25
Sep

As a woman engineer, I’ve been in the minority for a long time. At university I was in classes where I was the only woman. It’s been a bit of an upstream swim to my career path - I wasn’t choosing the most obvious route or doing what might have been expected of me. I’ve always been interested in making it easier for future generations to make the same types of choices I made. While I didn’t experience any blatant sexism, it wasn’t considered “cool”, or something that most women should do. I didn’t always know about all the options available to me.

When I was contacted by WGBH about being part of a web site to get girls more aware of engineering fields and opportunities, I was thrilled. This is something I’m very interested in! WGBH is a PBS affiliate in Boston, and this is a very big project, with smart women from all different engineering disciplines participating.

Check out my awesome web profile, complete with a video segment. And when you’re done with me, go check out the other accomplished women on the site! This site is just the kind of thing to provide all sorts of stellar information about how cool and exciting engineering can be!

17
Sep

The transcript to my Xfire chat is now available here. Thanks, John, for finding it!

09
Sep

Stop by Xfire on Monday! I’ll be taking part in a live chat talking about careers in game development. Check out the page on the event here. And if you can’t make it live, they’ll be posting a transcript after the fact, so I’ll link that once it goes up.

06
Aug

I can hardly believe it, but today was my one year anniversary at my current job. I’ve been working at LucasArts exactly a year today. It certainly doesn’t feel like over a year since I picked up and moved across the country. But there you go. Time flies and all that! Happy anniversary to me!

08
Jul

By popular demand (well, one request), I’m writing up my notes on Richard Evans’ talk from AIIDE. Richard Evans is currently working at EA/Maxis on the Sims 3. He talked about how the work they’re doing to make each Sim unique and distinct. They’re goal is to make them more individual and more social at the same time.

They have a large pool of discrete traits. Each Sim gets a selection of about five from the pool of traits. Some traits are mutually exclusive, for example, a Sim can be modest or have a big ego. A Sim can hate TV or love TV.

They’re doing their work on the game mechanics in a 2D prototype. It’s a simple sprite world with box graphics, but the simulation it’s running is complete. Richard showed us several demos of the topics he was discussing in action. He had a Sim that hated TV and one that loved TV. It resulted in a funny setup where one Sim would turn on the TV and the other would promptly turn it off.

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