? Maybe not everyone is such a pugilist, or I am too into pontificating? Or perhaps I just like five-dollar words that start with P?
How online poker has so far emerged as a viable, sustainable business is a fascinating story, about which I believe I could write a fairly compelling book. I’m now an expert in the area, know most of the major players, and have deep insights into the technical, financial, legislative, jurisdictional and operational business issues relevant to the industry.
From the rush to build between 1997-1999, to the great PlanetPoker debacle that almost destroyed the nascent industry, to the tremendous 91% marketshare that ParadisePoker pissed away, to the tipping point of 2003, to the emergence of the top-5 dominant brands, to the current wave of IPOs and M&As, I think chronicling the evolution of online poker would be a fascinating experience.
Of course, I’m a tad busy with my regular responsibilities, my secondary responsibilities, and executive producing the ONPC. So this will have to wait a while, but it’s something I’ll think about doing when and if I get some spare time.
More to follow, as I ponder.
Sharing beats with the RLB
Last night I saw the
Russell Leon Band perform with
Marcus Walker, their new bass player, the man who replaced me when
Scandinavia came calling. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, what I might hear, and what I might feel watching someone else play MY parts, but I honestly have to say that I was pleasantly delighted with the whole experience.
I anticipated their gig at
The Savoy in Toronto like I might anticipate spending an evening with an old girlfriend who I still
*really* liked, but who was inexplicably partnered with someone else, someone distasteful, inferior, bland, humourless, dull, out of time and out of synch with reality... Someone who could not possibly step into my 10 ½ inch shoes and fill the void of my absence but who somehow manipulated the universe to their own deviant advantage...
You get the idea.
I guess some part of me was hoping they might really suck without me. But that was on a subconscious level.
On the theta-level, I was looking forward to seeing my friends play, to hear some great tunes with the pulsating live groove I expect from the funkadelic RLB, and to stare once again in abject amazement and stark humility while Ansgar, Brian and Keith pulled tasty solos out of the air and dropped them like golden hammers upon our grateful little heads.
I was not disappointed.
The band are even tighter now than when I played with them, and their groove was more infectious than a sneezing four-year-old in economy class. The RLB made the whole room bounce and shake to the bombastic quake of their rocking beats.
They massaged the senses with delectable aural treats for about 45 minutes and pleasured us with songs from the repertoire I know (from back in the day, when I used to throw down the sticky, sickly basslines) and a few new tunes that I only knew from the scratchpad of joyous jazz head-oriented improvisation from rehearsals in another era.
It was an enormous treat to listen to the band, and I have to say it was also a treat to listen to their new bass man play. While he was certainly playing along to the same songs I used to play, he wasn’t playing MY parts; he was playing his own parts. And they were tasty, meaty, groove-inducing and ... appropriate for the songs.
I felt good listening to the band, with me not on bass. And while I would have loved to be up there playing with them, I was honestly surprised not to be bothered by being another plebeian in the audience. I was able to enjoy the swooning horns and brilliant smiles, and feel the great, positive energy from their music cascading off the stage and through the speakers.
And this is where the gushing ends.
After the set, I hugged the boys, and Marcus introduced himself with a warm smile and handshake. It was (and is) all good...
I joined them for the post-show ritual, and it’s good to know that some things never change. People are people, my friends are my friends, and I’m proud to share a love for music with them, no matter who is making it.
Apple's Updater trashed my iPod
I lost frustrating hours today with the first Apple product I’ve ever purchased.
I’ve been using iTunes for managing podcasts for almost a year now, but have never felt the need to get a dedicated audio player. I thought myself a dedicated 1-device man as my Sony Ericsson
K750i mobile phone has a great audio player in it (along with a radio and a video camera and a reasonable contacts and calendar synchronization with MS Outlook).
However, thanks to the generosity (and bad poker playing) of some friends in Toronto a few weeks ago, I treated myself to a spiffy new black iPod Nano. It took about 6 hours to charge-up after a 20-minute install process, and synchronization was a snap. Since then, I’ve been enjoying the iPod on planes and trains, while running, and in the subway.
Today marks the first day I ever swore at Apple like I used to swear at Microsoft.
This afternoon, I updated iTunes, and was prompted to update my Nano with the most current iPod Updater (2006-03-23). After running that, the Updater froze, trashed my iPod, froze my system and changed my desktop image to a pic of Steve Jobs smoking a cigar and blowing arrogant, triumphant smoke rings at me as acidic, maniacal revenge for all the
PC v.s. MAC jokes I've made over the years.
That last part is not true. Really, Steve, it's not. I'd actually like to keep the iPod...
Anyway, I tried troubleshooting and debugging my machine, the programs, the iPod and my brain but it took what seemed like forever (a few hours anyway, while toggling between e-mail and TV) before I found the perfect
support thread in an Apple forum where poster
TrevorQ suggests:
...go into My Computer with the iPod connected, right click it, wait till the right click menu comes up (could take a few minutes), click Format, wait for the Format window to come up (again, could take a few minutes), and format the iPod with the default settings there (FAT32, Default allocation size, and Quick Format NOT checked). Then open up the iPod Updater and restore the iPod. Should work fine from there.
Note that this did work for me.
Evidently there’s a major bug in either the Updater or the iTunes update which screws with your PC and Apple is going to need to update their Updater to debug the bugs which bugged me for hours tonight.
Bleagh.
On the bright side, I get to listen to my “
Running Hour” playlist tomorrow morning.
Happy Valborgsmässoafton, btw. And yes, I was in Uppsala yesterday!
