it's business time.....

I was interviewing someone today.  We reached a certain point in the process where he paused to consult his notes in a folder he'd brought with him.  As he did so, I noticed that he had a colour printed copy of my LinkedIn profile in there too, complete with the natty profile picture of me looking all suave and sophisticated in a tuxedo.

Now, clearly this makes sense on lots of levels: he got sent the names of the people interviewing him in advance and the picture will help him identify me when I come to pick him up; he can also read up on me and my job role (and by extension the area that he's hoping to become a part of) to make sure he's as prepared as he can be and armed with more than just the job description in the job advert.  I've actually also worked with him in the dim and distant past, so he might just have been looking to see if he could put a face to the name.... so, all in all, it's a pretty sensible use of a resource that's readily available and I should probably be applauding him for using his initiative.

But..... but....but..... LinkedIn has always been the crappest of the social media, hasn't it?  In fact, I would go as far as to say that it's really pretty lame.

I have a profile there, but I don't really do anything with it other than sporadically update it with the barest level of information.  They send me an email each week, and (as well as the tedious approaches from lazy recruitment consultants doing nothing more than key word searching) I have developed a deep and lasting suspicion of those people who always seem to be endorsing articles or tinkering with their profile on the site.  I'm sure it's a perfectly respectable way of maintaining a network of business contacts, or some other bullshit like that.  But really, who has the energy for that?  Is anyone really impressed by the size of your network of business contacts and those empty recommendations and endorsements that you have exchanged with people you worked with a decade ago and haven't seen since?

Surely normal people are busy getting into pointlessly impassioned debates with people they've never  actually met on Facebook.

That's a much more productive use of your time. Surely we can all agree on that.

It can't be just me who does that.  I'm not arguing with myself.

go play a video game...

I'm not really much of a gamer.  Over the years, I've played games on various platforms: Game and Watch, Spectrum, Amstrad, PC, Playstation.  Some games have held my attention for extended periods of time - Championship Manager springs immediately to mind, but so do games like Bard's Tale and Sorcery - but mostly I would describe myself as passingly interested.

I currently have a Playstation 3, but I only got it a couple of years ago and only really have a handful of games.  Some of them feature online play, but although my console is hooked up to my wireless, I've never really been tempted to get online.  Although I have played Call of Duty, I'm more of a one player kind of a guy, preferring to play games like Skyrim or Dishonoured, where you take a single character throughout and you interact only with the computer and not with other players.

I'm currently playing the latest Tomb Raider.   I played the original trilogy of games on my Playstation one back in the day, and I loved the puzzle element: this was less of a shoot'em up and more the kind of game where you had to figure stuff out.  As time went on, the games became less about the puzzle and more about the action (and the size of Lara's chest), so my interest started to wane and I stopped playing.  The new game has gone back to basics, taking on an origins story and giving the player plenty of puzzles to solve.   It's good, but I'm finding it ultimately a little unsatisfying.  Why?  Because I feel as though I'm playing the game on rails, with my path through the action carefully plotted and where I only have the illusion of a choice about what I want to do.

I suppose I've been spoiled by Skyrim.  I've never played a game before - with the possible exception of Elite - where it is such a large and totally open world; where the path I choose to follow, the quests I chose to accept and even the people I choose to interact with are completely up to me.  In Skyrim, if you so desired, you could spend all of your time mining ore, smelting metal and then smithing and enchanting armour.  It's not really my thing, but that's pretty much exactly how one of my friends plays the game.  He's never happier than when he's got suits of matching armour arranged on stands in his house....and to think that people called me sad for spending my time becoming the head of the assassins' guild and robbing every tomb I could find!  After 400-odd hours playing in a game like that, a more tightly scripted game, no matter how good and how beautifully realised, somehow feels like a step down.  You might almost as well be watching a film.  I've got "The Last of Us" lined up next, and although it's supposed to be an incredible game, I fear it's more of the same: more cinematic than interactive.

Someone suggested I try the "Fallout" series (by the same development house that created Skyrim and Dishonoured), and Grand Theft Auto 5 is supposed to be pretty freeform.  I might try the former, but I'm sceptical about the latter.  I played Vice City quite a lot, and I found that the wandering around aimlessly waiting for a mission was not interesting enough to conceal the fact that I was waiting for the next main mission to start.  It's fun jacking cars and killing pedestrians, but there are limits to exactly how much fun.  Besides, it's never been the same since I found out that those women you gave money too in the game were not raising money for stem cell research.

One of my colleagues was remarking how a guy we both work with was a champion at some old-school game.  I was thinking Chuckie Egg or Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy or something like that.

No.

Quake.  Old school?  Really?

I'm so old.  I can almost remember Pong.
Almost.

is this just fantasy?

I've been neglecting my life.  My real life.  A combination of work, all that running and an assortment of various other things have meant that I haven't been paying as much attention as I should to the things that really matter.

Yes.  Skyrim.

I bought the game around March this year, and since then I have apparently spent some 198 hours, 7 minutes and 22 seconds in the game.   That's more than eight full days and nights.  And that number doesn't include all the times that I've died and gone back in time to start at my last save point.  I reckon it's a pretty safe assumption that I've spent going on 250 hours in this game in the last 6 months.

That's a hell of a time commitment.

Let me tell you, I've crammed an awful lot into that time:

I've reached level 56; I've spent 96 days as a werewolf (now cured); I've looted 1497 chests; I own two houses; I've done 35 persuasions, 2 bribes, 3 intimidations and contracted 10 diseases (don't ask); I've killed 1,521 people, 607 animals, 305 creatures, 736 undead, 39 daedra and 121 automatons; I've carried out 61 assaults and 27 murders (an oddly low figure for someone who has killed more than 1,500 people).  I'm the head of the thieves guild, the head of a resurgent assassins guild, I am the non-magic practicing head of the College of Mages.  I'm a bard.  I'm an oblivion walker and a hero of the struggle against the Empire.  I'm also married, although I no longer take my wife on my adventures and leave her to run a shop in her home town.  I am the Dragon Born.  I have a horse of possibly demonic origin with glowing red eyes.

And people say I'm wasting my life!

favourite waste of time....

Yesterday evening, I spent a good couple of hours trying to kill a pair of woolly mammoths.  It was a spontaneous thing, really.  There I was, on my way to meet up with someone on a quest to prove my worth and my honour to the Companions, when I bumped into a couple of the hairy beasts in the beautiful countryside some way out of Whiterun.

Some time before, I'd picked up a quest from someone who had asked me to get them a mammoth tusk to help them set up business with a trading caravan.  I'd agreed to help, but as I was busy chasing after dragons and suchlike, it wasn't really top of my "to do" list.  Besides, all the mammoths I'd seen up until then were usually being herded by giants, and I've learned from bitter experience not to mess with those guys.

Anyway, I was making a beeline towards my destination when I spotted a couple of unsupervised mammoths.  Well, this seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up, so I thought I'd have a go at acquiring that tusk and ticking another task off the list.

Well, let me tell you, that's a whole lot easier said than done.

There weren't any giants around, but neither of the hairy beasts was going to let me take them down without a fight, and - at my lowly level - it only takes a couple of hits by those tusks and it was curtains for me.  I successfully increased my skill level in archery by standing on rocks where they couldn't reach me and taking pot-shots, but before long realised that this was going to take more arrows than I had in my possession and so I was going to have to get down-and-dirty, man to mammoth, using the double-handed sword that I had earlier liberated from a zombie whilst tomb raiding.

All to get my negotiation skills improved in Whiterun in exchange for the tusk!

Hours of fun.  Literally.

Let this be a warning to you: do not start playing Skyrim if you wish to continue with your normal life and enjoy activities like socialising, eating and sleeping..... or, indeed, if you don't want to be the guy who regales everyone in the office with tales of his mammoth killing when asked what he got up to over the weekend.

Good times.

I can tell that we are going to be friends....

After years of refusal, I have finally caved in and set up a Facebook account....although judging by the number of people who almost immediately hit me with requests to be my "friend", I would imagine that most of you know that by now.  (how does that work, incidentally?)

I'll admit that I was quite proud not to have an account for so long, but the simple truth is that the real reason I didn't open one because I know myself too well; I know how much time I spend on the internet on things like blogger and twitter, and I had an inkling that Facebook wouldn't be any different.  Best not to open that door, I thought; better not to get started at all than to have something else to suck up my life.  That and the idea (picked up from membership on Friends Reunited) that I would be getting requests from people who I would rather never see again as long as I live.

In the end, what tipped the balance was the desire to stay in contact with some of the brilliant people that I met in Africa.  Yes, I could email them, but setting up a Facebook account seemed to be the best way of making sure I was included on the photos we were planning to share and was generally a good way to stay loosely in contact with everyone with the minimum of effort.

You know what?  It's been okay.  I have had requests from people I don't care for, but I've ignored them; I have spent a fair bit of time mucking about with it, and it's another thing -- along with email and twitter -- that I check regularly on my phone, but overall it's not been so bad.  Actually, it's been sort of fun.  I had some initial problems setting up the privacy settings on my account, but even that's now been sorted and everything seems to be ticking along nicely.  I'm "chatting" to some people I haven't had much regular interaction with in years, and it's been good.

I've not "poked" anyone yet, mind..... I hope it stays that way.  And no, I haven't Facebooked your mom, although I wouldn't rule it out.

homeward bound....

As I was sat in traffic the other day, I glanced across at the truck alongside me, and to help pass the idle time, I read what was emblazoned on the side. It's not that I was expecting it to be particularly interesting, it's more that I had time on my hands and felt that it was likely to be more interesting than continuing to study the numberplate of the car just in front.

It was a haulage company. No real surprises there. I read on, perhaps not eagerly, but I read on nonetheless. It was a haulage firm from Barnstaple, North Devonshire. Now, my father's family are from Plymouth, so I happened to know that Barnstaple was in Devon. I didn't actually know that Barnstaple was in North Devon. If I'd had to guess, then I think that's what I would have plumped for, but it would still have been a guess. It seems my gamble in reading the side of the lorry was paying off and I'd now learned something for my troubles.

I read on.

Except that was it. The name of the haulage company and the fact that it was based in North Devonshire. Perhaps it's just me, but I was expecting more. Hell, now I'd started reading, I felt a little bit cheated that there wasn't more. In the unlikely event that I wanted to find this haulage company, what the hell was I supposed to do? Follow the truck and hope it was going home? Is it too much to expect a phone number or something? Is a website really out of the question? Do you even want my theoretical business?

And North Devonshire? What's that all about? If I didn't know where Barnstaple was, is telling me that it's in North Devonshire as opposed to any other part of Devon really that helpful? Are the people of Barnstaple able to get into a taxi, anywhere in Europe, give their address as "North Devonshire" and have a trouble-free journey directly to their doorsteps? Perhaps there's some kind of regional pride here that I'm not aware of, and the people of North Devon are desperate not to be associated with any other part of their county?

"Where are you from then?"
"Ah, I'm from Barnstaple"
"Oh yes, is that in South Devon?"
"FUCK OFF!"

etc.

Do the people of Central Devonshire make an advertisement of the fact, or do they prefer to think of themselves as being Southern North Devonshire? Or Northern South Devonshire? Are there rules here? Do the local councils have to issue guidelines, or is this something you are born knowing?

And then the traffic cleared up and I drove home.

Well, it passed the time alright, but what about all those unanswered questions?