Category: Personal

Sorry for my silence yesterday. I was out of the office at an all day seminar on Finance for New Media companies. I was only there because my boss is in Florida and we needed to send somebody. It was actually really enlightening. Now that I know all about EBITDA, and Current Ratios, and Betas, and ROI, and VC, I think I should become the freakin’ CFO!

I am contemplating putting up a new series of stories, sort of autobiographical things. One of the quirkiest episodes in my life occurred three summers ago when I moved to a smallish town in Ontario called Waterloo for 19 days. It felt like I was being swept along in a flood, and then suddenly I was plucked to safety. I’m considering putting up some of my diary entries and just changing the names. I’m still mulling it over. If you’re one of my friends reading this, and you think you’ll be implicated, let me know what you think. I’d love to eventually record “My Waterloo” for posterity.

Isn’t Brooke a babe? James is a very lucky boy…

I was thinking back today to my early adolescence, with that mixture of wistfulness and crushing embarrassment that might be familiar to some of you. I was thinking about my “Dungeons and Dragons” years. The coolest thing about this period was how I discovered the game. I believe it was 1977 or 1978 (I was 12 or 13 at the time) and I read an article about this new “role-playing game” in Psychology Today. Yup, just one of a few brainy mags I read at the time, including Omni, Popular Science, and Popular Mechanics. I even tried to read Scientific American for a while, but that just went over my head. Brooke was a little embarrassed when I told her about the D&D years (or, more correctly, the AD&D years), even though (or perhaps because) I protested that “I was always the Dungeon Master!!” Another aspect of those years is that since I couldn’t always convince many of my friends to play, I found a sort of club that met Sunday mornings in Toronto’s Eaton Centre. There must have been 40 or 50 of us there, and meeting those people was sort of a precursor to the kind of relationships I’ve formed online, relationships formed around common interests and not where you lived or went to school. Those were great times…

Anyone else have a geeky RPG past (or present!)?

Brooke and I ate at a great little restaurant last night. It’s called Nothing in Common, and it has about 6 tables downstairs (they have a smoking section upstairs but I expect it’s about the same size). The decor was great. Lots of kitsch on the walls, boxes of Trivial Pursuit questions on the tables, and the legs of our table ended in rubber boots. Great food, too, by the way. Funny thing was that because it’s so small, you can hear everyone else’s conversation. There was a couple there who were obviously on their first date, and I wondered what sort of a person would ask someone to a restaurant called “Nothing in Common” for a date…