Matthew Hutchinson

• #cabal
• [12:00] @matt: ive just got the best response ever from our sys admin here; i asked him a rather tricky question – the answer was;
• [12:00] @matt: It is possible to do what we’ve done in much the same way that it’s possible to build a house; I wouldn’t want to try to explain how to do it in an email, because a) it would take an awfully long time, b) I’d never get the whole concept across, c) someone would end up dead under a pile of bricks, in a pool of electrified mains water.

I took a visit to the Game:On Exhibition at London’s Science Musuem – £8 for 2hrs and all the Arcades and consoles are set on ‘free play’. Everything from the orginal Asteroids and Space Invaders machines, to Amiga classics and the current consoles. I took a few photos, but the Flickr group has loads more. Its well worth a visit if you are into this sort of thing, all the old cabinets took me years back to scrounging for 10ps at the Portrush arcades

After months of working on other paid projects, Im back working on Skribe and since I have no major freelance work on my calendar for a while, I am aiming to focus on this until its done – yes done! – hard to imagine after almost 4 years of starts and stops. Im looking forward to getting into Rails again too (with 1.2RC1 now released) And after reading the ‘Little Book of Flow’ I should be able to effortlessly fly through the work – experiencing great joy – possibly.

Skribe has defintely been a big missed opportunity. Back in 2001 we were attempting to offer a free social site with conversation/video/photo sharing (sound familiar?). And in 2001 there were very few competitors about. Now with the success of Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Bebo (and just about everyone) – its hard to think where Skribe fits in – I still believe our small team has enough original ideas and skills to break the mould and deliver a competitive product. If I didnt, I simply wouldn’t be trying.

So I guess this post officially restarts the long dead ‘Skribe Weekly’ – (which almost turned out to be an annual event) – The idea being to post about how the work is going, and get real people to feedback on our ideas and approach. So feel free to comment/criticise here – starting with some rough design mockups (more to come soon)

Apologies for the lack of posts, but any free time I currently have is being ate up by a hungry piece of nasty ASP work that demands my attention. Having worked with a couple of Rails projects recently – I can only say that stepping back into something as awful as ASP web development has helped me appreciate the fact that there is a better way – Also today from Scott Adams some other small pleasures,

Scott Adams

... ... I like being tired at the same time I have access to a comfortable chair and plenty of time to sit in it. Those three things don’t often line up, but when they do, it is pure sitting magic…

... I love the feeling of doing something right, no matter how inconsequential, such as guessing the exact right time it will take to warm a yam in the microwave. It makes me feel in control of my life…

Through the magic of Talkr I can now offer you a completely pointless Podcast feed for this very blog. With my feedburner stats telling me I have over 130 RSS subscribers, statistically, at least one of you will not be able to resist listening.

So click here to subscribe (link in the footer coming soon) and listen to me on-the-go. Laugh at the odd sounding american woman trying to read the top 20 posts. Be amazed at her strange pronunciation and such – then quickly unsubscribe and tell no-one what you’ve done.

On a more serious note, I have work to do..