Just passionate about Education, Gaming, and Family
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GDC Online 2010 Wrap Up
01 year ago
Had a blast at GDC Online this year. As far as work is concerned things went VERY well. Got some good face time with customers and moved some deals forward. It’s always nice to have your Director sitting next to you in a room with a customer if needed 
Obviously most everything that was discuss I can’t share here but keep an eye out on the www.torquepowered.com page for anything new.
As for personal development it was a great conference as well. It was my first time as a speaker at GDC Online. I had a lot of help during and before the round table from Sheri Ray and I want to say thank you to her. You can find out more about Sheri here. The talk was titled “How to create a diverse team, and keep it!” The first thing we notice about the room was that there was not a lot of diversity. In fact the room was mostly 25-35 white males. The good thing was that they came because they are interested and see it needs to be addressed. There was a lot of great ideas presented in the talk, so much so that I think I will be post another blog post later in the week to keep the discussion going.
And of course the after parties were awesome. I think on one night I made it through 5 different parties. One thing I have to say. If its a conference after party just try and be the sober one. I can’t tell you how much extra info I get simply because I am more sober than those around me. Although there was this one party that it was getting close. Thanks to my great friend Adam for making me eat something As for documenting the parties I took a few images but my camera broke… or well my wife’s camera that I got her as a gift broke. And yes I am in trouble for that so enjoy these pics
Day 5 at InstantAction Inc
21 year ago
Alright first week is done! Got the pics up as well so go check them out! Oh yeah here is the video for day 5!
Old School Networking in the Social Networking Age
02 years ago
Hand written and everything!
I got this letter after meeting with someone who was seeking advice on how to get into the games industry. After speaking with him for about 2 hours and telling him that he has to be certifiably insane to want to be in the industry, I got this note a few days later. It made me feel really good and really appreciated. I wanted to point this out as this is a tactic I use as well. I often send notes of thank you when I speak with someone who takes the time to give me guidance. It’s just like your mom always said, “Say thank you!”. And it’s just that simple.
I wanted to put this quick note up for two reasons.
1. I am always chatting about Social Networking and I wanted to cover something more traditional and relevant.
2. I have a few naysayers that follow the blog and I wanted to make sure they know I understand the more traditional methods of building a relationship.
I think the next post will be around the gaming industry as I have not really spoken about that yet on the blog and I have been busy at work on my game development. Also Thanks for reading this post
Making Moves at Round Rock Jelly
72 years ago
What is this “Jelly”?
Jelly is an every-so-often casual coworking session (we’re shooting for weekly in Round Rock.) Anyone is welcome to come and bring your laptop, art supplies, or whatever, and work alongside other creative, fun people.
From http://wiki.workatjelly.com/JellyInRoundRock
I went to my first Jelly meeting and had a blast. I have been wanting to make a vlog for a while now since Wayne Sutton encourage me to at SXSW. Here is the video log that tells about my experience there enjoy!
The Era of Crowdsourcing and my Educational Perspective
22 years ago
What is Crowdsourcing – Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group – Jeff Howe http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/about.html
In the education space we can use crowd sourcing to engage parents to help build a better education system. This could help increase the engagement of parents and relieve tension on budgets and most importantly we give our children a better education.
Common Misconception
Crowdsourcing equals access to free labor only.
Businesses have crowdsourced several things with success in three areas:
Wisdom
Wikipedia – A community drives the wisdoms of the online dictionary
Labor
Mechanical Turk – A community of people who need work and have work that needs to be done.
Wisdom and Labor
Digg.com – The community gathers to decide which is the most relevant news of the times. They hunt the news down and report it to the community for judgement
Threadless.com – The community decides which designs are best and they are also responsible for creating the designs.
Crowd vs Community
Crowd: A crowd is a large and definable group of people, while “The crowd” is referred to as the so-called lower orders of people in general (The mob). A crowd may be definable through a common purpose or set of emotions, such as at a political rally, at a sports event, or during looting, or simply be made up of many people going about their business in a busy area (eg shopping). Everybody in the context of General public or the Common people is normally referred to as The masses. -Wikipedia.com
Key Points:
Common Purpose – To educate our youth
Based Around an Event – Your child’s career in school is a daily event
Crowds don’t last long
Community: In human communities, intent, belief, resources,preferences, needs, risks, and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness. -Wikipedia
Key Points:
Sustainability – Education is a long EVENT and really never stops happening even after school.
Organic and Adaptive – A community can change with the needs of the community. The community can give schools the most relevant information on how the kids should be educated.
Risk:
Careless engagement: If you are going to engage your community do it to the fullest extent. If you go into the community and you are not prepared to go to the full extent of what it takes to get the community involved, you will create apathy for your cause. Soon enough the community itself will no longer want to support you at any level.
Summary
From my perspective I think as we grow our changing educational system we look to Crowd Source from the parents and help create a community of more engaged parents that in the end will help foster a 24/7 education system. We should always keep learningThis
This post is my review of the panel by the same name from SXSW. I originally posted on a shared edunotes.posterous.com site but I am moving it here. This is pretty much the only panel I REALLY liked at SXSW enjoy!
What is Crowdsourcing – Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group – Jeff Howe http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/about.html
In the education space we can use crowd sourcing to engage parents to help build a better education system. This could help increase the engagement of parents and relieve tension on budgets and most importantly we give our children a better education.
Common Misconception
- Crowdsourcing equals access to free labor only.
Businesses have crowdsourced several things with success in three areas:
Wisdom
- Wikipedia – A community drives the wisdoms of the online dictionary
Labor
- Mechanical Turk – A community of people who need work and have work that needs to be done.
Wisdom and Labor
- Digg.com – The community gathers to decide which is the most relevant news of the times. They hunt the news down and report it to the community for judgement
- Threadless.com – The community decides which designs are best and they are also responsible for creating the designs.
The crowd
Crowd vs Community
Crowd: A crowd is a large and definable group of people, while “The crowd” is referred to as the so-called lower orders of people in general (The mob). A crowd may be definable through a common purpose or set of emotions, such as at a political rally, at a sports event, or during looting, or simply be made up of many people going about their business in a busy area (eg shopping). Everybody in the context of General public or the Common people is normally referred to as The masses. -Wikipedia.com
Key Points:
- Common Purpose – To educate our youth
- Based Around an Event – Your child’s career in school is a daily event
- Crowds don’t last long
Community: In human communities, intent, belief, resources,preferences, needs, risks, and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness. -Wikipedia
Key Points:
- Sustainability – Education is a long EVENT and really never stops happening even after school.
- Organic and Adaptive – A community can change with the needs of the community. The community can give schools the most relevant information on how the kids should be educated.
Risk:
Careless engagement: If you are going to engage your community do it to the fullest extent. If you go into the community and you are not prepared to go to the full extent of what it takes to get the community involved, you will create apathy for your cause. Soon enough the community itself will no longer want to support you at any level.
Summary
From my perspective I think as we grow our changing educational system we look to Crowd Source from the parents and help create a community of more engaged parents that in the end will help foster a 24/7 education system. We should always keep learning.
No one wants a jacket made for your legs!
02 years ago
Today is Valentines Day, or well it was when I started writing this. On this day my family and I had a day lined up with several different business that were suppose to give us service, to make our day of love fly off with out a hitch!
SPOILER ALERT: That didn’t happen.
This is why I am writing this blog. To let all the companies out there know that I don’t want a new product. I just want a team that will backup what ever they say their product will do. No one wants a jacket made for your legs, they just want a company they can depend on when they get cold. So let me tell you about my day….
It started off with a visit to the doctors office. My wife and I came up with the nick name of “Mr. Happy” for the doctor. If any area of business needs to improve its service its the family doctor. Sick people are more than people just complaining about something funny they feel in their snuff box. They are people who have come to you because they believe you have the answer to help them. And the service you provide will be informative and helpful. “Mr Happy” was obviously not so happy to be working on Valentines Day… like I am sure all the people he saw were happy to be sick on said day. Every word and phrase jumped from his mouth with a hurried sense. Backed up by short answers that really had no care behind them. I would hate to get bad news from this guy, as I am sure it would be crushing. My wife is fine by the way. My point here is the doctor could have handled it better. He should have offered more detailed answers and not have treated us like numbers. He shouldn’t have herded us through the process and hurried us out of the door. My wife and I have left doctors before for bad service. Even during a time of bad news. There is a Good way to share bad news. All it takes is a little more passion about what you do. If you don’t enjoy being a doctor then don’t be a doctor.
From there we went to Best Buy. If you know anything about the Best Buy guys they are not paid on commission. Which means if they are willing to pay you attention and answer your questions, they have a passion for what they are doing. This guy Thomas (real name) made an impact on me and ultimately changed my thought process on what I wanted to buy. He sat my entire family down and had a 30 minute talk and demo of many different pieces of sound equipment. It was clear he was not speaking from a manual or training guide. It was also clear that he was not looking at his watch or just waiting to get out of work at the end of the day. This gentleman told stories as to why he felt which product was the best and backed it up with facts and figures. I am willing to bet that when Thomas goes home that his “out of work” chat is around sound system design or something close. Thomas had the chance to walk away many times, especially with me working to keep my 2 year old from destroying the place, but he didn’t. We have not bought anything yet from Best Buy. But our decision will highly rest on the bit of knowledge and service provided by Thomas.
Well let me wrap this up. Just remember finding passionate people to work in your business is the NEW yet old key to success. Back before technology and number pushing, it was all about passion for what you sold. We have lost that and replaced it with mediocrity and the bottom line. Just imagine if this blog was popular and I had more than 2 people reading it (not including my mom) A large number of people would see that Best Buy has great service and would want to partake in that! Not just people who can push product.
Passion = Good Service
Are you passionate about what you do for a living?