Unquiet Desperation

To say that 2009 was a year of many lessons for myself and my family is like the ocean is deep or that outer space is vast: the simple sentence doesn’t really capture the magnitude of the underlying intention. I’ve long held that there are parts of a person’s life that they will spend the rest of their days working to understand the changes wrought during that period. 2009 was one of those periods of time for me.

What I Learned In 2009

• It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there: Yes, Los Angeles. Everyone who knows me is sick to death about hearing about this by now, but it is worth marking the lesson learned. There were a number of good and bad things about the move to and from L.A.  We still miss the scenery, the weather, and the friends we made out there. I miss my team at Mahalo, and the challenge of the work at the company. I do not miss the long, long hours, the constant conflict between work and family time, watching my children struggle in a school system riddled with major problems, living in a shoebox, and watching cops chase armed felons through our housing complex.  This leads to the next point…
• Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home: Being back in Cleveland is a relief, a joy, and terribly  frustrating at the same time. We love being back with family and old friends. We love the familiar places, but with returning comes the familiar problems, the things we disliked enough to try moving to another city to escape. The entire family has felt it, and we’re working through dealing with them day by day.
• Thing that change you do not change others: We went to California as one group of people, we returned as another. We learned, we grew, we changed. But…for folks back in Cleveland, we were not gone all that long; how much could have happened?  Just because you change, don’t expect that others will understand or even recognize the changes.
• All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy: Not long ago, I ended nearly all of my personal projects. This was liberating. I’m able to concentrate on my family, and not on who needs what from me out there on the Interwebs. There’s no pressure to constantly be checking email, Twitter, message boards, etc to get ahead, make a name, swimming upstream ceaselessly. Projects are only worthwhile when you are passionate about them. After that, they’re just baggage. Best to leave them to the passionate people, and move on to new vistas.
• Disconnect: I ditched my G1 (Android Phone) this month and went back to a normal phone. I’ve stopped tweeting other than when I post a new entry on this blog. I read my email once every couple of days. Living offline is much more interesting and vibrant than constantly watching a screen, be it on a laptop, television, or cell phone. The reality is, none of you need to know every 140 character thought that enters my brain. I’m not promoting anything other than asking that you make time to be out of touch for a while this year. The “social” part of the current Internet vibe is more than a little creepy. There needs to be room for silence, isolation, contemplation, and introspection. No one needs to know where you are at all times. Relax. Cut yourself loose.
• They aren’t here to make your life better: Think about how much information Google and Facebook and other sites know about you. Google, for instance, knows what you are searching. If you have Gmail, they can read all your email. If you use Google Voice, they have your voice mail messages. If you are using Android, they know your contacts and their information, and depending on the apps you use, they can know where you are, where you’re going, what you are listening to, and who you talk to the most. Now…I admit I sound a little paranoid when I talk about this, but is it really a good thing for any business entity to know that much about you?  If it came out tomorrow that the government was keeping track of your calls, eavesdropping on your email, and monitoring your web searching habits, would you be pleased with it?  Why are we so trusting of a business, which has less oversight and less accountability that the government? The simple truth is this: a business is not providing services to be nice to you. It is not trying to help you. It is trying to find a way to make money for its shareholders. That’s the point of a business: making money — maximizing value.  Ask yourself, it if were suddenly in Google’s best interest to build a map of your life using the data they have and sell it to a third party, what would stop them?  Or, more interestingly, how comfortable would you be walking into a mall and having the billboard change and address you by name, because they could read the RFID in your ID or credit card, then hit a database service exposing data about your searching and buying habits, creating a custom message just for you?  Perhaps I’m just getting old, but I find that incredibly creepy, and since I take a dim view of marketers to begin with¹, I want no part of it. I’m opting out.
• In the silence, there is Truth: One of my favorite stories comes from the Old Testament of the Bible. From I Kings 19:11-12, when Elijah is looking for the Lord:
  

  And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still, small voice…

  After this tumultuous year, I have taken time away from everything. In that silence, I have found parts of myself I thought lost. That is what the New Year has brought me: the voice in the silence, reminding me than I am more than the code I write, more than the sites I create. There is that stillness in all of us, reminding us of the important things, giving us creative vision that spawn great passions, leading us to places we need to go to grow and develop as healthy human beings. I have spent the last decade chasing technology. The silence reminds of what I loved before the tech, before the storm of activity that carried me to where I am now. The silence shows me that now is the time to revisit these older things, to rekindle fires which once burned brightly.

Unlike past entries, I will not venture to say what the next year holds. The best that I can do right now is hold fast to what I have learned this past year, to make it part of myself, and then to move on, one step at a time.  Just like you, and just like the rest of the world.

I wish you a Happy New Year. May you find what you are looking for.

-Chris

1. How can you trust anyone whose job is to create a false need where none currently exists?  Isn’t that just…dishonest?  To convince people to buy thing they don’t need?[back]

In this episode of of the podcast, I talk a little bit about coming back from Los Angeles, the state of my various projects, and go into some details about the fiun had at Origins 2009 this year. Also, a bonus rant/ramble about why people like me are the Game Vendors’ Worst Nightmare:

Links for this show:

• Pinax
• Origins 2009
• War, Season 5 of Heaven
• Fluxx and Family Fluxx
• Are You The Traitor?
• Necessary Evil
• The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia

Names dropped: Kris Johnson, Jim Van Verth, Mur Lafferty, Ken Newquist, David Moore, Erin Moore, Natalie Metzger, Andy Steigle, John Cmar, Laura Burns

Download the show here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The final walkthrough of the house in Woodland Hills.

The Final Walkthrough from Christopher T. Miller on Vimeo.

(Yeah. I’m playing with the new Mino we got.)

A number of things are coming to an end today, but the most significant at that we’re finishing moving out of our apartment in Woodland Hills, and that today is my last day at Mahalo.

Mahalo

I’m leaving Mahalo because we’re leaving L.A…not the other way around. It was a tough choice, but I believe it was the right one.  I’ve built a team I can be proud of at Mahalo, and I have every confidence that they’ll do great things in the future. The truth of the matter is that I cannot manage this excellent team from a distance. A Lead Developer needs to be on site, dealing with the day-to-day running of things.  I cannot do that if I’m moving, pure and simple. There’s no drama, no feud, nothing like that…everything is ending on good terms.

I’m going to miss the whole company, no doubt about it. These are good, hardworking people. They deserve to succeed. I cannot wait to see what they are going to do next.

Leaving Los Angeles

I’ve written a little bit about why we’re leaving L.A. in a previous post, but there’s more to it that just economics and schools. Los Angeles might as well be a different planet when you’re coming from the midwest.  There are many who have moved here and loved it, and I can see why they would. The difficulty for use was that we did it with a family.  If Cathy and I had moved out here when we re newly married, I think things might have gone differently.

Some friends here told us what they’d like most: to own a small house with a good sized yard in a good school system. They followed that up with, “but this is L.A.”  As time went by, I heard this from other people — they all wanted what we took for granted, what we gave up to move here. And many of them had given up on ever achieving it, because “this is L.A.”

We’re moving back to our families, our oldest friends, to neighborhoods that we love, schools we know we can trust, and places that we’ve loved for years. We took so much for granted…that won’t be happening again.

People will poke fun about leaving the Big City, but that’s fine with me. Cleveland is home, and always will be.

New Eyes

Some folks have asked me if this move is bittersweet. No…not really. I achieved what I wanted to achieve at Mahalo, and I learned what I needed to learn from L.A.  I’m coming away better for it. If I never left Cleveland, I would always wonder what would have happened if I had. It’s been costly, yes, but I feel I’ve gained far more than I’ve lost.

I’m looking forward to seeing home with new eyes. That alone will be amazing.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the thing I’ll miss most about Los Angeles: My gaming group, the West Valley Pathfinders.

This was taken tonight at the Saddle Ranch Chop House in the City Walk at Universal Studios. The guys, left to right: Jeromy, Steve, Damon, and Dave. I’m the looming figure standing in the back.

I’ve shared many a pleasant Friday night with these guys, and it pains me that we didn’t get to hang out more while I was here. It’s my one regret about leaving.

Hmmm. Maybe I can get them out for Origins….