July 8, 2010
by Andy Affleck
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Without spoilers, let me just say that this last season of Doctor Who with Matt Smith as the Doctor and Karen Gillan as Amy Pond has been utterly fantastic. I have loved nearly every moment of it and was so glad to see that the ending was… well, not Russel T. Daviesesque. Stephen Moffat is doing an amazing job and I hope he continues it for many seasons to come. Well done!
(Images from Springfield Punx by Dean Fraser)
July 7, 2010
by Andy Affleck
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This evening, I’ve been grooving on my friend Owen Gottlieb’s wonderful blog, Mystical Creative. He and I talked on the phone this evening in a conversation spanning game design, e-learning, and, of course, the Jerky Boys (it’s a college thing). Among the wonderful stuff he has there, I especially liked this TED talk by Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus.
July 7, 2010
by Andy Affleck
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Kevin Kelly, an author I’ve long enjoyed reading (see Out of Control, a book that had a profound impact on my thinking about technology back in the mid-90′s) has written an interesting piece on the future of reading for Smithsonian’s 40th anniversary issue titled Reading in a Whole New Way. He makes a lot of very interesting and, I think, prescient points. He talks about the ubiquity of screens and that they will soon be watching us in turn. He says that reading will become a much more physical activity much like Tom Cruise’s character in Minority Report. These days, I read more and more on my iPhone using the Amazon Kindle app, iBooks, GoodReader, Stanza, and the Borders eBooks App. I have been having fun locating free books in pdf or epub format and getting them onto my iPhone to read. I am, for all intents and purposes, an advocate for eReaders. That said, I do not believe that the physical book is going to go away anytime soon. There is something about the feel and smell of a real book, the permanence of the physical object, and the simple fact that there are just some places you can’t or at least don’t want to bring a book (the beach comes to mind). As this next generation grows up into the digital world we inhabit and as their kids grows up, this will certainly shift more and more to screens from paper but I don’t think we’ll see the paper book go away. Not within my lifetime anyway. Perhaps when the technology is advanced enough, we’ll see objects that look and feel just like real books (pages and all) but that display digital content beautifully. Whatever your thoughts, Kelly’s article is a great read (especially online, using the new “Reader” capability of the latest Safari.) (Found via The Technium)
July 7, 2010
by Andy Affleck
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I woke up early this morning and sat down to write. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time but never set aside the time or space to do it. Instead, my early mornings and late evenings have been dealing with tending farm, working on my frontier land and cabin, building new and updated buildings in my kingdom, and fighting dragons. Yesterday, I stopped and realized that what little free time I have when I am not at work or doing things with my son were being eaten up by what I always called “Stupid Facebook Games.” So, I quit. Just like that. I removed all of the apps, their permissions, unsubscribed from their mailing lists, and blocked them from showing up on my wall. It was liberating.
So, I woke up early as I always do and sat down to write. Alas, I only wrote a single paragraph today and not a very good one, but it was a start and I’m glad I did it and look forward to continuing tomorrow. If you want to write, write every day, they say. And so I will. Before this, I only ever wrote daily during NaNoWriMo and the three years I have done that have always been wonderful. However, NaNoWriMo is a different sort of writing. There, you write with reckless abandon. You plough forward, never looking back, never editing, never questioning. Your goal is word count, not art. And it is liberating but it also has given me an incorrect view of what writing is. As I began working on this short story idea I have wanted to play with for some time, I realized that I can’t write like that anymore. I need to structure. I need to plan. I need to balance expository dialogue with action and description. I need to care whether my characters sound and feel real. I need the world I am crafting to be fully realized (at least enough for a short story). I could probably write the story in one marathon session and then go back and edit it but that somehow feels like the wrong approach. So, I am stepping back and working out the outline. I want to know where my story is going before I try to go too far into it.
I want to read more, especially paying attention to the craft as much as the story itself. I want to look for a writing class somewhere locally. I want to learn from other writers what works and doesn’t work for how they work and begin to find a process that works for me. So, that is the journey I am undertaking now. And it feels wonderful and exciting.
June 23, 2010
by Andy Affleck
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Anyone who knows me knows that I have long been a huge fan of Laurie Anderson’s work (dating back to High School when Paul made me listen to O Superman (For Massenet). In college I studied a lot of experimental and modern music and spent endless hours locked in the Bregman Electronic Music Studio composing strange things, much of which was deeply inspired by Anderson’s music. When Strange Angels came out, I remember after I finished DJing a dance party at my Co-Ed Fraternity, I put the new CD on and I pulled a small couch to the middle of the empty living room and listened to the whole thing at 2 in the morning on the sound system. To this day, my friend JIm and I are likely to start a conversation by quoting Hansel and Gretel in The Dream Before: “Hansel and Gretel are alive and well and they’re living in Berlin. She says, ‘Hansel, you’re really bringing me down.’ And he says, ‘Gretel? You can really be a bitch.’”
When I learned a few weeks ago that she had a new CD coming out based on a few years of live shows she’s done around the world, I was beside myself. I listened to it on NPR’s website, streamed up until the album’s release yesterday.
Homeland harkens back to her earlier works reminding me more of United States or Big Science than the more recent works such as Bright Red. Anderson talks about how the music is far more improvisational, that she went on the road without anything being complete or settled and worked with different musicians and spaces and ideas and how the music evolved over time. It has a spontaneous feel to it while still being deeply grounded in what I easily recognize as Anderson’s style of sound (though I couldn’t begin to properly describe it, and I’ve tried!)
The music is also more political than I remember her being in previous works and I like it very much. The song Only an Expert, easily my favorite so far, pokes good fun (though with an undercurrent of anger) at the modern sound machine that politics, news, and discourse has devolved into.
I actually went to a Fye and purchased the physical album rather than getting it on Amazon or iTunes as is my usual M.O. music in part because it comes with a DVD that I would not have otherwise gotten and in part because there are a few artists that I still prefer to have physical media than pure digital files.
An album release like this is one of those rare events that I love. I don’t often get to completely lose myself both in music and the memories the previous releases bring out in me. It’s been too long since her last album. I hope I don’t have to wait so long for the next one.
June 16, 2010
by aaffleck
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I am having social network fatigue. First, there are the long-form posting sites — my main blog, Posterous and Tumblr (though the latter may be argued as a short-form site too). Then there’s the quick snippet land of Facebook and Twitter. Then there’s the GPS-aware side of things like Foursquare, Loopt, MyTown, and Yelp! (I have since given up on Gowalla and Brightkite as not being particularly interesting to me).
The GPS group are getting a long form post from me soon enough as I have been evaluating them with an eye towards a blog post for some time now. At least that’s how I justify to my wife my continued use of them…
What I’m trying to figure out now is how I should talk to the world without having to worry about where I am writing. I am not a power blogger. I don’t really feel the need to blast 20 posts a day out there and I am not trying to set myself up as an expert in any particular field to make my site a destination for those in that field and resume fodder. I could just do things in my WordPress site and have my Posterous and Tumblr sites auto-carry the posts or at least links back to them and have links auto-posted to Twitter and Facebook. But I also like the ultra-simplicity offered by Tumblr and Posterous. It is just easier to pull a post together.
And then there’s the fact that I like posting pictures from my iPhone (not so much text — while I don’t hate the iPhone keyboard, I am just not interested in trying to type a lot on it) and I feel that it is much easier to go directly to Facebook or Tumblr than it is my WP site (yes, I have the app, I still find it a longer process than these other methods).
Maybe my problem is that I can’t commit to just one program and stick to that. I like so much of each of them that I want the freedom to use all of them whenever I feel like it.
I wonder what the rest of the world does. Where do you post and where do you ignore? How important is it to you to get your stuff out to as many sites as possible versus using just one and trusting that your audience (friends, family, whoever) can and will find it?
May 25, 2010
by aaffleck
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We’ve completed the first of two weekends of The Fantasticks and the show has been going very well! I was worried in the middle of last week — our Wednesday rehearsal wasn’t confidence building — but by Thursday it all fell together and the subsequent three performances were really good! Come on out and see us this weekend, our final weekend!
May 6, 2010
by aaffleck
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After 25 years, I have finally fulfilled a longtime dream of mine: to get back on the stage and do a play again! In a few short weeks I will be appearing in the Swamp Meadow Community Theater’s production of The Fantasticks. This is one of my all time favorite shows. I performed in it in high school as Matt, the male lead. Now I am playing Henry Albertson, an old actor, quite theatrical and vainglorious for his supposed glory days and lost youth. Every time I have seen this show (and I have seen it many times over the years) Henry has always stolen the show so, as you would expect, I am having a ball with the part. You can reserve your tickets at the Swamp Meadow Box Office and show dates are May 21, 22, 28 and 29 @ 7:00 pm and May 23 and 30 @ 2:00pm at the Isaac Paine School in Foster, RI.
I have been regularly photographing rehearsals (any that I am in are courtesy of my son who came to a rehearsal) and just having so much fun. The cast is great and the show promises to be, if you forgive the pun, fantastic.
May 6, 2010
by aaffleck
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I have to admit it’s very weird being back at Pfizer. It’s all so very familiar and yet so much has changed. There are some old friends and colleagues still around (or just returning) but, for the most part, the people I did most of my work with and for are no longer there. I walk around the Groton and New London offices and keep expecting to see people I know and only seeing strangers. I’ve only been gone a year and change and yet it’s all very different.
The work, however, has not changed. Granted, when I was there last I was working more on the portfolio/PMO side and now I am back to being a Project Manager but the processes have not changed significantly. I slipped right into the work like a comfortable shoe and am plugging away on what needs to be done. Yet, when I walk around I feel like a stranger in an incredibly familiar land. Imagine if they took everyone where you worked and replaced them with strangers and then think how weird it would be to walk around the office. That’s what it feels like. I guess when you’ve been somewhere for so long in the past, the feeling of being new is terribly at odds with the familiarity of the place and the work itself. It feels like one of those TV shows that changes more than half the cast between seasons when you thought it was over in the first place and while it’s the same show, it’s completely different and it’s weird watching it.
Such is the life of a contractor.
April 16, 2010
by aaffleck
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Today is my last day at Merck. On Monday, I start a new job returning to Pfizer where I worked before I came to Merck. It’s an odd feeling. I don’t particularly want to leave here and I am also excited to return to Pfizer where I have so many friends who have also returned, are in the process of returning, or who never left in the first place. This past year has been a great experience for me and I am going to miss the folks here. So, happy and sad at the same time. One moment ends, another begins. Monday will be a new adventure. Of course, it’s all still contract work with all of the inherent uncertainties and lack of benefits, fringe or real. But until I land that magical permanent position again, I do what I must. One moment ends, another begins. A moment of transition.