I was at school a few nights ago to help with the newest build of our project, and one of my classmates asked if I still blogged. I told him that the more structured my life gets, the more boring I become. Ultimately, what I generally wind up writing about is my shopping adventures. But let’s give this a shot, eh?

For example, I had my birthday in the middle of the week. I can’t honestly keep track of how old I am. When I went to the dentist last month, they asked me as small talk. I couldn’t remember. I told them I’m old enough that keeping track doesn’t matter. I’ve said that every year after 21 is just you getting older. Where’s the next milestone? 65-ish? For Senior Citizen status? You don’t really want to look forward to that, do you? At the suggestion of my fellow classmate/intern, I went out to eat. He, Janel, Mark, and I had a minor outing to Applebee’s and then back home for a bit of Rock Band. Just another night for any young person. Perhaps an underlying feeling of lonliness contributes to that malaise.

Speaking of time passing, the internship is already a quarter of the way through. Like that, in a flash. It was really slow to get going because my manager’s been crazy busy, so we haven’t had too much opportunity to talk about my ideas. This week, we really got crackin’, though, and we’re talking with the engineers Monday. The other FIEA interns sound a lot more productive, but they’ve either got a specific set of actions or a very free. The team I’m on has to not only deal with our Canada arm but our actual customers are the individual game teams. With their staggered schedules and different needs, it becomes a challenge to determine what would be usable across the the lineup as well as convincing them to add any crazy new features to their already tight production schedules.

So, back to school. I went in that night to help with the installer script, but any potential productivity from me was halted in its tracks. It turns out my account for the source control server was disabled to make way for the new set of students. So I couldn’t download any updates. I eventually wound up consulting one of my teammates through the process, but prior to that, I just wandered around and talked to some people. I talked with some friends from back home on the phone, I talked to the aforementioned classmate, and I talked with some of the new batch of students. Unlike in our cohort, the artists seem like they goof off more than anybody. But to put this into context, this was around 10 or 11 o’clock at night, and nothing was due the next day. So kudos to them for being around so late for me to witness all the Justice-soundtracked Nerf blasting. Our artists, especially during the production semester, preferred to avoid the clamor and work from home, leaving right after class.

After about a month and a half, the writer from the Orlando Sentinel wrote up about the presentations we gave at the end of Production. He seemed very pleased, especially with our project: Zephyr: Tides of War. [ Click here ] to read his impressions and a link to download the game. I’d welcome any comments.