Category: Personal

Reach For The Sky

This is a toy that took me a weekend and a bit to get going. I’m using the Cinder library, which for the most part keeps itself to itself, and C++, very badly abused C++ at that.

It’s only on the Mac at the moment. I’ll see if I can get it going on the PC and upload a build here if I can.

Grab the Mac build here.

Unzip it, stick it in Applications or something and remember to sort out your security settings to allow running something by a nobody. (After you’ve run it, do remember to restore your security settings, OK?)

Give Up on Your Dreams

“Is your deal on the Emu XL–1 Turbo with all the add-on cards still on at the same price?”

Many of my conversations with the staff of what used to be Soho Soundhouse and subsequently Turnkey took a similar turn. I spent a small fortune on music technology as it evolved, and even went there for my guitars, culminating in the purchase of a Paul Smith Standard 24 with the bird inlays at a cool £2,000. The journey began so long ago, as far back as the mid 1980s that I genuinely don’t remember my first purchase there. Like other firsts, it was hurried, clumsy and forgettable. It might have been a Roland TR707 drum machine, then over £450, and like most music tech, now worth £4.50 no doubt.

Every day a part of my consciousness acknowledges the rack containing the Emu with its sister-wives, the Roland JV1080; the magnificent, warm and unparalleled Roland Super JX, AKA MKS–70; the Alesis Microverb; the Emu ESI–4000 and the e-magic Unitor MIDI interface. I acknowledge the remnants of my dreams every day, a reminder of how I didn’t “succeed” in music, knowing full well that had I persisted, I would have.

Ohh the opportunities were there. In the late 1980s, Ben Wardle, an A&R man at Warner, liked what my band (Life in the Bus Lane) was doing, but we stopped. We had a contact with the CEO of CBS at the time, but we stopped. Then later in the late 1990s, I tried again. I started singing. My voice was untrained, the demos were rough, but people liked it. I got a good demo sound, not production-quality by any stretch, but good enough. I wrote some good songs, and recorded a handful. Then I stopped.

Every day I pick up my Dean acoustic fretless and I practice, and every day there is a part of my subconscious that is trying to push the “you could have done this” message to my conscious mind, but my conscious mind left that behind and moved on.

I never admitted that I’d failed, because I used to think that failure was shame. It isn’t shame. Failure is the only time we learn. When a child learns to walk, it fails again and again. It never beats itself up. It never chides itself. It smiles, picks itself up, loves the process and learns to walk. There are probably fewer skills harder to master than walking, but most of us do that without fuss.

I didn’t fail at music. I just didn’t keep going. If I’d kept going, I would have succeeded. What I have learned is that I wasted a lot of time thinking I’d failed. Failure is not shameful. The only thing I’m ashamed of is wasting so much of my time thinking there was no way forward. There isn’t always a way forward, but there is often a way around, or over, or under. There is a way.

My dream was to be a writer of great songs and a recording artist. I never gave up on that dream. What I did was pursue something else. Video games. I kept going and I kept going. I never stopped. I paused, but I never stopped, even when I thought it was over.

I thought it was over for me in 1984 after Jet Set Willy. I didn’t take Richard Jones’ offer of £3000 for Baby Starts Walking on the C64. That was youthful pride. And so I tried to make another game and got nowhere with it and thought it was over. Then I saw Knight Lore and knew what I wanted.

Then in the late 1980s, I thought it was over after a successful stint making games that Telecomsoft published. I’d had a great time and I was on top of the world. After Pandora, I thought I’d blown my chance with the Stampers, and that it was over. Then I got into music and started making music for video games. That led me to my gig at BITS where I spent a few years, after which I went on to Virgin Interactive, Hasbro Interactive and finally START! games where I was on top of the world for a while. And then START! stopped, and I thought it was over. Not just career wise either. Divorce, homelessness, no job, no money, crushing debt, ill health, I thought it was definitely over. After enduring that period as gracefully as it’s possible for a broken man to endure and gettnig by with some contract work for a while, I joined Sony Computer Entertainment at the back end of 2005, 8 years ago this week in fact.

By the tail end of 2005, I thought it was over again, but this time, I knew how to pick myself up. I never gave up the fight. I committed myself fully to work. I threw myself into work with zeal and passion. I found a new remit and a new focus. I totally transformed my life with energy and passion that I might previously have said was impossible. I worked insanely hard, stayed incredibly positive, stayed profoundly happy and with my colleagues, delivered, delivered, delivered. The run continues and I intend to reach new highs.

You see, if you are willing to put three decades or more of effort into something, you are going to be really, really good at it, but only if you care. If you go through the motions, you are doing a job. If you put yourself into it, you are following a calling. There are few forces in the world as powerful as the softness of water on the apparent immovability of rock over the aeons of time. Don’t be the rock. Be the water. Be the drop and fall. Again and again and again.

If I want to be “successful” at videogames, and success can be defined in so many ways, then I have to focus on videogames. Today is a great day for me to give up on my dreams, the dreams that were not meant to be, and to continue to kindle the fire inside that has led me to success I could never have dreamt of. A success that is its own reward. Of pride in my work, in my colleagues, my company, my partners. To deliver work that has moved people, enriched their lives, made them happy, in a way that they admire and aspire to. That is success. Today I give up on my dreams and hold onto that which becomes more and more real every day.

Twitter Isn’t a Holiday Destination

Twitter has become my default destination, my starting point, my notebook of thoughts and my conversation centre.

I find it harder and harder to write blog posts, because it’s so much more convenient and immediate to kick things off on Twitter.

Twitter has become the ultimate procrastination tool. Why finish anything, when in 140 characters, you’ve devolved responsibility to the global, social thought stream?

I’m supposedly on holiday, but thanks to Twitter and email, and despite my BlackBerry being turned off, I’m never far away, which means I haven’t switched off. Now two years ago, this would have been a tragedy that I would have railed against. Now, things are markedly different.

My job’s one of the coolest in the world. That wasn’t an accident. Two years go, I was ready to quit Sony. One day, I might not be at Sony, and that might well be the time to tell you why, if anyone’s still interested, but it’s really not that interesting.

I decided to put everything I had into the job. Everything. I’ve been a voracious reader and learner for years. I started reading again. Looking back, I acted on the advice of a man who I had yet to read, whose words I had yet to hear. Jim Connolly. I didn’t know Jim back then, but he said it best and when I heard his words, telling me that the quickest route to success was to put everything you have into what you’re currently doing, the hairs on the back of my neck rose in recognition. That’s exactly what I’d been doing for the last two years, and exactly why I’d managed to make so much progress. Massive action; the willingness to go the extra mile and beyond; a focus on serving others; massively positive, can-do attitude; the confidence to aim beyond what others are satisfied with and laser focus on results; all of these things work.

I started wearing suits again. I started playing table tennis, and I got pretty good at it. I lost a lot of weight – about 20 kilos. I got my diabetes under excellent control. I reduced the number of hypoglycaemic attacks I used to suffer.

Then things got really interesting. I got the opportunity I had been looking for, a move to a new department and a new challenge. I seized it with both hands and gave it everything and when I thought I’d given everything, I gave more. I defied convention and delivered with a team that shared my passion and commitment. They deserve the real credit. Thank you Lorenzo, Spencer, Tony, Robin, Nainan, Setsuo. And thanks Jim for believing in me.

And more recently, things have gone spectacularly well. Again, this didn’t happen by accident, but I feel no less blessed for the recognition and love.

Twitter has been there all along. I use my personal account. I speak in a relatively unfiltered way. That works. Obviously I’m not stupid about it.

Although at first, I spoke little of work except obliquely, I had a lot of experience on Twitter and started using it more for work. This was unorthodox, but I was delivering at work and I kept at it, refining my approach, refusing to take away the rough edges that make me human, but nevertheless, polishing those aspects that needed attention. I’m still working at it. The point is that Twitter has become an important part of my “job”, seeing as my life and my job have blurred boundaries.

That’s made it hard to switch off after an extraordinary Gamescom. (I’m about 52 minutes in by the way.)

What does switching off even mean in today’s world? More and more people talk about disconnecting digitally. Switching off email and social media and just going on a digital fast; digidetox if you will. I’m not sure if that’s the problem. I think the problem is living unconsciously.

We accumulate a lot of default behaviours over the course of our lives. Many of these are genuinely useful, but their execution not always optimal. An example of this is typing and mouse use. If we don’t use our bodies optimally, we set ourselves up for injury, even if we feel like we’re typing fast and mousing around like Jerry. Do it long enough, badly enough, unconsciously and you will get RSI, carpal tunnel syndrome and all manner of other problems.

If we sit at our desks with poor posture, we might not feel anything at the time, but one day, years from now, we’ll want to know how to get rid of the back pain that has “suddenly” crept up on us. So off we go to people who charge a lot of money to try to find a fix for a side effect of modern life. For what it’s worth, I got myself a good Alexander Technique teacher twelve years ago for about a year. From time to time, I still need to “give the orders”.

Using Twitter is also a habit, and not always a good one, though I think at the moment, the upside of Twitter vastly outweighs the downside, providing one uses it consciously. Given that my style is unfiltered and flowing, it’s not clear that being totally conscious would help, but it’s not the content over which I need to be totally conscious, it’s the moment before the tweet that is important.

Alexander Technique as taught by a good teacher shows you how to become much more sensitive to the feedback your body is constantly giving you, to use your body consciously. Once you have used your body consciously, the right way, for long enough, then good alignment becomes a habit again. I don’t have an Alexander teacher for Twitter, but I do have the next best thing – a holiday.

Driving is the same. We all think we’re fantastic drivers. I’m going to level with you. I’m not a fantastic driver. I know my technique leaves a lot to be desired and much of it is down to the erosion of good form, and the establishment of poor habits, but who is going to re-learn driving? It’s not cheap! I do think we should probably all go on refresher courses, but I haven’t a clue how we’d go about paying for it.

Habits are vital. They allow us to function without cognitive overload. If we had to consciously evaluate every decision in our extraordinarily complex lives, our decision-making reserves would be exhausted in no time and we probably wouldn’t even make it out the front door in the morning. What’s important is to occasionally have a conscious re-evaluation.

Holidays are really, really good for that.

Tomorrow, after the Friday prayer, I’ll be going to some wild, open space, near water, with a Dunhill Thames Oak pipe, filled to the brim with some mild tobacco. And I’ll be looking at those aspects of my life that I’ve been unconsciously suboptimal at and trying to be a bit more conscious.

Johanna

It would have been my friend Jo’s birthday today. She passed away too young, in 2007. This is more or less what I wrote after her funeral.

Bye Jo

My friend Johanna died recently. She wasn’t yet 40. Today, I attended her funeral service near Richmond.

i met Johanna at Dr. Valabhji’s (brilliant diabetologist, the man I credit with saving my life and extending it) clinic last year. I noticed her immediately, because she was having difficulty sitting down and she appeared to be unusually young for a person with absolutely zero eyesight.

I don’t usually start up conversations with people. You could say I go to some lengths to keep myself to myself. I keep a very small circle of friends, I prefer small groups and my favourite form of friendship is one-to-one.

For some reason, I felt drawn to talk to Jo. Sometimes I break all my own rules for no obvious reason and start conversations with people. It doesn’t happen often. It’s just this feeling. A voice (my voice, of course) telling me that this opportunity cannot be passed up. I struggled with the worry that I was going to start talking just because she was blind. Then I thought, “am I not talking to her just because she is?”

Somebody else was telling her about the electronic eye implant recently mentioned in the news. Such do-gooders make me feel uncomfortable. He was insensitive, perhaps tactless, and how was he to know that Jo didn’t have her own eyes in which to put such devices in anyway? No thanks to diabetes…

So I stopped the buffoon from talking any more crap by butting in at a convenient moment and letting her know where her stick was without touching her arm. People who have lost their sight don’t like to be led. Imagine being blindfolded and then kicked down the stairs, that’s how uncomfortable it is.

We talked about our diabetes. Hers had gone thanks to a combined kidney/pancreas transplant, but not before she had completely lost her eyes and a few toes to the ravages of this pernicious disease. Unfortunately, the kidney had failed and she was on dialysis.

We exchanged numbers. Her ‘phone spoke text messages and phone numbers to her. She hadn’t quite got used to it, but did her best and she never learned braille because she had very little sensation in her fingertips thanks again, to diabetes.

She was remarkably phlegmatic. I feel bad describing her as a list of ills. I do so only to point out that the person who was Johanna, the person that was my friend, was everything she was in spite of all of this and that is who I knew.

After we had spoken for a bit, I asked her what she missed and she mentioned not being able to read the papers. I offered to call her up from time to time to read to her. And so I did. Mostly the Daily Mail (which I despise, but that’s friendship. You are friends regardless of differences.) Rarely the Independent and on Sundays, the News of the World.

I didn’t call her as often as I would have liked, but it wasn’t just about reading her the paper, we talked about our lives and she always asked me if I’d managed to see my kids. She called me her favourite reader once and I can’t tell you how happy that made me. Then I had problems with the eye and my reading slowed down a great deal and I could not go on as long as before, but I read a few stories to her every few days or so, slowly. (Despite the damage to my eyesight, with full magnification on the monitor, my left eye could pick up words if I scanned many times before reading.)

I visited her in the hospital when she’d had some problems with autonomic neuropathy and read to her there. (It was the only time I’d met her mother, who ended up texting me this morning with the sad news.) Then more recently, I visited Jo during dialysis. Jo was asleep for most of it. I waited for almost a couple of hours, just watching her. Eventually, I had to leave. She apologised for sleeping and I felt terrible, on the verge of tears, that my friend who liked the Mail and who once asked me if I was one of those “vocal Muslims” should be worried about listening to me read the news to her while she was plugged into a machine that endlessly cleaned her blood before my working, witnessing eyes.

Every so often she’d tell me that she had fallen, or had suffered a setback with autonomic neuropathy (her blood pressure was very low too, sometimes causing her to pass out) and I would worry. Sometimes she would be too tired to listen and would say so.

I would get the odd text from her. It never ceased to amaze me that an unsighted person who didn’t do Braille could be so patient. She was always asking about my health. She was delighted when my eye recovered. She had been through operation after operation and yet she was so supportive of my (relatively) minor procedures. When reading got difficult for me, she would demand that I rest my eyes and her concern was always genuine and touching. Very few people are like that anymore.

Jo spoke slowly, deliberately, with pauses to allow meaning to sink in, to allow space, a living, breathing conversation where nobody trampled on the other. Nobody else quite does that anymore. We just rush into the wide open space if we hear it. Jo and I didn’t do that. I will miss that.

I got the text this morning. I cried for a few seconds. I said “I’m sorry Jo”. I wish I could have read more to my friend. I had hoped she would be around for a while. I called my boss in a daze, he was understanding – I do so love all of my colleagues, they are all wonderful people. For some reason, I recalled The Lord’s Prayer:

Our Father, who art in heaven

Hallowed be Thy Name

Thy Kingdom come

Thy Will be done on earth, as it is in Heaven

Give us this day our daily bread

And forgive us our trespasses

As we forgive those who trespass against us

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil

For thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory For ever and ever Amen

I wondered wistfully how many Christians know the Qur’an’s Surat al-Fatiha – the Oft Repeated Verses that Muslims recite at least 17 times every single day.

In the name of Allah, All-Merciful, Most Merciful

Praise be to Allah, the Lord of all the worlds

The All-Merciful, the Most Merciful

The King of the Day of Judgement

You alone we worship. You alone we ask for help

Guide us on the Straight Path

The Path of those You have blessed, not of those with anger on them, nor of the misguided.

I took the bus to Willesden Green, then a tube to West Hampstead and finally a Silverlink overground train to Kew Gardens. I can’t think of Kew Gardens without remembering the warden from the made-for-TV film “Scum” from the late 1970s that was so shocking at the time. For the benefit of younger readers, Scum heralded the start of illustrious careers for Ray Winstone and Phil Daniels.

The sun beat hard through my black trousers, the first time I have worn trousers in London all year. It was a longer walk than I expected. I arrived just after the service had started and though others were ushered in, I chose to wait inside so as not to disturb the proceedings.

They played “We Are The Champions” at her funeral service this (Tuesday) morning. Jo did go on fighting till the end. She did it in the manner that I think is the strongest, most noble quality the British ever cultivated…with stoicism. Jo’s mother, who had texted me this morning so kindly, met me and thanked me for coming. She too was the embodiment of stoicism. I felt like the 10-year old in the presence of my primary school teacher again.

I watched the water feature outside the chapel and I remembered our times together and her voice. Ever so slightly croaky (tracheotomy), but gentle.

I’m sorry I didn’t read more often to you Jo. And no Jo, I haven’t seen my kids for the whole of the summer holiday so far and have not spoken to them for over a week either, but don’t worry, there is still time.

And you and I will meet again. Insha’Allah.

For the last time, bye Jo. Take care.