Josh Ledgard, Death Bunnies, and a cool drink of lemonade

First off, it was sad to see Josh Ledgard go...although in working on the sites that Telligent handles for Microsoft, he's not going too too far away. Josh was one of the earliest members of "Drinking about Community" and someone I could always count on to understand and extend the thinking around community topics at Microsoft. I missed him at his own drinking goodbye by about 10 minutes - they'd moved the party to a restaurant down the road when I zoomed into the Workshop trying to figure out where Josh was...but I didn't have his cell. I still owe him a bottle of red wine and best wishes...

If someone stays in electronic contact with you, are they actually that far away? This question gets more interesting when you think about stuff like LinkedIn, Facebook, Spaces. Most recently I've been getting a slew of LinkedIn Requests and have been touched as well by the flurry of Facebook entries. It's summer and we all want to hook up electronically? Not sure what's bringing this out in people. :)

I know I'll be monitoring Twitter a bit more in the next couple of weeks because of Blogher and the fact that it really is a great conference update tool.

Working with the XNA folks has been  super interesting. I had forgotten how much I dig smaller teams and a more agile-like process (or perhaps simply one that the team evolves). I am also fortunate to be the officemate of a genius - game art director Cyrus Kanga. You can always tell which Visio is a Betsy Visio and which one is the stunningly beautiful one by Cyrus. :)  Other folks on the team have hinted or made outright references to their work in game development, where of course, I can only sit on the toes of giants, or whatever the metaphor is. QnA is the closest thing to an online "game" I've had a hand in.

I downloaded Game Studio Express (Web) and the Creator's Club game launcher and video (Xbox, though you can find some info here)

Once I get more settled, I suspect I'm going to lean over the precipice and fall in...and have to write an XNA game.

Now, we all know what happens when Betsy starts coding. Weekends and nights get lost. Diet Cokes get shipped in by the crate. And people suffer, especially her, because as a pm she's impatient with how slow her coding is going. I chatted about this with Julien Ellie, a fellow blogger and developer on my team. He laughed at me, but it's true...working with good programmers spoils me for my own attempts at coding. I think, oh, someone else could do it faster and then I lose patience.

A title for my game has already been suggested: Death Bunnies. Now, I just have to figure out what to do with them. Are you a bunny commando, and it's a first person shooter? Do the bunnies bring the carrot plague? Do they hop hop hop until they can't hop no more?

I hear tomorrow (July 11) will be a record breaking hot day. Time to work late and stay in the central airconditioning.

Live it vivid!