Synthesis Studios

At Synthesis, Wednesday is recess day! Each week, we spend an hour acting slightly more like children than usual and partake in the time-honored post-lunch activity of recess. Depending on the weather and average laziness level of the office, we either head out to a field with a random assortment of sports equipment or stay in and play video games.

Well, that’s the theory at least. It’s actually a lot harder task than you would expect to tear the engineers from their coding.
But, when successful, here is a sampling of the games we have in our recess arsenal:

JEREMYBALL
JeremyBall is a playground game that calls for fast running, quick reflexes, shrewd strategy, and, sometimes, a protractor. Much as the wise Calvin devised Calvinball, our very own Jeremy has created a ridiculous namesake sport. He came up with an initial set of parameters and they have organically grown more and more complicated over the past year. Michael, our intrepid intern from last year, actually spent a while writing down the rules on our internal wiki. Given the length of his documentation, I will spare the gory details of the game play here.

However, to get a basic idea of what the game is all about - imagine baseball, but instead of a baseball, you have both a Frisbee and Nerf football; instead of bases, you have character-themed dodgeballs; instead of organized plays, you have a flurry of projectiles and haphazard running. Can you picture it?

HORSE/ROUND-THE-WORLD
These are really just the standard schoolyard games made more interesting by the fact that none of us are very good at getting a basket. It’s actually probably for the best that we don’t play in an actual schoolyard since small children would almost certainly put us to shame.

FOAM BASEBALL ATTACKS
Every once in a while you will hear a crash and scramble of footsteps… followed by a scream. That’s when you go back to work, knowing that it was just someone throwing a foam baseball at someone else’s head.

Though, technically not a recess game since it’s played at any time, this is a well-loved pastime in the office. I don’t know where the foam baseball originally came from but I do know that it is wise to remember who the last person was to have it. Flinching is not an unusual automatic reaction to coworker visits.

ROCK BAND
When the weather is crummy, we stay inside and bring our rock band (the Synthesuckers) on tour. We belt out the words to songs we’ve never heard before, get shin splints from the drum pedal, and save fallen comrades when a song is tough. Unfortunately, I think we haven’t played since a particularly painful experience repeatedly trying to beat the ten minute epic “Green Grass & High Tides”. The memory of that trauma should subside soon, I hope…

NINJA TENNIS
Before Rock Band arrived and became the star of the Synthesis video game lineup, the indoor-recess (ahem, Wiicess) game of choice was Wii Sports. More specifically, it was 4 player Wii Tennis played with 2 people. Controlling one player with each hand, Tucker and Jeremy championed the introduction of this utterly confusing game to the office.

Last year, students at the Art Institute of California - San Diego created eight posters to represent the eight Millennium Goals of the United Nations. Those goals are as follows:

Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education
Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women
Goal 4: Reduce child mortality
Goal 5: Improve maternal health
Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability
Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development

What struck me as the most interesting wasn’t the starkness of the goals, whose missions I had read and heard many times before. What stuck with me were the cunning visuals the students were able to emblazon across their posters. Not only does each image illustrate the intent behind each goal, but it also brings a further meaning by utilizing prosaic items with double meanings. For example, Goal 8 calls for “global partnership;” the poster depicts a globe made of yarn, showing how all the world’s population is reliant upon each other.

Pretty neat, huh?

I’ve got to say, it’s the creative design behind the images that I find almost more inspiring than the UN’s goals themselves… which is why I ordered copies of the eight posters for the office. Shouldn’t we be thinking like this at all times? Not only about what we should accomplish and what we can accomplish, but unique and unusual ways of doing so. Having the goals in the back of your mind is one thing, but being graphically reminded of them while you work at your desk is another.

(And, in case you’re wondering, my favorite of the eight posters is that of Goal 7; not only do I think it is the goal I am most capable of working towards myself, but I just happen to find the trunk-to-wire transition very cool indeed.)

So many of our products come from other countries that it’s easy to ignore the ever-present “Made in …” hidden in the packaging. Apple goes so far as to prominently declare that their products are “Designed by Apple in California,” conveniently downplaying the fact that most are manufactured in Asia. The Garmin GPS I ordered has a similar message, which completely escaped my notice when I opened the package. Watching the device’s output, however, I was greeted with an impersonal but powerful reminder of just where it came from.

Our office has very little GPS coverage, even if you hang an antenna out the window. Thus, when I connected the Garmin to my computer, I was greeted with the following output:

$GPGGA,012013,2503.7070,N,12138.4160,E,0,00,,,M,,M,,*52

For those of you that don’t speak NMEA, that means the GPS was reporting a location of 25° 3.7070′ North, 121° 38.4160′ East, but with no visible satellite. In the other words, it was lost, and repeatedly outputting its last known location.

Once I realized what was happening, I had to had to find out where the GPS thought it was. A quick zoom through Google Maps (with the help of the Get Lat/Long mapplet) revealed the following building:

There it was: the birthplace of my GPS (in Taiwan, of course). You can almost tell which window it was looking out before being packed up and shipped off.

If any members of our international audience want to check out the place for themselves, here’s a map to point you in the right direction:

For the last few turns, you’ll probably want a GPS of your own.