sketches - September 2208

This is Monday of the second week back to work and it has been dog slow. Mentally, I am still on vacation in need of more rest. Although things are slow here in the office, there's lots of work to do for the Marketing department. I have to touch up and enhance some screen shots of creatures from our game to be used for web promotions - not very exciting work, but I got my share to complete by end of day tomorrow.

I guess there's lots of buzz around this project, and from all the emails that went out regarding awards here and there, I'm still not convinced that this game will be big because seeing is believing. I do truly hope that Dead Space becomes a huge hit and a big seller because then the second one could be more fun than the first - keeping my fingers crossed, though it may be more of the same, sigh.

As for the Fiat, got it temporary patched up. Seems the problem was not the differential, but the U-joint bearings. They were so old that they seized up and that caused too much stress to the drive shaft bearings, which in turn failed causing gear oil to spray all around the connection and the low rumble sounds that I was hearing. I only hope that the drive from San Francisco was not too damaging to the differential. The mechanic indicated that the drive shaft was a little bent and that I should not drive it too hard. A replacement would be around eight bills, ouch. Additional work starts on the eighth of October where both back brakes get an overhaul with new calipers, pads, and rotors. There's only five percent left in the current pads and there's a slow leak from the right, rear caliper, hence the decision to get it fixed now, rather then finding out about it when it breaks while I'm driving - been there, done that, not fun. This will set me back a grand!

The clean-up efforts for the garage is going well, it's half done and soon, I will start making some stuff again, woo, hoo! The rest of the house is relatively clean, all that's left is mopping the floors in the kitchen and bath rooms in preparation for the return of the Wife this Friday before taking off North with the GM. Plans for this evening is a thirty minute jog and off to the local book store for a sketching session, which will be put up afterwords when it's scanned in. Don't know if the Goober will be reading this today, if so, and are still interested, should join.

epilogue

The jog went well. Went four miles and breathing was steady with hart rate around one-sixty. Got home, took a shower and made dinner, ate and then headed to the book store, but was not feeling it tonight. The drawings were hard to establish, so after struggling through a few crappy attempts, decided to go home.

Until next time

Be seeing you

sketches - September 1108

It's almost the end of the forth week of my brain recovery time and I think I'm starting to rise out of the sand that's been keeping my mind buried for such a long time. I have a feeling that it will have to take more time to fully recover, but that's not really an option that I can take without just quiting all together. I'm sure the wife will not go for that option with so many bills still coming from the horizon of life. Anyway, I think it's just going to be an unproductive week next week at work, or at least I'm going to give it a good try if I don't get bothered by the supervisors, hee, hee:P

I still have not gotten to the mass clean-up that is required of the garage, but I have taken a few things to Goodwill that makes the garage less cluttered - a good start, anyway. This all has to happen real soon, too, because two of the four projects are for other people, and one of them has been paid for with a painting in advance, DOH!!!

As for today, I finally got off my ass and went sketching at the local book store.

As for politics today. I am quite annoyed about the conservative direction that this Nation has been heading, but I can't say that it's a surprise to me.

Here's why:
I am working in an industry that's constantly changing and the recent direction to go "Outsource" for a good percentage of my recent project, was, well, foreshadowed when I first started working in this industry. Back then, I didn't really think much about it because I was new to game development, and we were under a tight schedule that required outside resources to complete the project. At that time, ten years or so ago, we were "outsourcing" to small companies in Idaho, and India. Even though the idea was sound from a cost and time savings standpoint, the results were quite disappointing and ended up with me completely redoing their work from scratch - not much savings there. The artist in those companies were not trained in the standards of the time, what little of it there were, and communications were piss poor. A few years after my arrival at EA, I saw another attempt at outsourcing with the Godfather game.

Even though I was not involved with the outsourcing efforts on the Godfather game, I did hear the complaints over the assets that were received from the outsourcing partners. When the assets were review, the modeling lead was way pissed off and the outsourcing manager was totally frustrated. Those assets could not be used and had to be cleaned up to be used at all. The clean-up effort took away precious time and resources from our internal team that had little to no bandwidth in dealing with the problem, and thus, lots of over time work were put in by the already stressed out artist, only to have those assets used in limited fashion. Needless to say, outsourcing efforts for the Godfather did not go as planned, but still, outsourcing has been part of the development cycle since then, and will continue. But outsourcing was never a huge part in the development cycle until recently. Take for instance, my recent project, Dead Space. As most of you know, I was sent to China for three months, that became eight, to help with the "outsourcing" effort, because last year it was deemed mandatory to have most of this and future games "outsourced" to stem the tide of ever increasing development costs. I can see the logic from a financial point of view. When you can get six to seven junior artist for the cost of just one junior artist here in the States, it's a no brainer, and this is where I come in. The companies can eat the costs for one senior level artist to go over to China and train the six to seven junior artist the tricks of the trade, and by the end of the development cycle, that junior artist has just acquired the same experience as a junior artist in the States. Now with a promotion and a raise, you still get four or five to one in cost of labor. Now expand this scenario to the whole Nation, and you can understand why middle America is damn scared and pissed off, and hence more defensive and Conservative.

But the thing is, people don't see the new jobs and opportunities that are springing up around them. As jobs goes overseas, other jobs are coming here, but that's another discussion. It's now way late and I am way tired. So much for cleaning the garage tonight:p

be seeing you

sketches - September 0508

090508
This week has been full of unexpected turns that has further delayed my need to get the garage cleaned and organized. The Warden decided to stay for two nights because he did not want to face the horrific traffic to go back home - don't blame him for not wanting to be smothered in the valley heat. It was a good opportunity to just hang out with him. The Classmate called and wanted to do landscape painting - how can I refuse the chance to do more painting, which I did today.


As for last Saturdays air show, here's some photos I took of the Thunder birds. I was quite impressed with the precision flying and the speeds these fighters fly at, totally awesome! The A10s are bad ass!