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Electronic Arts, the world’s largest third-party video game publisher, is in a little trouble. Yesterday, this Livejournal blog entry by the spouse of an EA worker started a buzz on the internet. She was unhappy with EA’s unfair treatment of its workers. During crunch time, they are expected to work at least 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week. They get no overtime pay or additional days off for doing this.

I’ve known that in the software development industry, it’s expected that you work long hours during crunch time. I had heard that the video game industry was exceptionally harsh, but this is worse than I expected. I read some of the responses to the blog entry yesterday, and it seems like not all of EA is like that. And of course, not all video game companies are like that.

Now it appears that EA could be facing a class action lawsuit because of the unpaid overtime pay. I wonder how this will turn out.

Over the summer I went through part of the interview process with EA. I submitted my resume so that I could be considered for a position with their sports division in Orlando. They sent me a written test to fill out. I guess I did well on the test because they wanted a phone interview a couple of weeks later. The phone interview didn’t go so well, so I’m still here in Starkvegas. It would interesting to see how things are inside EA right now.

It looks like my favorite mp3 software, WinAmp, is effectively dead. All the members of the original team have left parent company AOL and who knows if it’ll be updated in the future.

WinAmp has been my choice since I first started listening to mp3’s. So what do I go with now? iTunes? MusicMatch? RealOne Player? Windows Media Player? I guess I’ll give some of them another chance or just stick with the current version of WinAmp.

You can read the story about it here.

Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released yesterday, so go try it out. It looks like the traffic to their website has slowed down since yesterday. You might want to uninstall any old copies first. Just leave the directory intact.

I finally got my copy of Everquest II just a little while ago. I ran into ole Russ at the store. I’m not surprised that he’s going to be playing the game as well. I think his group is going to be playing on the roleplaying-preferred server. It looks like I may be making multiple characters, which probably isn’t a bad thing. I’ve heard that Pacman might be interested in trying out Everquest. We must encourage him to pick up the habit.

I also got my copy of Halo 2 this morning. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

The manager of the GameStop here in Starkville told me that I could pick up my copy of Everquest II around 3:00 today. I probably won’t get a chance to go pick it up until around 5:30, and I’ll be playing most of the night (assuming that I can play today). I wish Sony would have released the name of the game servers. I think I’ll just pick the 4th one down the list and start playing on it.

GameStop is also going to start selling Halo 2 at 12:01 tonight. I hate to say it, but I think Halo may just have to wait a little bit. No longer than a couple of days, of course.

I saw The Incredibles last night. It’s a VERY good movie. Loads of fun. But that’s to be expected from Pixar. Go see this movie ASAP!

This weekend was supposed to be the debut of the Star Wars Episode 3 trailer, but it wasn’t played before The Incredibles. I’m sure I’ll be able to find it online somewhere.

It’s been over 4 years since George R.R. Martin released the latest book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. It looks like we may have to wait a little longer, partially because of President Bush. This message was posted on his website Wednesday.

I write this the day after the presidential election.

—George R.R. Martin, November 3, 2004

I was doing some reading on one of my favorite series of books, The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind, and found some cool information. Debt of Bones, a prequel to the series, was released in standalone paperback on Nov 2. On the copyright page, the author is listed as Robert Jordan, who is the author of The Wheel of Time series. Both authors use the same publishing company, Tor Fantasy. Since The Sword of Truth is similar to The Wheel of Time in many aspects, some people say that Goodkind copied The Wheel of Time and just changed the name and places. Maybe somebody at the publishing company was just trying to give credit where it’s due. I doubt it though. Anyway, on the same day as it was released, Tor recalled all copies of the book and is having them destroyed. If anybody got a copy, it’s probably a collectors item.

I cast my vote this morning. I went around 7:30 this morning and I was very excited. This is the first time I’ve been able to go into a booth to vote. I don’t know why that seemed so cool! I had always voted absentee in the past, but this year I had my registration changed so I could vote here in Starkville.

My voting place is less than a mile from me on the same street that I live on. The whole process probably took about 15 minutes, and a good bit of that was spent trying to get through traffic. I think I saw only about 5 or 6 people around my age there. I’m hoping that more younger people will get there as the day goes on.

I’m sure I’ll be glued to my TV tonight. I can’t wait until it’s over.

I want to recommentd Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. I’m currently on the second book. Someone had recommended this series to me before, but I had told myself that I wouldn’t get started on another incomplete series. Since the final book was recently released, I figured it was a good time to get started.

I guess I was about halfway through the first book before I started to really get into it, but it got really interesting after that. Now I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next.