Right, I’ve had enough of the sad kitten at the top of the blog now; you can only stand so much cuteness before the mind rebels. Time for a quick update on status, as I’ve been quite heavy with the waffling and opinionated posts recently.

This post is written courtesy of the wi-fi in a B&B in central Reading, where I’ve been installed for the last week. It’s not my favourite accommodation in the world, I’ll admit (far too many chavs hovering outside the window when the pubs kick out). Luckily, I’ve found a decent room to rent which I’ll be taking up from the end of next week, where I’ll be for the majority of the next few months. Why? Our new client of course – the behemoth that is Microsoft Games.

This is indeed the tools gig I hinted about previously, but sadly that’s as far as I can go in terms of details; not because I’m working on anything super-secret, but because the contract is just generally confidential. Suffice to say it will allow me to indulge my passion for making process improvement tools and automated build systems, and deploy them on a scale that is far beyond our range as a tiny software shop.

Sadly though this requires me to be away from Edinburgh for much of the time, which I’m still getting used to. I’ve lived in Edinburgh for so long it’s hard to adjust to living elsewhere, it’s a city that spoils you for anywhere else. This will also leave Tim minding the office in Edinburgh on his own, but hopefully he won’t be rattling around the place too badly. I’ll still be working with him remotely on our work with Evolution, but he’ll have to keep Bertie alive on his own…

On the bright side, since I’m kept away from all of my usual distractions in the evening, I’m hoping to use the time productively to get some serious effort into our internal prototypes. That being said, in the 3 weeks away so far, I’ve managed no more than a few hours, but I put that down to the fabulous selection of pubs in and around the Rare studio in Warwickshire where I spent the first fortnight – it’s really hard to feel creative and productive when you’ve just had an exceptionally tasty portion of steak and chips for dinner! I’ve settled for keeping the usual pile of paperwork under control. Speaking of which – I must sort out last quarter’s VAT return before I miss the deadline…

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Tales from the grind-stone, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.