Sorry it's been a few days, but I've been in California doing coverage of the 2004 Game Developer's Conference. All in all, I had a strong feeling of Deja Vu. It seemed like I was attending the previous year's everything. From the lectures to the roundtables to the expo hall to the food, everything was virtually the same as last year. No exciting new technologies. No interesting new lectures. Just a lot of the stuff from last year. I think the fact that they were still playing the 8-hour 'Advanced OpenGL' tutorial that I attended as a volunteer in 1998 says that it's time for a shakeup. Advanced OpenGL is certainly not an irrelevant technology, but if you've attended last year's, you probably won't feel the need to attend again.

On the 'what rock have I been living under that I didn't see this' front, I just discovered DavidRM's (my roomie at the Day's Inn) excuse for not writing any new games in a while. It's called The Journal, and it looks like it's gonna solve all my diary-writing needs, along with a few others. It talks to about a half-dozen commercial blogs, so it shouldn't be a problem to keep my diary on that and use the software to do the uploading. That way I'll get niceties like spell-checking and on-screen formatting that I've been missing from doing the stuff in HTML.

Buying a house sucks. They actually want me to sign a paper transferring ownership of the original homeowner's ten year-old Sears riding lawnmower with blade-guard being held on with bailing wire. According to my realtor, it's so I can come after him legally if he doesn't leave it as he agreed.

I knew there was a reason why the last time I did it was 13 years ago. Sheesh.