done deal

Ok after that break, there'll be little or no more posting on the subject of dime from me, I'm off to do some other stuff for a while.

I have in the past posted the occassional image here, more often than not images created by friends or myself but sometimes an image comes along created by someone else that just captures something for me. LOL

The Image below is from a recent Bank of Ireland Campaign (Briefly discussed here) and it's almost just right, it would be 100% perfect if the elf was overweight, completely disingenuious, ambitiously idiotic and a completely insecure egomaniac, I like to think her name might be Earene

cool d sac

ok I just don't have enough time to work on this blog anymore - Also I can't afford to employ a blogging assistant to write it for me - but I don't really want to delete it just yet so I'll just leave it here as is for a while.

HPSU

High Potential Start Up ?
So dime have been recognized as a HPSU, I fully understand the label and indeed the acronym, I just wonder what the implications actually mean for us. I've seen some weird stories about start ups and VCs on the next recently but possibly the most perplexing has been this one:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/09/27/odesk-announces-8m-funding-from-benchmark/

lots of interesting comments...too.

dance away

Clever people solve problems, truly clever people avoid them.... I haven't deliberately avoided updating this blog, I've just been so busy with actual working priorities (& holidays) that it fell from any number of those action lists into the total inaction outbox. Dime have had a couple of months of really focused effort in an attempt to realize one of of first major internal development projects - with some late late hours and the creation of team dynamics being required to ensure meaningful progress. - I think we have achieved that now T.G.

The company is currently recruiting some key people and that is also proving to be a longer process than originally envisaged. (there's ads on GD.ie) The whole business/commercial strategy aspect has morphed into that central concrete tenant it should have been on day 01 and the age old question 'why are (would) we (be) doing that ?' has been flogged to death on several occasions - which as an exercise is perhaps overstatement of common sense but does mean you don't end up doing stuff that won't 'add value' in the longer term. (obviously my case for this blog was fairly weak !)

So after this brief respite, back to the grindstone but keep Dancing In Molecular Energy

A hole month

Forget about butter, I can't believe that it's a whole month since my last blog entry, lots of stuff has happened in the interim. Our plans for the launch were overtaken by work, work and more work, Easter was also in there somewhere as evidenced by the chocolate hangovers. We put up a site for our company dime (www.dime.ie) partly because it's easier than continually explaining things repeatedly.

Tomorrow (Friday) was the day we had planned for the official launch - instead we'll be delivering some client stuuf and I'll personally be slaving over a hot printer ensuring we knock out some print materials for a particular gig we're off to: the interactive narrative content seminar or sagasnet in Germany. Which all means I miss a couple of gigs in Dublin tomorrow, the Irish Gamedevelopers Birthday shindig (GD.ie) and the IGDA Ireland Comittee meeting. Bit peaved about it but there you go.

So I don't know where the hole appeared from but it fitted nicely into the last month.

nonsense & incense

Ah yes, after a couple of phone calls, a few meetings and the odd (or perhaps very odd) email, we're pulling together an official launch for dime. As ever there are favors to ask & to do, a venue & food to book, speakers & guests to invite and a whole load of other peripheral stuff to get organized but it's a strange sensation this time round.

I have previously done this event management thing on many many occasions for other people, other companies, other entities but it's my first time doing it for a company I'm so heavily involved with, - and I know this is pretty weird - each time I visualize the event under way, I get this under riding sensation of epitaph or funeral eulogy. Weird I know, but with the opportunity to gather friends, former colleagues with those whom you admire and respect, all together in one place for some stuff you yourself are central to, it does bear some semblance to an interning. Yuck… Is this how artist’s feel when they have opening exhibitions, here I am at what could be my proudest moment to date, a launch of a new era or chapter in my life and I feel like I look like I’m about to go down the pan ? LOL yes I wonder who else laughs at their own blog entries, most would no doubt go back and edit that out, I’m not most.

Please don’t misunderstand me this isn’t about lack of confidence, it’s just one of those gaping holes in my mental inhibitors and suppressors. If you had the opportunity to read Minsky’s society of mind and (perhaps naively) like me adopt it as a roadmap to provide the occasional way point to grow your cerebral processes in an alternative direction, you’re most likely smelling the incense or embers at the launch already. Anyhow that’s merely some of what's going on today.

Paddy's A Soft Day in EL Passo ?

Let this blog lapse for a couple of weeks due to priorities shifting so for the 20 or so regular readers (that’s maybe 2 now !) apologies, here comes another rant…

Paddys Day..or is that Paddy's weekend ? or indeed as the drinks companies would like to have us now believe: Paddys week ! Anyway it all came and went and I worked right through it, national holiday's just don't put bread on my table, offer inspiration or liberation, future focus freedom or contribute a cent to cashflow, today's mass marketing debacle does not respect my sense of global identity or actually bond me to anyone, at least not now while I'm resident here surrounded by the other 4 million paddy's day patriots. (obviously if you find yourself isolated abroad the whole paddy's day celebrations offer completely different handles and hooks to hold onto and attach some fantasy about what it is to be born Irish - leprechauns 800 years of oppression, the land of saints and scholars, pints of stout, Celtic tiger cubs anyone ?)
My soft truth is that while I was some sort of nationalist in demographic and political analysis terms, I was raised speaking Irish and English in a working class multichannel area where all the clearest television singles were received from U.K. stations back when the UK was actually GB. The fact that my home town became known as El Passo, due to it's border location and gun slinging population didn't inspire confidence in bereft 70s and 80s Ireland. Whether certain people care to admit that or not, through 'the troubles', which were more than mere trouble my memory of that time was unrelenting bombing, maiming, shooting, deception, aggression, oppression, murder, collusion, butchery, sacrifice, terror, intimidation, evil, loss and sadness on every side, the in-human behavior that went on in the name of great states, struggling freedom fighters, community protectors or policy enforcers, somehow drained my enthusiasm for political rhetoric and the idea of politically motivated ownership of a fantasy island covered in green and gold. All we want is the power to determine our own future ?


IMHO personal choice is the only power worth having, often we deny it to ourselves because we conjure enemies and other adversarial ideas that thwart our course and restrict the range of choice, while social, economic and political factors will govern our material choices, educational standards build glass ceilings of knowledge and financial status encases us in a semitransparent demographic box, the hard choices come with spiritual freedom, decide to belong, decide to follow, decide to lead, decide not to decide. Forget about paddy all together.