2012. Another year where I’ll start with the best intention to keep this blog updated. Hah.
For the last year I’ve been working hard on community building on a start up website, certainly an eye-opening task! I’ve learned quite a few lessons along the way but it’s a fantastic project that keeps me interested every day.
Outside of work I’ve been trying to tackle the mountain of games I own and failing miserably. At the moment I have Saints Row: The Third, Skyrim and Battlefield 3 on the go as well as a myriad of awesome indie game titles. I’ll try to post some more about those as time goes on.
As well as gaming I’ve been finding the use of smartphones and gamification in every day living fascinating but I haven’t seen a single good solution yet. Jawbone released ‘Up’ which was an interesting, stylish looking band that sync’d with an iPhone app to track your activity during the day and sleeping patterns at night, coupled with a food blog type entity it seemed to hold a lot of promise. Shame the initial units had a massively high failure rate and cost a hell of a lot.
I’ve just installed Bloom on my phone from MindBloom, this seems quite promising but I found the media on their site to be a bit overwhelmingly ‘hippy’ for me and the app is a bit confusing to use. The premise of Bloom is to “to grow the life you want by thinking about it a few minutes a day” according to one of its creators. You set yourself small tasks each day such as “drink a glass of water at 9am” or “do 10 press ups” and these can fill many aspects of your life, as you complete these goals your ‘life tree’ will flourish. It seems reasonably similar to LiveStrong which I’ve used in the past and got on pretty well with, so I guess we’ll see if I can get over the interface.
I’ll leave it at that for now and go play some more Battlefield!