Paris, London and home…

So I took a few days away to Paris with my girlfriend to meet up with some chums from America.
Right before I left, my OS drive decided to develop bad sectors, so it looks like I shall be reinstalling half of my software, still I can purge the chaff. Hoping I can avoid buying a new hard drive, but I suspect I shall have to. Unfortunately, this means that I now probably won’t have time to get my computer working and finishing what I had hope to hand into the Evermotion competition.

Paris was great, we got to see quite a few of the sites that I had been wanting to see, such as Notre Dame, Les Invalides, Eiffel Tower, Saint Chapel, Pere Lachaise, Lover’s Bridge and Pont Alexandre III. We were only there for a weekend visit, so seeing more wasn’t viable.

During the week back in England I hung out with my middle brother which was a great thing, due to where I live I don’t see him nearly as much as I would like.

I also attended the Escape Studios‘ “Your career in VFX” webinar on Thursday. This was great and provided me a bit more confidence about getting a job

The  next night we attended a seminar in Soho held  by ZED along with HP computers. The talk was about how they did the visual effects in The World’s End. There were budget considerations on the film (as is the case for most films!), so in the end they ended up doing a lot of practical effects with a bit of cg sprucing up. I personally think this is the way it should be, obviously there are cases when it is wildly inappropriate. Still, CG blood? I hate it. Fake blood wins everytime be it chocolate sauce or corn syrup with dye in.

Last weekend, I went to the Eve Online London meetup, which was great fun. At the end of the evening my girlfriend arrived and we had dinner before heading home. I spoke to a few folk from a major alliance, always good to have someone to call to in an emergency.

On Sunday, I went to Eurogamer Expo 2013 with some friends from university. It was good,however playing PC games with a console controller was rubbish. I’m looking at you, Wolfenstein and Daylight.

I took the train back to London on Monday and on Thursday I moved house up to Marlborough. I am not sure how long I shall be here – obviously getting a job will have to be done and ideally I would like to live in the country and probably commute to work.