Category: Journal

I went on one of those funky team building courses on Monday just gone. It was actually quite good fun compared to some of the MoD ones I’ve been on in the past. Sure, it had a couple of dull bits, but since I work by myself for the most part it was good fun to mix with other folk from the building and get creative with the tasks we were given.

One of which was concepting a soap opera, and due to elements that were out of control our team managed to come up with “The Aged Team!” This was a take on the life of the A Team as they are now – in a retirement hospital. I can tell as I’m writing this that you really had to be there to get this one, but it was pretty funny at the time.

Funny up until you have to present it to fifty people including managment on the final day of your probation with the company!

I’ve no idea what sort of an impression it made – it wasn’t the winning concept and quite rightly so, I believe, as the winner was a damn sight less surreal than ours. When you add that kind of thing to a day where you threw eggs at your colleagues as part of a risk assessment exersize, it kind of makes me realise why these things are few and far between!

Man, that was fun!

Even lending a meagre hand in Ade‘s DIY adventure made for a fun afternoon. Following that up at George‘s place, playing more pool in one night than I’ve played in two years made for a very enjoyable evening.

Saturday night I hit the pubs in Helensburgh with my cousin Iain and my old mate Alan. Although I was tired as hell from the previous nights 4am pool playing, I managed to muster the energy to have great fun in my old haunts too.

And who would have believed it? – The weather was perfect up until the Sunday, when it rained. Three days of sunshine and drinking made Scotland seem like a very nice place indeed!

I spent a large part of last weekend working on WipeoutZone, redesigning the front end and customising the new release of phpBB.

The latter turned out to be quite a task, as it’s less customisable than the older version of the forum and with virtually every page being built with includes and from the database it made finding what I wanted to alter a bit of a chore. I got it done to a reasonable standard in the end, and although I really wanted to re-do the icons I just ran out of time. I knew if I rushed them they’d look like crap too, so maybe some day I’ll get back to them.

The re-design was a bit unnecessary, really, as I’d only just re-done the whole site in early January. However, there were some codey issues with NN6 and Mozzila due to the page stretching to fit the screen, so I had to scrap that. I also wanted to take a step back from Wipeout Fusion to concentrate a bit more on the previous versions of the game once more, which meant re-designing the banner of the site as well. I’m finding it hard to compete on a level playing field with the official sites in terms of material, and with WipeoutZone originally being a Wipeout 3 fan site it makes sense to cater for that audience until Wipeout Fusion no longer has an official site.