It seems that the older I get the later I am at arriving to the party.
I used to be an early adopter. Some new hardware came out for PC; I picked up the parts. A new console came out; I snapped it up. A new, highly anticipated, game hit the shelves; I bought it at release. I watched every movie in theatre. I was always there on the bleeding edge as they say.
Now, well, now things are different. I have a stack of unplayed games that, for lack of a better word, is simply daunting. I just finished Halo 3 a couple of weeks ago. I’m just now playing through Gears of War. I don’t own a copy of Call of Duty 4 yet. I haven’t even unwrapped Crysis, then again my computer also won’t play it.
I’m not sure exactly when this shift occured. I know that it was at least a few years ago.
The only way that I seem to get anything done these days is by scheduling it. One of the post-Christmas initiatives was to schedule some time to play games every Friday night with my brother-in-law. So far it has been pretty great. We have been making some good progress through great games that came out over the last year or two.
Something else that has been slipping has been blogging. I don’t seem to have as much time for it as I used to. Part of this has been the job change. I am a lot busier here than I was at my old job, so I can’t just take a morning here and there and blog.
I have also taken on a coding side project at home. I’m stripping down the open source zlib project to its bare essentials. So far it is going quite well. I’ve stripped away the majority of the code that it ships with, as well as gzip, zip and pkzip support. I just want the compression and decompression components. The point of this is to roll a well tested codec into my game engine’s codec library.