The job market is good

This week alone I've gotten calls from recruiters at Yahoo, Flixster, Amazon, and Ning.  I'm glad the market is doing well, it's always comforting.

Oh this is not good...

Someone who started in PayPal User Experience Design the same day as me, just left the company.

New record!

This is not the type of record I like to make or break. It's my personal record for longest commute to this job to date. It now stands at 1 hour 20 minutes flat. I can't wait for the 880/Mission Blvd. work to be completed.

A quote from a company-wide IT systems update

"The POS system at the Orchard cafe may experience a brief loss of connectivity
during a code upgrade of the Locoweed firewall."

I can't make this stuff up.

What goes around, comes around

Remember when I helped box up a neighbor's cube? Yeah, it wasn't so long ago. Well after spending 1 1/2 weeks away from my desk, hiding away in conference rooms in other buildings to focus on some particularly tough and time-sensitive work, I returned to this.

It even has a roof, made of old BAPs (big-ass posters).

There's only one entrance, and that's under the desk on one side.

I guess we're even! At least for now...

Tested the upcoming SimCity Societies

I had the honor of being in a group of 7 people who were the very first outside of Electronic Arts to play a fully-functioning version of SimCity Societies, the next game in the SimCity series. Of course an NDA prevents me from saying anything about what occurred during the test or mentioning anything that isn't already public knowledge, but fortunately there's a decent amount of public knowledge out there already, like this and this.



There are several big differences versus the original series:

• No zoning. Rather than designating areas for given types of construction, you actually go in and place every single building yourself.


• Like other modern entries under the Sim moniker, Societies is fully 3D, and you can freely rotate & zoom with the camera.


• You don't construct a power grid or lay water mains -- fine details of infrastructure are handled automagically.


• Some "The Sims"-like elements are introduced in the form of what they call "societal energies" that influence cultural and technological development of your society as a whole.

Browsing around the web a bit, it appears that serious SimCity fans aren't too happy. In fact, they're quite disappointed, and in some cases outraged. They like being city planners and watching their cities grow, rather than building them piece by piece. We'll have to see how it works out once it's released!