MMXI Week 3–Working 9 to 5 (or In My Case, 8 to 4)

Oh boy, this has been an draining week. I started my temp assignment on Monday working for Capita Total Documents Solutions. What they do, in simplest terms, is back up ‘analogue’ documents; paperwork, celluloid film etc. into digital format. I had my induction at nine thirty am on Monday morning, where they gave me a quick tour of the facility. The first thing that struck me was that it smelt like a pig sty. Not the proverbial sty, but a literal pig sty, with a ever-present odour that reminded me of my Granddads old farm.

Analogue to Digital Piggy Back Up

The smell was actually coming from the ammonia they used to clean the film in the restoration and back up area. I was grateful to be shown the document processing rooms away from the head ache inducing smell.

Work at Capita is broken down into four stages for normal document processing; Prep, Scan, QC and Export. Prep (sort for preparation) is just that, preparing the documents for scanning. This means aligning all the pages in same orientation, flattening out creases, taping down small pieces of paper, moving post it notes that obscure text and, most importantly, removing staples.
Or as I have come to know them, little shards of metallic hell.

Oh these little bastards task me!

Scan is fairly self explanatory and simple. Documents are fed into industrial automated document scanners, with the operator fine tuning the settings for best image quality. The main responsibility appears to be keeping the machine clean, as I frequently hear the hiss of compressed air ever few minutes.

QC, or quality control, is where the scans are inspected to check for errors. This can be anything from a folded corner, to a missed post it, to a whole page scanned far too dark to read. Any batches that fail QC are sent back to scan and so the process begins again.

Finally, you have export, where the scanned files, in Tiff format, are prepared to ship back out to the client. The files have to be converted, compiled, compressed and encrypted to the clients specifications, the transferred onto the media of their choice. This could be a single, multi page PDF document on DVD Rom, or a folder of hundreds of bitmaps on an external hard drive.
On a related note, I am not sure if Capita offers the WWF file format as an option. For those of you not familiar, WWF is a digital document format similar to PDF, with one key exception; you cannot, under any circumstances, print or convert it. This makes it a truly paper free format, preventing people from falling into the usual habit of printing a digital document so they have a hard copy to read, thus saving paper, therefore trees.

No, it’s not the World Wrestling Format; piledriver 2.0 compatible

I’m unsure how I feel about WWF, as I can see the sense in making a format that doesn’t lead to unnecessary use of paper, as PDF often does. But on the other hand, sometimes you need to print a document off, say if you’re going to use it in an environment where there’s not computer, or maybe you want instructions for fitting your water cooling system, which just so happens to need your computer to be switched off while you fit it. But then again, with the proliferation of portable devices capable of reading digital document formats, maybe this will become a moot point.

But back to my first week at work. During the first two days, I was on QC, sat at a computer wearing out the down arrow key. I would basically browse through documents looking for mistakes in the scanning process. Rapidly I learned to apply my knowledge of keyboard shortcuts, reducing the amount I used the mouse to an absolute minimum. It was almost painful to watch people who had been working there much longer than me using the mouse to rotate an image when you could use Ctrl + R to do the same job in a fraction of the time and with much less effort. But that’s probably just a matter of preference. It wasn’t too bad work, very similar to scanning through the hundreds of photos I’d take as reference images for uni work. Good, good, good, rotate, delete, rotate, good, good. You get the idea.

For the rest of the week I was working in prep, which was marginally more tedious than QC, and left me with sore fingers from using the staple lever. The only interesting part was nosing through the various documents. You see, if you put text in front of me, I can’t help but read it. So here I was, reading about bilateral breast enhancements, anti social behaviour in council houses and various other snippets of what I presume to be fair confidential information. Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t ‘intentionally’ reading these documents, it’s just my brain can’t help but pull every bit of information from text in front of me.

I got a really great bit of news at the end of Thursday that at the start of the next week I would be trained up on scan. This is the department I have the second greatest interest in after export. I will make sure I have a note book to hand as I’m absolutely petrified of breaking what I presume to be a very expensive piece of equipment.

In parallel to my work, I’ve been trotting along on two side projects. one of which you already know about. I've done a couple of pages of concept sketches for my level design project, but more importantly, I’ve done a mind map of the ships systems. I reasoned that if I was going to produce a plausible ship design, I would need to include ever possible element of ship systems, from life support to sensors to crew quarters. I did this using a very esoteric method. I lay down in my bed and closed my eyes, imagining I was the captain of this ship on a simple cargo haul that went wrong, narrating what would happen and every time a new element of the ship came up, I noted it down. I then listed all these sections on my mind map.

As you can see, it’s full of a lot of techno-babble and pseudo-science, but I like to think that using bad science is better than using made up science. My plan is that by the time I’m finished I will have created such a complex and in depth level, you’ll be able to spend ages walking around before you realise it’s not actually a game. One of the key aspects I’m really focusing on is variable gravity. There are currently three main gravity wells I’m focusing on. 'Standard’ gravity (one unit of earths gravity relatively downwards), cyclic gravity (one earth gravity towards the center of a toroid) and zero gravity. This will create very different environments, and I may even include areas of inverse gravity or even multiple gravity zones, say in the engineering sections where it would more useful.

My second project is something fairly new, my cosplay project for the MCM midlands anime expo in February. If I showed you this image, would you have any idea?

How about now….?

 

If you haven’t guessed it, I’m planning on going as the ‘Minecraft’ guy, otherwise known as Steve.

I was heavily inspired by this previous cosplay design, partially due to it’s simplicity, but also because I own a t-shirt of that exact colour worn by Steve the Minecraft Guy

I’m currently waiting until I can order some more printer ink so I can print off the artwork to cover my ‘head box’ with. I’ve also got a fairly large diamond pickaxe to print out and make, so hopefully I’ll have a really good costume. I’m just worried I’ll get people coming up behind me at the convention and going ‘ksssssssssssss!”

This blogging week finished in Oxford, as I was on the never ending gamer pursuit of the ‘special edition’. This time I was questing after the Dead Space 2 Collectors Edition. What makes this edition so collectable you ask? Well, apart from the steel book case, art book, soundtrack and dlc code, it comes with this:

Pew Pew Pew

For those of you that haven’t place the original Dead Space, that’s a full size replica of the plasma cutter, the most reliable gun from the original game. Now I have a pretty bad weakness for collectors editions, but when it comes to life size props, I get a little silly in the head. But this tale does not end in joy and rainbows, as you see, retail is often filled with incompetents.
After phoning HMV Oxford twice the day before to confirm that yes, they are taking pre-order deposits for Dead Space 2 and yes, that is the collectors edition, and it would be a £10 down payment, I arrived at the store to be told that there was a suspension on pre-orders, but I could call on release day to get one set aside.

Fortunately that wasn’t my only objective for dragging myself and my good friend Amanda into Oxford. I also visited T-mobile, to be told that they wouldn’t ever be getting the HTC Desire Z in stock. As my phone contract is coming up to its renewal, and I have a thing for both Android and physical keyboards, the Desire Z is ideal for me. It’s the keyboard equipped version of the Desire HD, which T-mobile do stock.

It will be mine, oh yes, it will be mine!

Having been defeated twice, me and Amanda set of in pursuit of culture. That’s one of the things I love about being older, I can appreciate museums finally. It also helps that I act like a little kid around anything dinosaur related! I wouldn’t be telling a word of a lie if I told you that on more than one occasion I interrupted my own sentences with the exclamation “ooooh! Dinosaurs!” When me and Viv travelled to London to see Blue October, I used up all the battery I was saving to take photos at the gig in the natural history museum dinosaur displays. Not event the whole museum, just the dinosaurs.

Terrible thunder lizard he may be, but that doesn’t change the fact he looks cross eyed!

On several occasions during mine and Amanda's visit to the Pit Rivers museum I embarrassed/impressed myself with my ability to recognise the more obscure dinosaur species on display. Then again, I successfully recognised cuneiform script, which I think made me look pretty erudite.

Well this has been quite a long blog entry, I’m certainly impressed with myself. I’m undecided if my next entry will be early (Friday) or late (Sunday or Monday) as I’m planning on spending the weekend in Birmingham and as such, probably won’t be able to blog on Saturday night as I usually like to do. Until then, switches and ores!