Secret to avoiding lost productivity

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Howard

Ok, so it’s not a secret, and not a catch-all… but here goes;

Some days you feel like you can’t manage or complete what you need to. You can’t focus right, and things that you should normally manage easily seem impossibly hard. You’re on track to pretty much lose the day…

I get this.

Some days I just don’t seem to be able to manage certain things; One day it might be coherent and creative writing, another it might be logic and number, another it might be effective speaking and communication. It’s most likely a left-brain/right-brain balance effect.

One of the things about running a business is that there’s *always* lots to do, but it’s fair to say that very rarely is something actually critical to be done that day.  So, there’s often scope to move things around, and get on with the things tha are achievable that day.  I don’t have my ‘word’ head on today, so I’ll get on with some accounting, or any other combination!

That way, it’s possible to still be productive even if the things that were on the top of the to-do list don’t get done. That’s better than writing off the day completely!  Also, it’s better to write off the day completely than spend it in frustration, if absolutely everything felt impossible.  Just as long as you don’t put important things off indefinitely!

Hope this helps some other people!

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Music From Games : Conclusion

Posted on February 20, 2011 by Howard

Reading these items, you may notice a similarity between the pieces that I’ve picked – they are all very sad pieces.

I love music from many other games as well, from atmospheric (UFO Enemy Unknown, Bejeweled 2), themed (Outlaws), Powerful (World of Warcraft series), Energising (Speedball 2, Bejeweled 2 again), and many more, which include the upbeat and major.

The pieces that have really moved me, and have kept with me and formed part of my musical being, they would seem to be the beautiful yet sorrowful ones. One day I hope to work out what this actually means!

I hope later also to write a series on emotion in games. It’s hard to believe that there are still people who aren’t ready to accept games as an art form!

Feel free to reply and comment with suggestions of your own favourite musical moments from games (and suggestions to check out!) if you have them! Thanks for reading!

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Music from Games: 5. Barber’s Adagio For Strings

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Howard

This is the last in my current short series of Music from Games, and for me the most powerful.

The game in question was the 1999 PC strategy game, Homeworld. The situation is that you are commanding a huge starship, and guiding various smaller ships to accomplish missions. The fist couple of missions are to get used to the controls, harvest some resources, and then test your jump drive by going to a prearranged point where one of your ships has been travelling ahead of time to meet you. When you get there, you find it has been destroyed, and an ambush is waiting for you. You rush back to your home planet to find it under attack… on fire… all life extinguished.

The music accompanying this scene is a choral arrangement (known as ‘Agnus Dei’) of Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

I couldn’t imagine a more apt use of this music, nor any moment in a game that could be more poignant.

The string version too is beautiful and emotionally powerful, but for me the choral arrangement will remain for a long time the most heartbreakingly beautiful piece of music in a computer game. It was also used in the film Platoon in 1986, which I didn’t see until several years later, but again the music is just as moving in that film.

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Music from Games: 4. Mahler’s Adagietto from Symphony No. 5

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Howard

The game in question was Millennium 2.2, which I played on my Atari ST in 1989. This was a strategy game, with the basic premise being controlling a moon base after the Earth is devastated by an asteroid impact.

The intro sequence showed the earth, and it fading from green land through to dead desert, and while this happened, a 3 channel song of the most tragic music imaginable was played. Here’s a You Tube link to the intro sequence and music on the Atari version. The feeling it gave me was of immense sadness, and loneliness, knowing that the last survivors on a research station on the moon are the last of humanity, and that everything else is lost. From here, the game is about survival and then building up in order to one day return to Earth, make it habitable, and recolonise it.  It was also this game that helped me to learn the major satellites of all of the planets.

I spent many dozens (if not hundreds!) of hours on this game, and each time I loaded it I would listen through the intro music. I had no idea it was a famous classical piece at the time. Some years later, David told me he had heard it while his Dad was listening to Radio 3, and was able to write down the title and let me know.

I thought what I heard on the Atari was beautiful… when I heard the orchestral piece in full, I was overwhelmed. This remains without doubt one of the most powerful pieces of music to me, not just because of the power of the piece, but also the emotion evoked from the original game. Desolation, but with a painful hint of hope.

Here’s a good version – be warned it is a very quiet piece, especially at the start:

I later heard that Mahler composed this on the Piano, that the opening arpeggios are a kind of signature of the instrument for composition. I later realised as a result of this that many pieces can be identified as having been composed on a particular instrument, or that the composer is a pianist (i.e. Freddie Mercury) or a guitarist (i.e. Brian May) for instance. I have a piano arrangement of this piece, and it is just as powerful to play as to listen to, and it comes as no surprise that there are some fantastically rich chords in there to play – but very very slowly!

To anyone just a bit older than me, this piece is much more commonly known as the theme to Death In Venice, released in 1971 (just a little to early for me to have known about it!)

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Music from Games: 3. Debussy’s Arabesque 1

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Howard

This one’s a bit of a stowaway in the series… as technically it didn’t come from a game!

Back on the Atari ST was a great piece of software called Music Construction Set. It allowed you to drag notes around on staves and create music in 3-part polyphony! (Luxury!) You could play or print this out. As well as allowing me to create music (including for one of my GCSE Music compositions), it shipped with a number of built in pieces. One of which was called ‘Arabesque’. It didn’t say anything else, but this piece was absolutely lovely – light and flowing. I enjoyed this piece enough that I would set the computer to play it over and over (99 times) while I would sit reading.

As I later got a bit more accomplished on the piano, I found this piece of music (I assumed that Arabesque was a unique name, how lucky that the first one I found was the correct one!), and set about learning to play. I’m still learning to this day, as the piece is quite tricky to master!

Here’s a lovely version being played:

I don’t play it quite the same (and certainly not as well) but like many pieces I play, it has such great scope for adding in the emotion you want, that it is almost a canvas in itself.

And all from hearing a crappy 3-part cut down version with plinky chip noises!

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Music from Games: 2. Ave Maria

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Howard

Back in the days of the ZX Spectrum, one games company ruled undisputedly, and that was Ultimate. One of the greatest games they made, in my opinion, was Sabre Wulf.

This game had you playing the part of a swashbuckling jungle explorer, battling through all kinds of jungle baddies to collect pieces of an amulet.  The baddies all had their own sophisticated (for the time!) behaviour, and the explorer character had a wonderful (again, for the time) swordfighting animation.

What had me enthralled, however, was the title music. It was incredible! Somehow it managed to emulate – through playing lots of notes rapidly – polyphony. I’ve heard better methods over time, but the essence was that I could hear the chord ring in my head like a kind of audio version persistence of vision.  And that chord sequence… it was like paradise!

As I later discovered, the theme was heavily based on, or at least inspired by, the song popularly known as Ave Maria, or properly Prelude No. 1 in C major from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

It is a beautiful piece to listen to, and to play on the piano. Slower than the Sabre Wulf theme, with appropriate sustain on the notes the chords still sustain through the arpeggios.

With words from a latin text, and a melody added by Gounod, the song Ave Maria is simple, and wonderful.  My favourite version of this is a pop/opera arrangement that is sung by Filippa Giordano:

This song was playing on Classic FM at the moment when my daughter, Maria, was born. We’d decided on Maria in advance (actually inspired from West Side Story), but this was a happy coincidence.

A very joyful piece of music!

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Music from Games: 1. Romance D’Amour

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Howard

This is the first of a short series of posts I’d like to make on music from games that really matters to me.  I’ll include the game, the name of the piece of music, and try to explain why it matters.

The first piece I’ll mention was in a game called Pheonix, an arcade game, although I came across it in the ZX Spectrum clone, Pheenix.  ( ‘Reviewed’ Here! )

The game was an arcade game, and had within it simple monophonic tune that played at the beginning of each game. Hearing now (there’s a video link at the bottom of the review) it sounds like an ugly beep, but to my ears it was recognisable and haunting.  I was just 10 when I heard it, and I could remember it for years afterwards.

I didn’t hear it again until I was about 22, and a girl in Kirk’s hall of residence at Keele University was practising her classical guitar, and started to play a piece… it was a beautiful, finger-picked arpeggio version of the same tune. I meant to ask her what it was called but I didn’t want to interrupt her playing, and I never did get around to asking…

10 years or so later, after beginning to play the guitar, I was listening to Classic FM, and I heard same tune! I just managed to catch what it was called – “Jeux Interdits”.  It turns out this is the name of a film that used this tune as a theme, the tune being commonly referred to as “Romance D’Amour“, or “Spanish Romance“. The composer is unknown, and the piece is also known as just ‘Romance’ or ‘Romanza’… and other variants too.

5 years later still, having found various transcriptions (tab), and practising obsessively, it is now one of the pieces I play – although I haven’t perfected it yet. One day I hope to play it as well as this :

To me it is a beautiful, lonely piece, that brings very happy memories. The fact that it stayed in my consciousness across those leaps of 10 years tells how well it resonates with me!

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The Big Catchup

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Howard

There’s a noticeable big gap in the blog from 2008 to 2011… why would that be?  The simple answer is that after the Astraware merge with Handmark, I was incredibly busy!  I knew my blog software needed an upgrade, and getting the time to do that and get around to writing the content again was just tantalisingly out of reach!

At the end of 2009, seeing that the business had changed direction somewhat since the merge, David and I bought Astraware back in order to make it an indie company again.  And there went 2010!

Figuring out how to make a company again – not quite from scratch, but in many ways new again, was a challenge. Between us we all had to learn new skills and relearn old ones! We also had to figure out what our goals and business plan were.

Since I’ve given a number of talks on being an entrepreneur, and I always tell people to write a business plan, I couldn’t really miss out that part.  I’d forgotten how much writing a plan really really makes you focus on what is important to the business!   Being part of a larger business (albeit a pretty cool company like Handmark!) taught me a huge amount about things like messaging, corporate communication, and scale. I’m hoping to apply a lot of that over the coming years!

I’ve fallen woefully behind on archery in the last couple of years, although Kirk and I did join a new club, and Maria passed her basic coaching course so is now allowed to shoot too.  Kirk and I competed together shooting longbow in a competition, and I was immensely proud of us both for completing a round and achieving a score!

I’ve still been practising guitar a lot… more to write about there in other entries!

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Blog Proliferation

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Howard

Had to happen… as I delve further into WordPress I discover more and more neat admin features and customisations and plugins and widgets…  And I realise that WordPress is appropriate for the front end for quite a number of domains I own, so the last week has seen me putting WordPress into a number of sites!

Kirsten will get her face painting website in a more manageable state now she has it set up on Facepaint.me.uk and her own blog back at long last at kirstentomlinson.com.

I’ve set up my own ‘Green Power’ blog at AirPowerEnergy.com where I can write about the renewable energy generation and efficient use that I’m enthusiastic about. I also have a few ideas of my own that maybe I’ll pursue someday!

I also realised that after hand-crafting a site for my Dad’s daffodil walks & talks that he does, theat literally every feature I lovingly wrote and coded in PHP,HTML, Javascript and CSS, is done in WordPress plus themes about 10 times prettier and more efficiently. Bah! (At least when you write something for yourself you get a good understanding of how things work and makes you appreciate good code and design more!)

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Importing Old Posts… Success!

Posted on February 6, 2011 by Howard

Feeling particularly happy – I managed to successfully import all of my old blog posts (2008 and earlier) via the magic of mangling sql with textpad and php… I’m expecting lots of ‘\’s in weird places that I didn’t spot…

I don’t think I can bring across any of the old comments (not that there were many), and any inserted images will be broken, but I can at least go through and fix up any that are missing. Going back to some of those old posts will stir the memories!

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