November is always busy for me as I try to get everything that needs doing done before December.
At work I’ve been cleaning up areas of the building that were essentially mothballed when the zombies attacked in back in 2020. This involves disposing of literal tons of old computers, monitors, and associated peripherals, and destroying old data in the form of removable media and the drives in the aforementioned tons of old computers.
It also entails a lot of unboxing, inventorying, and re-boxing… For example, two labs that I cleaned out contained a lot of the company’s old console testing hardware:
Back when game studios still cared about turning out a working product, we did tons of game QA for every big name studio you can think of – and console certification for the big-4 console makers as well.
Then online happened, so online patching and DLC could happen – then the game studios trained gamers to not only be okay with buggy, broken stuff, but to actually pay them to QA the game…
Anyway, the above is a pretty complete collection of every test and dev environment for every console from Xbox and Game Cube (2001) to PS3 and Wii (2006)…
Most people will recognize the Xbox/360 machines and the PS2/3 machines – and maybe even the Game Cubes and Wiis – but not many have seen a PSP dev unit (the tall white units in the middle) or the Nintendo NDEV stuff (blue and gray boxes in front of the PSP units). There’s also a box of 50-ish Nintendo gameboys and DS units in that box nest to the PS3s…
Not pictured is the rest of the NDEV setup (special media burners and whatnot) which I found in a third lab after the photo.
All of these have a couple hundred pounds of peripherals as well – so it’s a bit of an undertaking to get it all inventoried and re-boxed.
Then there’s been a month-long saga with the AC in the server room, which happens pretty much every year as soon as the temperature drops below 32 degrees at night. This year it’s been a comedy of errors with the HVAC company that has involved me running on the three backup portable 1-ton Tripplites for most of the month now.
I actually added a 4th 1-ton unit to take some of the load off the backup units while the HVAC company pulls their head out.
As of right now I’ve only lost four HDs due to overheating, which honestly isn’t that bad.
And of course there was Thanksgiving to contend with – this year I once again ordered a spread from Honey Baked Ham, like I’ve done for a couple of decades now. The biggest difference being that the order this year was just about $200 – five years ago it was $90…
But it was good, and I have several days of leftovers to eat now.
And there was also the winterizing of the house, which this year involved fixing the garage door that my roommate just about ripped out of the garage with his truck. And getting my Hellcat ready for storage, which happened today as I’m off work for the holiday and winter finally arrives next week.
So, that’s the update – I’m tired but still kicking… I plan to take most of December off to try and recuperate from October / November.
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