Sunday, June 14, 2009

Back on it.

Well that's about the most neglecting period for my blog ever, largely due to Facebook which I keep updated due to the ease of it. 

Anyway, since last time I've been out west again (3rd time this year) to E3 in Los Angeles, which was a good old jaunt and I also, for the first time ever, managed to not suffer massively with Jet Lag. 

How did I do this? Well, I think it was a combination of taking it easy for a couple of days when I got there (on the booze) and also stopping overnight in New York both going & coming back - the trip back meaning just a 6.5hr direct flight rather than a very long and tedious day with layovers and other travel. I got back and felt fine rather the near death as usual. 

E3 was pretty good and back to pretty much it's flashy formal self. I didn't really spend too much time around the event as most of my meetings were off site, but Beatles Rock Band looked amazing, can't wait for that.

The trip had its fair share of parties, including the Noridic in Figueroa Hotel and we spent a fair bit of time there on other days, liking it's mix of non-pretension and locality to the conference centre. We stayed in Santa Monica and had a couple of nights out there, with the lads from Sony and on another night, Gordon & his lads from R* San Diego as well as a bunch of marketing & bizdev girls from Microsoft - we had an awesome dinner and the waiter wore the horse-head, job done.

On Friday we drove through the Mojave and to Vegas, which for me was pretty uncomfortable as I had a rollicking hangover, the 12hrs we had in Vegas were ok, spent most of it in Centrefuge/MGM with a bunch of Lucasarts fellows and had an early night at 3am given we had to be up at 6am to fly to New York.

We had a good walk around New York and I took a bunch of snaps (on Flickr/Facebook now) and I really love the place. Met up with friends from Sega in the evening and ended up in  Greenwich village Karaoke bar until 3.3am... but wasn't so drunk. We'd had a spectacular room upgrade too, having an enormous suite at the Hilton for a paltry sum (I'd booked an offer on a room ages back). The next day we flew back at 10pm, so had plenty of time for sightseeing and a bit of shopping, before the straight forward flight & return home almost jet-lag less.

Back at work and there's tons on, with the new Worms for XBLA (Worms 2: Armageddon) launching shortly, iPhone Worms nearing completion and Alien Breed nearing Beta & entering the formalities of it's certification process... and with 3-4 other projects in various forms of undress, it's meant a very business period for all at T17.

Tomorrow (Mon 15th) it's our 13th wedding anniversary and I'm somewhat controversially spending it in London at the House Of Commons, part of a meeting to represent the games industry to the UK Govt. I'll be meeting Lord Puttnam and a bunch of the other MP's, moat-filling, expense-grabbing buggers that they seem to be.

Wednesday is Jack's 12th birthday and we're out to Leeds for a meal. Thursday evening Tom Gluckman is over to discuss some concept work on a couple of projects and the week after is both the Game Horizons conference in Newcastle (I'm talking there) and later in the week, the AC/DC concert in Wembley... woot. Busy times...


1 comment:

Vladimir Panteleev said...

You can get Facebook to automatically post whatever you write on your blog to your wall. Although, Facebook is more about microblogging (like Twitter) than page-long blog posts...