That's "Mister" to you.

Like all parents, I want to ensure my kids get a proper education. I believe that starts with a solid foundation based on the classics.

Which is why we took a break the other day from the never-ending Lego Star Wars gaming to introduce Thomas and Jennifer, aged four and a half apiece, to the classic Pac Man franchise. This way I could show them what games were like when I was their age (actually about 3 times their age when Pac Man came out, but I digress).

We started with Ms Pac Man because it's more forgiving. Then we moved on to the original Pac Man, at which point my daughter corrected me.

"Daddy, it's not Pac Man. It's MISTER Pac Man."

Tom likes eating ghosts. Jenny is interested in the part (on 360) when she is presented with a tally of which fruit she has eaten, citing that fruit is very healthy and that both Ms and Mr Pac Man will avoid getting sick as a result.

Back on the horse...

Man... over 2 weeks without posting. Very unlike me. (VGVC is lagging even more. Really ought to do something about that...)

Things have been busy between work & settling into the new house. Work's also involved some travel. Did a few days in San Fran for work-related meetings, dinner with Chris, lunch with... well, no one talks about Fight Club.

Montreal last week for 3 days which was fun, but tightly packed. Work related meetings and dinners, tons of work to do in small gaps of time between, and then one afternoon of visits with mom, dad, friends. Flew back 6:00am Saturday to attend Adam & Stacey's wedding party.

Hopefully should catch up now that I am stationary (I think?) until GDC Paris.

Robots suck!

They don't of course. They are the coolest thing in the world, especially to my four year old son, who thinks that robots, Lego, and Star Wars are all the coolest things in his world.

So Lego Star Wars, which has Lego R3D2 and C3PO robots in it, is a perfect storm of coolness.

My wife got him a Star Wars toy the other day and didn't realize she was buying a Star Wars *Tansformer* toy... which meant it *turns into* a robot. Coolness intensifies.

Tom was pointing out all the parts of the robot to me, saying "these are his guns, these are his wings, and this is the part that sucks up the dirt".

Of course, these are the types of things one might infer if you grow up around robots.

We've Moved

We did our move this week. Exhausted, and still half living out of boxes, but we are in the new place:

Letting Toddlers Play With Knives

This great talk from Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School, is a good watch for anyone raising kids in today's overprotective society.

It really resonated with me. (Spoiler warning: Watch the video before reading the rest of this post. If the link below is broken, watch here)






Of the 6 things he encourages us to let our kids do, my parents -my father in particular - encouraged *all* of them.

1. Play with Fire: I was allowed and even encouraged to do so, including building my own rockets. He didn't even intervene in my making my own gunpowder until one of my rockets actually worked and almost knocked my neighbor off his roof when an ill-timed flight coincided with his choice of days to re-shingle.
2. Own a pocket knife: My dad gave me both a folding pocket knife as well as a sheathed deer-bone handle boyscout knife that had been his when he was a kid. As Gever says, it was a universal tool. We whittled, carved, disected bugs, skinned squirrels (sorry peta people), peeled bark, made conkers, and a thousand other things with them.
3. Throw a spear: I did. When we lived in South Africa i got one. Dad also bought me a bow (not a little plastic one - a fiberglass one that could put an arrow a good inch into a maple), a slingshot, and a pellet gun.
4. Deconstruct appliances: I was always allowed to take apart any device that was going in the trash or was otherwise non-functional. I was given full access to dad's shop including all power tools from as early as I can remember. I beleive at around 9 or 10 I recall being told to "be extra careful" with the electric jigsaw.
5. Break the DMCA: We didn't have it. But dad DID encourage questioning authority and WHY systems were structured the way they were (including the law).
6. Drive a car: I got to sit on dad's lap and drive the car. I also was allowed to build or acquire a fair number of two or four-wheeled contraptions that had internal combustion engines, even though I was too young to legally drive them.

Anyhow. My wife and I have had numerous conversations about 'risky' activities, that usually go along the lines of "what age is it ok for him/her to be doing this/that?", and I often feel that we as a society are far too protective of our kids, and that this may be doing it's own kind of harm. This talk really helped crystalize that sentiment for me.

(Update: Fixed link in post)

Back from Vacation

I'm back after 8 days in sunny hawaii (only 5 of which were sunny :-( ). We rented a little house on the windward coast of Oahu and had a lovely time. Now, back on the grid and back to work!

Bye bye Gran

Just found out that my grandma passed away at the ripe old age of 95. She'd been fading in health for a while now, so it was not unexpected. I hadn't seen her in a few years since she lived in the UK.

Sharp as a whip to the end, I'll remember her as seen below. Smile on her face and never saying no to a bit of dessert and a glass of red!


Bye Grandma, we love you!

We now return you to regularly scheduled programming

Bonjour Blogosphere,

Apologies for going dark for a while, but I had a bunch of things line up on top of each other that kept me fairly busy.

As stated in the previous post, my son Matthew was born just over a week ago. He's a delightful little fellow who's actually pretty low maintenance; at least when compared to our experience with preemie twins. Alisa's doing most of the work (alas, I am without the means to feed him), but I've been shuttling the twins to school, swimming lessons, etc. Had a nice outing yesterday taking my daughter to Fry's for the first time. "Daddy, I LIKE that big tv!". *sniff* *that's my girl*

However, I've not been exactly idle from work at the same time. I had a bunch of Vista-enhanced casual games being released in time for the Vista launch; a bunch of work in getting some Vista-related developer documentation together, and was helping with a bunch of the aspects of getting our crew ready for the Casual Connect conference (F.K.A 'Casuality') in Amsterdam this coming week, even though I don't get to go this year >:-(

On top of that, I upgraded my home dev machine to Vista RTM, and have the SW set up to join the XNA Creators Club, should I ever get around to dusting off my coding chops.