Well since its apparant that mentioning Managed DirectX impresses neither games programmers or girls I've decided to introduce myself as "the guy who was number 120 in line to buy Halo 2 at the Redmond EB". Maybe more people will talk to me.

Let me start by giving some credit to people who have listened to my sad story of being an IT developer whose dreams are killed by the thought of 50% pay cuts. Kevin, a student at digipen - looking forward to seeing your games, Paul for living the dream and being another guy who paid for himself to come to GDC, and of course Steve for buying me some beers on his expenses, and being a lucky bastard for getting paid to do what the rest of us desire.

And on to day 2 at the GDC. I know its not quite as exciting as the Michael Jackson trial but I shall try. Nice early start with a hangover, and straight into a talk about message based architectures. Sadly it wasn't quite as interesting as I hoped. I think it could have made a good 30 minute talk but it didn't stretch to the full hour. Then I attended a Microsoft hands on woskshop on HLSL. The tutorials are nice and I hope they post them to the web after the show but it wasn't very hands on. Most of the lessons had 1 or 2 lines of HLSL to fill in and it was pretty obvious what should go there.

Then it was time for lunch and it was quite entertaining to watch 200 geeks stand in a line for a sandwich, bag of chips and a cookie. I'm hearing the food at this GDC is very poor. Compared to what I've seen at PDC I have to agree. But geeks will stand in line for just about anything as long as its free.

So the afternoon came around and a postmortem by Peter Molyneux regarding Fable. A nice talk and its so nice to see the British sense of humor. In fact I'm quite amazed how many Brits there are at the event.

Finally I attending a talk about advanced rendering techniques. Some of the stuff was a little beyond my scope but they explained things very well so I give that a 5/5.

Finally it was time to head off to the Microsoft party. Thanks to my inside guy who got me a ticket, food and drinks were great and the ladies were as attractive as one could hope. Sadly I am officially an old man and the music was too damn loud and IMO crap! They got some guy on stage doing the vocal boombox thing which I thought went out in 1988 with the last police academy movie. Everyone else thought it was cool which further proves that the Managed DirectX geek is the least cool person at GDC.

...and on that note its time to go to bed ready for day 3. Good night.