I guess this mention is coming a little late but, as they say, better late than never. My good friend Tiago has a really nice blog primarily describing (in portuguese, so be warned) his work days at Procter & Gamble in Belgium this summer. Particularly cool pictures of his lovely nephews somewhere thrown in there too :) This reminds me that I depart to Belgium myself by the end of next week (September 2nd to be precise) to spend the better part of 5 days with him. This shows some really good promise as I'll hopefully be able to visit Antwerp (home town of dEUS!), Amsterdam and more. Also, there's the possibility of meeting an old time #champman IRC friend, Yallii, who's currently living and studying in Antwerp. Hanging out with him sometime during the weekend would be nice. Looking forward to all this.

On the other hand, the bad news is that my laptop is currently AWOL. Unfortunately it stopped functioning early on this month, a Fujitsu guy came over to take a look and he decided to order a new base unit and a new hdd (good thing, warranty). The base unit arrived in their department the day after it was ordered but the hard drive is proving to be much more difficult, as apparently they don't have it stocked. I've already rang them twice and they've acknowledged this situation but are impotent when it comes to the disk. It's ordered and all we can do now is to wait for the factory. I wonder if they somehow lost track of the process or something. Right now, all I'm asking is that I have it back before I go to Belgium next month so I can get some work done while I'm staying abroad.

Talking about work, I've been pretty much focused on the translation work lately. To make a long story short, I'm one of two portuguese translators of the well-known football manager simulation PC game called Championship Manager. This involves a lot of work and I've been doing it for the past three or four years, for different editions of the game. This time it's actually changed its name into Football Manager 2005, due to it having a different publisher (now Sega, then Eidos Interactive). Eidos kept the CM trademark to do whatever they please with it but the game proper is still property of Sports Interactive in London, UK, only it now has a different name. So, the amount of work for this next installment of the game is divided in three parts, each amounting to anything between 2 and 3 weeks of work, roughly. I'm past the first one already (finished a couple of days ago) and currently going through the second one which is a little bit heavier than the first (most notably it has a huge amount of unusually long strings) which in turn is a little bit lighter than the third and last one (though this one apparently has no long strings). This basically means the amount of work (and drudgery, if you ask me) will increase at a steady pace and I'll have to cope with it. The payment however is well worth the effort and if I want to keep my plans of buying a nice, shiny and sweet Apple Powerbook 12", then I'll have to do it and do it all the way.

Now I notice the post is getting too long, sorry about that. I'll leave a few more thoughts for later on.