33 Years Old

My first birthday abroad :)

The weather has changed dramatically here, some days have been extremely hot.

Took this pic on the way to work today - lots of green, and the roads are being swept and cleaned up by the officials.

Sent a late e-mail out around the office inviting people over for curry and beer :)

There was a good response, I never though our sofa could accommodate so many people...

We had Jax, Wendy, Mel, Dave, Bob, Maggie, Jon, Jess and Sawler.

Jon and Jess surprised me and made my day, Kath and I had already bought our presents (BBQ and outside table/chairs) but there was something I wanted, but never mentioned. I looked it up on the Internet to find it was discontinued, so I never bothered to tell anyone. Somehow though these guys, not only had some intuition or something, but they found it in the local comic book store - Talisman - Upgrade :)

We've been playing Talisman a bit over here and people are enjoying it, so now I have the upgrade pack for the 4th edition I can get the expansions.

It was a nice evening, having everyone round and the curry was well received, thanks Auntie Jay for teaching Kath how to make it - we're out of cumin now though... bad times :(

On Second Thoughts...

We shall not use Flash as a development platform... it is a silly idea!

Well, after trying to create a code base that would suffice for our upcoming projects, Jax found that things are just too damn slow with the Flash player.
Limited sound channels, very slow alpha blending and performance drops when scaling images was just too much to continue developing our projects with it.
Luckily we think our in house libraries and cross platform engine should be able to handle what we need.
It's going to probably need a bit of work to make things compatible, but it seems that the whole team is behind the move - so we've dumped Flash in favour of C++ again - yay :)

It wasn't exactly a waste of time, it's good to know this stuff, and to know what to avoid, and the projects are only really just taking off. Luckily I've had a peek at the OOI stuff already (was working on it a few weeks back) and we had a 2 1/2 meeting today where it was explained in detail.
Tomorrow we begin proper, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Moving Day

So today we moved offices from the Atlantic Technology Centre to a new location on Queen St.

It has been a loooooonnngggg day.
Me and Bob got drafted into sorting the rest of the old office, which meant cleaning, hoovering, dumping loads of rubbish, playing cricket, baseball, broom ball, and chuck ball into tape.
Oh, and drinking beer at the new pub which opened opposite :)

Meanwhile, the removal guys were extremely slow, hence our ball game antics, and the rest of the staff mostly waited around all day for the stuff to be delivered in batches.
Nothing even got fully delivered until around 5:30pm.
It wasn't until gone 6 before I was fitting my desk back together and rigging up the PC.

It's 8:53pm now, and I'm knackered along with everybody else. Sculpin guys, JR and Ryan are having to do some testing, but as soon as they're done I'm heading out for beer - much needed beer - it's been REALLY hot here today.

The office though seem nicer, much more like a games studio and we have more greenery, although less space.
Still tons to clear up and boxes to remove next week, but hey - PC is on and network works.

Star Trek

Still learning Flash at work and about to get assigned a new project... I hope.

In the meantime, been sorting finances with Kath and trying to get things sorted and ready so we can afford to fly back to the UK next year for Dave's wedding.

Went swimming this morning to the Cari Complex near the University, nice swimming pool. It's got a large recreational pool area, going to about 1.5m, a splashy hose and bucket type thing, a REALLY fast twisty water slide, which Hayden loved and a large deep pool split into lanes with proper diving boards, going to 3.95m deep.
Then we went to Wendy's, a good fast food place, and topped off the day by heading to the cinema to watch Star Trek, which I have to say was just incredibly good.
Absolutely loved it.
Hayden fell asleep after the dramatic opening, and woke up during the credits - he would have enjoyed it I think, so I will be saving for a Blu-Ray player for when it comes out in a couple of months :)

Edge Magazine

Hmm, it seems like my link to the Edge Magazine article a couple of posts ago was iffy outside of my own network.

If you treid reading it and the link didn't work, please try again. If it's not showing up then please e-mail me and let me know so that I can sort it out.

Update

Haven't blogged for a while, although have some pictures of stuff.

Weather is changing rapidly around here, grass is springing up, it's really hot, then cold, sunny, then rainy.
Been working and learning Flash still, and Kath has been making new friends and going to various activities.

But that's about it, the sense of a normal life is returning - I think I'm putting on weight again... with Kath's cooking :)
Weekends have been a bit hectic and seem to fly by as we 'seem' to have lots to do.
Oh, yeah - my UK TV broke, the power went, so we had to fix that and then Walmart do an awesome thing, of letting you buy anything and take it back, no questions asked, within 90 days (30 days for TVs and the like).
So we bought a TV for $460 whilst our one got repaired, took the ONE guy on PEI, Gallant Electrical, who can fix LCDs over a week to fix, but it only cost $130, as opposed to buying a new HD TV for $800!
We then took the Walmart one back and got a full refund :), I did this in March also, I bought one, and then when my UK TV arrived took it back... it's like renting something.. but for free :)
Gotta love Walmart, they have pathetic prices on things.

Oh, double yeah, we bought each other our birthday presents, I bought Kath some garden furniture and she bought me a BBQ - at a pathetically low price.

Today I had 2 fresh corn on the cobs for breakfast on the BBQ.
Sobeys are doing another stupid thing, selling fresh corn for 75c each and doing a deal which is buy 6m get 6 free... so I got 12!!! for less than $4.50 - that's less than £3.00!!! for 12 corn on the cobs...!!!!
And the Farmers Market was selling Lobster for $5 per lb, as it's Lobster season now.. Glen, my landlord bought 4 whole, fresh, live and just cooked for him lobsters for $20!!!
It's ridiculous!!!
Preposterous!