Summer is coming to an end, I can hardly believe I’ve been here for a season already.  Time flies by and while it feels like there is still so much work to do for Cheyenne to keep us running, it’s amazing to see how much we’ve gotten done as a team.  On the IT side of things it’s easy to tell a lot of cool work is getting done.  When I’m forced to migrate to new file servers because we’re out of disk space on the original machines, you know the assets keep coming in!

The hard part of course is moving all that data without losing anybodies files, or data and trying to do it with minimal impact to the team.  Back in a former life I remember IT being fairly uncaring about other peoples work schedules.  I’d routinely see e-mails saying “We’re bringing the e-mail server down for 2 days, deal.”  Maybe my attitude here is different because everyone genuinely cares about what we’re doing.  But it’s not really a big deal to try and do a server migration on a weekend, at nights mostly, in order to make sure Monday morning people can keep on working hard.

 I’ve met a tremendous amount of amazing people here and as the team grows our skill at finding even more amazing people just gets better.  If you’re familiar with the Control Alt Delete comic series you’ll understand when I say the “Ethan” in me gets more and more excited every day.

 In other news I’ve started to play a lot of “Dawn of War” again.  Previously I’d only played the single player campaigns and lately I’ve been expirimenting with the multiplayer.  There is a ruthless AI combined with a brilliant give/take RTS engine that keeps games nail biting.  It still suffers from knowing the game is won/lost for the last 10/15 minutes of any game but I’m not sure, given the current state of RTS design, that that is something completely avoidable.  I’ve also been dabbling in Guild Wars (Factions) again, just to refresh my mind on how the henchman system works and to play with the new classes.  My Everquest 2 fingers are starting to itch with an expansion coming out, but now that I’m on the west coast I need to find a good west coast guild… ahh the joys of MMO social life (now that’s a subject for a blog!).

Also with the Christmas sales season coming up, I’m rapidly trying to juggle my schedule to see if I can make room for the great titles due out this year

I still can’t get over the contrast between the real Phoenix and the Phoenix I had in my mind. I ride my bike 3 miles to the office on a paved path between rows of trees, past the occasional horse and along a lakeshore of all things, with boats! It’s August, and it’s been cooler than Washington State for over a week.

I probably just jinxed it.