Tonight's Dinner Conversation with My Brother Dex

For some life after Christmas can seem a little slow with a New Year's hangover and the rut of having to pay off the Christmas Visa after splurging a little more than you should have. I've just passed my first three months as Community Manager at EA Canada and the one thing my life is not, is slow.

I was having dinner with my brother Dex who came in from Toronto to do a photo shoot and we were catching up on each others' careers. He had moved out there to be closer to the fashion capital of the world, NY, as he's really gotten busy with his photography work and he was just in town for a bit to do some shoots here in Vancouver. As a fashion photographer I always thought he had one of the coolest jobs in the world...for obvious reasons

We both had this look of 'busy' on us as we chatted on different projects. I hadn't realized how many places I've had a chance to be involved with lately and how through my work, I've really had a chance to not only meet and work with some great people at EA, but also some pretty cool people from the gaming and sports community as well.

I mentioned having just returned from Orlando where I met up with the other Community team members and that lead to a talk about doing some more traveling (which I absolutely love to do) to Phoenix for the upcoming NBA All-Star Game in a couple of weeks.

Our plan is to hang out and follow Tim Ahmed the winner of the NBA LIVE Jersey Creator contest who created this year's Rookie and Sophomore Jerseys. Check out the coverage of him at Wed night's Knick's game where he got a chance to hang out and was even mentioned over the PA system with his jerseys. Cool stuff. Add this to covering our NBA Live Challenge Finals and it should be a great weekend in Phoenix.

We'll be hanging out this weekend and watching the Super Bowl with family and friends which, yes, even us folks in Canada do every year. I let him know that we had our Madden Bowl tonight and even showed him some footage from our new Inside EA SPORTS Blog where Raczilla has been posting pictures from all night. We checked out some of the pics and he thought it was pretty cool to see Evander Holyfield along with a handful of football pros chillin and playing some Madden. Congratulations to Tampa Bay's Antonio Bryant who took home the hardware this year.

He did critque some of the pics being the photographer that he is and I try to take some pointers from him as he's pretty good at capturing light in his shots. I guess it takes some steady nerves as well when you're shooting eye-catching beauties. I totally thought our guys did a great job with the shots and he's just a perfectionist

We talked about the upcoming Fight Night Round 4 Community Event and he got a kick out of some of the videos by our producers. He was pretty impressed with some of the early screens he saw of the boxers and even compared lighting to some of the stuff he's done with athletes sweating and how lighting is affected by that. I told him I'd reserve him a copy for his PS3 when the game comes out this summer.

He asked how the Canucks were doing. And that's pretty much when the conversation ended. That's another blog post altogether! I did mention that I do get a chance to hang out with the Canucks' Ryan Kesler who will be touring and checking out our facilities and doing a motion capture session at EA Canada. I'll be blogging and taking some pics for EASW, so that should be pretty cool too.

We flipped on the HDTV to catch a favorite of mine Stand By Me on the screen and I noticed him glance over with a pleased look on his face and a quiet nod.

For the first time it kinda felt that he thought that I actually had one of the coolest jobs in the world. I'd have to say it's still up for debate, though I am pretty grateful for the opportunities that I've got, since at the end of the day, I still get to go to work and pick up a controller from time to time as well. Who's luckier??