I spent most of July doing telecommute work for Christopher Allen and Skotos on the SkotOS 2.0 project. We’re finally approaching some kidn of early, limited alpha release, and with that release comes the hope of turning what is essentially a one-man project into something more collaborative.

Also in July I flew to San Francisco to interview with the illustrious Three Rings Designs and to chat with their chief pirate, Daniel James, an old friend of mine from the SF Bay Area and from the pinnacle years of the now-defunct MUD-Dev mailing list.

He had bangers and mash and I can’t recall what I had, which probably means he chose the more interesting dish.

Um, anyway, things went well and agreements were signed and so (apart from the fact that I’m in Sweden on sort-of vacation for most of August) that’s where my professional energies shall henceforth be focused. I’m quite excited about this (somewhat surprising) turn of events, and thrilled to be doing something so new and different — while I have oodles of experience with online multi-player gaming in text I’m honestly rather new to building graphical user interfaces, and it’s fun stuff.

And then the other week I finally cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft. It’s a lovely game, and I made a lot of friends there, and I don’t regret the copious amount of time I spent raiding with them. But it does take a lot of time to do well, especially since I’m not so great with moderation. And it’s time to live more fully in the present, to maybe fix up the house a bit.

And tomorrow Jeremiah and I fly back from spending almost three weeks in Sweden, I’ll be doing new things with most of the hours of my days, and so I think September represents the turning of a new leaf in more ways than one.