Blog

Well, this is a strange occurrence indeed, but I was in the mood to write two days in a row! Today I’m going to focus more on giving an update on my career and office status. So here goes…

Here at Summersault things have been going well. We’ve recently adopted a new productivity model that allows us to better accommodate changes in large projects and also helps us to have more bug-free code from the early stages of development. Part of this paradigm involves working together two people at a time. So, we’ve moved our office around to better facilitate this.

It’s been an interesting switch because we are all very quite and all you usually here is the pecking of 3 (and sometimes 4) Macintosh keyboards. So, whenever we’re not working together on a project it usually dead silent in our office (which is nice).

Another team-building exercise we’ve been working on is a Skyrail marble track. It’s quite an amazing little toy. It involves lots of plastic pieces as well as cables for suspending the track pieces. The idea (or at least the goal we have) is to create a perpetual motion track that will just keep going. We have a few pulleys and motors we can add-on to the package to make it more possible, but right now we’re just working on a few of the in-box track setups to get familiar with the contraption. Below are a few pictures of the first couple of track iterations we’ve completed. The top row was the first design and the bottom row was our second design. We’re now working on a 3rd design that will feature perpetual motion.

It’s been a very fun way to get your brain going at those points when you really don’t feel like thinking.

We’re also talking a little about an office band. 🙂 It’s mostly joking, but we’re all somewhat interested in trying to play a song together. We’re talking about making a video about Summersault using a new, very nice digital video camera that Chris bought recently. In the video we’re thinking of showing us playing a song together. Probably not a good idea since only two out of the five of us are musicians… lol.

Another bit of news is our 2003 Christmas display. Each year since I’ve been employed here we’ve made it a tradition to decorate the front window displays to have a wintery Christmas theme and this year was no exception. Partially motivated by the annual window decorating contest that Main Street Richmond holds each year, this year we went all out and the display has turned out better than ever.

As in the past, this year both windows are decorated differently. One side is an indoor theme and the other side is an outdoor, winter-wonderland theme. We’ve got an elf browsing through tech pamphlets in front of his Mac gear on one side and a group of young elves having snowball fights in the other. Overall we’ve been very happy with the turn out and from the amount of people stopping to take a look, the public is pretty happy about them too.

Who knows what we’ll come up with for next year???

I believe that’s about it for now. More on Summersault later.