I went up to visit the Colemans this weekend, and one of their family events that I accompanied them on was a trip to go ice skating. My experience with this activity previously in life has never been positive. It was almost always at some sort of birthday party (not mine) and involved me falling down, hitting my chin on the ice, and having blood to deal with. Well, while I didn’t manage up maintain an upright position the entire time (I only fell down once though!), there was no blood or even pain to deal with. I believe I speak for everyone involved when I say that this was the preferred outcome.
I’ve continued working on SC2, now close to I think about a third of the way done with the campaign. The distraction of other games is starting to get louder, but I’m going to do my best to primarily focus on it just so that it doesn’t get lost by the wayside somewhere. That’s what happens to cause me to restart games, so I’m going to try out this amazing new* idea of actually beating a game before starting on a new one.
*Totally not new, see my summer game lists I maintained a few years back
Personal - Seattle
It might be a fairly strange situation for me, but today was the last day at work of me being the youngest non-intern member of our PM team. We have a new person starting on Monday (although because of NEO, he probably won’t show up until Tuesday), and he’s a part of my specific project even. Apparently that now makes me the “senior” member, so I get to decide what I want to keep and what I want to give to him. That sounds special, but I was basically getting to do that already since I was the only person and therefore just pushed for the stuff that I wanted to do in the first place.
One of my things today at work was a presentation related to a part of Windows that another one of the major groups is working on, and the stuff they presented was quite interesting. Of course I can’t talk about it, but suffice to say that I’m still greatly impressed by what our plans are and how they are shaping up. I doubt there will be too much information said at the company meeting this year in September about it, so it’ll be interesting to see just what exactly the Windows team has to talk about besides sales numbers.
Personal - Seattle
Another couple levels down in SC2 tonight, and I’ve yet to get bored of the game yet or run into an impossible level which is a good sign. There’s also a (unique?) autosaving feature so if I did get completely owned on a level, I don’t necessarily have to play the whole thing over again. I think that was one of my biggest problems with the original; the 10th mission I would always manage to die on after investing about 30 minutes in it, and it just wasn’t worth it to keep trying to beat it over and over and over…
Tomorrow my calendar looks full, but there’s actually very little for me to do in any of the non-white area. Aside from talking for about 15-20 minutes or so in my first meeting of the day, the rest is pretty simple. It’s also nice that the stuff that “technically” needs to be done by the end of the day tomorrow won’t actually be looked at until Monday morning, so I think I’ll easily take the tradeoff of working frantically on a Friday afternoon vs finishing up a couple documents at home over the weekend.
Personal - Seattle
Yesterday I knocked out four SC2 missions; today, another two complete. I’m actually pleasantly surprised by the variety of objectives (so far), even if some were quite predictable. I expect that the core objective concepts will start to repeat before too long and just get harder and harder to accomplish, but it’s quite nice for the time being.
Product Fair this year was much, much nicer to walk around at given the drastically lower temperatures. I once again avoided swag collection (although I guess I do have the office space now), but I randomly ran into Adrian while walking around, and he most definitely was not subscribing to my philosophy. Of course, he had also just gotten out of his talk with Ballmer where it was decided/announced that all interns were going to be getting free phones also, so he was in quite a free stuff state of mind.
Personal - Seattle
Apparently I’m not quite as dedicated as Julia who was actually at the midnight launch for it, but Starcraft 2 is exactly what I want out of my favorite RTS series so far. Sure, I’m only 4 out of 30 levels into it, but since when has Blizzard ever managed to screw up a game after it starts off well? I can hope that I won’t get too distracted in the near future so that I might actually have at completing a Blizzard game for once (I never have up to this point in time), but WoW is going to be calling my name again before too long.
Tomorrow is a big, gigantic day of empty for me, so my time will be split between continuing to write my multiple page one pagers and attending the Product Fair. The latter will probably happen around lunch or shortly thereafter; the high tomorrow has now dropped to 70, so I definitely think it meets the comfort bar for spending some time outside. Of course, in Seattle you always need to qualify that as being with no rain, but according to the little sun picture next to Wednesday, it seems like that requirement is met also.
Personal - Seattle
Why hello, primary role of my job! So happy that I get to do you all week long, as well as probably most of my non-meeting work time for the next month. Ah, how fun it is to actually get to do what you were hired to do once in a while. Of course, doing little parts of it over the other two month of each milestone would also be a great thing, but I’ll happily take this amount of time given that it’s about twice as long as what I had the previous round.
Amazon has chosen to inform me that my copy of SC2 has in fact shipped, and with the delivery estimate currently set at tomorrow, I can hope that 24 hours from now I’ll be completely engrossed in playing that. More realistically, I’ll install it, probably watch TV for a couple hours while said install process completes, play for a little while, and then go back to watching more TV. I’m not sure if buying it digitally and preloading it (similar to what Steam can do) was an option, but hey, it’s a Blizzard game, so I of course had to buy the Collector’s Edition and get all the random, totally unneeded extra stuff that comes along with it.
Personal - Seattle
Since I didn’t finish the second season of Lost until early this morning, it was technically exactly one month that it took me to go through the first two seasons. Hey, watching shows off Netflix apparently does have some advantages over torrenting it seems. Well, I guess I could have pulled the same data out of the previous posts here, but Netflix does make it quite a bit easier to get at the same information in this case.
Not a whole lot planned so far this week, but there is Product Fair on Tuesday and Wednesday. Last year this was accompanied by the 100 degree heat on a field with turf that mentally took me back to football training, and not in a good way. This year the highs are projected to be at 75 and 74, so I expect it to be a much more enjoyable time.
Personal - Seattle
Inception was an interesting movie; part Bond, part Mission: Impossible, part Matrix. Fortunately I like all three of those series, and Inception did a good job at being entertaining also. It’s definitely on my purchase radar, but I feel like it might be a little bit to “heavy” to a movie to be one that I’ll just randomly turn on whenever I’m bored and want something to pass the time. My score: 8.5/10.
I should get done with the second season of Lost before I go to sleep tonight (I can say that because I only have the second half of the finale left to watch). Unless there’s just some huge cliffhanger that I can’t bear to stand waiting on, I feel like I’ll take a few weeks break before starting up the third season so that I can spend my free time catching on up some games. Perhaps some 360 games will come into the mix, but I’m mainly thinking about WoW and SC2. Especially SC2…
Personal - Seattle
On one of my previous movie outings, I accumulated enough points on my rewards card to have the machine spit out a coupon at me for a free ticket. Yay, free ticket! Well, it’s also void on certain classes of movies which tends to include anything that’s up to a few weeks old. My plan had been to go see a movie tonight since I would get the greatest value then, but alas, all the movies I wanted to go see were still new enough so that my free ticket could not be used. Given the choices of paying or staying at home and watching Lost, I went with the free option.
My lack of ability to use a free ticket tonight in no way impacts my plan to go see Inception tomorrow. It late enough that I can comfortably sleep in, but still at a good time to leave me the majority of my afternoon to go do other things. Granted, all things that probably involve me coming back to my apartment, but I never restricted myself from that when thinking of stuff to do on the weekend.
Personal - Seattle
It’s. Almost. Here.
Blizzard just has a way with their cinematic trailers. The Wrath of the Lich King intro for WoW was amazing, the Diablo 3 debut trailer was impressive, and now the final Starcraft 2 trailer looks like it might as well be a movie. At this rate, the intro for Cataclysm will probably be indistinguishable from real life.
Tomorrow’s Friday, weekend is after that, same drill as always. I’m getting tired of ignoring Inception spoilers so that will probably be my Saturday entertainment. It would be nice to play through the original Starcraft before next Tuesday (especially considering I never beat the campaign on it), but there are supposedly enough problems with running it under Windows 7 that it might not end up being worth the effort.
Personal - Seattle