Archive | people

07 March 2012 ~ Comments Off

Play and Work

I am an avid player of computer games and pen-and-paper RPG games. I enjoy shooting hordes of zombies, building and deploying armies and being part of a team in a fantastic and dangerous world. I have always valued games for themselves, but it has only dawned on me recently that they must have great survival [...]

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19 February 2012 ~ Comments Off

Mental health and games

OK, help me think about this. I have spent a year recovering from burn-out. During the first period, I frankly do not know how long it was, I could not play in any way whatsoever. Given that game-playing has always been important to me, this was a sign of poor mental health. As I started [...]

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14 September 2011 ~ Comments Off

Credo: I don’t know their story

I am a geek, so I follow Will Wheaton. Much as I like Will Wheaton, I am no longer fond of his catchphrase “don’t be a dick”. Don’t get me wrong. I agree that dickishness is more than plentiful and less would be better, but DBAD seems to be something that is only said to [...]

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18 April 2010 ~ 1 Comment

Mind like Tomatoes

Mind like Tomatoes

After an interesting exchange with a fellow blogger I feel the need to map out a bit more thoroughly than last time the pragmatic mashup of GTD and The Pomodoro Technique that is the method of my current madness. This is then a post about methods…aargh  and I am (strange to say) not much of a [...]

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07 April 2010 ~ Comments Off

My life as a Dog (again)

My life as a Dog (again)

As I very often say – I have an astounding ability to finally realize the extremely obvious. If I have an intellectual guardian angel she probably spends a lot of her time slapping her forehead and going “good grief”. My current brainstorm is on the subject of learning a new habit. I have finally realized [...]

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27 March 2010 ~ Comments Off

Uses of the truth

Uses of the truth

I got used last week. But that’s ok. Here is how it happened. At the moment I spend part of my time in an environment were there is fear and lack of candour. People feel threatened and powerless and unable to connect to each other. Such situations are anathema to me, they dampen down our [...]

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03 March 2010 ~ 1 Comment

Why do we fall?

Why do we fall?

As Bruce Wayne’s father says “So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.” It is a hard thing to do, perhaps the hardest thing. Coming back for something that really hurts you, really makes you doubt: very hard. But if you can do it, you will be stronger, simply because you know that you [...]

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03 July 2009 ~ Comments Off

Burning up your will-power

I got very interested recently in experiments being done in the field of “ego depletion“. The theory proposes that humans have a  limited quantity of “ego” or willpower. When you exercise self-control you use up this resource and will then be less able to persist with other tasks. In the classic experiment of this field [...]

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09 May 2009 ~ Comments Off

Fitting your frame

Let me tell you a story. I once ran a team into which was dropped a grumpy and rigid old-school programmer. He was unhappy to be landed with me and I was similarly unhappy that this ugly duckling had been dumped into my budget.  Fortunately I had through personal experience one insight that served me [...]

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23 April 2009 ~ Comments Off

Rosanna

Sometimes what I need to say seems to obvious. One of the things I am still learning is to say it anyway. I am a deeply fortunate person. I have a family I love,  a cheerful disposition and there are moments in my day which are eternal, where I am breathless with the glory of [...]

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