The song’s called Hurricane and the video’s a whole lot of images of four line poems. The poems have been written using part of a game called Boggle which I used to have when I was a child actually – I used to enjoy playing it.
I think it’s a very cool video and I like the poems.
In the Acadia Report today I’d like to introduce a video about a game developer called HB Studios. The company is in Lunenburg in Nova Scotia. And I’ve been there which you might know if you’ve been watching The Daily English Show for a while. When we were at Acadia University we went on a trip with the English language students to Lunenburg to go on a boat trip and it was amazing. It was such a beautiful day. You can go and check out the video we made if you haven’t seen it already.
Anyway, back to the video about HB Studios – they interview some Acadia graduates who are working there and they talk about what they like about their jobs and what they learnt at university and advice for people who are thinking about getting into the industry.
For example, one of them says: I think the most valuable thing that I learnt at Acadia and in the school of computer science was how to learn and how to keep up with constantly changing technologies in the IT sector.
We started with nine people, ah, and now we’re 130, so there’s, there’s been some, some periods during that time where we’ve really grown extremely fast. The culture of our company is, ah, is a … a dynamic, ah, creative, um, vibrant culture. Um, I think a lot of that is established by the environment we’re in and industry itself, um, which is an extremely, ah, fast-paced, ah, creative industry.
I’ve worked on a couple of titles. My first one was Madden 07 for the Wii. And that was a Wii launch title, so we got to work with the hardware before people had … the general public had played with it. It was a really interesting and difficult project.
The thing I enjoy most is that it’s, it’s always changing and there’s always new things to learn. With a short development cycle, you’re always working on different projects and there’s always different areas to work on.
My favourite thing about working with HB is that, ah, there is a great sense of community here. Being in, ah, such a small town as Lunenburg, ah, we tend to, um, spend a lot of time together. Not just at work, but outside of work as well.
Our staff will invariably socialise with each other. And that’s actually been enormously beneficial for us in the quality of the work we do because when people are friendly and used to spending a lot of time with each other, um, that really has benefited us during, during crunch time. It just … it really helps with the creativity.
I guess I enjoy the toys. It’s always fun to get all this stuff, all this stuff I’ve got around my desk. Like, ah, right now I don’t have quite as much as I did a few months ago, when I had, like, the PlayStation 3 sitting next to the Xbox and the Wii. Any given time I was programming for any given subset of them.
I think the most valuable thing, ah, that I learned at Acadia and in the school of computer science was how to learn, ah, and how to keep up with, um, constantly changing technologies in the, ah, in the IT sector.
The advice I would give to a current computer science student would be to gain as much experience as possible.
A great piece of advice that’s pretty simple to … and straightforward would be to, ah, pay attention in maths class. Cause, ah, a lot of that stuff is going to come back. Stuff like polynomial algebria. Matrix algebra is huge for, um, doing stuff like 3d graphics … everything is linear and matrix algebra. Now you can actually, thanks to the internet and Microsoft’s got their own visual studio express program. So you can get your hands on a compiler and all the SDKs necessary to make a, ah, Windows game, like, at the same level as what we’re doing here. It’s all available on the internet for free. And there’s all these knowledge bases like MSDN, ah, just to give an example, that’s available on the internet. So you don’t actually have to wait to you get to university to try it out and see if this is something that might interest you.
world's animals from a great flood. A big boat called Noah’s Ark has just been built in Hong Kong. The boat is 137 meters long and is a tourist attraction. CNN reported that one of the attractions was lying in a coffin. According to the official press release: The facility is full of happiness and positive messages … it will lift people's horizons with new knowledge and let them rethink life and experience love.
And that was Stick News for Thursday the 28th of May. Kia ora.
maim v. to injure sb seriously, causing permanent damage to their body
conversations with sarah
What are you listening to?
Kim What are you listening to? 何聴いてはるんですか?
Sarah Oh, I was listening to a podcast. ああ、ポッドキャスト聴いていました。
Kim What was it about? どんな内容?
Sarah They were talking about this hikoi that happened in Auckland. オークランドであったヒコイについて話しています。
Kim What’s a hikoi? ヒコイとは?
Sarah It’s a kind of protest march. デモ行進のようなものです。
Kim What’s the difference between a hikoi and a protest march? ヒコイとデモ行進の違いは?
Sarah Mm, good question. I think they’re the same thing. Just if it’s organized by Māori then they call it a hikoi. They had some funny chants, like: Move aside, Rodney Hide. うーむ、良い質問ですね。 意味は同じだと思いますよ。 マオリが組織したらヒコイと呼びます。 面白いシュプレヒ コールがあります。 「邪魔するな、ロドニー・ハイド」