The company conference. Like a holiday, but less fun.
On Friday morning, I got up mind-meltingly early at 5am, to try and get to
the airport in good time to check in for the nine o'clock flight. Sony had
chartered two flights, but due to an organisational mess up, the one going
from Stanstead was unavailable to me, so I flew from Gatwick. Once I got
there, I could see the check-in queue. It wasn't easy to miss, as it
stretched nearly half way round the airport. It wasn't too long before we
had checked in and gone through security though.
Unfortunately, since there were a few problems with the plane, we were kept waiting around at the gate for nearly an hour before we finally boarded. During the wait loads of people got out their DS and were using the wireless chat feature, drawing silly pictures of genitalia and sending them to each other. It was great fun, and I didn't know that so many people at Sony even owned a DS! Once we got on the plane we were kept waiting for another hour while they had problems refuelling and then lost our air traffic slot. Eventually we got into the air and thankfully I didn't have any dizziness because of the motion of the plane. I was quite worried that I'd be in a lot of discomfort. I played DS games and slept much of the journey.
Once we arrived, we were transferred to our hotels. Because I couldn't find anyone to share with me, I had a room to myself. All the single rooms are in a hotel called the Radisson SAS, which is quite a distance from the others. I thought I would be on my own
there, but since Mark put down to share with Dan, and Dan being high up got the management hotel, Mark was left on his own, and so got a single room in the Radisson too. That was lucky for me, because I didn't know anyone else there.
The room was huge, and had a stunning view over the sea from the top floor of the hotel. As the plane was late, we had to go immediately to the welcome speech. We were guided by one of the event team, who held up a placard and we all followed him, like the pied piper. I kept on expecting him to lead us into the sea to drown. All the locals were looking at us and I felt a right sheep.
The actual speech itself was held in a huge auditorium with Sony staff filling it to the brim. There were over 1200 of us! Then various top brass management told us how well we were doing. One of them showed us graphs which were obviously a complete fallacy, with no figures on them so were completely devoid of any useful information. Finally, Paul Johnson, a world record holding athlete in the 200m and 400m was brought out to give a motivational speech. He described his career and how he pushed himself to succeed when times were hard. While his achievements are amazing, I didn't see how it related to us. I love to go for my own personal goals, and it feels great to achieve something entirely off your own back, but in a big company like Sony there are so many things involved that it's often hard to see exactly where your contribution to the project fits in. He told us to go for what you believe in and what you really want to do, but in my case, that may well be to leave Sony.
After the talk we were taken to the Westin Hotel for a buffet dinner. It was
right on the coast, and looked beautiful. There was a huge queue for dinner though, and I think I was waiting for about half an hour to get something to eat, by which time I was famished. They didn't really have enough to go round either, so I ended up eating tons of fruit, as there was no queue for that! We spend the rest of the evening sitting by the pool grumbling about Sony and how badly it's run with Dan, the technical manager on the technology team. I spent much of the evening speaking to Emily, our HCI expert. She's a really warm, caring person, and has a very sharp mind. She's also really attractive, and someone I'd really like to get to know a bit better. Unfortunately, she's already in a relationship and even so I doubt she'd want anything to do with me.
On Wednesday morning we were given a bit of time to enjoy ourselves in Malta. There were various planned activities and I had booked myself on a coach going into Malta. I managed to oversleep and missed the coach, but it wasn't a problems as there was a regular public bus service. I persuaded Mark to come with me and we took a rickety old bus into Valetta, the capital of Malta. The place was very idyllic, the white stone buildings which made up the city looked like they'd been there for centuries. We met up with Emily, Matt and Darren, and took a nice stroll round. This was the first time I was actually enjoying myself. Good company, and interesting things to see. We clambered onto a wall overlooking the port, and the views were spectacular. We all decided we would skip the Sony-provided lunch, and stop at a cafe instead, so we did. We left it a bit late to get the bus back, and instead crammed into a taxi. There were four of us in the back seat and I had my shoulder jammed into poor Emily's side. The driver raced around the streets of Valetta, swearing in Italian at other motorists.
That afternoon was the development talks. People from the various Sony studios had volunteered to talk on a topic, and the atendees picked three of them to go to. Emily was due to give a talk that afternoon, and she was very nervous. I helped set up her equipment, and she gave the talk, which went without a hitch.
The second talk I went to was on the PSP Internals. What I took away from that talk was that the PSP would be quite a difficult machine to program for. The last talk was called Programming the Cell, and was very well attended, as the Playstation 3 is still a secret and people were hoping to learn a bit more about the hardware they will be expected to program for in a few short months. The talk went though the design process that went into making a volumetric explosion renderer similar to the one used to make the explosions in the Terminator 3 film. I was struck by the fact that the choice of task to solve was ideally suited to the Cell chip, and it's performance on general tasks would be quite a lot worse. I asked the question of the speakers, and they didn't really have an answer for me. Other people asked lots of
questions too, and they said they weren't allowed to answer most of them. Apparently we'll find out in September, which in my mind is too late. Many of the people at Sony are quite worried that the learning curve will be steep, and that they'll be thrown in at the deep end with no time to get to grips with it all.
After the talks we were all herded onto a pair of huge ships to cross the harbour. We were off to the the Villa Bighi for dinner. As the boat docked, a brass band welcomed us ashore. We thought that was impressive, but there was more to come! The brass band led us up the hill in a long line to the villa. I lost track of where people were in the crowd, but managed to spot a few people I could sit with. We walked through the castle along a red carpet to the accompanyment of flag dancers and local musicians. There were stilt walkers, and magicians too. At the top of the hill there were huge long tables just outside the villa that were laid for dinner. It overlooked the bay that we'd seen from the other side when we went round Valetta. The view was truly spectacular. Of course, we all cynically thought it was way too over the top.
The food was the usual barbeque stuff that we'd been served last night, but there was more of it this time! We all ate our fill, and then there was a fireworks display, before they took us all back to our hotels in a fleet of coaches.
On Thursday morning it was back to work bright and early. At lest, it was meant to be. But Mark wasn't ready when I went down to meet him for breakfast so we were a bit late to our first workshop. I had chosen to attend previews of PSP and PS2 software for the year ahead. We were shown several videos of games, very few of which sparked my interest at all. One PS2 game, called Buzz, seems to be management's hope for the next mass market game, and takes the form of a music quiz show. The game comes with four quiz show style buzzers in the box. A bit gimmicky, but you never know. The PSP previews were as much about video and film content as they are about games. They seem to be pushing that as large part of the PSPs worth, something I think is a mistake.
After that I attended a talk called 'All About Our Consumers'. It was basically marketing telling us how they target the products. It was very much about products that have a mass market appeal, such as Singstar, our Kareoke game. As a target market, actual gamers were pretty much left out in the cold. He talked about the relative ages of people who play games (who are pretty much all 18-30) and showed us cheesy videos of interviews with people and their gaming 'life'.
The last talk I went to was about Wifi. Wifi is a method where the PSP can connect to the internet and to other PSPs without a cable, using radio transmissions. He talked about the difficulty of connecting to public Wifi hotspots in Starbucks and McDonalds, and suggested that this may change in the future. He talked about how people login details will cross over from their PS2 online account. Nothing really new to me.
After that had finished, we were herded again (I was getting really sick of all that) back to the Hilton hotel for a lunch. The hotel was again very impressive, and was right by the sea. A group of us clambered down and went and stolled along the rocky beach. It's amazing to stare out at the huge openness of the sea.
In the afternoon we had a Plenary session (nope, we didn't know what it meant either). Since everyone was required to attend I assumed it would be like the welcome session, which made me want to throw up. So I decided to skip it and do something more interesting but I couldn't find anyone else willing to join me. Is it only me that likes breaking the rules? I had a stoll around town, and went into an internet cafe to check my email (and LJ, of course!). Then I went back to my room for a nap before the gala dinner that evening.
Before dinner we went up to the rooftop pool in the Intercontinental Hotel. The place was amazing. There was an atrium on the fifth floor where we got out of the lifts by mistake, and on the tenth was the pool, overlooked by some of the rooms on two sides. It was full of people and waiters walked round with trays of champagne.
Soon we were taken downstairs to a huge hall deep inside the hotel. We were seated randomly, and I ended up next to the head of finance for France and a product selection guy from Italy. I managed to be sociable with them all though! Dinner was served. Then there was an awards ceremony in which six people I'd never heard of were given awards by the board of management. I went and found a few of my friends on other tables, which was a difficult job as the room was very crowded. Desert was served (my favourite part of any meal) and then they brought on our entertainment. To my delight it was Bill Bailey, one of my favourite comedians! He did a fantastic performance which had everyone laughing.
After that, Sony had hired out a bar and a club for us, so I went along to the bar with a few other Eyetoy people. I wasn't there for long though, as it was very loud and I needed to be up for the flight the following morning (don't I sound like an old man?).
On Friday we started the long journey home. A coach picked us up from the hotels, and this time the flight was only delayed by about half an hour, which I was thankful for. I dragged my case on the train round to my parents, where I spent the evening cuddling the cat.
Although I did enjoy the trip, I felt a bit out of place due to the lavish expense of it all. Like a kid at an adult's party. I'd much rather have had a more relaxing time exploring the island, so it was a bit frustrating not to be able to get away much. Still, I had a good time anyway.
Unfortunately, since there were a few problems with the plane, we were kept waiting around at the gate for nearly an hour before we finally boarded. During the wait loads of people got out their DS and were using the wireless chat feature, drawing silly pictures of genitalia and sending them to each other. It was great fun, and I didn't know that so many people at Sony even owned a DS! Once we got on the plane we were kept waiting for another hour while they had problems refuelling and then lost our air traffic slot. Eventually we got into the air and thankfully I didn't have any dizziness because of the motion of the plane. I was quite worried that I'd be in a lot of discomfort. I played DS games and slept much of the journey.
Once we arrived, we were transferred to our hotels. Because I couldn't find anyone to share with me, I had a room to myself. All the single rooms are in a hotel called the Radisson SAS, which is quite a distance from the others. I thought I would be on my own
there, but since Mark put down to share with Dan, and Dan being high up got the management hotel, Mark was left on his own, and so got a single room in the Radisson too. That was lucky for me, because I didn't know anyone else there.
The room was huge, and had a stunning view over the sea from the top floor of the hotel. As the plane was late, we had to go immediately to the welcome speech. We were guided by one of the event team, who held up a placard and we all followed him, like the pied piper. I kept on expecting him to lead us into the sea to drown. All the locals were looking at us and I felt a right sheep.
The actual speech itself was held in a huge auditorium with Sony staff filling it to the brim. There were over 1200 of us! Then various top brass management told us how well we were doing. One of them showed us graphs which were obviously a complete fallacy, with no figures on them so were completely devoid of any useful information. Finally, Paul Johnson, a world record holding athlete in the 200m and 400m was brought out to give a motivational speech. He described his career and how he pushed himself to succeed when times were hard. While his achievements are amazing, I didn't see how it related to us. I love to go for my own personal goals, and it feels great to achieve something entirely off your own back, but in a big company like Sony there are so many things involved that it's often hard to see exactly where your contribution to the project fits in. He told us to go for what you believe in and what you really want to do, but in my case, that may well be to leave Sony.
After the talk we were taken to the Westin Hotel for a buffet dinner. It was
right on the coast, and looked beautiful. There was a huge queue for dinner though, and I think I was waiting for about half an hour to get something to eat, by which time I was famished. They didn't really have enough to go round either, so I ended up eating tons of fruit, as there was no queue for that! We spend the rest of the evening sitting by the pool grumbling about Sony and how badly it's run with Dan, the technical manager on the technology team. I spent much of the evening speaking to Emily, our HCI expert. She's a really warm, caring person, and has a very sharp mind. She's also really attractive, and someone I'd really like to get to know a bit better. Unfortunately, she's already in a relationship and even so I doubt she'd want anything to do with me.
On Wednesday morning we were given a bit of time to enjoy ourselves in Malta. There were various planned activities and I had booked myself on a coach going into Malta. I managed to oversleep and missed the coach, but it wasn't a problems as there was a regular public bus service. I persuaded Mark to come with me and we took a rickety old bus into Valetta, the capital of Malta. The place was very idyllic, the white stone buildings which made up the city looked like they'd been there for centuries. We met up with Emily, Matt and Darren, and took a nice stroll round. This was the first time I was actually enjoying myself. Good company, and interesting things to see. We clambered onto a wall overlooking the port, and the views were spectacular. We all decided we would skip the Sony-provided lunch, and stop at a cafe instead, so we did. We left it a bit late to get the bus back, and instead crammed into a taxi. There were four of us in the back seat and I had my shoulder jammed into poor Emily's side. The driver raced around the streets of Valetta, swearing in Italian at other motorists.
That afternoon was the development talks. People from the various Sony studios had volunteered to talk on a topic, and the atendees picked three of them to go to. Emily was due to give a talk that afternoon, and she was very nervous. I helped set up her equipment, and she gave the talk, which went without a hitch.
The second talk I went to was on the PSP Internals. What I took away from that talk was that the PSP would be quite a difficult machine to program for. The last talk was called Programming the Cell, and was very well attended, as the Playstation 3 is still a secret and people were hoping to learn a bit more about the hardware they will be expected to program for in a few short months. The talk went though the design process that went into making a volumetric explosion renderer similar to the one used to make the explosions in the Terminator 3 film. I was struck by the fact that the choice of task to solve was ideally suited to the Cell chip, and it's performance on general tasks would be quite a lot worse. I asked the question of the speakers, and they didn't really have an answer for me. Other people asked lots of
questions too, and they said they weren't allowed to answer most of them. Apparently we'll find out in September, which in my mind is too late. Many of the people at Sony are quite worried that the learning curve will be steep, and that they'll be thrown in at the deep end with no time to get to grips with it all.
After the talks we were all herded onto a pair of huge ships to cross the harbour. We were off to the the Villa Bighi for dinner. As the boat docked, a brass band welcomed us ashore. We thought that was impressive, but there was more to come! The brass band led us up the hill in a long line to the villa. I lost track of where people were in the crowd, but managed to spot a few people I could sit with. We walked through the castle along a red carpet to the accompanyment of flag dancers and local musicians. There were stilt walkers, and magicians too. At the top of the hill there were huge long tables just outside the villa that were laid for dinner. It overlooked the bay that we'd seen from the other side when we went round Valetta. The view was truly spectacular. Of course, we all cynically thought it was way too over the top.
The food was the usual barbeque stuff that we'd been served last night, but there was more of it this time! We all ate our fill, and then there was a fireworks display, before they took us all back to our hotels in a fleet of coaches.
On Thursday morning it was back to work bright and early. At lest, it was meant to be. But Mark wasn't ready when I went down to meet him for breakfast so we were a bit late to our first workshop. I had chosen to attend previews of PSP and PS2 software for the year ahead. We were shown several videos of games, very few of which sparked my interest at all. One PS2 game, called Buzz, seems to be management's hope for the next mass market game, and takes the form of a music quiz show. The game comes with four quiz show style buzzers in the box. A bit gimmicky, but you never know. The PSP previews were as much about video and film content as they are about games. They seem to be pushing that as large part of the PSPs worth, something I think is a mistake.
After that I attended a talk called 'All About Our Consumers'. It was basically marketing telling us how they target the products. It was very much about products that have a mass market appeal, such as Singstar, our Kareoke game. As a target market, actual gamers were pretty much left out in the cold. He talked about the relative ages of people who play games (who are pretty much all 18-30) and showed us cheesy videos of interviews with people and their gaming 'life'.
The last talk I went to was about Wifi. Wifi is a method where the PSP can connect to the internet and to other PSPs without a cable, using radio transmissions. He talked about the difficulty of connecting to public Wifi hotspots in Starbucks and McDonalds, and suggested that this may change in the future. He talked about how people login details will cross over from their PS2 online account. Nothing really new to me.
After that had finished, we were herded again (I was getting really sick of all that) back to the Hilton hotel for a lunch. The hotel was again very impressive, and was right by the sea. A group of us clambered down and went and stolled along the rocky beach. It's amazing to stare out at the huge openness of the sea.
In the afternoon we had a Plenary session (nope, we didn't know what it meant either). Since everyone was required to attend I assumed it would be like the welcome session, which made me want to throw up. So I decided to skip it and do something more interesting but I couldn't find anyone else willing to join me. Is it only me that likes breaking the rules? I had a stoll around town, and went into an internet cafe to check my email (and LJ, of course!). Then I went back to my room for a nap before the gala dinner that evening.
Before dinner we went up to the rooftop pool in the Intercontinental Hotel. The place was amazing. There was an atrium on the fifth floor where we got out of the lifts by mistake, and on the tenth was the pool, overlooked by some of the rooms on two sides. It was full of people and waiters walked round with trays of champagne.
Soon we were taken downstairs to a huge hall deep inside the hotel. We were seated randomly, and I ended up next to the head of finance for France and a product selection guy from Italy. I managed to be sociable with them all though! Dinner was served. Then there was an awards ceremony in which six people I'd never heard of were given awards by the board of management. I went and found a few of my friends on other tables, which was a difficult job as the room was very crowded. Desert was served (my favourite part of any meal) and then they brought on our entertainment. To my delight it was Bill Bailey, one of my favourite comedians! He did a fantastic performance which had everyone laughing.
After that, Sony had hired out a bar and a club for us, so I went along to the bar with a few other Eyetoy people. I wasn't there for long though, as it was very loud and I needed to be up for the flight the following morning (don't I sound like an old man?).
On Friday we started the long journey home. A coach picked us up from the hotels, and this time the flight was only delayed by about half an hour, which I was thankful for. I dragged my case on the train round to my parents, where I spent the evening cuddling the cat.
Although I did enjoy the trip, I felt a bit out of place due to the lavish expense of it all. Like a kid at an adult's party. I'd much rather have had a more relaxing time exploring the island, so it was a bit frustrating not to be able to get away much. Still, I had a good time anyway.