I’m starting to see our oldest son apply logic and given that he just turned 3, I’m pretty damn impressed. For example, I told him tonight that next week I would be going to San Francisco and so he wouldn’t see me until Friday. Usually he sort of shrugs these things off, but tonight he got very, very upset and kept saying that HE wanted to go to San Francisco with me. He even managed to turn around the tenses at one point and say “I’m going to San Francisco and you are coming with me!”.

The part that blew my mind is when he stuck a couple of pieces of knowledge together like so: San Francisco is far away (he knows this because we recently got him a map to show him all of the places Patti and I travel to along with where all of our friends and family live - it was very handy when Patti was traveling a few weeks ago, let me tell you!). Because San Francisco is far away we need to take the car. Because we need to go outside to get to the car, we need our coats.

The result of this is that when I thought Kai was done throwing a fit he was instead planning our trip and immediate departure. He popped up next to me a second later, coat and hat in hand telling me to put it on him and to get the car keys… we were going to San Francisco! Wow.

Case in point, today I went out to my office and it stank. It *really* stank, and that made me grumpy.

The thing is, it stank on friday so I cleaned it all out all the trashcans, sprayed a ton of air freshener, and got rid of the smell - or so I thought. It turns out that someone (don’t worry about who, they will be teased unmercifully on monday) left a styrofoam takeout container on their desk early last week. Apparently it got pushed aside and covered up by some papers and thus forgotten. Let’s just say it’s contents weren’t easily recogizable as “food” today when I found it.

So there’s the thing - I smelled an aweful stink in my office and that made me grumpy. But then I found the source, binned it (outside of course) and frebreeze’d up the office enough to make it livable again. Yet, I didn’t drop the grumpy. I had been happy all day, and then it was BAM grumpy. It actually took me semi-snapping at my wife for me to realize that I was grumpy and then traced it back to the stink.

I have to wonder why this is happening more and more. I mean, I know my dad is this way (or at least was when I was growing up - these days I when I see him he’s playing with my sons so he’s always in a good mood!). Anyway it looks like it’s just something I’ll need to work on.

It was a lot of fun really defining the problem and then scouring the net for the information I needed. I re-learned a lot of basic electronic theory that I learned back in high school and then went further to really finally understand capacitors, diodes, rectifiers and even a bit of AC theory. Oh - and I found out I haven’t fully lost my soldering skills too!

I feel like an idiot as I write down dozens of these teeny-tiny tasks - it just feels silly. But then as I work, the rush of breaking out the red pen and slashing out a task drives me to do the next one, and the next one, and then before I know it, I’m done. I think I’m going to start calling it the potato chip method… cause you can’t just do one!

For example, this week I’m in Brighton, UK at the Flash on the Beach conference and for the first time in a long time I’ve been able to actually attend a good number of sessions. My talk was on the morning of the first day so I knew I would be able to do this and was looking forward to the warm glow of inspiration that accompanies an awesome presentation. Seeing the works of Grant Skinner, Eric Natzke, Robert Hodgin, et al used to always be a great way to get the creative juices flowing.

This time was a bit different. The juices flowed, but on top of them poured a thick slick of self-doubt and self-criticism. Back when I started in this industry I spent probably too much of my time doing just want I wanted and what interested me. I, quite frankly, wasn’t exactly a model employee for my first few employers. I did good work, but I wasn’t exactly the most productive worker.

Today I own my own company and I bust my tail for probably too many hours every week to make it succeed. I write a lot of code and put out a lot of projects that I’m proud of… but very few of they bear the stamp of both my hard work and creativity. Most of the time I’m just implementing others ideas.

When I do come up with some idea independent of client work I start on it but never come close to finishing - the real world gets in the way.

The fact of the matter is that I forgot how to play. The result of which is that I feel disconnected from my own personality - if that makes any sense. I’m still a generally happy person, but I feel the shadow of self-doubt creeping more along the edges every day.

As I try to learn to play again I’m very aware that I must make sure I’m always doing it for the right reason. It’s very easy for me to fall into the trap of doing things so that others will like me. It’s very easy to want to do things for acceptance and use that acceptance as a measure of self worth. But if you start chasing that snake you never stop. I need to play and create for me.

So I went off on him. I went fully off-the-scale off.

It’s a fact, when faced with an unproved assault of perceived assault I immediately go nuclear. All of the DEFCON levels race past in an instant and the strongest action I can take at the time is taken. I believe my first response kicked off the ad hominem attacks and there at least half a dozen more responses that mostly just escalated.

This isn’t part of my personality I’m proud of - but I am proud to say that I refuse to go back and edit any of my posts. I may have made them all in a fit of white hot rage, but I did mean every word of them.

I recently have started to really get into late 90s trip-hop - Massive Attack, Portishead, that sort of stuff. It feels oddly enough, like when I got into The Beach Boys and Queen as a kid. There’s this huge body of work that is just dropped in my lap. It’s like buying the DVD collection of a TV show you’ve never seen before; you just chew it all down as fast as you can in a binge of entertainment. The thing is, this time I was actually around for when the material was new. Hell, I even heard some of it. But it wasn’t my “thing” so I ignored it.

Food has also help strengthen this revelation. I have always been a picky eater and an even more picky “tryer”. I just wouldn’t try new foods, particularly if they had some ingredient I didn’t like in it (mayonnaise being the worst). I’ve been wearing that predilection down slowly over the years, but I think I just about broke it a few weeks ago while I was in San Francisco. A client of mine took me out to lunch at a sushi place and insisted that he order. Since his wife is Japanese and he knew the chef that seemed like a good idea but it meant that I would be eating a lot of stuff I had never touched (the only sushi I had eaten before was tuna, spicy tuna, and eel rolls). Somehow just before lunch I just made it right with myself that I would just eat whatever I was given and that’s exactly what I did. Even the rolls dripping with mayonnaise. And I like every bit of it.

It’s nice being right here, right now… it sounds awesome and tastes even better.

The other thing I wanted to mention was a thought I had today about convergence and how it seems to be this big lofty goal of a lot of pieces of software and hardware. The problem is that our definition of “everything” seems to be expanding all the time. Think about it… a few years ago YouTube and Facebook didn’t exist, yet now any “convergence” device or application is found wanting if it doesn’t tie them.

It seems to me that more important than single devices or applications that do everything are interchangeable formats. Ways that these new and different worlds of information can talk together. These technologies are often simple (such as JSON) and use existing standards (like REST). This is a good thing and honestly, I’m finding that interoperability gets me a lot more interested these days than convergence. Let me decide what bits I want to stick together and give me to tools to do it!