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Now that Blogging 101 over at The Daily Post has wrapped up, it’s time to take a quick look at my resulting posts. Here’s a short list of what I think of as the “highlights.” In no particular order, but numbered, nonetheless:

  1. Take…a red shirt – I didn’t really get any responses on office shenanigans, but I’m sure there are more interesting ones that the one I posted out there.
  2. Salad Days – Lamenting the trouble I had getting my brothers to play games with me.
  3. We all want a hero – I commented on another’s post, and had a bit of a conversation as a result.
  4. Valuable Data – I really enjoyed thinking about a “what if” situation that also tells a bit about myself.

I don’t create lists often, but it’s nice to go over some posts to quickly review, so this might happen again, from time to time. I’m doing my best to fit the theme of the Countdown Challenge here. You’ll probably see better efforts there.

 

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Sometimes, I think my phone’s brightness is too bright. It’s often that I find myself fiddling with the brightness, especially in a dark environment, such as outdoors at night.

It’s a little tricky to get it right when indoors as well, and I’m hoping I can find the right setting that automatically adjusts to a comfortable setting no matter where I’m at. I’ll keep tweaking it until I hit the sweet spot.

One Word Wednesday: Bright

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The past 30 days has gone pretty quickly, I must admit. In between work and extracurricular time, I’ve been participating in Blogging 101. At first I had intended to take part to simply motivate myself to post more often. I think, however, that it kind of did a bit more. It got the gears turning, and I now, at the end, just created a bit of an editorial calendar of things I’d like to work on through the end of the year (30 more days).

The first is to post a bit more activity from one of my other fun activities, Saberguild. Also on the calendar is a game review, which is a bit scary because I’ve never written a lot about how I feel about any particular thing and I used to hate book reports in grade school, so this’ll be interesting. Last, but not least, I might try a few challenges, starting with the weekly photo posting challenge, the One Word Photo Challenge.I want to take, and post more photos as well, so I’m challenging myself to do that more. Having a goal is helpful and sometimes tricky. I mainly wanted to achieve something, though.

All this should hopefully lead into the next phase of learning and growing in the new year. Here’s to a fun month had, and to come!

 

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Dealing with strange customer behavior? Just ask them ‘why?’

If you take one thing away from this, I hope it’s a reminder to ask why. Particularly when customers do or say things you don’t understand. You might be surprised when you find out their true motivations.

Belle Beth Cooper, formerly of Buffer, has written a bit of insight that I’m letting churn in my head for a bit.

It does seem, at time, that customers sometimes can help you realize areas that could use improvement, or even just repair, if you take a bit of time to coax a bit more information about the problem they’re having. This is as simple as a needed clarification to a wiki article on how to carry out a common task, all the way to bringing light to an unseen system bug (since no software is ever bug free).

Very interesting is how taking a technique that seems well-suited to self-inspection (the linked-to summing up of ‘The Five Whys’) seems to also be adaptable to helping customers solve their problems as well. It seems to boil down to finding out what type of habit, when repeated, does not have the desired outcome, for a several cases.

Once that’s found, then the real work begins of finding the true cause of the issue, namely, “why” the non-working habit was done, and then dealing with that cause. As noted in both places, it’s possible for the reason to be different from what the surface issue suggests.

While I’m mulling this over, I’m hoping to see more good posts from Belle and the crew over at the Crew blog, so I subscribed to their newsletter.

 

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An Entrepreneur’s Struggle to Understand “Need” and “Want”

Wherein, a serial entrepreneur explains his journey to try to better understand the difference between “need” and “want”.

 

Tucked away in a hallway at GDC was the Videogame History Museum.

I couldn’t be there, but, fortunately, IGN posted a set of photos. I bookmarked this months ago. Have a look.

 

Speaking of history, here’s a quick look at how manga and anime changed over the years, visually.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Dear Anime,

Thanks for being such a fun form of entertainment, anime. It’s because of you that I can’t sometimes find some pretty unusual stories and even situations that would be highly unlikely to occur in real life. Even when you get a bit heavy on the fan-service, you still manage to have some grain of pretty unique situations. I also like your associated art forms, such as Manga and the cosplay that inevitably arises. Continue reading →

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Is there a period in your own personal life that you think of as the good old days? Tell us a story about those innocent and/or exciting times (or lack thereof).

Salad Days | The Daily Post

That question got me to thinking about some of my earliest gaming memories. Was it really better before online gaming came along? Some gamers lament that things were simpler then, especially since playing with friends meant everybody on the same couch in front of a TV. For me, it was not that simple, or even always that much fun.

My brothers and I were indeed lucky to game together during one of the most well-known time periods; the days of the Atari 2600. Our collection grew pretty sizeable over the years, due in small part to the fact that an uncle also had some games as well. But, I digress a bit. The experience of playing games is what I’m remembering. That was not terrible, but it was not as ideal as I would have liked. For one thing, I was the eldest of 3, and it was sometimes tricky to convince the other 2 to play with me, especially on competitive games, of which there were many, as I, due to a bit of an age gap, was usually better, and would often win (in games that had winning conditions, like sports titles). The loser would sometimes just plain quit playing, leaving me to play alone for a while.

I grew less and less willing to want to play video games with them, and didn’t really see that getting better over the years, even through the golden age of the NES and later systems. It really wasn’t until Xbox came along that it started to get a bit better. I think more gaming with the 3 of us able to play together helped, and online play made it possible to play even separated by distance. I still think it’s better now, even though I’m mostly solitary gaming again, but now, I have friends who I can connect with online sometimes, and sometimes those sessions are hugely fun. Even though I do play in a well-known MMO, I do not fall heavily on either the solo adventurer side or always grouped raider. I just flow as the situation demands it and I think that I’m better able to deal either way.

This is all to hopefully say, it wasn’t, for me, “the good old days,” but that doesn’t mean it was all bad, and it’s definitely not terrible now. I’m going to keep on gaming and having adventures.