Nope, not those sort of moves. Not the ones related to well timed button presses of deft flicks of a stick or mouse. Moves in the real world, those related to house and home.

I’ve lived in the UK all my life, all 38 years plus. Linda however has never spent more than 13 years in any country having moved from Denmark to Norway to the UK. And this year would have been her fourteenth here, thus fate has decreed that we should move on, and it is a return to Denmark that is on the cards. Though not as one might expect to return to where her family are from, that being northern Sealand (Sjælland) but to a rather remote island by the name of Bornholm. It’s an island of some 40,000 people, quite similar in size to the Isle of Mann for our UK based readers, and in many ways it could easily be a location in World of Warcraft so diverse is the terrain.  From near white sand beaches in the south, through to the forested middle on on to the craggy rock faces of the northern shores, we quite fell in love with the place during last years holiday. We had reason to be there though, a part of Linda’s family are already living there now and so we will be creating a bit of a clan there as not only ourselves but Linda’s parents will also be living there.

This may seem an odd choice to many, particularly as we will be sharing the house with Linda’s parents. I realise not everyone has a positive relationship with their in-laws. Thankfully though I do, and the house will be split in floors, allowing us a retreat when required to our own space, sharing only the kitchen. The was also the draw of value for money, property on the island is very cheap compared to anything in the mainland of the UK, at least that we have seen. For little more than we will be getting for our three bedroom semi near Liverpool we have been able to buy an old farm house consisting of four adjoined buildings and a good bit of land. Something we could never dream of owning in England these days.

Of course there is a price to pay for this, there are not a huge number of jobs to be had locally so I will be relying on my computing skills to find work I can do remotely and we have ideas for some web based business opportunities also. So money will not be something as readily available as it is right now, but then that isn’t really what this move is about. It’s about obtaining a better quality of life, of living in a place were we can feel safe, were we can step outside out door and go for a walk or a cycle without worrying about dealing with excessive traffic and indeed in many cases being able to use cycle paths separate to the main road system. A chance to get fitter and eat healthier foods by being closer to local sources of good produce an ample amounts of fresh air. To become people whose lives will become more outside bound.

Not that we will be giving up on our gadgets, the plans we have for our own space in the house are heavily geek influenced. There will still be his and hers computers in an office space. Games consoles will litter the shelves of our own living room, and the house will obtain a substantial network setup to keep everyone there online 24/7. There are even long term plans for a cinema area, or dreams if not plans. But it will certainly be a catalyst for change in us, at least that is what we plan and hope for.

So you may see less games and gadget related posts here, and far more general life ones,  but there will still be that same emphasis on doing things together and thereby getting more out of them (Stop sniggering at the back!).

I hope this will still interest you all.

Long Overdue

Leaning Danish is probably definitely something that should have happened long ago. I’ve had getting on for fourteen years of living with my now wife, and yearly trips to Denmark or Norway (where Danish was spoken in Linda’s parents house) and yet I’m still only at the stage of being able to name a few dozen objects. Sure I can kind of follow the over arcing flow of some conversations via these few nouns and verbs that I’ve picked up, but it’s really not even close to conversational. I’ve tried a number of text book based learning solutions over the years, but they’ve failed to inspire me enough to carry them through to fruition, the lack of interaction and reliance on telling you to go off and practice make procrastinating and then “forgetting” to return all too easy.

Seeds of Learning

What’s needed is something with a little more cosiness, something that feels friendly and encourages you to continue learning and growing your vocabulary. And growing is the key word when it comes to this new website I’ve been using, Memrise. At it’s core the site is a flash card based learning process, with the added bonus that as well as showing you words and having you select the correct translation from a multiple choice screen, it will occasionally have you type the answer in. This really helps to drive home the spelling, something which I struggle with in Danish having mainly learnt from listening, and also due to Danish words often sounding close to English words, yet being spelt very differently. It will also alternate the direction of the translations, sometimes supplying the English word and requesting the Danish, other times the opposite. Another thing I have noticed is that if a word appears in two separate lessons, the system knows you are already familiar with that word and will just go right to asking for the answer rather than supplying the translation a few times for you to learn it. Clever stuff, and useful given that lessons are often created by different people without knowledge of which words another person might have included in their module.

Continued Growth

What keeps it fun is the representation of your knowledge of a given lesson as seeds growing into flowers which, once learnt, are planted into your garden of long term knowledge. It’s a pretty simple idea, but it works perfectly. The process of watering your garden to maintain your vocabulary fits perfectly, and seeing those happy faces on your grown flowers keeps bringing you back to maintain them.

The site also updates you when seedlings are ready to be harvested into that garden, so you are always receiving reminders to come back and engage with the site. And it’s not just languages that are catered for, though they make up the bulk of the subject matter. Geography, Science, Natural History are all represented too. There is even the ability to create your own lessons which can then be picked up and used by the other members of the site. And user input into existing lessons is encouraged, maybe adding pronunciation guides to tricky words, or examples of use all goes to help create the community of learning feel.

It’s a great little site, and completely free at this point. There are experts in learning and memory involved in the system being used so the whole things has some basis in a scientific approach which works for me.
Even if you only have a passing interest in learning something new I recommend you check it out.

My gaming schedule of the past few months has not been of my own choosing. However far from this being due to some subversive mind control I have chosen to have my gaming dictated by the choices made of two of my favoured podcasts. Namely those being GameBurst and Cand & Rinse.

We all know the joy of being swept up in the latest releases, joining in the twitter gossip and forum posts that erupt whenever a new game comes along. However following such practices can become a very expensive pastime, requiring day one purchases of games.

How then to capture that sense of community and belonging without the cost of day one buys? Why by tracking the gaming choices of GameBust’s Replay show and Cane & Rinse’s weekly output. Both shows deal with games that are removed from the wave of the new by at least a few months, and sometimes years. Picking up a game you don’t own to ‘play along with’ becomes a far more economical choice, and yet you can still get that same sweep of excitement and belonging that chasing the new instils. Sharing thoughts with others that are playing the same games around the same time, twitter comments and forums posts are all there in check. Plus you may well find missed gems that you never knew were out there such as I have in Valkyria Chronicles.

For me this has become a very good way to keep involved without the incessant rush to keep up with the ever increasing barrage of new releases. Long may it continue!