Fall colors are here – at least the first round. I went up to the japanese gardens here in portland, renewed my membership, and took a few shots. This year’s colors look better than last years by a good measure. More pictures coming, but here’s one to whet your appetite. Click for a larger image.
Watched this movie last night at the Laurelhurst. It’s about the race to the highest score for the classic arcade game Donkey Kong by Steve Wiebe (a laid-off Boeing employee, now HS science teacher in Bellvue, WA) and Billy Mitchell (a hot-sauce vendor with a long history of classic arcade game record scores). This really is a great movie to watch since it also includes commentary and a walk through the contests/rivalries between Mitchell and Wiebe.
However, it is also very painful to watch. I can only liken it to the ‘Best in Show’ movie about the crazy dog show people. Wiebe comes off as an average guy trying to become great in something. Billy comes off as one of the most arrogant, self-delusional, and (in my unprofessional opinion) emotionally/behaviorally manipulative guys you’d ever hope not to meet. Yet it’s the whole cast of other professional game players and the sadly myopic interactions they have with each other that’s even more painful. The Filthy Critic captures the feel of this movie almost perfectly. The best quote of movie that sums up a lot of what’s going on: Steve Wiebe is driving to a contest to play Kong, and his 10-ish year old daughter in a fit of insight says,
Daughter: “I didn’t know that book (Guinness Book of World Records) was that important”
Steve: “Well, yeah, it’s important for some folks”
Daughter: “I think a lot of people probably ruin their lives trying to get into that book”
Brilliant. A 10-year old girl sees what all these guys in the 30’s and 40’s did not.
Looks like the Google street-level view guys hit Portland this last week or so. They have all the streets for most of Portland done – including my house.
I could tell they did it last week because my car is in the shot of my house – and it had a white hat in the back window that was in there just last week. 🙂 So, if you know my street address, enter it into Google maps and check out my block.
Got a little more of the front page redesigned. At least the wordpress blog is better and much more readable. Still need to add the sidebar stuff – but this should be ok for now.
In my new group, I got a 24″ Dell widescreen LCD for my development work which recently got upgraded to a 30″. After only 1 week of use, I saw the Dell 2407 went on sale for $559 with free shipping, so I bought one and have been absolutely loving it. I couldn’t justify the $1200 tag for the 30″, and the 24 is actually plenty big for my living area. It’s now my tv (well, for movies anyway), console gaming display, and work display.
See, I was a die-hard CRT fan for many years. LCD’s had ghosting problems in games, the contrast/brightness was not good, fuzziness when not using a native resolution, etc. I stuck with my 22″ near-flat Trinitron CRT for a good while and it still puts out beautiful colors. But after only 1 week with the widescreen real-estate and the beautiful 1000:1 contrast ratio – I can’t hold out any more. Once you use widescreen for development or watching movies, you just can’t go back. Even better/worse – my Trinitron can barely keep up with the contrast when side-by-side with the LCD. In games, there is no lag or ghosting problems that are visible in the work I do (I have ghosted white to pink – but that was while I was trying to beat on it and I never see it in my daily use). It simply looks like they have fixed all my old complaints and LCD’s are now ‘there’ for me.
Also, I have a Huey Pro (made by Pantone – the color gods) which does monitor/color calibration. I do a lot of photo editing and fiddling around. This nifty little device plugs into your USB, and then monitors light conditions. You do a one-time calibration by sticking it’s suction cups to the monitor while it runs test patterns/colors. After the initial calibration, it just sits in a cradle on your desk and auto-corrects the color balance in the background based on ambient lighting conditions – even through reboots. Whites always stay white, reds stay red, etc. I can tell when I turn the overhead light on/off and it corrects on the fly. It saves calibrations that can be used by Photoshop so that when you edit your photos, they’ll be balanced correctly. Nifty gadget – and it works perfectly with the LCD.
I am about half-way with my new website layout. As you can see, my beloved blogging tool has been replaced by WordPress. I managed to squeeze it down to fit in my old blog area (sort of). However, all my old blogs are on here – from all the way back.
Every time I look at this, it’ll motivate me to fix the rest of the site.
So, the new job awaits!
I’ve been doing graphics drivers for our Digital Home group at Intel the last two years, but it’s been mostly on mobile class parts and lower-level graphics drivers. While fun, it isn’t very cutting edge or particularly challenging.
A great job opportunity came up recently, so I interviewed for it and was notified that I beat out the other candidates late last week. The job is still here at Intel (heck, its with a group just down the hall). So just a lateral move in the company. However, my new work will be doing research and development of shader-based graphics algorithms for a new kind of high-end graphics architecture. Some of the information about the architecture is out in the public, but a lot is not. So, for fear of not spilling too many beans, you can check out this thread here for more information about what I’ll be working on.
I’m excited to begin – and begin I will in less than 2 weeks!
PAX (Penny-Arcade eXpo) was a blast. It’s getting bigger and bigger every year, almost doubling in attendance since last year. They had to moved to the convention center from Bellevue to the main convention center in downtown Seattle to fit everyone. One enforcer thought they might hit 30k attendees.
PAX itself is broken into 3 major branches: tabletop gaming, console/handheld gaming, and PC gaming. The was also a show floor and sessions all day long. The show floor was like a mini E3 with Sony, Nintendo, Intel and all the big players there. Valve was surprisingly missing. On the show floor I got some of the comic strip’s stickers and a pack of all 4 of their books. They were out of the PAX shirts I wanted so I skipped the shirt. I got to play a demo of the new “Precipice of Darkness” game they made and watched folks playing/demoing the new Rock Band game with all the instruments. They had a stage set up and everything, and the developers did a great job with it. One of my buddies kept playing it again and again with random folks. The line went on around 3 booths.
There was also the usual Indie crowd of table-top gaming guys, small game developers, the Army had a big showing with their stuff, Halo 3 guys were selling hats/shirts, etc. nVidia was having a contest where they gave out pairs of matching numbers to random folks. If you found who had your matching numbered ticket, then you got to spin this wheel and win a prize. Not bad prizes either: they had a slot for each of their 8-series cards. But it got annoying. Folks were walking around with huge cardboard signs with these numbers on them, a wall was impromptu pasted with paper, numbers scratched all over it, and ‘call me if you have this number’ cel numbers. It made getting around hard because folks would park in the bottleneck areas with their signs for more visibility – which made the bottlenecks worse.
Sessions were very good. Wil Wheaton was on hand, got a couple good shots of him but I didn’t bother to catch his talk. Most of the sessions I wanted to see were Friday (which I missed), so I only caught a few on Saturday. The Hothead game guys that made ‘Precipice of Darkness’ were there doing an open forum about the game. Amazing how many indie devs are switching to off-the-shelf engines and spending most of their money on art/content now with just like one/two coders. The game looked very fun; but I didn’t see anything particularly new. All the dialog and story was written by the PA guys, so it follows a lot of their style/humor. Should be a fun one to get as long as it’s about the $20 price point.
The PC area was easily 2x in size what it was last year – half being BYOC and Intel supplied the other half as free-play boxes. They came from the demo unit that I sit right next to at Intel. The guys said they shipped up 330 machines alone. Very nice boxes (I went out and bought one of the mice because I liked the kind they used so much). Played CounterStrike Source with a couple buddies on their freeplay servers and cleaned up pretty well. Tried to watch the finals of CS:source, but they weren’t letting anyone watch for fear of folks yelling hints, signaling, etc. Bummer. I would have liked to see all the other contests going on all day but just couldn’t make it to them all. You could just sign up for a game and play against others – everything from table-tops to console to PC. Some of them were quite large with multiple rounds of play and finals. The Frag Dolls were there whooping everyone’s butts on various games (mostly PC) – amazing players.
Only complaint is that it was beginning to feel less ‘Indie’ and a little more commercial. There weren’t as many weird cos play folks running around (though there were plenty), but it still had a good geek feel. There was still a great table-top showing and feel to those areas – but if they keep growing I’m afraid it will fragment into the different groups. When it was small, folks milled about and talked with other gamers of other genre’s (tabletop with consolers, etc). But with so many folks in each discipline, people could stay in their zones without stretching out or meeting other folks. Still, the combined energy of that many gamers really getting into the contests, music, talks, panels, and demos just makes parts of it almost electrifying. The Saturday night concert energy was also amazing. Watch the video clips on their website.
I watch a little of the Omeganauts on Saturday – pretty fun. Always drew big crowds and had lots of cheering and yelling. You could always tell when they were playing if you were even close to the same floor. Sunday, I went to my old seminary buddies ordination up in Everett – so I didn’t get to see the final round which was head-to-head Halo 3.
The freeplay console and table-top areas were bigger than ever before, and there were lines for the consoles most of the time. Bioshock was definitely the not-to-be-missed game of the whole event and Guitar Hero had its same showing. There were random DDR machines scattered around the playing area – but you can tell that DDR is waning quickly in popularity. They did movie nights each night and I dropped in for some Tron to relax. Listening to the crowd/geek commentary was just as entertaining as the movie.
At dinner, the Guild Wars guys rented out Gameworks downtown and I got in for a night of all the free food/beer you wanted along with freeplay of the whole arcade. I won a mini-usb lava lamp racing on an Indy500 game. The concerts were that night, but I’m not much a fan of Frontalot and the other guys I’d heard 2-3 times already. So I hung out with my buddies until midnight when I got in my car and drove to my seminary buddies house to crash for 5 hours until I got up for his 6am ordination.
The ordination went great, got to see a bunch of my old buddies and one of my classmates get ordained to the deaconate. I took off about noon and drove back to Portland after a stop at Dick’s burgers and Archie McPhee’s for a double dose of Seattle burgers and weirdness (respectively).
For some reason, my drive up to PAX and a friend’s ordination was the worst drive I’ve ever taken on I-5 from Portland to Seattle. Granted, they are tearing up the Tacoma ramps (an area which always backs up) but then there was a crash on I-5 southbound that shut down the interstate for 5 hours. A guy jumped the median and created an eight car pile-up when he went head-on into southbound traffic. Amazingly nobody died, but they pulled down the median barrier and turned all 4 lanes of southbound traffic into the 4 northbound lanes. Then, some fool rear-ended a guy 2 miles past the accident and shut down 2 more lanes of the northbound traffic. 8 lanes -> 4 lanes -> 2 lanes. I got there just after both accidents happened and still managed to get through only an hour late. Still, they shut the interstate down for 4+ hours and some people were stuck there most of that time by the looks of it. Seattle to Everett was also closed down for construction and I got to take a 20-mile detour through town at 1am. More fun.
On the way back, traffic was heavy from Seattle almost all the way to Portland. The northbound lanes were even worse – random pockets of just slow/stopped traffic in the middle of nowhere. I made it back in 4 hours – which wasn’t bad considering. But at one point I was sitting completely idle for over 40 minutes on a hot interstate miles from the nearest town. Man was that exhausting driving. I’m just glad I filled up before hitting the road.
This whole trip has just solidified my desire not to drive to Seattle anymore but to take the train, or even the Greyhound. It’s just too tiring and frustrating when the traffic gets like that. At least with the train/bus you can sleep and arrive relaxed (or take a nap!) When you lose about half a day just because you need to recover, it’s just not worth it anymore.
Extremely funny review of Heavenly Sword for PS3 and Resident Evil 5 – some good laughs: Link