A NOTE ABOUT THE WEATHER


Image courtesy of myconfinedspace.com

Though the “official” start to summer is still about 16 days away, unofficially in years past the weather should be quite nice around this time of year. The problem is that the weather has been pretty much crap since about November.

In Vancouver this year, we didn’t really have a spring. “Spring” as it were, was just a continuation of winter, except just two or three degrees warmer and lots more rain. Granted, it doesn’t dip below freezing any more but it’s just as gray, wet, and dreary as your average fall day. Just this evening, it was pouring rain and not your nice summer rain either. It was a soul-stealing cold rain. While walking home, I even briefly thought about bringing my wool coat back into rotation since it would not look or feel out of place.

The one good thing about this poor weather is that once a nice string of sunny days comes along, everyone quickly forgets how bad the days were. The question is, when are the sunny days finally going to arrive?

A DECK INSTEAD OF A PLAQUE

A common practice in the video game industry is to award each member of the development team a plaque once the game ships. Usually, the plaque contains the cover art for the title, the disc of the title, and a small metal plate with the member’s name and the name of the title. Some people have their plaques at home but a lot keep them at work.

Though I helped ship Sonic Rivals, I never received anything for being on that team. Maybe it had something to do with me leaving the company at alpha. For skate. they decided to do something different. Since it was a skateboarding game, they decided to forgo the usual plaque and instead, had custom decks done up for all the dev team members. We had a choice of two pieces of artwork: a single skeleton reaching up towards the skate. logo or the skate. army which you see above. You also had a choice of getting your name printed on the deck. After all that hard work on the game, I decided I deserved at least that little bit of recognition.

Sorry about the flash removing some detail. The characters you see on the deck are all the pros we signed for the first game. I left the protective plastic wrap on it because I need to bring it back to work since that’s where I want to leave it long term. Click on the pic above for a much larger picture.

COMMENTS LOST

UPDATE: After some tinkering I’ve been able to safely republish my entire blog. If you’re curious, it amounted to 2175 individual files and about 24 Mb worth of data.

All old references to the previous commenting system has been removed, making archive page loading much faster now. As a consequence to the republishing, the current commenting system has been backported to all my old pages, so if you want, you can go back to pre-2007 pages and leave comments there. Also, you might see one or two new things in the formatting. Thanks for you patience.

As some of you long time readers know, this blog has not always used Blogger’s built-in and awesome commenting system. Actually, Blogger’s own commenting system didn’t exist until about a year and half ago. Previous to that, I used a free and external commenting system that I was never happy about.

It now appears that external commenting system has now gone down for good. Sadly, this means that any comments from about 2002 to about 2007 are now lost into the digital ether. I sincerely apologize to each and every one of you who took the time out to comment on this little dog and pony show. There were some classic comments made on this blog over the years.

The bad news continues in the form of longer load times on pages where it still references the old commenting system. Because of technical details I won’t go into, I can automatically strip out those references but it’ll invalidate the archive links you see to your right.

I’m still working out a solution. In the meantime, I’m sorry for the inconvenience.