Dev Support on the water

Nokia Games developer support members are visiting San Francsico office for Java platform training. We went through all the key docs, processes and SRs together. They even started coding using our new SDK. One month training started in the beginning of June is almost over and one more week to go before they fly back to their original offices.

Well, before they fly back, one thing they have to do. Get their feet wet! Actually, this is written in the original developer support training agenda I wrote ;-).

Friday, I came in office around 7 am to get my work done earlier. At noon, Sun is high and air is hot! Our developer support members are ready to jump into the water!

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We hopped on my outback and hit highway 280 to Lindamar. No wind and looks good!

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This surf shop "Norcal" is local known shop next to Pacifica beach. When you come to San Francisco, you will often see "Norcal" or "WISE" (two big surf shops in SF) mark on those surfers cars. At Norcal, Jesus bought a nice pair of booties. He seems determined...

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After renting boards and wet suits at Norcal, we are ready to hit beach. N-95 timer shot is not bad, right? I got new SNAP Mobile Mavericks Fish with me.

By the way, both Jesus and Leslie are first time in surfing. I wonder how this session will go...

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After 1 hour session. both of them caught many waves! Jesus even stood a split second(amazing...). I hope they enjoyed this lunch break session!. Of course, after this, we went back to office and worked again...

Yes, we work hard and play hard!

If you are visiting San Francisco, please let us know. We will hit beach together!

Mavericks Surf Boards!

Thanks to Jennifer, long wanted Mavericks surf boards arrived to SF office. Right on time before summer gets heated! Some N-Gage and some SNAP Mobile boards. They are custom boards and hand-shaped by Jeff Clark, the man of Mavericks Big Wave Competetion.

The boards are all Fish with quad fins. The length ranges from 5'10 to 6'2. The width and thickness varies a bit.
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On front and back, we have cool Mavericks logo and SGR compliant SNAP Mobile logo ;-).

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Yes, I could not wait...I picked up 5'10 Fish and took a quick 20 min drive to Linda Mar for "acceptance test". Weather is great, air is hot, and water is blue!

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Acceptance test -> Passed! It floats well and easy to take off. Since the one I took was a bit bulky, run and turn was ok. I say this is really good for mid level surfers. I want to use this board in much bigger waves. We will try other ones as we go.

We plan to have Friday afternoon surf trips/sessions for office members starting July. If you are interested joining, leave your comments!

Antoine's Farewell

Former head of SNAP Mobile, Antoine, is going back to Paris. Let's see how he is going to adjust to his origin after living abroad for more than 10 years...
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For him, we had little farewell lunch. As always, he made us laugh in his speech. All of us miss him going! Stay with us!

SDK2.0 launch party!

Yes, we have delivered one of most important deliverables, SDK2.0 on time! Actually, it was published 1 week ealier than plan. Great job to the team!

Our initial scope of "cruise and BBQ" tunrned into 3 bottles of Dom Pérignon toast... Well, as long as we have some buz, we are cool!

You see how easy you can make people forget about cruise and BBQ by pouring nice Champaign ;-)

Tokyo Publisher Session

Nokia Games 3rd party publishing team held a publisher session in Tokyo. George and Shinya managed very good sessions.

While schedule is packed, we managed to find lunch time and visited Kanda for fresh Sushi. Ya, they are happy...
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This is real Sushi place. You order over the counter. You do not come here after 5pm since all good fish bought from Tsukiji Fish Market that morning will be gone by then. Cannot wait!

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N-Gage Launch Party!

Nice thing to be a part of being in SF office is that we can free ride on N-Gage events on top of our cool SNAP Mobile activities!

You can see SNAP Mobile team members are very happy here. But if you listen carefully to their conversation...

QA: "Free beer, go N-Gage!"
Tech Writer: "Can we do cool thing like this?"
Java Engineer: "Ya, hire vendor for our BBQ! No more Safeway!"
Game launch mgr: "Ya, I don wanna go to Trader Joe's again for our BBQ food and drinks!"
Testing: "Ya, me neither. No sitting alone in the morning at Golden Gate Park to secure BBQ pit!"
R&D/Operations mgr: "Be real, man! No budget. Go surf, it's free!"
All: "Oh, crap!"

We get along well...
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"Where is our party? Where is our luxury suite?"

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R&D/Operations mgr brought complete SF baseball night game set (jacket, hat, globes for chilly SF night game). He did not know we had a box room!

"What? We have a box room? Really? Order Dom Pérignon!"

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Game launch mgr: "Hey man, we should do this more often! I enjoy being served..."

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Night fell and Giants won...

Hey, if you have a chance to vist SF, please contact us. We will take care of you! Surfing, baseball, bring it on!

Let's look around SF!

Hi, sorry for lazy update during April. As you might know, our team published SDK2.0 on May 2nd and all of us were very busy to meet this deadline. Thanks to all the effort from our team members and partners and special thanks to Forum Nokia friends, we could publish our very important SDK on time! Well, not much team activities yet (our special BBQ was canceled due to tight deliverable timeline and budget...) but we never stop cruzing around SF area! Here are some pics.

This is our hanging-out place next to our team's home beach "half moon bay". The name is "Half Moon Bay Brewery" and it is one of popular micro breweries in San Francisco area. You see the harbor out there and 1.6 mile outside, that world-famous "Mervericks" point is fascinating local and world surfers.

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After checking jetty point (unfortunately no good waves and just had bergers and beer at brewery), we headed north to the other side of Golden Gate bridge. This is looking at east side of bay. You can see Alcatras island toward right side and UC Berkeley (Go Bears!) on the other side of bay.

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This is looking at south side. You can see our city (SF!) throuhg the nice read Golden Gate Bridge. Though the bridge is fun to walk across and nice to look at, if you want to know creepy side of this bridge, check out the DVD "The Bridge" in the renal store. It is creepy...

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Looking west side, the pacific ocean. It was such a beautiful day and all of us had good time hanging out.

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Here is our money man. Our game launch manager is handling all the Java game deployment globally so that we have consistent/streamlined process of delivering Java games through Nokia channels. He does not surf but soon all the surfers in the office will drag him out...
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SNAP Mobile in Lapland

Here is another Finish tradition. Key meetings are held in the snow-covered forest far away from the city. The temperture outside was minus 7 degree. Kittila is 2 hours by air from Helsinki, located within the arctic circle. SNAP Mobile is meeting up with collegues in Games.
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We stayed and had many strategy discussions in this cottage. The place "Levi" is Finish famous ski resourt. 2 minutes away from slope. While seeing skiers walking by through the window, we spent a lot of time in team discussion to form a next new direction in operations.

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Here is the team. After heated discussion in various topics, time for appetite! We visited a beautiful cottage/restaurant for lunch. The grilled fish served in this restaurant was excellent. A man from the land of Sushi was very impressed;-). This farm(?) seems very old (150 years old?) and even had Santa Clause post office!

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OK. First time I see a raindeer besides the one on a plate. None of them had horns. They looked very gentle and nice. Probably I should focus on fish from now on in the restaurant...

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Fortunately, we had a chance to do some team activities. The organizer knows what to do to make the team as one...intellectual/active discussion, dine, wine and exercise! Bunch of us went to a snowmobile trip across forests. Traveled 65 kilo meters in 3 hours...reaching over 70 mph/110 kmh in speed (seriously, it was fast...maybe too fast...). At the end of trip, we reached the top of Levi ski resort. Quiet and pleasant moment.

SNAP Mobile in Taiwan

OK. The manager who was absent in previous blog was in fact in Taipe Taiwan to meet up with local partners. Here is Nokia Taiwan office building. The office was very cozy. Small but very efficient teams were present there.
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After lunch, we have visited 7-11. I have been wondering why they sell so many CDs in 7-11. It turned out that actually they are not CDs but they are online computer games. Since credic card is not that common especially for younger customers, these retailers are selling "pre-paid" access code to these online games. Mobile online games should be using similar sales strategy soon...

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I have visited our partner's office. Very cozy and pepople were working pretty hard.

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Lunch time in Thai food restaurant. They are checking out yummy desert.

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Of course, we had to vist KTV (Karaoke Room) at least once! The food (and beer) served there was amazingly good. I am picky about rice but the rice served there was yummy as well. I heard that the food was so popular among KTV customers, the owner decided to open a restaurant. With that taste, I agree. It was nice and relaxing night before flying back to US.

While the manager is away the employee will play

So our manager was out for a week, it was awesome! We just mostly hung around and watch tv, played Wii and most of us went home at 3pm. Oneday Heidi had this awesome idea to throw a party, it was sooo much fun. We will have to do this again next time the manager is out :)

Web Dude is feeling a little down because the manager will be back tomorrow.

There goes the part

Peter partied waaay to much this week and barely got any work done!

Is Kicking back or past out?

When the SNAPmobile is manager, other manger can let down their hair -Cheers!

Capt'n Morgan it's my favorite!

Some game publisher heard that the manager was out so they stopped by to party with us.