I woke up at 5.30am this morning and proceed to go through my regular routine before leaving for work. I left the house at around 6.30am and walked up to the Cambridge Roundabout to catch a bus to Whetstone. I waited around for about 30 minutes and was told by a passerby that there was no public transport operating in London. Also, I received a phone call informing me of the situation. I decided to go home. I called my work place and they advised that Tuesday may be another snowday.
So far, I’ve taken the dog for a walk and she ended up dragging me across the bridge and due to the mutt getting cold paws, I ended up carrying her home. I cleared all the snow from the front garden path but as soon as I was done, snow had covered it again. Damnit. I had a snow ball fight with the dog and I won, Mwhaha!
Just a quick post to keep you updated on the latest. First thing’s first, I started a new job at London Heathrow at the beginning of June and yesterday, my line manager offered me a promotion which I accepted.
I will be posting more about the new role in the coming days but due to the sensitive nature of my work, I will not be able to divulge a great deal of information about it. This does mean I won’t be working in the games industry anymore but rest assured, I will be blogging about the topic’s I have posted about in the past, and I will be revealing a few thing’s some publisher’s and websites don’t want you to know.
In other news, I’ve seen ‘The Happening’ - think chemicals and the movie, Day of the Triffids without the man-eating plants. Also watched ‘The Incredible Hulk’ which wasn’t that incredible but I did like the ending. Oh, the mid-season finale of BSG was pretty awesome.
Apart from the above, I’m planning two trips: Toronto in September and Burbank, California in November. I haven’t had much time for anything else. Although I will be, at some stage, going to visit Myra and Gunit in their new home and hosting a gathering in London soon.
One last thing… I have completely given up smoking. About a week ago, my carbon monoxide reading was at level 31 (Heavy smoker / 20 plus per day). I had a reading this morning and it was in the green, 3. (Non-smoker).
Easter weekend saw the return of XL, one of the UK’s longest running Xbox and Xbox 360 LAN’s. The event was held at the Birmingham NEC, and from what I’ve picked up on the gaming grapevine is that the event was a great success.
Unfortunately I couldn’t attend XL due to prior commitments but I’m hoping to make an appearance at the next XL event. It would have been cool to get live twitter updates from XL, maybe somebody could get one going for the next event?!
When I saw Jon over at Play.com Live! he mentioned his next LAN event would be taking place over the May spring break. On another note, did anyone attend The Gathering ’08 last week? I was there last year and it was fun.
At some point I should really update my schedule to coincide with this years LAN’s!
The ride home tonight only lasted thirty minutes but it was awesome… the stretched Hummer limo was very cool. Thanks Paul K.
I’m hoping I get a ride home tomorrow night 
I started a new contract on Tuesday morning. This contract has absolutely nothing to do with games, so I won’t bore you with the details but as it was my first day on site, it went well and was extremely productive 
I’ am based about five minutes away from Wembley Stadium. However, due to the nature of the work I’m doing, I have very limited access to the internet, email and twitter. Blog post’s will be posted when I have the time. Also, I’m not using a cell phone right now but the company has said they’d be giving me one next week. They also offered to provide me with a brand new Windows laptop, I politely declined, however, I was keen to point out that Apple has already released the MBA, and if they really wanted to provide me with a laptop that I could effectively use for work, then they can always provide me with a MacBook Air (SSD).
Time for sleep, I’ll update my blog when I can.
This time last week I was sitting in a hotel bar watching Martin (MSVGhost) playing through the single player campaign of World in Conflict. Yes, the game is done, it’s gone gold and it’s out in the UK on the 21st September. The Single Player looks awesome and I can’t wait to get my PC fixed to play it. i31 turned out to be a lot of fun. It was a bit slow on the Friday but picked up over the weekend. It was good catching up with the folks from Sierra Entertainment and Massive Entertainment.
Once we had finished on Saturday evening, we went to see the Quake Wars: Enemy Territory presentation. The games looking pretty good. After the presentation had ended there was a massive pub quiz but I wasn’t too interested in it and disappeared into the main bar and ended up finding Martin who had slipped away earlier. We had a good chat and it’s always fun hanging around with Ghost. It was cool meeting Emma, looks like she’ll do well at Massive.
At i30, the WiC presentation took place on the Friday night but this time, it was held on Sunday evening after the Girls Aloud WCG thingy. Yes, we did watch it but we got bored after twenty minutes. I’ve posted up loads of pictures on my flickr page and on the WiC Facebook group. I recorded a short video of people playing WiC which you can view via YouTube.
The WiC presentation was really good. I twitted’d live from the presentation until we started giving away t-shirts. I think our presentation had the most questions during the Q&A round. Overall, i31 was fun and an interesting experience for everyone involved.
I started using Windows 3.1 in the early 1990’s, I’ve had Windows 95, 2000, MEH, oops I mean ME, XP and more recently Vista installed on my computers over the years. While the latter version of Windows is big leap forward over previous incarnations of the operating system I cannot help but think OS X is slightly more advanced. Windows Vista and Office 2007 are installed on my work PC and my laptop has Windows XP and Office XP.
For the past couple of years I’ve thought about buying an Apple Mac and spoken to a lot of people about Apple’s computers. I never got around to buying a Mac until a few days ago. My sister picked up a white MacBook a couple of weeks ago and I decided to get one on Friday due to the work computer dying. When I’ve fixed the work PC, I think the Macbook is going to be the main work station and the PC will be a gaming computer – fully optimised for all the latest DX10 games.
My MacBook arrived on Saturday morning. I opened up the box and configured the settings. OS X Tiger takes some time to get used to but it’s certainly has the “Wow” factor. I’ve started to enjoy using the computer again. The system is VERY, very cool. I like Windows Vista but Tiger is a big leap forward. I’m really looking forward to Leopard now!
I’ve installed a few applications such as Windows Live Messenger, Skype, NeoOffice - Free open source software which has full compatibly with Microsoft Office documents – and some other applications. I was able to connect the MacBook to my wireless network within a few seconds and I’m writing this post in the garden because it is way too hot inside the house.
So, who else owns a Mac and finds it a joy to use?
GameSpot, one of my favourite multi-format publications has posted an extensive preview of World in Conflict’s single player campaign. I played a level of the single player campaign a few months ago and at the time, the game was visually impressive but since then the developers have tweaked, polished the code and it now looks stunning.
World in Conflict won a lot of awards at E3 last month and we’ve now got a new website. The website looks really cool but the neat features are far from finished. Hopefully, all of the regional sites will be going live in the next few days.
Check out the new preview, website and let me know what you think of them via the comments box below or on the forums.
On Monday my work PC decided to die. I originally thought the VGA cable wasn’t working but after buying a replacement and testing it, there seems to be an issue with the Video Card. Due to this hardware problem I haven’t been able to write up any reports or finish any of V2’s stuff because I’m unable to access of the data on the tower PC (Work PC). The problem with the computer will be resolved tomorrow.
On top of this, one of my elderly neighbour’s fell down in her home. I called 999 and requested an ambulance because I didn’t want to run the risk of picking her up. The emergency services arrived shortly after I had called them but they needed some specialist equipment to pick her up. After a brief wait two ambulances arrived and took the lady to hospital. She broke her knee and pelvis, she had a six hour operation the other day and seems to be getting better. Hopefully, she’ll be back at home soon.
This week was pretty crazy. So many things going on its unreal but tomorrow we’ll be having a little gathering in the West End. I’ll be meeting up with a lot of people that I haven’t seen in AGES. Like always, I’ll take plenty of photos and may possibly record some embarrassing, drunken behavior using the N95.
In other news:
I’ve booked the flights for my Hawaii holiday and I’m really looking forward to this break as it covers Christmas and the New Year celebrations.
Everything with World in Conflict is going really well. There are a number of awesome things in the pipeline but those projects will be revealed at the later date. I’m working on a dedicated WiC page at the moment and I hope to get it finished this weekend. If I’m not blogging about World in Conflict then I’ll be writing about it on the official website.
I’ll be traveling across the UK on business during July. Just looking at my schedule… I’m in and out of my office every other day for the ENTIRE month.
The Book of Games Volume Two (BoGV2) is well underway and I’ve submitted the first article. I’ve got a few more to write within the next few weeks and I’ve got to write down some solid ideas for a feature article and email that over to the chaps at gameXplore. There is a lot to do before the book goes to print in September but the support we’ve gained within the games industry over the past eight months or so, it’s very positive in the UK, Europe and further afield.
Oh, one last thing. I’ve started up a new feature for my blog. It is called “On the Spot”. You’ll get a good idea of what is all about this weekend… stay tuned.