08 Jun 2006
Yesterday I became a GTO. I don’t even really know how. It just sort of happened.
So what is a GTO in this sense? Well, it sure isn’t a pontiac. It’s a General Technical Owner. It means that a certain project or subsection of a project is completely mine. If it goes wrong, it’s my fault, etc.
Again I will reiterate, I’m not sure how I fell into this. It’s not really a bad thing, if anything it is a good thing in terms of my career. It’s like being a mini-lead programmer. Seeing as how my current lead is one of the most amazing and highly respected programmers at the studio, I really don’t mind playing second fiddle here.
Yesterday the managers came to me and said “We want you to lead the demo. Would you be willing to do that?” and I said without even a moments hesitation “Sure. I’ll do that.” Just as the words finished coming out of my mouth my brain locked up in a WTF? moment as I realized what I had done.
It’s some sort of sick compulsion. I don’t know how to turn down responsibility. It’s like a part of my brain cackles and rubs it’s finger tips together while whispering Stress. MORE STRESS! in an evil tone.
Of course the saddest part is as much I as I don’t really want to do it in retrospect, there is a much larger and louder part of myself that really does want to do it. As much as all of my friends tell me not to get caught up in the management and politics of working here because it will take all of the fun out of my job, a part of me absolutley craves it.
I want to officially lead again in the future. My true skills are in developing and growing technical talent. I can freely admit that I am not the best programmer in the world, but I can turn people into the best programmers they can be.
Well, that’s sort of what I want to do in the future. My actual goal would be to start a central debugging team. We would be involved in the setting up of all projects and doing general reviews of coding methodologies used in projects. My team would lay the groundwork for cross-team debugging tools and features. When a team hit the wall and were searching for a panic button, my team would be the group that responded to the panic button. We would be the fire fighters, the medics, the SWAT team of coding.
You’re either SWAT, or you’re not.
05 Jun 2006
The word tired quite simply isn’t a big enough word to describe how I feel right now. Exhausted barely even scratches the surface.
I think I may suffer from an as yet undiagnosed disease that I will dub Awakeaholism. So let me start by saying, “Hi. I’m Sean. I’m an Awakeaholic. It’s been… I’m not sure how long since I’ve had a good night’s rest.”
You see, I’m awake a lot. Even when I don’t want to be. I have no real control over it. Sometimes I just can’t stop being awake for extended periods of time.
Take last night as a perfect example. Around 10pm I started thinking “Gee, I should go to bed and get a good night’s sleep to start the week with.” Then I watched the hours tick by. 11pm. Midnight. 1am. 2am. 3am. 4am. Around 4:30am I went to sleep. My last thought was “insert explitive of choice tomorrow is going to be hell.”
So what happened next? I woke up just after 6am (just a little before my alarm). I’ve been up ever since. Even when I “woke up” I wasn’t tired. All day since then though, I have been tired. Not the kind of tired where you can sleep though. I know tonight I’ll go home, beyond exhausted as I am, and still not be able to sleep. The later the night continues, the more awake and alert I’ll become.
Time to go home for the day I think. Maybe I’ll just go straight to bed and see what happens.
31 May 2006
Working a lot + Not sleeping much + Very little gaming = Where the hell is the weekend?
I don’t really mind the working so much. Any time work ever seems to be too much I just think about how I used to have to work. That’s called “Putting things in perspective.”
Hell, I got up this morning, and started working before I had breakfast. I just needed to solve the puzzle before I could start the day. I’m a puzzler. The miniscule amount of sleep helped me figure it all out.
Basically, the STL has some really slow algorithms. So I by thinking about it and messing around a bit with a few ideas I sped up a critical path in the code by a bajillion percent. It went from sometimes taking up to 41% of a frame, to about 0.35%. That’s what I call progress.
Tomorrow, or tonight after I get home, it’s time to get those loading times down. I have a plan as they say. A plan to take over the world! Well okay, maybe not to take over the world, but to put the files in order… oh yes, to put the files in order.
Time for some brain dead time on the bus now.
Night all.
29 May 2006
Yesterday was kind of a sad day. Meghan resigned from the guild/raid in World of Warcraft.
It reminded me of when I stopped playing Ragnarok Online. Ilona quit, Jeff quit, Kim quit, I got really bored because none of my close friends were still playing, and then I quit. I didn’t even so much quit, as I just sort of drifted away from it. After they were all gone, other things were just more fun.
I guess I’ll see how things fall out. I don’t really have anything keeping me in the guild at this point. The beating heart and soul of the guild is gone now. I really only joined and brought a few others over because I knew it was something that Meghan always wanted. I am an “officer” of the guild, but I’m not actually involved in any decision making.
I have heard others say that they would leave if Meghan left. So I’ll see how many people are left in a week. Maybe I’ll go back to Affinity. Maybe I’ll go back to Soldiers of Ragnarok. There are probably like three people left in those guilds.
I think there are still about a dozen people in Soldiers of Ragnarok in iRO. At least there were last time I checked in on everyone.
I had some good times in iRO =) People used to stop and stare in awe as SoR rolled through the dungeons. Nothing could stop us in our prime. We were one of the only guilds that even tried to take on the world bosses. I can remember one night we were rolling through the big undead instance, which then was probably the hardest in the game, and people kept saying how they had never seen anything like that before. Even priests wanted to be in our guild.
There was a limit in iRO as to how many people could be in a guild. We always had a pretty steady flow of people wanting to join. Guild membership had a sense of pride to it. It was so much more special because it was limited. There was no room for alts (which we got around by having a few seperate guilds like Merchants of Ragnarok). It was also special to someone new to the guild, because they knew they beat out a bunch of other people to get in.
I’ve never found that feeling again since.
I have been mulling the idea of quitting WoW over for a long time. There hasn’t really been any single contributing factor to it. Just lots of little things adding up:
- The rep grinding is tedious and boring.
- The direction that the raid is heading I don’t really agree with. Mostly because I don’t enjoy AQ40. I believe there is one upgrade item in there for me. There are a couple of other items that are like 0.001% or 0.002% better than what I currently have. Hardly worth the effort.
- Work is going to be getting a lot more demanding between now and September.
- I have more and more of my friends heading out to Vancouver.
- A few other things…
But hey, maybe it’s just time for me to take a break again. I’ve had a couple of one month breaks in the past.
At the same time, I don’t want to quit. It’s cheap entertainment(fifty cents a day) that fills my days and nights with fun most of the time (although the fun factor will be significantly diminished now I think, at least for a while). At some point I know I will need to really step back and re-evaluate my life and where things fit into it (tends to happen around September and December/January of each year).
Maybe this will all pass in a couple of weeks. I honestly don’t know what I would do to fill my time if I quit playing WoW. I think that I used to write, and play other games. I seem to remember spending time in the big blue room with the bright shiny orb at the top and the living green rug once in a while as well.
26 May 2006
dark and secret
all things perfect
wandering around
in the tall concrete
sneaking beneath canopies
as the rain pelts down
soaking and drowning
smiling wetly
dodging street people
with organizers
who knew the homeless
required schedules
past the japanese tourists
taking pictures of everything
of the 24 hour McDonalds
so much taken for granted
across a busy street
through a crowd of people
up the steps of an unsigned building
arrival at Saturday brunch