Hey, where did everyone go?

Just over two months ago, I wrote that I was taking a job with Microsoft’s Xbox division. The ensuing 5 weeks ended up being one of the busiest periods of my life. In fact, I think we must have set some sort of record for doing a complete interstate move.

My last day with Reuters was June 20. By June 26, me, my wife and 6-year-old son had packed up and hit the road on the 900-mile drive to Seattle.

I received my Microsoft badge on June 30, just two weeks before the E3 expo in Los Angeles that is the video game industry’s most important show of the year (and which, incidentally, we won hands-down).

We closed on a new house on July 31 and were fully moved in by the evening of August 2.

It really was one of those moves in which everything comes together, A-Team-like. It was about time, since we’d had enough practice. Here is a brief history of our wanderings since the mid-90s:

• April, 1996: Take full-time job with Reuters in Beijing.
• January, 1999: Take job with Reuters in Los Angeles
• February, 2000: Take job with Reuters in Seattle
• May, 2002: Take job with Reuters in Beijing
• October, 2005: Take job with Reuters in San Francisco
• June, 2008: Take job with Microsoft in Seattle

That’s five major moves in less than 10 years. I guess all that practice paid off since pretty much everything went off without a hitch this time.

In a corporate move like this, there are so many moving parts: moving company (and a separate company to move one of our cars), corporate HR for both Reuters and Microsoft, the temp housing company, the real estate agent, the mortgage lender, the home seller, etc. In every case, each party totally went to bat for us to make sure everything went as smoothly as possible. It was amazing.

I don’t have much to report right now. Scratch that, I have tons to report, but I’m not going to do it right at this moment. This is sort of the re-launching of Command-K, and I just needed to log in and get the ball rolling again.

In the coming weeks I’ll be writing about the new job, my evolving perspective on the games industry from the inside and other random thoughts.

Vacation

I’ve been taking my first vacation of the year and my folks are in town, so posting has been light lately.

Yesterday we did a 4-mile hike through Muir Woods and then followed it up with some refreshing surf and sun at Muir Beach. Today we went to Haight-Ashbury. Did the dirty hippie thing. Went to Amoeba Music, which is so edgy, even the clerk who took my money was complaining about the weird stuff piped over their music system. Bought a CD.

Having my parents in town means, of course,  that we get free babysitting for the duration. We’ve finally saw a couple movies we’ve been dying to see: There Will Be Blood and Juno. Both were excellent. Blood was a lot more subtle than I’d expected. I was figuring on an in-your-face, over-the-top, Bill the Butcher-style role, but there were a lot of interesting and even admirable aspects to Daniel Plainview’s character. I may write more about it later.

Kite is game

You know something? Kites rock. The past few weekends, Tala and I have taken Harlan to kite heaven, otherwise known as Cesar Chavez Park at the Berkeley marina.

The park is perfectly sited for flying kites. Check it out on Google Maps. Not only does it jut out into the bay for maximum wind exposure, but if you zoom out on the map, you’ll see that there’s only about a 2-mile finger of terra firma that lays between it and the entire Pacific Ocean. The wind today was rather mild but even so it had flags and banners snapping. Moreover, the park has several gentle hills and valleys, all carpeted in lush, shin-high green grass.

It really is a delight to walk, and we’ve gone over on several weekends to admire the squadrons of kites that always seem to be patrolling the park’s airspace. The place has such ideal conditions that it’s the site of the annual Berkeley Kite Festival, which features some amazing kites. So last weekend, Costco had a deal on big kites spanning 6′. We picked up one that looks like a dragon and today was our first chance to try it out. There’s Harlan, above, performing some corrective action.

At one point, Tala and Harlan had wandered off, leaving me in sole custody of the dragon. As I stood there, back to the setting sun, letting string out or taking it in, and occasionally jerking my hands from side to side, it struck me what a similar sensation it was to playing a video game. Gripped in my two hands, the kite reel felt not unlike a game controller of some sort (Wii kite peripheral, anyone?), and my mental state seemed similar to what I feel sometimes while playing — a sort of detached focus on the objective at hand, with hands and eyes working together sort of quasi-automatically while a portion of my brain thinks about other stuff.

In a way it’s not really surprising because both activities are a form of play. I’m sure there are many other pastimes have similar effects on people, but I’ve never before felt such a close association between two pretty different activities. I found kite-flying sort of hypnotically addictive, and Tala mentioned that maybe it’s what draws people to fishing as well. I can definitely see getting into kites, especially with this world-class proving ground just two miles down the highway from us.