Last Third of PhotoadayMay

I am taking a picture each day in May, for an online photo challenge. Here are the final eleven days of May's contest. For each, I am digging up an old photo for each day's inspiration as well. My first ten days and second ten are available for viewing as well. Finally, a slide show of the entire month's photos.

White Board Artwork

Not all the artwork at DreamWorks Animation is for the films. Armed with dry erase markers, the artists tag the various white boards with interesting works. I shall share a few I have spotted at the office in this post.

Spider-Man

Note: I do not know who drew any of the items within this post.

Solution to Missing Mirrors

The bathrooms at work at being remodeled, which is great. We are permitted to use the rooms before they are one hundred percent complete, which also is great. The bathrooms are sans mirrors, which is not so great. Someone at work posted some mirror replacements, which is funny. I love the creativity and fun at DreamWorks Animation!

King of TT

I never really played table tennis until I moved to India. There, it seems to be a very popular activity. Since I was such a horrible player, I became known as टी टी का माहाराजा or "Ti Ti ka Maharaja - grand king of table tennis". At the DreamWorks Animation office in Glendale, there are several tables and just about any time of the day you can find people playing.

We recently held a tournament, and someone captured a video of the final match. I am posting it here. I don't know what happened to game two, but hopefully YouTube user ceark will post it in the near future. Enjoy!

Dragon Day at DreamWorks Animation

DreamWorks Animation recently released How To Train Your Dragon, which I think is their (our?) best work to date. Yes, I work at DreamWorks, but as a computer nerd I had nothing to do with the creativity which led to the magic of this film. Anyway, we celebrated the opening of this film on campus and I wanted to share some photos. I took some pictures too, but some coworkers took much better photos. Links to the complete sets of their photos are available at the bottom, and here are some photos from the day taken by others.

Dragon Wrap Party

The latest release from DreamWorks Animation is How To Train Your Dragon. We attended the cast and crew screening, watching the movie in 3D at the Gibson Amphitheatre. After introduction from the producer, directors and our CEO, a special guest came out to say a few words. Gerard Butler joined us for the screening and expressed how pleased he was with the film, where he voices the main character's father, Stoick. Something funny he mentioned was that he is concurrently in the best rated and worst rated opening films on Rotten Tomatoes, also starring in The Bounty Hunter with Jennifer Aniston (as I write this, one is one hundred percent fresh and the other is eight percent fresh). Of course, this is not his first time working with dragons nor working on horrible films, as he was also in Reign of Fire.

cisco High Load

It is annoying when you have a small network component which acts funny. Here is a switch with a high load.

Problem

Switch has a high load. Consistently, this L2 switch has a load of ninety-plus percent.

Halloween 2007 at DWA

Lobster in a Group, originally uploaded by s_w_ellis.

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Random flickr photo blog entry for October 6, 2009.

I took this photo from the breezeway at the Riverside building on the DreamWorks Animation Glendale studio campus. When you have a creative workplace of one thousand people, Halloween can get pretty crazy. I am still wondering how the lobster guy ate lunch that day. To see more photos from that day, click here. And, for even better photos from that day, check out these from Travis.

Sunshine

Campus Starbucks, originally uploaded by s_w_ellis.

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Random flickr photo blog entry for October 2, 2009.

The DreamWorks Animation Glendale campus has its own Starbucks. Inside you will find the always-smiling Sunshine. It has been a long time since I have had an early morning coffee run with Victor and Murad, or an afternoon game of chess with Sunshine. Murad, one morning we'll have to get you a drive-on pass.

Looks like I shall be back on campus in early 2010, so see you then!

Jira is Evil

I am now convinced that Jira is pure evil. Check out how many unread messages I have in my "Jira" folder!

CTRL-A,DEL

Rubberband Support Ticket

So, today I get a note from Robin asking me to take a look at a support ticket and help him out. I drop the important load balancer SNMP work I am doing, push some firewall work out even later, and take a look at the ticket:

Support ticket for rubberbands

This was pretty funny. The ticket was not meant for the systems team, but it is always fun to see requests like these come through. And, here is another:

Catch your running fridge?

Sick of Swine Flu

The craziness has to end soon. I was in the city the other night and decided to meet Anjali for supper. Upon entering the restaurant, we had hand sanitizer squirted on us because of the swine flu scare. There is being cautious and checking for symptoms, but that is a bit much.

At the office, all employees were given hand sanitizer bottles:

Hands-On sanitizer

We have held a training session on how to deal with swine flu. There are posters put up showing how to properly wash hands. Now the company is giving out masks to anyone feeling under the weather. At least someone has maintained a sense of humor through all this, as you can see below:

Ogre Flu?

I know it is a real illness and people are dying from it. However, the knee-jerk reaction is a bit overboard, don't you think?

DeLorean Time Machine Visits DWA Campus

One day during lunch in 2008, I saw this DeLorean parked on campus and realized it was done up like the time machine from the Back to the Future series of movies. As Doc Brown in the first film states, "The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?"

You can even see the hoverboard

So, it turns out, this car was built by J Ryan and Sean Bishop, the first commented on my Flickr photo shown above. I am adding this to my blog to pass on their website link, which has some interesting information about the car. Another cool thing is that Sean Bishop built Ecto-1, from Ghost Busters.

Wearing Pajamas to Work

On the day before India's Independence Day anniversary, my office had everyone come to work in traditional Indian attire. My girlfriend and I went shopping and she bought me a kurta-pajama set, along with jootis. I was cool to dress for the occasion and I look forward to another opportunity to step out in something traditional.

Me, as a Punjabi munda

What's Special About Today?

Today is just like any other day. Or, at least I thought it was.



Evidently I am looking colorful today. We use a simple application, much like xmessage to send notes to each other at work. I got this one today. I hope being colorful is a good thing.