With the holiday, and how overwhelmed I have been returning to work during our busiest season, I decided to combine two weeks of updates into a single post. For those in the States, hope you have a great 4th of July weekend.
I've had a pretty great, but stressful, couple of weeks. I continue to be able to do more and more post-surgery, and went to the gym a couple of times this week. I'm mostly still just walking, but am starting to work on my mobility and doing some band and body weight strength stuff. Some really sore days.
I finished "There Is No Antimemetics Division" by qntm. I found this science fiction book to be quite a mind expander, very inventive, has a certain modern-Lovecraft vibe to it too. Highly recommend. You can find more information on qntm's site. I'm going to be reading everything else by him.
I also finished "Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania" by Erik Larsen, the second book of his I've read in a few weeks. This one was great, a lot about the time period, German U-boats, the beginning of WWI and the US's entrance into the conflict. I really didn't know much about the Lusitania going in, so I soaked up a lot of new information. This won't be the last Erik Larsen book I will be reading this year.
I watched this Salt Hank video about making Anthony Bourdain's favorite sandwich, which led me to make this sandwich, and now it's one of my favorites, too. I've made it a couple of times, and I have to say that it will be a permanent part of my lunch rotation moving forward. I wish I had known to go and try it where he discovered it in São Paulo. I was there two years ago.
We finished watching The Bear: Season Three. I wish there was more that I hadn't watched yet, but that's all there is for now. I couldn't be more enthusiastic about this show. The music selection and how the music is folded into the episodes is just so good. Here's an unofficial Spotify Playlist. Finally, watching episode six, the "Napkins" episode, I was struck by how it is, in part, an homage to Groundhog Day, one of my all time favorite movies. (If you're familiar with Groundhog Day, and you watch this episode, you'll get it.)
It's funny, I have been meaning to do a quick writeup about the Boox Palma here as part of one of these posts, and in the last couple of weeks it feels like its press footprint has just exploded. Bump favorite David Pierce had a nice writeup that referenced the same Craig Mod post that led me to buy one. I purchased mine a couple of weeks before I went in for my surgery, in April. I thought I might want something smaller than a regular Kindle in the hospital and during my recovery, and that's exactly how I started using mine. Since then, I have been carrying mine in my sling bag everywhere I go. It's a great device for the pool, the waiting room, or while waiting in line, and the battery lasts.
Having this device has made me realize how frustrated I am with the lack of any kind of innovation with the Kindles in recent years. I do love my Paperwhite, but there's so much more that Amazon could be doing. More competition in this market is great, and I hope the press that the Palma is getting turns into more readers.
I’d aimed to have this done on Monday, but my energy levels have been all over the place the last few days, and I just never got to it. Small subtext is that I had a medical situation a couple of weeks ago, and am recovering from it, but slowly. The energy levels are really the last thing to get back to normal when you don’t eat for a few days. I won’t get more specific than that, I’m reluctant to post medical related information on the internet or social media.
Like most of the gaming world, I’ve really been enjoying Fortnite this week and for the last month or so. For those who aren’t gaming adjacent, it’s a “Battle Royale” style game that has skyrocketed in popularity. The game is available across a wide variety of platforms, but I play on PC. I am “bumpish” should you want to friend and play with me, but don’t set your expectations too high on what my level of skill might be. I’d love to play with you in any case. I’m only on a few times a week, and for a brief time, I don’t get much dedicated PC gaming in these days with family duties.
I’m also enjoying the rollover to the Year of the Raven in Hearthstone, which happened this week with the release of the Witchwood expansion. I exalt in the end of the mill deck era. There is one card, Shudderwock, which is totally broken and makes things less fun than they could be. Here’s a great video from Disguised Toast that elaborates on how broken, at least the animations, if not the whole mechanic are.
I did go to the Atlanta Pen Show for a couple of hours until I ran out of gas. My new purchases were an “Aiken” pen from Carolina Pen Company, which is colored to look like the Northern Lights using the same material as this pen, and a Seed A5 case from my friends at Nock.
I did also buy some Gigante Note Cards from Nock while I had the chance in person. These folded over notecards are a favorite of mine, and I keep a couple in my pocket sheath with me all the time. They are essentially the smallest available notebook, with only 4 pages.
Top of mind for me on the music side is Black Moon Rising from the Black Pumas. There are listen links for a variety of music services on that page. At first I thought it was Cee-Lo Green, but it’s not. I haven’t been able to find anything else by them, they are from Austin, TX.
Last night we watched the first episode of the Pastry Chef season of Chef’s Table about Christina Tosi from Milk Bar. If you have Netflix, I highly recommend this episode, I found it really inspiring. Be careful though, you can order just about anything in the episode from their web site. My cookies are on the way.
I’m thinking about getting a ReMarkable Tablet based on the recommendation of some folks online who swear by it. Seems like it might either completely replace my work notebook, or it won’t work for me at all though, making the price tag a little tough to swallow. The iPad hasn’t really worked for me for this particular use case, and I love my e-ink Kindles, so the idea of the product might be in my sweet spot.
I’ve been thinking since last weekend that I should write something up about the ELEAGUE CS:GO Major that just happened. This event was a watershed week for our business, but also a marker in my career. This is from my perspective, and I should be clear that this is from me, not my employer. Any opinions are my opinions, and not theirs. The facts belong to us all though.
For those who might not be familiar, or weren’t following along, this tournament was one of the most successful in esports history in a number of ways. It was the first CS:GO Major tournament with a televised Final, which was on TBS here in the US. It was a tournament with some of the best and most competitive gameplay in the history of these tournaments, something we clearly can’t take credit for, but which is a testament to the state of competitive CS:GO. A team named Astralis triumphed in the end, and during that final amazing match, we broke the all time Twitch maximum concurrent users record for a single channel, smashing the previous high mark by over 200,000, and becoming the first channel to ever go over 1 million concurrents. There’s an awesome Instagram video, captured by a Twitch engineer friend, which captures my awkward enthusiasm in the moment that we crested that 1 million mark.
The tournament was held here in Atlanta, first at the ELEAGUE studio on our campus in midtown, with the quarterfinals, semifinals and finals then being held at the Fox Theatre, a venue at which I have attended concerts, plays, and even a movie or two. It was incredibly cool to work an event in my adopted hometown of almost twenty years. While I have worked many NBA All-Star games and golf events while working for Turner, none of them have ever been here in Atlanta. That somehow made this more real and meaningful for me.
In many ways, this event was no different, from a work perspective, than one of the seven NBA “season starts” I worked on, or an NBA All-Star Weekend, or a PGA Championship, or the Ryder Cup that I wrote the software for onsite the week of the tournament. This event left a huge 14-day gaping hole in my life, every waking moment those 14 days I was thinking about or doing work. We spent well over a hundred hours the week of the tournament getting ready for each day, working the competition, and making sure that things were updated at the end of the night. These kind of hours have an impact of those around us, and I am more cognizant of that than ever these days. I’m not the only one in our home who is exhausted from the long days. I missed my kids and my wife, and they assure me that they missed me. When working with live sports or live events, this is how it is, what it takes to be successful. There are a multitude of details that need to be carefully tended to, and it has to be on a specific time scale that is not negotiable. I am incredibly proud of the entire team that worked on this event. There were no major outages, our Twitch stream stayed up with no downtime. We ran our Game Command player for more matches in a week than we’ve ever run it before. In fact, I believe we ran it for more hours for the Major than every other time we’ve run it combined.
So with all this background information, what did this event mean to me? To understand that, I need to provide just a little more context. First, it was the culmination of an 18th month journey for me. I was asked to first help with, and then work on, Turner’s esports initiatives. I had an amazing job working on the NBA’s products in the US at the time, and I personally took a big chance on esports because I was passionate about it and ready for something new. I had no idea what it would turn into for Turner, and there were no promises about what my role would be moving forward. We started 18 months ago with a vision for what we wanted to do, and the rest has been a wild ride right into this weekend.
I could have never imagined that Valve, the publisher of CS:GO, would choose us to host a Major in our first year of existence. I couldn’t have guessed, even the morning of the Final, that we would break the single channel traffic record on Twitch. So much of that relies on the quality of the matches, and the interest of the fans. If the match had ended after two maps, we never would have broken the record. In any case, even if we hadn’t broken that record, we’ve accomplished so much in a short period of time, starting from nothing, building a team, hosting events. Not everything has been perfect, nor has every decision been a winner, but we’ve learned from every mistake, and taken all the fan feedback very seriously, and I think it shows. That’s how we roll.
So, this meant a lot to me, more in some ways than anything I have helped build in my career. I may not work in esports forever, but the memory of this event, especially, across everything we’ve done with ELEAGUE in it’s first year, will always be with me, a reminder that if you just keep going and try hard, and do your best, good things happen.
I’ve been quite busy with work related items for the last couple of weeks. I realized this weekend that my hosting provider had upgraded some of the software that this site runs on, and in the process, they broke everything. I logged in yesterday, and fixed the problem, but then also realized that I was sick of what the site looked like, and hadn’t updated it in forever.
I am starting fresh with a new theme that I should be able take to places the other one was equipped to go. For a bit, this is going to be a work in progress.
I don’t often post about work related things to my site. I’m averse to getting in trouble for expressing work related opinions on my personal publishing, and I have a lot more to lose than gain in that department.
ELEAGUE has been a very interesting ride for me, particularly because I was literally the first person working full time on esports at Turner. I may be able to write more about that ride at some point, but I have to say that I’m really proud of what we accomplished right out of the gate. We’re not perfect, but we’re constantly learning, and will be better each time we do this.
Here’s an infographic with some of the consumption numbers:
Over the years, I have tried all sorts of methods for managing my day to day, both analog and digital. I’d go so far as to call it a never ending process of trial and error, ever trying to find something that works for me, helps me prioritize things the right way, and helps me not forget something important. Unfortunately, I tend to find a system, use it for some period of time, then decay from using that system back to using my email inbox as my task management system. I then realize that that doesn’t work and I am not prioritizing work the right way, I then try a new system, then begin to decay again after a couple of weeks. Rarely has any system stuck for very long.
Over the summer, while on a business trip to Manhattan, I read this blog post over at Simplicity Bliss about a newish productivity method called Bullet Journal. It struck a chord with me, and so I decided to give it a try for a couple of months and see if it worked for me. I ran out and picked up a Moleskine Evernote Smart Notebook, thinking that I would combine this with Evernote for a longer term searchable archive of my daily productivity notes. This method of managing my todo list, and my notes from the various meetings and calls from each day has proved to work really well for me. I won’t spend any time trying to explain how the system works here, watch the video and head over to the well designed Bullet Journal site for more information. What I will say is that I have made some changes in the way that I use the system, and that I still also use Trello for managing my longer term to do list, while I use Bullet Journal to manage my day to day to do list and notes from meetings/calls. I’ve filled one of the Evernote notebooks above, and have moved on to my second. That size of notebook works really well for this. (I am going to experiment with a combination of Bullet Journal and a Hobonichi Techo in the new year.)
I think the reason that this journaling productivity technique works well for me is that it forces a routine each morning, where I am move the undone items from previous days to today’s page. This routine makes me think my day through with a more metered approach in mind. This coupled with the task of physically writing the items down each day engrains the list in my mind as I move through my day. There’s a huge difference for me mentally between typing something and writing it down, and my retention of things I write down seems to be much higher. What I found, after using it for a month or two is that the results in productivity were definitely tangible, and the results in a more peaceful work mind were even more useful. There will always be change to adapt to in the work day, but it’s a lot easier to adapt to change when you have a plan.
The achilles heel of this system, for me anyway, is that my handwriting is not neat, or aesthetically pleasing to me. I have tried to find a better pen, and that helped some. I am now, however, starting the process of trying to teach myself neater handwriting. It will end up being one of my New Year’s resolutions at the very top of my list. If there’s something you don’t like about yourself, you more than likely can change it, it just takes hard work and mental flexibility.
Basically, I will be using some variant of the Bullet Journal system for the foreseeable future. It hits the sweet spot for me between the efficiency of my digital toolset and the flexibility and retention of a completely analog system. Were I using it purely, I don’t think it would be as effective for me, it’s the hybrid of using it with Trello and Evernote that makes it a success for me. Huge thanks to Ryder Carrol for coming up with this concept and the video/site.
Some additional recommended Bullet Journal related links:
I represented my team to accept the Webby award we won for Best in Sports Mobile Apps. Here’s the video of the five word speech I gave when accepting the award.
I’ve been thinking since last weekend that I should write something up about the 
