My 3-week vacation started this Friday. It hasn’t quite sunk in that I don’t have to go to work on Monday, or the Monday after that, or the Monday after that… I’ll be going to New York for part of it, but this is going to be mostly a staycation, which I’m uber-excited about. A good chunk of time is going to be taken up by half-marathon training, but otherwise, I think there will be a lot of outdoor activities, maybe some day trips, and I have to be sure to block off some time for pajamas-n-video games at home. I can’t wait!
Posts Tagged ‘work’
Ship day!
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
At long last, The Sims 3 has shipped! Go out buy 10,000 copies, pls. For those of you wondering, some of the major features I worked on are opportunities, cooking, moving, lifetime rewards, carpools, the burglar and policeman, and several others. So if any of those suck, you can blame me. 
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It’s alive!
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009And by ‘it’ I mean ‘me’. Or to be more grammatically correct, ‘I’. Anyway…
Apologies to all my readers who have surely abandoned me by now. I have been in the middle of the most prolonged and intense crunch period I’ve ever experienced at work, but it’s winding down now, and I have emerged relatively unscathed, if not a little fatter and with a more confused sleep schedule.
The one positive about my 1pm-midnight work schedule is that I’ve gotten to visit Buddy, i.e. Casty McBrokenAnkle almost every morning on my way to work. (I am presuming, perhaps wrongly, that this is a positive for him as well…)
Last weekend I had my first weekend off in a while, and made good use of the San Francisco sunshine. We hosted a baby shower on Saturday which was actually not crappy, and on Sunday the mom-to-be’s mother treated us to Easter Brunch at the Marriott downtown, which was delicious. Afterwards, a group of us went to Dolores Park to check out the “Hunky Jesus” competition which was one of those only-in-San-Francisco things. But it was good to hang out in the sun and eat snacks.
Hopefully I’ll be back on a normal work schedule within a week or so and get back to my very important life, i.e. running, climbing, playing games, and catching up on TV. Woo!
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Hello, World!
Monday, March 2nd, 2009First things first:
Happy Birthday, Amanda and Joe!
Here are your bunnies:
Sandwiched between a 16-hour and a 14-hour work day, I was able to attend their joint 30th/60th birthday party last Saturday, which was a lot of fun. Plus, leftover cake! Mmm…cake for breakfast.
As for work, I have emerged victorious after an absolutely brutal weekend. As bad as it was, part of me actually thought the experience was kind of…fun. I’m not sure how many of you have done this kind of crunch, but there’s something about all of you getting together to squash the last few problems as a team that’s pretty exciting. On Friday, I left at 2am, and about half of my group stayed behind to play a board game together. I guess there really is something to doing a job you like with people whose company you enjoy. It certainly could be a lot worse, that’s for sure. Hopefully things will slow down going forward, but it’s more likely it will be stretches of boredom punctuated by spikes of extreme panic. Good times!
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Q3
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009EA released its dismal 3rd-quarter results today to the tune of a $641M loss. It is always sad to have your company do poorly, but it is especially disappointing because I feel like it will make our company even more risk averse, and more likely to stick with surefire hits, instead of investing more in new and interesting games.
Of course, I (well, maybe not me personally, since I have no decision-making power) am actually partly to blame, because a non-insignificant contributor of these dismal results is the new ship date for The Sims 3, which is, as the astute will notice, not in FY09.
That all said, our stock price somehow went up, which apparently was because our revised earnings plan for FY10 was not as bad as everyone feared. I guess I’ll take what I can get.
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Buzzzz
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009When people ask how I’m doing, I sometimes answer that I am “operating at a high frequency.” While this makes perfect sense to me, it generally elicits a response of stunned silence. What I mean by this is that I am feeling very stressed out, usually about work.
The problem with this state is that I tend to get a sort of tunnel vision around the thing that is the source of the stress, causing me to leave all other interests by the wayside. This is why my Flickr stream has all but dried out, I am terribly out of running shape, I’m still stuck at 10d/11a in climbing, and why a 40-hour game is probably going to take me a year to complete.
This is not a wah wah entry, just an explanation as to why I might seem a little out of it nowadays. And a little fatty.
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Still Employed, Part II
Friday, October 31st, 2008As some of you have already heard, there were some pretty massive layoffs yesterday. I’m still employed, and unlike previous years, our studio seems to have gotten off pretty light.
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What’s going on in my head?
Monday, October 20th, 2008I had a dream last night that I met Sarah Palin. One of the things I told her was that I was concerned that people don’t have a voice. She nodded and suggested that maybe people should write their ideas out on huge banners and stretch them across the state of Alaska. My response? “Governor Palin, I don’t think that will work.”
Apologies for the lack of updates recently. They unofficially have us on 6 day work weeks, so I haven’t had too much time for fun-ness. Still was able to squeeze in an outing to Martunis Saturday night where I had, wait for it, two thirds of an apricot martini. Aw yeah. Sunday a group of us walked to The Park Chalet for an overpriced brunch. Trying to get my money’s worth, I ate a lot of cocktail shrimp and woke up this morning with a stomach ache. But, as Yar pointed out, at least I “just leveled up in Asian”.
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Not my best night
Friday, July 11th, 20081) Left work at close to 11:30pm after working for 5 hours on someone else’s bug, and deciding it was more of a feature request.
2) Discovered the 101N on-ramp at Ralston was closed.
3) Took 101S so I could get off at Holly, and get onto 101N there.
4) Did a U-turn to get to the freeway entrance.
5) Discovered Holly on-ramp was closed as well.
6) Saw flashing lights in my rearview mirror.
7) Was informed by nice police officer that I had made an illegal U-turn.
8) Was let off with a warning.
9) Breathed a sigh of relief.
10) Took El Camino to Hillsdale to finally get on 101N.
11) Got home around 12:15am.
12) Ate chips and salsa for dinner.
13) Bed.
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Another lazy weekend
Monday, June 23rd, 2008And by “lazy” I mean I went to work. Saturday was a laundry day, then we had dinner at Aslam’s Rasio in the Mission, which I thought was excellent, but maybe not worth the Muni ride + walk out to the Mission.
Sunday I went to work for 5 hours or so to get a little more ahead on my current task. On the way in, on Yar’s recommendation I tried the McDonald’s Southern Style Chicken Sandwich, which is supposed to be a poor man’s Chick-Fil-A sandwich, and I gotta say it’s pretty decent. Not as good as Chick-Fil-A, but considering the nearest Chick-Fil-A is 40 miles from SF, I’ll take it. Of course, without the cole slaw and waffle fries, it wasn’t really a complete experience, but I’ll take what I can get.
That evening we went to see Owen and his friend Yair play at Epic Arts in Oakland. It was a great show, and I got to exercise my 5D under very challenging lighting conditions (very dark room + backlit performers), so I’ll have to see how those came out.
Other than that, I watched a lot of Dexter, which I highly recommend, though maybe not right before bed, as that leads to really weird dreams.
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