Archive for January, 2010

Snapshots 1/19/2010

My room in the new house, before anything done. As seen here the new sofa is confusingly placed.

Eule log burning on every available monitor at work starting from weeks before Christmas.

Read more

Work and Play (Week of 1/11)

上一次的Work and Play是在上年九月寫的.. 所以說這個blog人流少得可憐我也沒有投訴的份兒.

由於搬屋的關係, 當有時間和精神開機的時候都不免要用幾分鐘思考一下自己最想玩哪隻遊戲 – 時間實在太寶貴了! 經統計後發現, 從十一月起開動過的遊戲一隻手可以數盡:

Silent Hill Origins (PSP)

Read more

Break from the office, working from home

Happy New Year!

For the past 20 days or so I was off work, but there wasn’t a moment where my hands weren’t full. Moving is an ass fusioned with a biatch, I’ll just say it out in the beginning. After moving four times over the past 8 years, my family has finally decided to settle down (for a relatively longer period of time anyway) in a nice little townhouse in Richmond.

While the new place looks promising and ready to be occupied by its new owners, we aren’t. The “big moving day” which involved a moving company was on my last day of work before the break (18 Dec), and I just finished transferring the last of my stuff from the old place to the new one about five days ago. Major reasons for the slow progress are 1) That moving company my dad hired brought a truck the size of a clown car which of course was only able to move the major pieces even after two runs, leaving a bunch of smaller items that we thought “can pick them up ourselves over the next few days”. 2) The fact that we are stuck with renting the old place until February 2010 due to a stale contract makes us all lazy and unmotivated. Not one moving experience was ever pleasant to me, but at least in previous moves the process had to get done within a day or two no matter how ugly, because we had to return the keys to the building manager. 3) My mom always come visit in December, and this time her and my aunt arranged a three-day ski trip to Whistler and a day trip to Seattle over the break. The first trip annihilated my lower back/upper butt area (first time snow-boarding) and the second trip was just twisting the blade.

While I’m extremely glad that the move is almost finalized now that I have to get back to work, I feel that the vacation passed by without me being able to lay down to relax and just truly enjoy the break for a few hours. Almost no movies watched and no video games played in my new room which is still half empty (I was able to finally watch one of my favorite Christmas movies “Home Alone” last night while waiting my cat to dry off after a bath). I was excited to get Final Fantasy XIII in the mail on the 29th but so far I was only logging about 2-3 hours in the game, a LOT less than I would’ve liked. I’m sure if I choose to, I can drop everything else and just start enjoying my new room by cruising on the new sofa, but the unsettling feeling that the shelves and closets are empty bothers me so much that I must unpack and arrange everything before I can sit comfortably and explore the world of FFXIII while watching “Home Alone 2″.

Also apparently I wasn’t able to write in my blog a lot, given that half the time during the break I didn’t even have internet in the house (kudos to the Telus tech guy doing a great job installing cable and leaving his card on my desk even though I was not able to be there during installation, the guy from Shaw who’s supposed to come and install TV just came and left a “we missed you” note on the door even though everyone was in the house at the time. We miss your dumb ass too, so come quick and this time knock on the door instead of whispering outside the building while writing up your little “we missed you” card, you lazy son of a bitch).

Cleaning the old place and changing a bunch of addresses still have to be done, but I’m sure things will get back on track within a few decades, eventually. For now here’s a bunch of photos taken during the break:

Read more

Been “in the game” for 8 months and going

Before the Christmas break, as a thank-you everybody in the team was given a nicely framed pledge. This is my first full-time job since graduation and also the first item of gratitude that I received since joining the team (they did let me pick two games to take home, but no personal touch there). As a contractor this brings a nice sense of belonging to the team for me, even though I understand there is still quite the distance between my current status and that of a “true” employee.

It has been a great experience working for this team so far, and I was pleasantly surprised when they handed me this on the last day of work. However that excitement was quickly withdrawn and kept to myself when I noticed that everybody else had the “ugh, this again” look on their faces while holding the pledge.

This is one step closer towards having my name on a game’s credits list.

FFXIII 入手!

Happy New Year!

終於收到了! 不過由於最近搬屋還有各類慶祝活動/陪親友等節目, 就連自己房間也只是在收拾中. 今天玩不了, 現在也只能寫這麼多. Stay tuned for updates!