Heh. The boss and I were within the first 250 registered Meltdown attendees, so we each got an nVidia geForce FX 5900 Ultra at registration. Then at the ATI-sponsored party Wednesday, I won a Radeon 9800 Pro in the drawing -- I thought I heard my name called so I headed over that way, and I was wrong... but a minute later they did call it. :) (Probably going to install the Radeon at home and the geForce at work, since we already have a few 9800's at work.)

I have a view of the Space Needle from my hotel room, if I lean at just the right angle.

I've learned a bit, though a lot of this stuff is in areas I haven't dabbled in or is just plain over my head and not really useful in a real-time game anyway. Today we're going to mostly hit the sponsors' tracks which should promise to have some cool demos. Intel will be giving away computers today and it'd be nice to win one to put one of those cards in... though there's a preview of Windows Longhorn going on at the same time. Hmmm.

The ATI party was actually really good. Interesting food (including someone making sushi), classic arcade stuff including foosball -- I found out that John Ratcliff is some kind of invincible foosball god, a band that seemed on first song to be mediocre and second song to actually suck, but once they got warmed up they were a lot of fun, and some of the strange hi-tech art displays at Consolidated Works (a "contemporary art center").

I swear, one of the band members' daughters looked exactly like Amy, the object of a severe crush when I was in high school. Same taste in clothes, same huge smile, same radiant face. Somewhere I probably still have a framed, enlarged photo I took of her in New York in 1989. Which is kinda creepy now that I think about it...

It's been interesting finding out that huge companies with budgets that could buy us outright for the price of their phone bills have the same, and often worse, technical problems than we do. Some things that have simply never been a problem for us because we did it right the first time are the subject of a task force bigger than our entire in-office staff. Bad coding practices that I did myself and then fixed myself a couple weeks later, still prevalent in massively multiplayer games that have shipped. So I don't feel so bad now about stumbling over obstacles on the way to the goal. :)

Anyway, this internet cafe thing has a non-natural keyboard at exactly the wrong height for my hands, and I realized when I got up here that I forgot to shave this morning, so I need to head back down, over, and up to my room and take care of that.

Posted 07:25 AM CST [Link] [Archives] [Index]

Oh yeah... a way-cool messenger bag from Microsoft, with an ATI USB storage device of some kind tucked in one of the hidden pockets where 90% of convention-goers will never even look. And a backpack from ATI with a sports water bottle. And an ATI t-shirt, heh.

Wow, that convention sounds pretty cool. Well, any place that has cute girls and gives away free stuff (especially video cards) probably ranks up there pretty high as being a pretty cool place, in my opinion. :)

A lot of that programming stuff would probably be way over my head, too. I'm sure Microsoft loves explaining every little thing their DirectX software can do, even if it's something you'd never, ever use in any type of program.

Heh, maybe next year I'll goto Meltdown (if they still think I'm a developer)... Actually, no, I'll probably just goto SimuCon. Yeah, that sounds better. :)

"nVidia geForce FX 5900 Ultra "

*whimper*

Cool Chachka But its stil a MS Conn