Just before I left Tokyo I got a chance to visit the Tsukiji Fish Market which one of the largest Fish Markets in the World. It is enormous. These picture do not do it justice.
Just before I left Tokyo I got a chance to visit the Tsukiji Fish Market which one of the largest Fish Markets in the World. It is enormous. These picture do not do it justice.
Kamakura is a city about an hour by train outside of Tokyo. It's probably the closest place to Tokyo that looks like old Japan of the type you might see in the movies. I really don't know anything about the history of Kamakura but I would be glad to hear about it if you feel like telling me.
I'm not currently looking for work but if you are curious here is my work history.
From 1995 to 1998 I was VP of Product Development at Big Grub Inc. As VP of Product Development I oversaw the development of the entire project including hiring, leading the design, pitching to prospective publishers, evaluating, selecting, purchasing all equipment and services including both employee equipment, (computers, software, furniture) and also office equipment/services (printers, server, networking, ISPs, phone systems, etc).
From 1995 to 1998 I was Technical Director at Big Grub. As Technical Director I was responsible for all the technical details of a 16 person project for both Playstation and Windows platforms. I created the technical design spec including detailing all risks and workarounds. I managed the other programmers on the team and made all technical decisions regarding the project. I was also responsible for setting up and maintaining all employees' computers (both Mac and PC) as well as company network servers (both NT and Linux), e−mail servers, internet connection, backup systems, Mac integration for the music department etc.)
From 1995 to 1998 I was also Lead Designer at Big Grub. Using my design experience from previous games, especially M.C Kids where I was a co−designer and also Gex, I wrote the design documents, laid out the world maps, assigned and placed all themes, monsters, bosses, items, events, and puzzles and organized the design around both a best case and worse case schedule so that even if all the stages could not be created there would be a coherent game ready to ship by the deadline.
I've been the lead programmer on 5 products. I've lead teams of up to 25 people through all things technical. I've created entire game engines including 2D and 3D. I've designed and created level layout tools both for 2D and 3D. My 2D tools (tUME) were used industry wide by as many as 60 different companies all over the world. Unlike most programmers I actually have at least some artistic talent. This ability has let me interface well with artists and therefore find ways to make their jobs easier and more efficient than most programmers. Where most programmers will say "No", I have always strived to find ways to achieve the effects and high levels of graphic realism the artists desire to create.
As a programmer I have extensive experience in C and C++ as well as a variety of software and technologies. I've written plugins and/or tools for most of the major 3D packages including 3D Studio Max, Softimage, Maya, and Lightwave. I've programmed with various APIs including DirectX, MFC, Quicktime, and many others. A comment I've often heard is that my code is, unlike many programmers, easy to read, easy to use, easy to integrate, and well written and I know when to keep it simple. I'm also familiar with Flash, Photoshop, Actionscript, Perl, Lisp, Scheme, HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and many other technologies, languages and applications. You can see some of my work in perl, Javascript and PHP based on my website (www.greggman.com) which is entirely perl and PHP based to be automated, template driven, and updateable from anywhere. (long before blog software was readily available)
I can of course provide references etc. Other achievements: I have given talks at the Game Developers Conference. I run a website about game developement. (http://games.greggman.com) Although I am not in any way an open source fanatic I do have a few open source projects online. There's Flickdown (http://greggman.com/pages/flickrdown.htm), another is Thumbs Plug TGA (http://greggman.com/pages/thumbplug_tga.htm and yet another is mayasvn (http://mayasvn.sourceforge.net). One is tUME (http://members.aol.com/opentume/) and another is a set of libraries and tools (http://elibs.sourceforge.net). I have also contributed to a few including JWPce (a Japanese word processor for Windows CE) and Dave's Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar (an infinitely more useful tool than the google bar). I have one shareware product which I used to maintain and support (http://greggman.com/thumbs/). And I have a couple of freeware products (http://greggman.com/nostalgic/) and (http://greggman.com/shorts/). I am also one of the 2 sys admins and a contributor to Tokyopia.com, a site about games and life in Tokyo
If you are interested in my personal website you will find it at greggman.com. You will find that it is quite large for a personal website. I have over 1400 articles on various topics including many on what it takes to make games, design games and also my personal history. I often get e−mail from kids and adults alike about making games and the game industry and I always make time to answer them to the best of my ability. A few of the many pages that are relevant to my job experience are:
Work History |
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My friend Scott turned me on to these.
Sharp makes a line of personal digital assistants (PDAs) collectively known as Zaurus. They make both English versions and Japanese versions from simple versions with not much more functionality than a calculator up to super versions with color TFT displays and built in digital cameras.
Or Fujikyuhirando as it would most likely be spelled in Japanese is an amusement park at the base of Mt. Fuji. I checked it out with some friends in December.
Here is a darker side of Japan. I hope nobody gets upset that I posted it. This is something I see almost every weeknight. At around 10:30pm the homeless start to come into Kawasaki station and sleep next to the walls. I'm not sure where they go in the day. In fact you can see homeless people have setup shanties in many parks in the bushes and places like that around Tokyo. I'm not sure which other stations get this. I pretty sure it doesn't happen at most stations.
An Izakaya is a Japanese style bar. When you hear that Japanese businessmen go out drinking every night an Izakaya is were they go. I don't have much experience with bars in the U.S. but so far I really like Izakayas. They have all kinds of food and they serve it in small usually pretty cheap portions so you can try lots of different things.