Raaiiinnnn

Getting sick of this. Been almost 3 weeks of this!

Halifax Instagram Walk

It was +20 today, so I decided to go for a walk.  Once I was walking in the sun, with my headphones in, taking in the beautiful Halifax Sunday afternoon I decided to take some photography using only my iPhone and the popular app Instagram.  It was a great afternoon, and reminded me how beautiful Halifax is.  I moved here right before winter, so this will be my first summer in Halifax, and I’m beginning to realize that’s when it really shines!

Work Desk

My view from my desk at work.  Click the picture to get full 360 panorama!

360 Panorama

I bought a cool app for my iPhone.  “360 Panorama”  1.99$.  Lets you take panoramas by stitching photos together.  Here’s 2 examples:

Sprint Planning:

Office:

Each one took about 20 seconds to make.  It uses the accelerometer and compass in the phone to stitch the photos together automatically, so all you really do is click capture and move the phone around until you’ve looked in all directions.

But the really cool thing is it lets you export them as true 360 panorama views as a website link.  Try clicking this link for an example using the second image.

Gundead Defense

One of the games Longtail Studios made before I started here.  It’s free on the app store.  It’s really fun!  It’s a tower defense game, with a bit of a story and multiplayer!  I don’t know of any other multiplayer tower defense games.  And it’s FREE!  So go download it and give it a shot!

 

Peggy’s Cove

(If you’d rather see the photos in an album, click here)

Yesterday I decided to finally make a point to see the ocean.  I’ve lived on the East Coast for over a month now, and winter is coming fast, so it was now or never.  I’m so glad I did!  I stopped at a few places, but Peggy’s Cove really took the cake for the nicest place.  It was honestly a life moment as I sat at the edge of a cliff with my legs dangling over the Atlantic as the waves crashed below.  I took some nice photos and video of it.

On a side note, I took the video on my new iPhone 4.  I just got it cause my old phone couldn’t hold a charge anymore, and since I was eligible for a hardware upgrade, I barely paid anything for it!  When I got home I took the videos off my phone and could not believe the quality!  It’s true 720P HD video!  I ended up editing the video right on my phone using iMovie, so keep in mind while watching that this was shot and made entirely on a PHONE!

Early Spring

Loving it!

February

Awesome.

iTampon

I hear the eventual iPad nano might have a phone and camera built in, and works as a portable mp3 player…  Now THAT would be cool…

Awww

Rogers Meets Bioware

Kyra sent me this pic from her cell. It's the Coming-Soon flyer from Rogers, where I used to work. Look at the bottom right, Dragon Age!

Power Down

Scheduled power-failure at Bioware yesterday.  I’ve never seen so many people so restless as Bioware during a power failure.  People walking in circles in the hall, everyone on their iPhones and Blackberries, smokers deck packed with…  smokers.

But Bioware, ever the awesome employer, gave everyone free Sundaes!  I had chocolate and vanilla with sprinkles and whip cream!  Yum!

I finally figured out how to sync my work calendar with my iPhone, which is insanely useful.  Now, even if I’m away from my desk, I can get a meeting request, accept it, and have my calendar update automatically.  I’ll always know where every meeting is, what it’s about and who else is going.  Genius.

Weekend starts tonight!  I have myself a date with the Turtles In Time remake on Xbox Live Arcade!

Time Capsule

Was looking through old texts the other day and found this mass text I sent out before leaving Winnipeg.

Weird.  I didn’t know anyone in Edmonton yet, had no idea what working at Bioware would be like, or that I’d become so ambitious about it as a career.  The city was a distant memory from the time I went with my family when I was 11, and I had no idea the life that lay ahead of me.

It also makes me miss the life I had in Winnipeg.  That life is over, even if I went back everyone’s drifted apart, doing their own things.  But I had some good times in Winnipeg, and haven’t thought about them in a while.  Right now the plan is for my next visit to be in October/November.  By then I’ll know if I have full time or have to take the mandatory 3 months off.

Creepy Chad

Whenever I’m talking to Chad on my iPhone he creeps me out as he peers at me through the gui.

Great Monday

This morning I headed into work, and started my week with the link I posted in my previous entry.  The day was off to a good start.

For lunch Nathan, Dave, Owen and I went to Ikea for some cheap hotdogs, then we drove down to West Ed to buy a hard-to-find game.

When I returned to work, Zac (my boss) immediately said “Dale, come with me!”  I had no idea what this was about.  He took me over to Jason’s room and told me I was being moved to the PRC (Post Release Content) team to do QA Design work for them!  I’ll be moving offices (window office!!!), attending all the QA Design scrum meetings, and working exclusively with them now.

If you remember, a few weeks ago I took some initiative and brought up the idea of doing some QA Design work for PRC, which the right people seemed impressed by.  Since then, on my down time, I’ve been playing the PRC stuff and submitting design bugs, and have been getting very positive feedback from them.  Well apparently the need for some more dedicated QA Design work on the project came up, and my name came to mind.  So the power-play a few weeks ago accomplished exactly what I wanted it to, and as a result I’ll be making a jump to the career-path I’ve been trying to get on for the better half of a year!

This is great news!!!  I applied recently for that QA Design fulltime salary position, so this can’t hurt my chances.  And the job comes with much more responsibility.  As an example, immediately after I got the news I returned to my desk and had several meeting requests waiting for me in Outlook.  The rest of my day was spent in meetings!  The first was a playthrough of some PRC with the QA Design team to critique some of the new stuff.  I was nervous, as I didn’t know any of these people, and many of them were big names, including David Gaider, lead writer for Dragon Age.  I wanted to make a good first impression.

Despite my intimidation, I spoke up during the meeting, introduced myself to people, etc.  Throughout the meeting I made my ideas heard, and several were even accepted.  That means they will be changing elements of the game based on my ideas.  Not just technical stuff like “That door won’t open” but more creative stuff like “This should happen in a cutscene to emphasize the emotional impact of the event”  I find that amazingly cool, that I now have some creative input on the final product!

Tomorrow I have a meeting with someone from the team and they’re going to show me the infrastructure and all the tech stuff I need to know for the job.  I’ll probably be moving offices by the end of the week.  I will miss the office I’m in now though; Zac is a great boss, and the whole room is filled with great guys.  Reid and I always have intense debates while we work, Dave and I always rib each other, and we all collectively rib Owen, lol.  I will definitely miss that.  Though I’m just down the hall, and when Nathan moved offices to help with the audio team it’s not like we never saw him again.  Hooray for in-office MSN.

My calendar is literally packed now with all the meetings I have.  I’m really excited about the more involved role I’ll play now.  The more responsibility I’m given, the more chances I’ll have to prove I’m the right person for the position.  And I truly believe I’d be great at this job. 

                                                --  Meetings!  --

Also, the PRC project I’m now on will be my 4th official sku with my name in the credits!

I find it funny that I was never the ambitious type.  There was a time when I thought I’d be fine working at Pita Pazzaz in the mall food court the rest of my life.  I was a total screw up, but put me in the right place and suddenly there’s a fire I can’t put out.  And I love it; I love that I’m always on the way to something even better, while loving where I’m at.  I love that the further I get, the more I have to show for it.  This has been a great ride so far, and I feel I’ve grown along the way.  I’d really hate for this ride to end, or more specifically: I’d hate to have to take a 3 month hiatus from it.  But today was a big step in the right direction.  It was a good day.

Maintenance

Thursday was a rainy day, and on the way to work I turned my headlights on.  “Don’t forget to turn them off!”  I thought to myself…  I forgot.

After work, sure enough, the battery was dead.  “No big deal,” I thought “I’ll just go back upstairs and see if someone in the office has jumper cables.”  That someone ended up being Brian.  But after 15 minutes we could not get my car running, even with a third passerby helping us.  My car was dead!

Nathan was nice enough to give me a ride home, but I was now stressed out.  I kind of need a car.  I live almost out of town, making it hard to get anywhere to get anything without a car, not to mention have a social life and get to work.  I’ve been thinking of getting a new car, but that was maybe a year down the road, it’s not a realistic option quite yet.  So this sucked, and I was stressing out.

The next day I caught a ride to work with Bill.  My car was still dead in the parking lot.  At lunch Nathan gave me a ride to PartSource and I bought some jumper cables and some fuses.  I’d burnt a fuse a while ago and figured maybe that was why we couldn’t jump start the car.  After replacing the fuse we tried jumpstarting the car, and it worked!  Thank God.  Put me in a great mood.  And on the way back up to the office some strippers from the strip club across the street were putting up some signs dressed in almost nothing and came and talked me up for 10 minutes.  That put me in an even greater mood!

Not having a car, even for one day, made me realize how much that would suck.  I figured I should probably take care of the one I have, so on the drive home I stopped my Mr. Lube and got an oil-change, engine sealant, etc.  My rear driver’s side turning signal had just died so I bought a replacement light for that too.  I then went back to PartSource and bought a new air filter and changed that too.  I have to get my car safetied for Alberta soon too.

It was actually pretty fun getting my hands dirty under the hood of a car, even if it was only minor repairs that anyone could do.  But I’m still a tech-geek, and as proof, screenshots of my new theme for my jailbroken iPhone!

Jailbreak!

Devon convinced me to jailbreak my iPhone, and it is awesome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mass Effect On iPhone

Go get it, it’s really fun!  Already available on app store with a 4/5 star rating!  I got to test it a few weeks ago, and it’s cool!

=D

Lately I’ve been getting really anxious about getting a fulltime position with Bioware.  I know it’s somewhat unlikely due to the economy and hiring freeze, but at the same time I’ve been getting a good feeling from my boss, and been hearing a few good things about my chances.  But at the end of the day it could go either way.  And I have so much riding on this.  I don’t have much of a life in Winnipeg anymore, but the only reason I moved to Edmonton was for this job.  I’ve made a great life here now, and want to keep it.  And I probably won’t know anything about a full-time position until the last minute, in October.

It’s really stressing me out some nights, when the reality of what’s at stake hits me.  If this doesn’t pan out, I can either get a crap job for 3 months until I can return to Bioware for another year and try my hand again at fulltime in a better economic climate and hopefully no hiring freeze, or I can apply at studios in Vancouver or Montreal, or even the U.S.  But I’d so much rather stay at Bioware, a company I LOVE being a part of.

Anyway, that aside, we had a meeting today and I got to see some really cool company secrets.  Also got to hear about the guys at Penny Arcade who got a full build of the game and what they thought of it.  Good stuff.

At 5:00 today there’s a company picnic I’m looking forward to.  It goes until 8:00 at which point I’m picking up my Mom who’s visiting me for the weekend!  It’ll be great, I haven’t seen her since Christmas, and I’m really excited to give her the Bioware tour and show her where I’ve been working and what I’ve become so passionate about.  So I’ll be hanging out with her all weekend. 

Also, next month my good friend Andi will be in town.  Also haven’t seen her since Xmas, and she’s since moved to Vancouver.  Now we’re 2 people who left their hometown to chase dreams and evolve, and I’m really looking forward to hanging out with her again.

Also, been getting in to Soul Calibur 4 lately with the guys at work.  Every break we head down to the lunch room and play winner goes on.  Good times.  I bought the game, and after a bit of training I’m a force to be reckoned with.  Though lately Reid has my number.  But I’ll figure his moves out and put him where he belongs :P

iPhone OS 3.0!

Now with MMS!