An article in the Orlando Sentinal came out today about where I work, EA-Tiburon. Lately there’s been a rash of practal jokes going on around the studio: they filled one of the circular conference room tables with plastic balls; while one of the managers was on vacation, they removed his door and drywalled it in; when one of the engineers left during the finaling of Madden, they filled his cube with alumninum cans and put a web cam on them so he could see it online.
For my birthday coming up I ordered a new phone, a Treo 750. I haven’t gotten it to work and I’m assuming that I have to get it fully charged. I’m going to let it charge up over night and hope for the best. Otherwise, it’s back to AT&T for another one. We also upgraded Jennifer’s phone to a Razr, since it was free.
I also played NCAA Football 08 at home for the first time tonight. It’s much better playing in at home than at work. It was the first time I got to sit down and play the Campus Legendmode. This is really cool. You get to create a player. I created a free safety #37 who played for Lindale High School (this is the position & number I played in junior high). The mode starts out with you playing through the state high school championship tournament. How well you play in the tournament determines the school you will play at in college. It was fun although the position of free safety isn’t all that exciting.
Vacation Bible School is getting more stressful for Jennifer as they keep adding more and more kids. They are now over 400 kids and the crafts she’s in charge of are going fast. She doesn’t want to get into a position where she has to tell one of the kids that there isn’t enough supplies for them.
Today it was announced that Peter Moore is now President of EA Sports. Recently Electronic Arts split into four separate labels or brands: EA Sports, EA Games, EA Casual, and The Sims. Each label will have a president who reports directly to the CEO of the company, John Riccitiello. EA Sports was the only label which didn’t have a president. Peter Moore comes from Microsoft where he was head of marketing for the Xbox. It’s good that John Riccitiello recognized that we needed someone from the outside to give us a different perspective on how to take our games into the next decade of gaming. I’m closing in on my seventh year at EA and it’s been pretty much the same thing: each year there is a packaged good that we sell: Madden 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, etc. How long can that be sustained? Are there better methods? Hopefully Peter Moore can help guide us in the right direction. It will now be interesting to see if this changes how the reporting structure works between studios. We’ll have to wait and see.
Today was another softball game this time against the QA department. We ended up losing 13-3. We were leading after 1 inning, 2-0, but after that our bats went away and they started getting in the runs. I went 1-2 with an RBI for hitting. They were playing with a “rover” in the outfield. I was able to plunk it right between the gap in the outfielders, but beyond the reach of the rover.
Today was the first day of Vacation Bible School for Jennifer and the girls. Even Isabelle got to go now that she’s two. Almost 400 people are attending and Jennifer said it was a sea of kids in the Family Life Center gymnasium up at church. Fortunately, Jennifer only sees a hand full of kids at a time and only for around twenty minutes until the next group comes in. Today’s picture is some of the decorations that were put up this weekend.
At work, I conducted the first team meeting for my new team. It was pretty much silent as I explained the plan for figuring out the type of game we were going to build. I also had to give some bad news to some guys who were going to moving off to a new team. Of all the things I don’t like about being a manager, it’s delivering bad news. It’s a fact of life that it’s part of my job and I know I have to do it and I don’t have a problem doing it. I just don’t like doing it. I guess no one really does, unless you are sadistic.
NCAA Football 08 comes out tomorrow and the Marketing department had some extra Xbox 360 Faceplates, so I snagged one for my 360. The requests for copies of NCAA from some of my friends started coming in this weekend. I plan on picking up my copy tomorrow. A pretty good commercial featuring the Texas Longhorns was sent around work today as well.
We started out the day by heading up to where I work. I recently moved to a new project and, thus, moved to a new office. When ever that happens, that means that I have to re-hang all my game plaques. Now totalling eight, it’s not an easy project. I try not to do it during the day, because I never have enough time and I don’t want to be banging on the walls with a hammer. So, it’s a family trip up to the office to hang the pictures. Jennifer did most of the work arranging them in a pattern. Because there’s now eight and I had a smaller area to hang them, we went with a double stacked approach. It also left some room for a new plaque when I finish the project I’m on a year from now. The girls ran around the cubicles and found some Nerf darts that some of the guys on the team sling across the cubicles. Abby was actually pretty good at firing them.
After that we went to pick up the camper. We bought some bike racks for the top of the camper. We noticed after we bought it that it had a Yakima rack system on top. So, I visited the web site and found some bike racks so that Jennifer and me could take our bikes. We didn’t buy four because we didn’t know if Abby and Emily’s bikes would fit. However, once we got them up on the camper, we tested their bikes and what do you know, they also fit. I’m going to go and buy two more so that we can fit all the bikes on top of the camper.
It’s been awhile since I’ve written on Frenchville and I apologize. Work has been super busy (as it usually is) and I just haven’t had the chance to write. I will try to change that habit moving forward.
Today was the first day of Summer vacation. Abby successfully navigated kindergarten and will be moving on to the 1st grade. To celebrate the end of the school year, I took a week off from work starting today and we pulled out the pop-up camper and headed to Disney for four days of camping.
This was the second time we took the new camper out. Our inaugural camping trip was three weeks ago on a long weekend. We wanted to take baby steps and it paid off. We had the camper fully put up with beds made and awning out in just under an hour. It took us twice as long last time. Jennifer has also won the job for pulling the camper in. She picked up the camper last night and pulled it into our driveway unassisted; then today, she pulled it into the camping slip in one try (I can’t say the same when I tried pulling in a couple weeks ago).
After setting up camp we headed out for a few hours at Blizzard Beach, one of Disney’s two water parks. When we were here a couple of weeks ago, we decided to get season passes for the water parks. The plan was to come camping several times over the summer and visit the water parks.
Last week I was at the book store and I picked up the book Campfire Cooking. It looked like a pretty cool cookbook with chapters entitled “On a Stick” and “Wrapped in Foil”. Tonight’s dinner came from the chapter “In a Skillet” and was called “Cowboy Casserole”. It wasn’t too bad. It consisted of ground beef, bacon, and beans. You placed biscuits on top and shut the lid. When it was done you remove the biscuits and ladle the concoction on top. Our charcoals didn’t seem to be very hot and the biscuits didn’t get all the way done, but it was still good.
Right now we are trying to get the girls to settle down and go to bed. In the distance you can hear the fireworks going off from either Epcot or Magic Kingdom. I will report more tomorrow on our adventures.
Jennifer has been getting on to me for a while to update Frenchville. Especially, since I had a Christmas tree at the top. Well, it’s now changed. We’ve been pretty busy for the past month, so I guess I will do a month in review.
For me, it has just been work, work, work. We are starting to wrap up our planning phase for the game I’m working on and we will start the actual construction of the code and making of the art assets. I can’t write any details on the web, but hopefully soon EA will put out a press release and then I will write a little bit more about it.
Jennifer has been getting more and more stuff for her photography studio (a.k.a. our front office). She has lights and a couple of sets she’s is working on. She’s been taking test photos of the girls in order to get the lighting just right. She will be starting to take photos of some of the neighbor kids in order to practice.
Abby has been doing fine in school. I’m amazed at how much they learn in Kindergarten. She has spelling words she has to learn. I don’t remember having to take spelling tests way back then. Of coarse, I don’t even remember Kindergarten, but oh well. She’s been struggling with writing out the numbers 11 – 99. She sometimes gets them reversed. We’re working on it often.
We had sad news a couple of weeks ago. Jennifer’s Grandmother, Helen Musselman, passed away. Her funeral was the following weekend, so we had to buy plane tickets and meet Jennifer’s parents in Muskegon, Michigan. The high temperature the day we arrived was 17 degrees and snow was on the ground. We flew into Grand Rapids and then had to rent a car and make a forty minute drive to Muskegon. We stayed in a hotel there in Muskegon and had the funeral on Saturday. On Sunday, we dove over to Jennifer’s other grandparents and visited with them and all of her aunts and uncles. Abby and Emily had fun playing in the snow, having never seen it before. It was tough having to always bundle up when we went outside. We were happy to get back to the warm weather in Florida.
As I write this there is something trashing around in the ceiling. It all started on Christmas Eve and we though it might be Santa’s reindeer on the ceiling, but then we noticed the noise was coming from within the house. A critter has gotten into our attic once again. This morning we called a person to come out and set traps and seal any holes in the roof.
Today was a day of chores around the house. Jennifer took the tree down, which proceeded to drop the rest of the needles. It had been raining down needles for weeks. We learned our lesson: no more live trees. We like fake ones. Less up keep. I installed a soap dish in our shower and a rack for the brooms in the laundry room.
On a completely different note, we’ve been playing Fantasy Football up at work for the game I’m currently working on. Last night was the final game and my team had made it to the Championship against my boss, Jeremy Strauser. My team had finished with a 29 point lead and he had the Dolphins Special Teams/Defense. I finally had an excuse to watch a Monday Night Football game. It wasn’t looking good as the Jets-Dolphins entered half time tied 0-0, but the Jets came back and ended up winning and thus giving me the Championship in our league.
Today’s pictures were taken by Abby of their new playroom upstairs. They took over my office, which was upstairs so that Jennifer could set up her photography studio in their old playroom. My desk has been moved in our bed room.
34. Wow. As I’ve been telling people: I’ve entered mid-30’s. Kind of a milestone, but what can you expect? I’ve been out of college for 10 years now. I’ve been married for 7 and I have three beautiful daughters. I guess I am “old” now. Funny, I don’t feel old. Here’s to another 34.
I took the day off from work and went to Clerks II. It was a good movie to see since it had me reminiscing about the old times back in college when the original came out. I went and saw it with my friend Erik Youdal at Dobie Mall. It was great seeing the original Clerks in the movie theatre because the movie because such a cult classic and you can always say you saw it in the movie theater.
For my birthday, the girls gave me a new University of Texas jersey and flag that we hung outside, but for the most part it was a pretty normal day.
In other news, I finally got an office at work. If you can believe it. So, we went up this past weekend and hung all the frames of the games I’ve work on that I’ve been collecting over the years.
Today was the big day. NFL Head Coach was released to the public. It’s now available in stores, so go out and buy a copy. We got our copies of the game and took a team photo. I’ll be updating my site for the game soon with up to date screen shots and information about the features in the game.
I’ve been playing softball again. Unfortunately because Head Coach has been Finaling, I missed a few games. Also, our team isn’t doing all that great. We lost again tonight making us 0-5. Because I’ve missed most of the games, I only got to play the last half of the game. I went 0-1 with a fly out to left center field. I made one play hit to me at second base.
Today’s picture is from Isabelle’s party back in Lindale, Texas. She was getting help opening her parents from Abby and Emily.
Frenchville 