No more yielding but a dream…
–"A Midsummer Night’s Dream", Act V Scene 1
I know that I really ought to be concentrating on one thing at a time, but there are far too many things that I want to do. A partial list:
- Learn Linux (so that I can get my Linux box working and browsing our local network successfully, not to mention getting it talking to our printer)
- Learn Java (heck, I’m even enrolled in an on-line class)
- Install and configure all kinds of neat things on my Linux box — Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, PHP, Perl, python — and learn how to run them all
- Run a new Dungeons and Dragons campaign
- Create and run a full-length scenario in a role-playing game system that a friend of mine and I have been developing for about three years now
- Write a novel that takes place in that same milieu (loosely based on The Pilgrim’s Progress, or "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner"
- Learn C and C++
- Learn how to program for the PalmOS
- Get a new job
- Finish reading The Lord of the Rings
- Work out regularly
- Learn XML
- Read Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet H. Murray
- Learn Unicode
- Finish writing a database application in PHP and MySQL for our family website
- And, oh yeah, sleep once in awhile.
In an ideal world, I’d find some way of combining several of those projects into one big project, making my life much more efficient. Of course, tools like my Palm Pilot make it much easier in some ways; for example, during a corporate update meeting last week I was able to write notes for my Dungeons and Dragons game right into my Palm Pilot and look like I was paying attention and, yes, even taking notes about what the COO was saying.
Actually, I suppose, in a truly ideal world, I’d find a way to get paid to do all of those things. Heck, if I could find a way to get paid what I’m earning now to create sophisticated on-line web/database applications with PalmOS components and which focused on my own creative little worlds of science fiction and fantasy — well, then I’d be very happy. The same friend with whom I’m developing the new role-playing game dreams of a day when we can travel to a science fiction convention or see a new science fiction film and write it off as a business expense.
Actually, that’s only half of what I’d like to do. The other half is exactly the same thing but with a focus on building similar applications for research professionals — specifically, field researchers involved in cultural, wildlife, and natual resource conservation.
Now that I think about it, though, perhaps those two things aren’t all that different after all. It’s all about me learning how to use the latest and greatest web-enabled technologies to enable people to work with each other to explore and learn about the world around them and tell meaningful stories to each other about what they’ve found and learned.
But that appears to be a weak and idle theme, no more yielding than a dream…
Addendum, a few minutes later. There are actually a couple of different organizations which do at least part of what I’m interested in: Skotos has been seriously developing new technologies to build up interactive storytelling on the web (even if the front end honestly doesn’t resemble anything more interesting than a pretty MUD interface); and Explorati has been building new software and tools to enable web based communities of all types, with a particular focus on interactive storytelling. Unfortunately, neither company is hiring. Ah, well.