Friday 1 March 2013

a week until simcity

About the only up-side of the horrendous work-load I've had to take on this last month is that I've asked for a day in lieu and I'm taking that day on Monday the 11th.

Monday the 11th is significant because it's the Monday after simcity comes out.  Well, comes out in the UK.  I'm not quite sure why we in the UK are getting the game 3 days after the US.  Well, I say I don't understand.  Given the online nature of the game I'm guessing it would increase the chances of it crashing if everyone got it at the same time.

Saying that, though, there are apparently going to be multiple servers so you should think the load could be shared, but then I've no idea how those play servers mesh in the Origin.  Origin is EA's version of steam and that's where you download the game from - perhaps the issue is more to do with the load on origin.

To be fair, to some extent it's a good thing we get it on the 8th because then I won't get sucked into playing it on the first few weeknights.  Or trying to play it - if there are horrible delays in downloads or anything then there's always the risk that I spend a weeknight trying to download it and failing, which I've had before and it's not conducive to a good night's sleep.

I'm so looking forward to the new game - it looks great.  They've been doing lots of preview stuff and really giving it the hard sell.  In particular this week they've been running a website http://letsallbemayor.com where they've been streaming 4 hour sessions each day where they work on cities with different themes and stuff.

The commentators can grate a bit - they were a bit annoying on the first day in particular - but last night was great as they had a senior guy on and asked him lots of questions about the game and how it works.

Of course the downside of this month has been how horribly tired I am.  There were 20 working days in February, and I've recorded 24.25 hours' worth of working days.  I'm getting 1 day in lieu and today I've worked a bit less than a normal day, but I've still basically worked 3 days.

And that's 3 days for nothing - no overtime, no double time, we don't do flexi.  It stinks, to be frank.  Particularly when you factor in a big reason for me having to do that has been because of pathetic levels of support from others in the office.

I might write a rant about it over the weekend to post next week.

Monday 25 February 2013

everywhere words, but not a blog to post

So I worked over the weekend as I'd said I would.

It wasn't as bad as I'd feared, though - I did about 6 hours on Saturday and 3 or 4 on Sunday.  When I was driving home on Sunday I was reflecting on how screwed my thought process was: I'd gotten the Sunday afternoon off: bonus!  Oh no, wait, I'm not being paid for working Saturday and Sunday at all, so I shouldn't be doing any work at all, let alone celebrating getting an afternoon off that I'm already entitled too.

However, I didn't pre-write any posts.  Obviously I could have done it on the Sunday afternoon but while I did spend most of that time on the computer I had lots of other stuff to do so didn't write any posts.

This is actually particularly annoying as I've run out of pre-written review posts as well, so expect the blogging to be pretty thin on the ground this week.