Once, a famous jazz trumpet player came to my high school.

He played spectacularly for us, and answered many questions about improvisation, fame, and music. I’ll always remember one question in particular, though.  A student was called upon, and asked,

“What’s your advice on becoming a better jazz player?”

“Become a better person,” he said.

Right now, I’ve traveled to the other side of the planet to do just that.

At the moment, my activity on this site has diminished because I’ve been in Australia. Did my trip have something to do with video games? Not really. I had a different objective in mind – my growth as a human being.  However, I don’t think the two are all that unrelated.  In fact, I think they are inseparable.

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Trent (game designer/main programmer of Finity Flight) is at his hippy antics again. Last month he traveled to Australia, and hes been keeping a video blog of the whole adventure. Its a fun watch…

www.trentinoz.com

MirthKit is now fully open source, under the LGPL. You can find the source on Launchpad. If you’d like to check out the source immediately, branch from the bazaar repository with the following command:

bzr branch lp:mirthkit

Cheers!

Last night my band played to a crowd of about 6,500, opening for the hit band Panic at the Disco.  I was lead guitarist.

…But I don’t play guitar.

Not real guitar, at least.  In front of the six-thousand-strong crowd, I was playing the video game Rock Band after winning a Rock Band Live Tour competition.  If you think that’s cool – well, you’re absolutely right – but what’s really cool is what it means for video games as a medium.

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I started using Ubuntu three years ago this January. Recounting that fact, I was actually a bit astonished. It doesn’t seem like its been so long. A lot of life can go by in three years, and its interesting to note that Ubuntu has been a faithful companion for what has now been a decent chunk of my living.

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Open Source Software is founded on the principal of community involvement. Everybody pitches a small hand, and sooner or later terrific accomplishments happen. However, open source games haven’t yet seen the success of say, office tools. Let me explain why I think this is.

The open source community is no joke, and together, numbering in the hundreds of thousands of contributors, it has created software that has managed to rival Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and numerous other software titans. How could it be then, that one of the most popular types of software, gaming, is so far behind?

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