Adam Montandons Blog - The Montandon Method

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #25

admin — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:00:31 +0000

25) I always wish I could do more.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #24

admin — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:00:03 +0000

24) I hate to see wasted potential. It’s my biggest pet hate. I often thought that if you have a talent you should use it, push it to the max, because there are millions of people out there who wish they had that talent, so please don’t waste it.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #23

admin — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:00:32 +0000

23) I really don’t understand why, in business, the single most important thing you can do is “Be different” yet everybody teaches us to be the same. Come on. Be different. Don’t fear it. If you are going to be the same as everybody else then don’t complain if you blend into the background of obscurity. Just because everybody does it one way, it’s not a reason for YOU to do it that way.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #22

admin — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 12:00:05 +0000

22) I love giving lectures. It’s my favourite thing to do in the whole world, presenting things to people who are interested. I have seen so many great lectures from so many amazing people who would visit my university. Danny Brown, Kevin Warrick, Stephen Perrella to name a few. And I really want to “give back” the knowledge stored up in my brain to other people. If I didn’t have my current job, I would love to be a lecturer. My favourite thing is to give a guest lecture, because I can just zoom in, blow people’s minds, and then zoom out again. No academic politics or paperwork, just sheer inspiration. Because to me that is so important. One of my favourite lectures was when I gave the Keynote speech at Lego Land and showed some new projects for the first time and the crowed loved it. If anybody is reading this and wants me to come and do a lecture at their university or organisation, let me know!

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #21

admin — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 12:00:47 +0000

21) I can’t quite believe that in my life I have spoken at the Royal Institute of Science, and had digital artworks in Tate Britain. I would never have imagined that in my wildest dreams.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #20

admin — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:00:36 +0000

20) Two of the biggest influences on my life are Walt Disney and P T Barnum. When I tell people this, they don’t believe me though.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #19

admin — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:00:59 +0000

19) I am constantly surprised by how magical reality is, and how surprising and unusual life is. There is no such thing as a “daily grind” because there is magic everywhere.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #18

admin — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:00:33 +0000

18) When I was working on the Butterfly Garden, I went to sleep the night before the installation. I hadn’t had time to test much of the code, because the hardware wasn’t entirely finished. In the night, I dreamt of every single line of code, and saw it vividly in my imagination. Every list, every variable, every handler. When I woke up, I realised that there would be an error, and I knew exactly in which line of code it would be, and I knew exactly how to fix it. When I finally got to the installation I checked it and I was right. I had compiled all the code in my dreams.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #17

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:00:34 +0000

17) When I was 19, I really did see the matrix. Lines and blocks of code everywhere. This was BEFORE the movie came out, and the matrix to me was white and green and blue and grey, and tabbed in paragraphs. It happened when I was kissing a girl. That’s probably not a good thing.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #16

admin — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 12:00:44 +0000

16) When I was 9, I had the most horrible teacher ever, an evil old Irish catholic dragon. She would read out maths questions and we had to answer them in our schoolbooks. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was audio-dyslexic ( I wouldn’t find this out till I was 22, and I deduced that at least now I had a psychological reason for “never having to listen to anything anyone ever said”) and I found it hard to answer the question in my head without writing it down.

I developed my own shorthand for writing down the questions, much like a computer code ( I started coding my own simple games when I was about 8 years old). I always got the answers right, but the “working out” was wrong, so my teacher always failed me. I thought it was so unfair. As I grew up I realised that finding my own solution would serve me better in the long run than getting a 10 out of 10 from Mrs Wilkins.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #15

admin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 12:00:24 +0000

15) When I was 10 years old, and I went to a highschool, the teacher tested us on maths and English to see how good we were. They thought that there was a problem with me, because on some tests I did really well, and on other tests I scored very badly. The truth was, I was sat next to another boy who wasn’t very smart at all, and I was trying to help him out as well, by looking over at his answers and helping him out when he got stuck. It meant that I had “failed” my five times tables, even though I knew them off by heart. They even made me see a special teacher to try and figure out what was “wrong” with me!

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #14

admin — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 12:00:42 +0000

14) I love my brain so much, its crammed with so much stuff I’m always surprised by it. I have often thought that I could cope easily with the loss of a limb, an arm or a leg or something, even the loss of speech or sight, but I would be devastated if I lost my brain function. I love how I think.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #13

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:00:00 +0000

13) I love it when it is raining or grey, because I don’t have to make an excuse for not being outside. I’m a real indoors sort of person, and I’d much prefer to be in a city than the countryside.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #12

admin — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:00:02 +0000

12) My house where I grew up was a 400 year old convent. My bedroom was above the crypt, and the back garden had gravestones in it. For a child with a big imagination it was a very scary place indeed. To this day I still cannot watch zombie films, vampires, or anything to do with the undead. It did, however, give me the idea to start a “multimedia monastery” where people weary from the dot-com burnout could seek digital refuge.

I’m pretty sure the place was haunted. But I dont like to talk about it.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #11

admin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:00:18 +0000

11) When I moved to Canada I made so many great friends, and shared a special relationship with them, that I never wanted it to end. It did, but I’ll be back one day, I’m sure. It was the best year I have ever had.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #10

admin — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:00:54 +0000

10) When people talk about love, and they talk about “the one” and “just knowing” I thought it was a load of rubbish. I had never felt that way in any of my relationships, and I just thought it was soppy greetings-card mush. Then I met someone really special and perhaps for the first time in my life really, really fell in love. It surprised me, and for the first time in my life I understood all those scenes in Japanese films where a couple stand either side of a field with the cherry blossom blowing in the wind and the soft blurred focus of the camera. That was the first time I ever felt like that.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #9

admin — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:00:51 +0000

9) I once had a client tell me I was “Too Radical, Too Interactive” – And I want that as my epitaph on my gravestone. Also, at my Funeral I really want to be sent off to the sounds of Electric Six – Danger! High Voltage! – I always figured I’d die of electric shock and it would be hilariously ironic.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #8

admin — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 12:00:30 +0000

8) My single most favourite moment of my entire life was in 2004 in Austria at the Europrix awards presentations. It was before the awards, and each nominee had just 5 mins to present their project to an international audience. I worked so hard at the presentation to make sure that every word was right. I gave the performance of my life and I really loved it. At the end, a girl from France came up to me and said “When you were up there, talking about the future, you made everybody else seem like they were living in the past.”

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #7

admin — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 12:00:53 +0000

7) I work crazy hours. I usually start around 9:30 – 10am but keep going till 7:30 or later most nights, and I’ll spend pretty much every Saturday and most Sundays working too. Usually in the office, on my laptop or in my note pads. Every time i go shopping I am looking for something that I could use in a project. Every time I watch TV or see a movie or read a book it’s because it’s something related to what I am working on.

Twenty five things you never knew about me. #6

admin — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 12:00:17 +0000

6) I have to think of the future, or I will go crazy! If it’s been 3 months or more without really thinking about what I am doing and where I am going, it drives me mad. I love to try out different possibilities, first in my head and then on paper. I work out what I want to be doing and where I want to be and work backwards from that, to see what it would take to achieve, and then I work forwards again to project how I might do it. I can never just “drift along” for more than a couple of weeks, I need to constantly remind myself what I am working towards.