Uhoh.
Steam Summer Sale time …
Every summer and winter, the most popular (cos they got in first) online software distributor does a massive sale. Huge discounts, daily deals and all that. I’ll keep my eye on it for a while in case any good deals appear. So far I have my eye on Beyond Good & Evil, although I’ve not bought that yet. I’m also interested in Sins of a Solar Empire (not discounted) and a couple of others.
I’ll occasionally have a mad moment or two when the sales come around. I’ll see something and think “ooo – shiny, always wanted that” and then when I’ve got it, I’ll leave it in the games library unplayed like :
SWTOR – got boring very quickly
Battlefield 3 – criminally unstable
TitanQuest – bought it when my last machine broke its Windows
Moo3 – very, very poor
And there’s a bunch more like that. I’ve improved my record lately with games, just by buying less of them. I ignore the magazine reviews which don’t tell you about unfinished code and believe the online reviews more. It’s trusting where the money is coming from. Online reviewers tend to be unaffected by commercial interest. They get their cash from you watching their videos and they’ll make enough ad revenue to let them buy their own copies of the games. A magazine has far higher production cost and is dependent on the publishers feeding them early stuff so they meet their deadlines.
I’d far rather trust an independent than magazines which time and time again prove themselves to be in the pocket of publishers who persist in peddling stuff that’s unfit for sale.
I guess I’m getting a bit cynical about the gaming, although I’m not actually gaming that much at the moment anyway. Doesn’t seem enough time in the evenings to bury myself in a game.
I have had time tonight though to indulge in a bluray (Three Musketeers – silly but fun film). Not done that for months. I needed the popcorn. (Getting tired – leave is booked for a fortnight’s time, just spookily coinciding with Olympics!)
Still raining. I was thinking about saying “Hey! Not busy, I can play tonight” for cricket after missing potential games on Tuesday and Wednesday due to the Glasgow trip. However, I’d have had to fight my way through traffic to go home to fetch my kit before heading to SW Bristol to the game. Bristol roads are bad news at that time of evening. The decision became academic at about 3pm when the heavens opened … and I think there’s still stuff up there because it’s still raining.
Wanted to say something about a work colleague.
He hurt his hand quite badly on Monday evening, bad enough that he needed to go in for an operation on Tuesday morning. We hadn’t got much information coming through to the team so we didn’t quite know what the implications would be. I figured he’d be demanding his work laptop as soon as he was coherent enough to remember the password. Back on Communicator by 11.30am after the op. That’s commitment.
Some people will take the mickey for doing things like that. There’s a few who are a bit too much into “I’ve been signed off work – yippee! Free time”. We’re not like that though. We feel an obligation to get things done. Last time I had off sick (I don’t notice bugs) was bugs but the time before that was my 2 nose jobs 9 years ago. And I only had about 4 days off total for that. We”d get horribly bored anyway if we had that kind of time away from getting stuff done.
We’ll miss our guy’s actual presence for a little while but with the way we’ve shifted how we work over the past few years, he’ll still be able to make his mark through remote log in and teleconferencing.
It used to be that we’d have people visiting the outstations far more regularly. That expended a lot in terms of time and air tickets. We’re hopefully more efficient now with us reaching for the spiderphones at the slightest excuse. We probably get more meetings in and more stuff done that way, although I have to say it was great yesterday to say hello personally again to people I’ve only talked to over the phone over the last couple of years.
That’s enough about work though. Friday tomorrow. Bacon day. And I’m hoping to get away early enough to not lose any of the flexi credit I’ve built up 🙂
PS I think my fingers have come out in sympathy. I’ve cracked the bones in most of my fingers through cricket and they occasionally like to remind me … The latest are two fingers on my left hand which feel cracked again. They still support typing pressure and holding stuff but are still … distracting. I’m either getting old or they’re rain sensitive !