Been Busy

So over the course of the last seven days, I’ve been in five different cities. Even for me, that’s quite a lot.

Last Thursday and Friday, I was up in Seattle, visiting Nintendo for some business. I happened to have dinner Thursday evening with my friend Tom Prata. Great steak at the top of a building in Bellvue. Flew back to SFO that afternoon for a whirlwind of meetings in my office with finance and marketing.

Saturday and Sunday were mostly relaxing. Managed to steal a little time on Sunday to get the car washed for the first time in about three months and a quick haircut (nearly the same interval there, so it was desperately needed).

Clean M6. 🙂

Monday morning I took off for Tampa to visit my Aunt Marla and cousin Shannon. As I’d mentioned, a couple weeks earlier my Uncle Gene had unfortunately passed away. I was trying to get down in time to see him but alas, it was not to be. I arrived at their house about midnight EST, having left my house at about 7:30AM PST. A long day of travel. I’ve not seen either of them in many years and we had a great visit all day Tuesday. While Aunt Marla was at work for a couple hours, Shan and I took a ride out to one of the beach areas and to my grandparents’ house. I hadn’t been to Florida in probably close to 20 years. Frankly, not much has changed.

Aunt Marla and me after a big Italian dinner.

Pine Island "beach" area and boat launch. Was pretty but about to rain.

Grandma and Grandpa Svensson's house in Jasmine Lakes. Started pouring as we arrived.

Wednesday I had to fly into Chicago (which I had passed through O’Hare as a layover to get to Tampa so this was the second time this week I was there). I got in in the afternoon and caught up on a bunch of work (it never stops). I met my buddy, Kerry Ganofsky who runs High Voltage Software for dinner that evening. I spent the entire next day helping give him insights into a new business venture he’s been mulling over. Kerry offered me my first job in the games industry (which I turned down 😉 ) and we’ve been friends for close to 20 years. I have a lot of time for him.

The following morning, I was back to O’Hare (third time for those keeping score at home) and off to Boston to give the key note address at the DDM Executive Summit. DDM is a game developer management company. A lot of people would consider them “agents” but they’re really much more than that.

We had a nice dinner at their president’s house Friday night with all of the VIPs in attendance and then a little time at a local bar with some of the late night scoundrels. The following morning, I was sitting in an intimate room of about 25 studio CEOs sharing my vision of what the future of our industry will look like in the next couple years. I don’t think I said anything revelatory but several folks came up to me after my hour was up saying I was “brilliant”. Like my ego needs more padding (but thank you nonetheless).

And then, right after lunch EST, I was hopping a shuttle back to the airport to begin my journey back home. After another two hour layover in O’Hare (4X – 5 days) I arrived back home just after midnight PST. Woke up Sunday morning at an ungodly hour (given that it’s there’s a time change to daylight savings, even more ungodly) to write this.

Coming up:

Kaiya has conjunctivitis (I’m sure mis-spelled), BOD meetings and Ops meetings, Sharon is travelling all this week. The following week I have a “day trip” to NYC and about two weeks after that I’m back to Japan for a full week.