My other new art
played Halo last night. How lucky am I?
My new art
night. On my office wall now.
Blogs - Abstract
Ahh, class. I'm finding the online class thing to be interesting. If you're the type of person who procrastinates and needs the motivation of a teacher and class in person to do work, online won't work. Its basically discussion board threads, and you either contribute or you don't. Not whole lot of direction. At first, I thought I'd hit it in small bits every day - an hour a day. But I'm finding I end up doing the readings each day, and doing the work itself in long stretches on the weekends. Which also works for online.
I'm sure I'll find later classes more interesting; ITEC 610 is basically an introduction to IT class. The nice part is I'm able to use much of my work experience in the discussions so the class work itself, so far, has been easy. The readings are boring, mostly because this is what I do for a living. To be fair, this is just an intro class so I wasn't expecting too much.
I submitted my Abstract (300 word overview and outline) for my class paper this week. I originally chose Wikis as my topic, but as I started drafting my thesis, I found that what I really wanted to write about was Blogs. Most of my work is based off this fantastic book called Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. It starts out fairly dry and academic, but later chapters discuss specific companies and how they use wikis and blogs for collaboration -- those chapters are great read.
So most of my paper is going to be about using blogs as a venue for corporate transparency - like Microsoft or Google. Both companies have dozens of blogs - both internal and public. I'm mostly interested in the internal blogs -- communication between developers is a problem that every team grapples with and I think blogs are a way to improve them. In regards to gaming industry specifically -- companies like EA have multiple development teams scattered across the world - all trying to basically do the same thing and blogs can be a great way for all those developers to share their experiences day to day. Post mortems are fine, but limited because its a one time report. A blog can communicate the day to day pain and suffering right away - so all developers can get a taste of the project immediately and learn together.
Because software development is not an assembly line -- though many folks in the industry want to pretend that it works that way. We make stuff by failing. A lot. And learning so we can improve on the next try. The fancy word is iteration. I say that word a lot at work. During Oblivion's development, we called it making pots. You gotta make a lot of pots so you can eventually get good enough to make an awesome pot, rather than spending a long time trying to make your first pot perfect.
In fact, I think blogs can apply to any team. Large teams make it difficult for depts to communicate. Pick any dev team in the industry and if the tools programmers had a blog that documented their day to day - I bet artists and designers who use the tools would read it religiously to find out what features are coming and how to better use the tools themselves (along with the rationales for why certain features are lower priority or cut - this would inevitably lead to discussions/arguments and better information for prioritizing features -- and in the end, buy in from both the programmers and the folks who use the tools since everyone will have had their "say" so to speak). All this stuff happens in person on a team either informally or via meetings, but it doesn't scale well when the team grows -- blogs handle scaling well.
I do love corporate public blogs. Google has excellent ones. MajorNelson for Xbox is a favorite, as well. My company's blog -- bethblog -- is a nice snapshot of my company. In many ways, bethblog is as much for the company itself as it is for the public -- Bethesda is growing like mad and bethblog provides a nice central spot for the pulse of the company. I haven't contributed much lately beyond the developer profiles (which I love doing. I think they are great way to get to know the team as individual people, as opposed to the entity of the "team"), mostly because things are crazy busy at work and will be for a while (until "Fall 2008").
And I've been far too busy taking pictures on my iPhone and posting them here. Priorities, people.
Line for Halo 3
Picked up Halo 3 this morning, after pre-ordering via bestbuy.com and selecting in store pickup. I stopped by this morning, got my game and ended up waiting over 30 minutes to get my receipt. Evidently, if you order online and do in store pickup, the store has to process your order online -- so, when bestbuy.com is experiencing high traffic and locked up, guess who isn't getting their receipt? Me, that's who.
Swedish Tv Host Throws Up On Live TV
Check out this video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9ihncLGOx4
Sent from my iPhone
Heroes is back!
I've been waiting all summer long for new Heroes. And yes, I did take this with my iphone (not).
Cool looking cake
Greatest parking spot
Ever get a parking spot that was so awesome that you just want to take a picture of it so you could prove that you did get the closest spot once?
Smooches
Ash's Good Eats update
Burlington Bagel and Bakery Cafe - while at Sarah and Jon's wedding in Burlington, we had breakfast here. Lots of interesting bagel varieties, great service and good coffee. Cheap, too. When in Burlington, VT, eat breakfast here. Probably good for lunch, too.
Hank's Oyster Bar - at here last night with Megen and her sister, Ellen, and her friend, Kate. I had the lobster roll with curried cauliflower. The mac and cheesy was particularly good. The food was fantastic and there was more on the menu that I wanted to try so we'll be going back.
A&J's - this is a family favorite. Authentic, delicious, cheap.
View Larger Map
Blogger Play
This is one of the most mesmerizing, addictive websites I've ever seen -- Blogger Play. It displays all the images being uploaded to Blogger. Unbelievably cool. Like tapping into the collective consciousness of everyone who is using Blogger.
Bionic Woman = awesome
I downloaded some TV premieres to our Tivo from Amazon. They were free. I like free. Bionic Woman was good (though the teaser trailers give away too much). Chuck was surprisingly entertaining, too.
Free_Fall_TV_Premieres
Logging onto intraweb while flying
Virgin America announces in-flight, air-to-ground broadband - Boing Boing Gadgets
This is pretty cool. I'm flying Virgin America in November for a 2 day conference in San Francisco. It was weird booking a flight for an airline that actually doesn't start flights out of Dulles yet. They are due to start later this month. I ended up with a direct flight for under $300 from Dulles. Great deal considering I usually have to fly out of BWI to get that low a price.
WVU vs MD tomorrow
Terrapins Say Their Rushing Defense Is Finally Up to Speed - washingtonpost.com
WVU spanked us last year pretty badly. I have high hopes this year for a more respectable loss -- yes, loss. We aren't winning tomorrow night. Just hope to lose better.
Make Love, Not Warcraft Wins Emmy
TV: Make Love, Not Warcraft Wins Emmy - Kotaku
I love this episode. I've decided my new goal as a game developer is to get into a South Park episode.
Austin, day 3
Slow day but enjoyed a spirited panel about the future of MMOs. Part of the conference is like visiting a foreign country -- places like Habbo which is a huge MMO. If I were a 13 year old teenager, I'd know all about them, hehe. There seems to be a divide between AAA-hardcore, subscription-based MMOs (World of Warcraft) and web-based, micro-transaction/free, user-created content driven MMOs. Buzzwords like social networks and Web 2.0 are being thrown around a lot. I think it would be cool if someone made an MMO out of Facebook - in many ways, it already is. Raph Koster made a reference to Oblivion's Horse Armor during a question about microtransactions, which made me laugh.
I had a great lunch of Arroz Con Pollo. Yum.
Megen arrives in a few hours. Looking forward to eating BBQ tonight, driving up to Dallas tomorrow.
Will miss football on Sunday as we have a 2 PM flight home. Bummer.
Photographer
We chose a photographer - Weatherford Photography. We met with several, and thought Weatherford was the best compromise between someone we thought would be reliable, yet artistic enough to give us interesting pictures. We both really aren't interested in standard shoulder to shoulder pictures, and tended to like the more artistic, "photojournalistic" pics. I'd love to have 2-3 amazing shots that look artistic enough that we would hang them on our wall, pieces that look like art in addition to pictures from our wedding.
Weatherford had some pluses going for them:
They had really cool photo books - more like coffee table books instead of photo albums.
We liked their pictures.
They are all digital and they touch up every picture, irregardless of whether we are ordering prints or not.
A husband and wife team, they both work the day of our wedding so we're getting two photographers for the price of one.
They are local. They live in Sterling and work out of their home. So we know where they live if they screw up the most important pictures of our lives to date. hehe.
So that's done.
Cut that meat! Cut that meat!
The Taipei Debs had a great opening NFL night thanks to Peyton Manning's 288 passing yards and 3 TD passes - a sweet 32 points. I'm playing So Many Swears - Mike Ryan (a former coworker who lives in Chicago now). Fortunately, only 2 of the TD passes were to Marvin Harrison, who is on Mike's team.
I'm feeling pretty good about this week so far. I think Barber is going to have a great game this week, so should the Jaguars.
ITEC 610: Information Technology Foundations
One of my first assignments, a mini project practicum is to start a blog and use it as a weekly reflective learning journal. Fortunately, I'll just use this blog.
I'm taking this class online. Its basically readings and discussion boards. The textbook is Management Information Systems. Pretty stale reading in general, but since this is the first course, I'm imagining its not going to be particularly fascinating.
I have to select my individual research subject and sign up for a group project this week, too. I signed up to do a case study on Southwest airlines. As for my own research paper, I'm thinking of writing about Wikis as my topic.
Austin, day 2
Had some good sushi tonight for dinner, watching Colts-Saints game.
Just got an email that COD4 Beta level cap is going up. woot. Wish I were home to take advantage of that.
More sessions today. Walked the floor a bit. I'm finding the sessions not as interesting as last year.
More stuff for my class while I watch football.
Megen arrives tomorrow. We're going to look at bats and eat BBQ.
Austin, day 1
Got up at 5:30 AM to get to airport. Next year, I'm leaving the night before. Whew.
Bumped into Tammy, our HR director, and Matt Firor, our GM for ZeniMax Online, along with a couple guys who work for him.
Flight was good. Wasn't full. Reading Education of a Coach - Bill Belichick biography. Great read, getting me psyched for football season.
Hotel is great. I'm on the top floor with a beautiful view of the Colorado River. The convention center is 2 block walk.
Had lunch with Mark Nelson and a colleague of his at Big Huge. Good seeing Mark. He is commissioner of my fantasy football keeper league.
Met with some folks, sat in on a couple sessions. Nothing of interest really. Bumped into Jeff Ward, another ex-bethsoft employee.
Checked out the ZeniMax Online Studios meeting booth room. I'll take a picture tomorrow.
I'm back at hotel now, not going out tonight. I'm behind on reading and work for school. (I'm starting to take classes for my master's degree, this is the first semester).
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