Tag Archives: busy

Yeah, work can be weird

July 9, 2008 – 9:35 pm

Got someone to throw a glass of water over a colleague today - and caught it all on film. Boy, some days… more on what that’s about soon enough.

Working hard on everything Leipzig. Pay attention to Twitter, if you’re that way inclined (or if you’re not, the most recent updates are on the front page here) and you’ll get a minute-by-minute.

Okay, you won’t, that would be stupid, but you’ll get occasional random updates when I’m too busy to sit and type here. Tonight my brain isn’t functioning enough to do anything more creative, so you see me here, rambling.

Let’s see. Read More »

By Rockjaw | Posted in Work-related | Also tagged , , , | Comments (2)

Sniffle

July 7, 2008 – 9:57 pm

What ho. So the illness, which started off as some sort of bizarre muscle pain and then just decided it was a cold after all, is now running its course. Lemsip. Strepsils. You know the drill. As my wife delights in pointing out, apparently I have some sort of Super Immune System when it comes to colds, so she has zero sympathy.

We’re busy at work. Very busy. Busy in that “So much to do, what next??” kind of way. It’s almost all to do with Leipzig. I’m teaching myself the intricacies of Final Cut Express by cutting together videos for the Bristol Comic Expo and UK Games Expo, which is teaching me how I’ll be able to hack together promotional videos for the show. At the same time, I’m dealing with our casting (almost done now) and helping the community guys with their crazy ambitious plans. As one of them put it today “How come we knew we wanted to go to Leipzig a year ago, and we’re still running around trying to get it finished a month out?” Ask me that again next Easter.

Anyway, this is preamble to say that posting will probably be light here for a while. Keep an eye on Twitter if you want semi-regular updates. (By the way don’t be offended if you ‘follow’ me on there and I don’t follow back. I tend to keep Twitter fairly one-way, otherwise it’s just more distractions throughout the day.)

More stuff coming. It’ll just be slow.

By Rockjaw | Posted in Day Today, Work-related | Also tagged , , | Comments (2)

Coagulation

June 25, 2008 – 1:59 pm

I know I’ve been quite absent lately, but hey - this is what happens when work gets a mite busy and out-of-work gets busy too. Between work, socialising, theatre trips, writing and the (very) occasional game of something-or-other, it’s left very little time to think. Let alone write.

To guilt-trip myself into doing them here are a few posts in the brain hopper, ready to go down the chute:

  • UK Games Expo (in one post) - half, maybe two-thirds written
  • Something on being ‘almost famous’ which is not as dumb as it sounds (I think)
  • Reflection on comments made by Richard Bartle recently… go Google it
  • Something on the games industry, students, breaking in, etc…
  • The reality of, well, working in the biz

As you can see, pretty half-formed stuff. My mind’s been on the whole industry/students/breaking in/reality vs fantasy/dreams vs reality thing a lot recently.

Hope you can make sense of this, I’m not sure I can.

By Rockjaw | Posted in Work-related | Also tagged , | Comments (1)

Days of summer

June 21, 2008 – 3:33 pm

Ah, those lazy days of summer. Although of course they’re not lazy, as you can probably tell due to the lack of activity around here.

In fact pretty much the opposite; the To-Do list at work has been growing rapidly in the last week, and that leaves me with very little time to even think about blogging, let alone doing it. So sorry about that.

It’s all for your good though, dear reader, with the possible exception of some of our ‘internal facing’ projects which are of course directed inside the company. Naturally, plenty going on but not much I can really talk about. All will be revealed in time.

Speaking of, I don’t seem to be able to get a handle on time during the summer, which is odd. I keep telling myself I have loads of time before Event X or Event Y, and then realise that X is in fact pretty much around the corner, and that Y isn’t too far long after that. About then I count back in my head and realise I’m already behind schedule.

It’s also a myth that summer’s any kind of quiet time; instead we’re working to prepare for the end of the year, when the next round of ’stuff’ starts to happen.

So for instance even though Memorabilia is five months away, I’ll have to start thinking about it seriously pretty damn soon. Although the proposed ‘MiniCon 2′ (needs a better name) won’t happen until next Easter, there’s stuff to do regarding that, as well. Before all that though, there’s other things on the near-horizon that need much more urgent attention. So the to-do list blooms and we get busy.

Not a whole lot to say then I guess, but just wanted to check in and let you know I was alive. The next couple of weeks will have some interesting stuff in ‘em, so stay tuned, and hopefully more will be revealed.

By Rockjaw | Posted in Work-related | Also tagged | Comments (0)

Going AWOL

June 3, 2008 – 10:30 am

I’ll be a mite busy in the next few hours and days:

  • Today’s all about nailing this damn presentation for my talk on Thursday. It’s almost there, in my mind, and the rest of it will come in the next few hours as long as I keep working on it. Tonight will possibly be more of the same, knowing me.
  • Tomorrow we’re driving to Stafford, which is going to take a while, even with good traffic. I’ve no idea if I’ll have internet access at our hotel either.
  • Thursday and Friday - MMOG-fest. When I’m not watching talks, giving a talk, talking to students, or selling to students, I’ll probably be in the pub doing all of the above.

So back to normal on the weekend. I’ve got a few things stored up - half-done on my post about London MCM Expo, and of course I want to write up the UK Games Expo from this past weekend. In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves. About this, if you like:

Callista, Lillit & Paul by Karl Kopinski

By Rockjaw | Posted in Work-related | Also tagged , , | Comments (4)

The week that was (and is)

May 8, 2008 – 8:05 am

Busy week especially outside of work, which is why you haven’t seen much here and probably won’t for a little while. May is festival month here in Brighton, with the Brighton Festival and Fringe both descending, and this year unlike previous we’ve decided to really go for it and see a bunch of stuff. So far we’ve seen a couple of plays, with more to come, and a tea dance which I’ve foolishly agreed to as well.

Most of this is purely for entertainment but I have a personal interest too, as I’ve written a couple of plays and want to see a lot more theatre just for reference on staging, direction and so on. It’s illuminating.

When I’m not out being cultured I’m trying to hit the gym and in-between, GTA IV tends to suck me in, so time at the keyboard to do this is sort of limited.

Work-wise, we’ve been preparing for this weekend’s Comic Expo (at which I might even try to ‘live blog’ a bit, when I’m not being bombarded by people!), as well as getting a few other things moving or off the ground.

Had a real start-stop day yesterday - our Christmas party idea was presented and welcomed… only for us to find that the venue we had in mind is now a year behind schedule in its refurbishment. So that sorta throws that idea out of the window. Back to the drawing board.

As well as that I’ve been invited to attend an academic / industry ‘conference’ up at Staffordshire University in early June, which should be fun. I think I’ll be doing a variation on my ‘how to break into games’ presentation for it.

The calendar’s filling up rapidly, which is good but unusual for me. So please feel free to direct suggestions my way so that when I do get time to blog I do so on topics you want to hear about.

By Rockjaw | Posted in Day Today, Personal, Work-related | Also tagged | Comments (1)

Sketchbook Wednesday

April 3, 2008 – 12:15 am

Three days left in the office. Errr, two… things for breakfast. One thing on my mind: sketchbook*.

  • Toast and coffee to start the day. Mmmmm.
  • Decide to nail the sketchbook as best I can today, so start things rolling when Chris and Spaff are in, by getting each of them on to tasks to help finish it up.
  • Not long after, Chris gets an email which throws a fairly large spanner in the works with the Bristol Comic Expo, and one particular planned… thing. (I can’t reveal because it’s a good surprise.) Still, I move to fix it.
  • Email four of the CrewNC Sidekicks about their Forum titles, which we forgot to do by accident. Sorry folks!
  • Some general chit-chat about April Fool’s, which we’re all agreed can run the gamut from very clever and funny, to extremely lame and not funny at all. I blame the lawyers. But basically, you can’t do an April Fool’s on April 1st and expect anyone to actually be fooled… so now it’s just a sort of ‘April Joke’. Which is often not funny.
  • Having said that, we all agree the Guild Wars stick figures are really cool.

Read More »

By Rockjaw | Posted in Day Today | Also tagged , | Comments (9)

Last night, Kyle quit the band

March 20, 2008 – 7:19 am

… now we’re back together. Uh.

So yesterday saw the third 12-hour plus day in a row, starting in the coffee shop and ending… erm, in bed? Well no, at my desk I guess, after pizza and morale-boosting beers earlier in the evening, and a final-straight boost of Tenacious D, the Top Gun soundtrack, James Bond themes and other ‘uplifting’ songs supplied by Spaff.

As he said, “I knew there was a reason I kept those speakers.” At one point I even started dancing, and that’s when I knew I was exhausted.

In my personal experience of ‘the hard slog’ during my career (and there’s been quite a bit) you’ve got to be careful how much you do in close sequence. Too many days of this and your mind starts to work against you. You lose focus, start to wish desperately you were elsewhere, and as a result can’t really accomplish what you need to do.

I never quite figured out what my limit was, but I think it’s probably around three, four days. Today’s day four, so we’ll see how we go. Luckily today is filled with ‘distractions’ from my normal work, like P.A. systems arriving, picking up a minibus, and of course our favourite stress-filled activity: packing.

Tomorrow we hit the road and at that point, there ain’t a whole lot left we can do. I think we’ve done a whole lot, I just wish we had more time to plan it, and more time to execute, so that there was less of a feeling of headlong rush. In the immortal words of the D, though, I hope when we get to this meet people realise one thing; we made all this effort for one reason.

“We only came to kick some ass. “

By Rockjaw | Posted in Day Today | Also tagged , | Comments (0)

What DAY is it??

March 19, 2008 – 7:28 am

Ah, movies; always ready with a quote whenever my mind isn’t quite up to figuring out a subject line.

To answer my own question - but I had to check - today is Wednesday. The day after tomorrow is Friday, when I’ll be driving a minibus to Birmingham, Omega Sektor, and our MiniCon. I feel like I’ve said this a few times here, but to be specific; we had six weeks of prep time for something that I’d normally need six months for.

It’s been busy.

Yesterday was long. In the office at 9:30am, out at 11pm, with an hour’s break for dinner with Amanda. I got quite a bit done, but it’s like climbing the second-to-last-peak of some mountain range… you crest the summit, look over and just go “Oh, bugger, there’s another bloody mountain over here.”

I am completely exhausted but gotta push through. We now need to focus on details, as we always do this close (although we usually get to that point earlier). Today we’re going to literally fill a room with everything we need to pack and take to the event (which, conveniently, is pretty much everything we have in storage). We need to double-check everything, and I mean every bloody thing - from “Do we have enough copies of Lineage II?” to “Do we have enough gaffer tape?”

It gets a bit crazy at these times. But we’re never gonna survive, unless… etc.

Right. Email, shower, COFFEE (small vat should do) and then work.

By Rockjaw | Posted in Day Today | Also tagged , | Comments (0)

Holy schnike!

March 17, 2008 – 8:46 pm

Boy, it’s been an insane few days. Those kinds of days when they all blur into each other and every day just seems to fly by, and you look back and you can’t quite believe what you’ve done and then can’t write a coherent sentence about the experience, as I am failing to do… here.

Friday and Saturday were spent on a scouting trip, and also a delivery run. Quite a while back I’d decided it would be a good idea to go check out Codemasters’ Connect 08 event, basically out of professional curiosity. We wanted to see just how the competition would handle a large scale player event. In a nutshell, and of course in just my opinion, they didn’t handle it that well.

Sure, it wasn’t a chaotic nightmare. On the other hand it wasn’t very exciting, either. I could go on about this but I expect you might think I’m just bad-mouthing because they’re in the same field as NCsoft - not true, but I don’t think this ‘early in our relationship’ you can trust me that far yet. Suffice to say, I don’t feel as worried as I did before I went that we’ll be able to mount a much, much better event this weekend.

Ah, this weekend; the source of all my trouble and the reason I’ve been working like a dog. So after we returned from Birmingham on Saturday I basically went straight back to work, and apart from a few hours with the wife at home where I couldn’t quite relax nor veg out, I’ve been here ever since. Here I am, 11 hours after I walked into the office this morning, still here - and this, dear reader, is in fact my way of relaxing before I head home.

That, and listening to the Romancing the Stone soundtrack. Which is awesome.

Anyway. I don’t want to ramble on too long, so I think I’ll leave this here. I have more stuff to say but my brain has barely been able to talk about… whatever I was just talking about. It was interesting though, right?

By Rockjaw | Posted in Day Today | Also tagged | Comments (0)

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