I was walking on my way to work on Wednesday when I came upon an intersection I had to cross, like I do every day. As I was about 20m from the intersection I saw an SUV waiting for the light to change so he could make a left. Then just to my right a clearly marked police car (of the Crown Victoria Interceptor kind) passed me and stopped behind the waiting SUV.
As I took two more steps the SUV took off and turned left into the busy street. It took about a second for my brain to process what I had seen. I don't remember the light turning green for him. Sure enough the light was still very distinctly red. I looked at the police car to see if s/he had noticed it too. The SUV's actions must have surprised the police officer as well since it was good two seconds before the cruiser's lights lit up. Even though the light was still red, the traffic was clear so the officer roared off to catch up to the SUV.
I was hoping the officer would catch the SUV just down the block so I could see the traffic stop myself but the cruiser was well out of sight by the time I was able to cross the street. I wonder how that conservation went between the officer and the driver.
As a service to my female readers, I'm featuring the commercial above for the Kush Support product. As per its web site, "Kush is uniquely designed to fit between the breasts to maintain a more natural shape while resting on your side." I am not making this up. If you're interested, there's a slightly sexier commercial here. Both ads, however, feature a kick-ass Nintendo 8-bit era soundtrack.
Traditionally, video game development teams have consisted of mainly male developers. Even today, I have never heard of a team being half female. My own team consists of a significantly higher proportion of females (compared to other EA teams) but we don't even break the 25% mark unfortunately.
While nearly all my team's project mangers are female and we have several female artists, the one job function that remains decidedly male is the role of programmer or software engineer. We're lucky to have one female software engineer on our team and she just happens to be one of the best Playstation 3 programmers on the planet.
As further proof that female video game programmers exist, take a look at the video above. It features Anna Kipnis of Double Fine. She's a gameplay programmer (just like me) who's working on Brutal Legend, which is going to be published by EA. From what I've read, Anna and I for the most part share the same day-to-day tasks and responsibilities albeit on totally different games.
I wish the programmer / software engineer role was much more gender balanced in our industry. Perhaps we should have career days at EA specifically targeted for females. It's a pretty fun and interesting job. Oh well, back to my dude-bicle.
Last week, I made a brief reference to this photo. It was amusing but I didn't think the story would go beyond the initial picture. Well, I was wrong. In the above clip from press for the new Transformers movie, Ms. Fox addresses the issue personally.
If I were that kid, I'd feel much better about myself right now. She did, however, refer to him as a "sweet boy". Ah, who am I kidding, if she referred to me as such, I'd totally be ok with that.
As many of you know I still haven't bought a HDTV for my apartment. Part of the reason is that I've had to pay for a lot of one-time costs associated with purchasing a new apartment. As you can imagine those costs aren't exactly five dollars here and ten dollars there. Another reason is that I just can't seem to commit to a particular model I would feel happy with. You know, I kinda I wish that previous sentence was referring to lingerie models. Ah, anyways I believe it's actually a drawback that I have a technical background. As such, whenever I go do some research, I feel the need to process all the data that's provided in the TV's specification documentation. I'm sifting through contrast ratios, input/output configurations, company-specific technologies, the list goes on and on.
In a way, I wish I could be like many of the consumers I see at Future Shop and Best Buy. Most of them just pick a weekend to buy a TV and they do it. They go into the store with a budget in mind (and usually won't go over it) and for the most part, not all that educated in HDTV technology. They usually get a salesperson to show them a few models in their price range. Then they make their choice on completely uncalibrated TVs in an environment that is far from what their living room is. A few of them then drive home their new TV in the same hour. While I would never buy a TV like that, I admit I completely envious of their savings in time and effort. Having said that, I've narrowed my choices down a bit this weekend and we'll see what next week brings.
Ok, so in the picture above, you can see what my slapdash, ghetto, duct tape entertainment centre solution looks like. The "centerpiece" is a 24" LCD monitor with a single HDMI input along with DVI and VGA. It is resting on a red metal filing cabinet I bought at Ikea. For aural pleasure, I'm using my dated yet still effective Pioneer 5.1 sound system. It decodes regular Dolby Digital and DTS only but at least I have digital optical out (which is good enough for me). What the picture doesn't show is my two surround sound speakers which are on speaker stands behind the couch. For movies, I've got a Samsung Blu-ray player. In the picture, it's the black thing on the shelf above the DVDs. It's not exactly the fastest player out there but certainly a lot faster than the initial models out in the market. It has Ethernet capability which makes it great for firmware updates and BD-Live. For my TV viewing, I have an HD box from Telus (part of my year long free TV and Internet). I watched Saturday Night Live in HD for the first time two weeks ago and it was awesome. Finally, for my gaming pleasure I have my trusty first-generation Xbox 360 which has never had any problems. It's sitting on my useless fireplace mantle (I really do not like that thing). It plays games of course but it also allows me to stream movies, music and pictures to my display device and sound system.
So until I get a real TV this is what I have in my apartment. I'm not sure if the picture really demonstrates this but the my entire living room is crawling with wires. Just look on top of the mantle. Those aren't extra cables you see. Everything there is needed to properly hook up all the equipment. It might surprise you but nearly every device needs to be connected to the Internet now.
I'm going to clean up the wires once I get my TV. For now, it'll just have to be. Last but not least, a free et.com key chain for the first person who can identify the Xbox 360 game on my coffee table.
