I think it is required, given my previous posts on all the benefits of cycling, to disclose that a few days ago I went out on a snowy morning when I probably shouldn’t have  and broke my collarbone in two places. While this has provided lots of entertaining stories, it certainly raises some tough questions about something that I love to do.  I’m scheduled for surgery on Wednesday to have the bone repaired and a metal plate inserted. I’m encouraged that apparently Lance Armstrong is wearing one too, but I suspect that his is some advanced carbon fiber molybdenum composite…

For the past few years, I’ve had a slow-burning desire to own less. Certainly in the physical sense, I keep looking around me at the contents of bookshelves, boxes of papers, odds and ends and jars of spices I haven’t opened in a year. I am just not going to use that star anise. How about that bag of dried lotus roots Jonah brought back from Thailand sometime in the 90′s? Yikes. At one point, I even woke up in the night, scrawled some notes on a piece of paper and fell back asleep. In the morning I found:

• Get rid of 30% of everything
• If something hasn’t been used in 12 months, dump it
• If you find something that you weren’t able to locate when you needed it, dump it

I’ve had some success trying to act on these. My friend Geoff sent me this link to Paul Graham’s interesting essay on this topic. So I’ve started using Craigslist to unload things of value (guitar amplifier, color printer, etc.) and took at look at Freecycle but haven’t waded into it yet. I took a great Gibson ES335 down to be sold on consignment because I just never play it anymore. I’ve been giving things to my kids that I was holding onto for years, which they totally love and I won’t miss. It’s just hard to throw things out when they seem like they still have value to someone, somewhere. Anyone want a Sony Handycam from a few years back?

So if you are a WALD customer, I suggest you switch away just so they lower your rates and send you free ice cream.

As I study this, and try out a variety of new input devices, I am also wondering about what’s been different in the past month that could have contributed to the developing pain and soreness. Ergonomics and different software that drove up mouse usage are the prime suspects so far.

My friend Josh Seiden has started a blog just about that old Williams video game. 1981 in the city all over again.

Josh writes:

When Defender came out in 1980, I was 16, and going to high school
in Manhattan. Nino's Pizza, on Lexingon at 92 St. had a D in the back.
There was also a machine at Optimo on 97th and Madison. But I never
got enough.

The mark of a true player; you knew all the machines in your neighborhood. Which were cranked up fast, which had solid sticks, clean buttons. I even knew the machines in other parts of Manhattan. One night after a concert at the old Palladium I played a few hours in the 7-Eleven on East 34th. I walked out around 3:30.

I turned over a bunch of machines when I was good. I learned how to get the 999,975 score by dying as I hit something to score the last points with my last ship. If you did it ten times to a machine before anyone else, you owned that machine because no one else could squeeze a high score up there, just yours. I spent a lot of quarters, time and pinky knuckle skin on that beautiful piece of software.

I bought a PC version from Williams sometime in the ’90s that ran under DOS. That was dangerous. MAME was incredible. MAME was dangerous. I have avoided the temptation to build a console with joystick and everything. A few years back (before the kids were born) I came across a really old beat up game in an arcade at an amusement park and dropped a few quarters. It was like time travel, because all those old reactions came firing back, and just before the first Baiter materialized I had this tingle on the back of my neck and realized it was about to happen. I shredded it, too. What a blast.

I could say a lot about that game, but ultimately it’s what got me into computer science. I wanted to create a game environment that good, that creative and satisfying. I never did, but got sidetracked into software and architecture for business, and…miss the simple pleasures of dropping in a quarter and flying around a planet defending the space folk for a few hours.

Now Robotron, that’s a different thing altogether….what ever happened to that author?

There is a rich dynamic when it’s working, like group improvisational music, with riffs and forms and deferrence and ambition. I like to sit at a table with people who are smart, know things I don’t, make me laugh with funny stories, listen and come back with a sharp turn.

I have in the past convened a group of gearheads to talk tech, but this time around I had it in mind that tech might give way to something broader, and it does. It’s important to be yourself, many of the parts of yourself, and have them be accepted, recognized, appreciated by a group you can respect in turn. But it’s especially satisfying to reach out from technology to children and family, politics and philosophy, good deals and traps to avoid.

Everyone should find or form a group so they have a place to relax and be known in that way, to have a pack of minds to call on for questions, to be entertained over a meal.