Home Sweet Home

After a week of game conference-related activities, it's so good to be back home! Don't get me wrong, the conference was wonderful; I ran a two-day "Audio Boot Camp" with many colleagues from the industry contributing their time to present excellent lectures to students and young composers/sound designers/audio programmers just getting into the game audio industry. And I got to attend some excellent lectures (both technical and creative) and game 'post-mortems' (talking about their audio after the project is completed), and had a typically crazy schedule of overlapping meetings, events, dinners, random meetups with folks, lectures, panels, etc. Yup, that day of work meetings last Friday was pretty tame by comparison.

A brief, random sampling of fun things I saw/heard at the conference:

• The Independent Game Festival - student and small studio games compete for recognition. Three of the games were really neat audio-related games (one from a group of Seattle college students that one of my coworkers had taught), and two of them came away with major awards. Very cool!
• The new Pleo robotic dinosaur was on display. Looks like geeky fun for kids and adults alike. A few coworkers were already talking about grabbing one and hacking it.
• The elevators in my hotel had computer screens promoting their restaurant, events, and so on. A few of them were in varying states of crashes throughout the conference, including one displaying a text-only screen warning of a fan failure warning and telling the user to press any key to reboot. I wonder if any attendees offered to fix these displays; I doubt if there's actually a keyboard attached to the mini-PC likely sitting on top of the elevator car...
• Among the variety of swag at the exhibition hall (there were the usual pencils, pens, t-shirts, etc., along with less likely items including small energy drink bottles, a deck of customized playing cards, and slinky's), I picked up a stress ball shaped like the THX robot, which Zachary already seems to love. We'll just have to keep it under supervision to avoid possible future choking hazards and such.
• At one of the parties, a player from the band came up to me at their break and thanked me -- he'd been an attendee at the tutorial I'd run, and didn't realize his band was booked to play one of the corporate-sponsored conference parties.

Got back home last night to a major weather-sweap; San Francisco had significant downpours through most of the conference (I got a bit soaked on several occasions, refusing to encourage the opportunistic hawkers of overpriced umbrellas; Seattle-ites don't really believe in the things anyway) and brisk evenings in the upper 30s. Meanwhile, Seattle has been pretty dry and is pushing 60 degrees today. We're hoping to take advantage of the weather to do some kind of outdoor activity, perhaps even Zachary's first trip to the zoo!

While I was gone, Mima and Zachary got to spend a day together while Meh was at work, which sounds like it went really well. Here's a fab picture of the two of them reading together. Mima went home on on Monday, so most of the week Meh was on her own with Zachary. I checked in and tried to stay caught up at any opportunity that I could, but I know I still missed out on things, and I wish I could've stepped into some kind of teleporter at the end of the day's events to come home, play with Zachary, and help Meh out. And maybe get out of the rain for a bit.