I attended the OpenGL ES tutorial today, which was pretty tedious. To be fair, I’m no graphics programmer so there were parts that I might have got more out of had I understood what they were talking about. That doesn’t really excuse the fact that these guys weren’t great speakers, and that they were mostly giving dry facts that I could read directly from the slides, as opposed to an insightful commentary on the issues around the slides.
I was also suffering badly from a combination of jet-lag and a cold, which probably didn’t help. Unfortunately Sony have plonked us in a hotel which is a 20 minute bus ride away from the conference. This is no problem in the morning, but the ability to nip back to the room for a quick hour of sleep in the middle of the day would have been invaluable today. If you’re coming to GDC from Europe next year, I’d strongly advise that you find yourself a hotel within easy walking distance of the convention centre!
On the positive side, I managed to meet up with Kevin Marks and Maf Vosburgh in the evening (both fellow MMC alumni). We had a few beers and talked over old times, then Maf took me off for a tour of the humungous Google campus where he works. Judging by the size of the canteen, they really are talking over the world ;)
Top fives for the day:
- breakfast at the hotel: 4/5 (mmm… pancakes…)
- lunch at gdc: 1/5 (a sandwich and a packet of crisps? I long for the halcyon days of WWDC circa 1994!)
- dinner at Google: 4/5 (mmm… burritos…)
- San Jose weather: 2/5 (feels more like Manchester to me)
- OpenGL ES geek factor: 5/5 (nuff said)