Amit Schreiber's Blog | ืืืืื ืฉื ืขืืืช ืฉืจืืืืจ
Those of you who know me can probably guess how excited I am about this.
If you want to come with me to enjoy an award winning, extremely energetic live act that is The Prodigy, here’s a link to buy tickets.
And if you’re unsure about going – let’s talk about it. I’m sure I can convince you :)
This birthday comes when I’m relatively happy, but it follows a few not-so-great months. The past year had its ups and downs.
We closed Playrock. Following that I started looking for a job outside of Israel, but instead opted to take a job at an Isareli startup. That may have been my biggest mistake of the year. My experience in that company wasn’t good and I switched jobs again. I’m sorry that I didn’t follow through with moving abroad, mainly because it would have saved me a lot of grief, both professional and personal. I take comfort in the fact that I’m enjoying my current place of work (Stratoscale) a lot.
Other than that, I became involved in a side project, Unvelope (Hebrew link), which I hope will do well.
I also had a short relationship that didn’t turn out well at all.
I saw The Prodigy twice – in June and very recently on New Year’s eve. That’s always a good thing :)
I’m still running (outside) twice a week. I feel healthy and in that sense things are fine.
To sum up, quite a lot happened this year. I hope I’ll be mostly happy this year and maybe to accomplish something meaningful.
That was a great one. Exactly at midnight The Prodigy came on stage and gave a great gig. Not much to say about it that I haven’t said before. My favorite of the new tracks played is Get Your Fight On, but there isn’t a decent enough recording of it yet.
Last week I went to my 14th Prodigy show. It was one of the best ones I’ve ever been to. The Kiev crowd was intense but fun, and there was a fan zone so there was a lot of room to move around. The sound was great and new beats were played.
I also went with a very good friend, so that always makes it a better experience. At first she made fun of my enthusiasm, but after a few tracks she was jumping around and pushing people into the mosh pit. Now she wants to go again :)
I managed to find a video someone else shot during the show, where you can briefly see me. Here’s a screen grab of me and my friend.
And here’s the video. See if you can spot us in the mess between 1:20 and 1:30 :)
When I look at last year’s birthday post I realize how quickly time has passed. It’s like I wrote it yesterday. Compared to last year, 36 doesn’t come with thoughts about choices, but with a look to the future.
It’s been two years now working on Playrock. We released as beta without advertising and are improving it all the time to make it better and more appealing to our users. I think Playrock is a great idea and we get very good responses from people that hear about it.
However, if Playrock doesn’t do well enough, I will be forced to look for a job. It’s not optimal, but not bad either – it will be a good time for me to explore overseas job opportunities, as I previously wanted to but never had the chance.
I traveled to see The Prodigy for the 13th time in September and had an amazing time thanks to some new friends in Belgrade, Serbia.
As for side projects: I haven’t had much time to work on those. My ideas list is growing and I might start working on one of them soon. As always, it will probably be a niche project that won’t appeal to many people, but it’ll be fun to code. I didn’t manage to find a designer for the website I built for my online will idea that I already implemented, which is a shame because I was hoping to progress with that.
My workouts are still the same and I’m relatively happy with my fitness and health.
So for the upcoming year I hope that either Playrock will be successful or for a different kind of adventure outside of Israel. Other than that… life is pretty good as is :)
A few days ago I came back from my short trip to Belgrade, Serbia, where I went to see The Prodigy for the 13th time as part of their self-organized Warriors Dance Festival. Needless to say, I had an amazing time, especially because it’s been two years since the 12th show in Athens.
With me were two new Serbian friends who took very good care of me and made a great night even greater. The Serbian crowd was ecstatic, there were multiple mosh pits throughout the entire show and the adrenalin was flowing at least as much as the beer.
I only have a few pictures from Belgrade. I don’t take too many pictures any more, which is probably a shame. But maybe that will change next time.
And here’s Omen Reprise/Invaders Must Die from the show. It’s one of my favorite parts where the crowd goes from listening to clapping hands to jumping in less than a minute:
I can’t believe it… not too long ago I wrote that this was going to be a great year for me in music, partly because of a new album by The Mars Volta (which is already out and is great, by the way) and now it’s even a greater year because The Mars Volta are coming to Israel on June 11th (Hebrew article on NRG.)
This is so amazing. Here’s a fan video of one of the songs from their latest album, Noctourniquet:
Wow. 35. This age comes with some serious what-am-I-doing-with-my-life kind of thoughts. Being unemployed, single and living with a cat at that age is hardly normative (at least in Israel) and despite being very content with the current situation it’s hard not to ponder other life choices.
In any case, it’s time for the yearly look back:
A year ago I left my job to start a new venture with a friend. We since grew to a 3-person team and by now we have a very early version of our product, while we’re still tweaking the requirements for the first release. Hopefully in a few months we’ll have something to show for. This is probably the year in which we’ll know for sure whether this project is destined to take off or not.
Being unemployed (and having no income) for so long is my biggest worry for the upcoming year. I was very willing to spend some of my savings on this project, but I was hoping it will be in a better place by now. Other than that, I don’t think there’s a lot to say about entrepreneurship that hasn’t been said before. The joys and sorrows of this road are well documented in countless articles. I’m otherwise happy with my life, something I wished myself a year ago on my birthday post.
Travelling: I was abroad twice – France/Germany and Switzerland. Both trips were great. Having already booked one trip for this year – to The Prodigy’s 3rd Warrior’s Dance Festival – I already made sure that I’ll keep “exploring the world” this year as well. Travelling has become one of my favorite things.
Side projects: I updated Dindy a few times in the past couple of weeks, hoping to address issues users have been experiencing for a while. I don’t plan to add any new features to Dindy – this was just to prevent it from rotting in the Android market. Unfortunately it hadn’t gained any new users for a long time now, yet it remains with a relatively high user score (4.2 out of 5.)
Another side project is my online will idea from nearly 3 years ago. I already have an almost fully functional version of it running on Google App Engine, but there’s still a long way to go as it lacks visual design (if you’d like to help me with that – let me know) and there’s still quite a lot of code to write.
Workouts: Having suffered some injuries I’m working out (running) only twice a week now. I’m not happy about it, but I’m still in pretty good shape so it’s not that bad. I hope my injuries will subside and that I’ll be able to get back to my 3-workouts-a-week routine at some point.
That’s about it, I guess. I hope you’re happy too.
Two good things have happened in the past week, music-wise:
So as my 35th birthday is approaching it appears this year is going to be exciting, at least on the music front.
Not a bad start.