Posts Tagged busy
The week that was (and is)
Posted by Rockjaw in Day Today, MMO-related, Personal on May 8th, 2008
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.
Sketchbook Wednesday
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.
Last night, Kyle quit the band
… 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. “
What DAY is it??
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.
Holy schnike!
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?
You said what?