by Matt | Jun 23, 2009 | Personal, Travel
I’m not really sure if simply getting here counts as day one or not, but we’ll just go with it. We’re all checked into the hotel and, as you can see, the wireless is working. It took a little under four hours to get here but the trip was pretty uneventful, as it should be. We did stop at Buc-ee’s, the international rest-stop of awesomeness. Honestly, those stores have everything. I limited myself to a giant piece of homemade jerky, which I’ve already eaten.
After we got here and checked in at the hotel we ran downtown to the Austin Convention Center to get our packets and badges. The conference officially opens tomorrow at 7am, but I had little doubt that the line were going to be crazy, so I wanted to get that stuff out of the way early. The expected turn out for the conference is 4500, not counting exhibitors and lecture guests. They’re also giving away tshirts… so that should be, well, nuts. Something tells me 4500 tshirts are going to go fast.
After that we drove around a bit to try and plan our parking strategy. There isn’t any parking directly for the convention center or in the adjecent buildings, so we’re going to have to get a bit creative. Our thought is to park at the Mariott downtown, which is the “sister hotel” to ours. Hopefully flashing our room keys will be enough. It’s worth a shot. If that doesn’t work, there’s a downtown garage a few blocks away. That will have to do.
I was just flipping through the information packet about the vendors and sponsors and low and behold, SCAD will be here as a “platinum sponsor”. I’ll have to try and get a tshirt off them. I was going to bring my SCAD hat, now I’m regretting having decided to leave it at home. Oh well.
Now we’re just chilling at the hotel, waiting for the third person in our group to arrive at the airport. They’re renting a car and doing their own thing, but we had made plans to get some dinner with him. I hope it’s not much longer, I haven’t eaten since this morning, not counting the jerky.
Anyway, lots of rest tonight, lots of walking tomorrow.
Matt out.
by Matt | Jun 22, 2009 | Personal, Travel, Work
This time tomorrow I’ll be gathering my things and heading off to the 2009 HOW Design Conference in Austin, TX. Since it was so close this year I’ll be driving up with a colleague. I’m pretty excited. HOW is the largest design conference in the country. It’s like MacWorld or E3, but just for designers and artists. Adobe will be showing off CS4 and beta versions of features for CS5, designers and pundits like Cameron Moll and DJ Stout will be there along with Photoshop experts like the grand-master Scott Kelby.
It should be pretty awesome. I’m hoping that the Austin Convention Center will have wifi, but I’m not holding my breath. If it does, I’ll probably be live-blogging some of the talks, just for note-taking purposes. If it doesn’t, I’ll try and recap in the evenings back at the hotel.
If nothing else, I’ll at least replenish my supply of crappy trade-show grade t-shirts. You can never have too many t-shirts you can paint in, lol.
by Matt | Jun 15, 2009 | Aggravation, Personal
I checked my GameStop order today and it still said “pending” instead of “shipped”, so I decided to call them.
Apparently, they sold so many, they’re now on back order.
Good news is that they sold out of the “weathered” and beat up boxes, so I’m getting a brand new one from the next shipment from the manufacturer.
Bad news is that they won’t get more in until June 30th.
Good news is that I sounded pissed so they upgraded my shipping to “overnight”.
Bad news is, I still have to wait until the 30th for it.
So…. I still got it for a good price. But for $100 off, I’ll have to wait another 15 days.
I thought about canceling, but I let it go. It’s already paid for and it would take 15 days just to get a refund anyway. It’s not like it’s the end of the world or anything, just really disappointing. Now we won’t have anything to play this weekend at our already planned cookout. 🙁
by Matt | Jun 11, 2009 | Culture, Games, Personal
I’m not really sure when it happened, but apparently I’ve gone bat-shit insane. I’ve made multiple rather crazy purchases recently, for no reason other than they would give me personal satisfaction. The largest of these being Rock Band 2. I couldn’t resist the price RB2 was being offered at on GameStop’s website. They, according to the 100% fake story attached to the sale, came across extra inventory of Rock Band and Guitar Hero games in their warehouse and, being slightly aged from being in the afor-mentioned warehouse for so long, has decided to reduce the price to move the units. I have no earthly idea what condition the game will arrive in. It could be anything from “slightly faded box” to “OMG, someone drove the fork-lift off a cliff”. Either way, I have GameStop’s undying assurance that the contents of the box are in fact pristine and that it’s merely the outside that’s slightly “weathered”. We’ll see.
Either way, I only paid $94.99 for it, including free 3rd day shipping. So, there you go. The way I figure it, even if I only play it a handful of times with a “band” of friends, the way it’s meant to be played, I can at the very least play through it in Guitar Hero-ish mode just by myself. Or, I can actually attempt to learn the drums. I’m not holding out much hope. I’m rather rhythmically challenged.
Anyway, $95 for Rock Band 2, with the full bundle, sure isn’t a bad price. In case you’re feeling rather musical, I believe the sale is still going on. Edit, never mind, it’s apparently sold out.
So… who wants to rock their faces off!
by Matt | Jun 1, 2009 | Games, Personal, Reviews, Web, Work
No. I’m not at E3. I wish I was. Nope, just a guy watching all the press conferences and reading as much news as possible. I’m now post-live-blogging the Microsoft press conference. Post-live meaning that I’m watching it on my DVR after it’s happened. Here we go. Of course, to follow along, you should probably be watching it as well, or at least checking out clips of the afor-mentioned games. They should be everywhere by the time I post this.
Update: Just because I like you guys, I’ve gone back and tried to link to videos whenever possible.
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by Matt | May 15, 2009 | Aggravation, Music, Personal, Web
In preparation for the release of new GreenDay CD today, I fired up the old iTunes store last night because I heard there were bonus and exclusive track available if you pre-ordered it. Sure enough there was. There were two bonus tracks (that can still be purchased separately) and 2 additional bonus tracks that were only for people that pre-ordered. They were two covers of Who songs. Not that I’m a big fan of the Who, but getting 4 bonus tracks for free was appealing. So, I clicked on “purchase album”. Nothing happened. I clicked again, same thing. I figured maybe the page wasn’t loading, so I hit the “home” button to back to the main iTunes Store page. The featured ad was still there, touting the inclusion of said bonus material, so I clicked on it again. Nothing. What the hell was going on? I tried another tactic, I searched for GreenDay in the search box. I found the artist, then found the album. It still said exclusive/bonus/preorder, so I clicked “purchase album” again. Then I got an error. Not a normal error either. A big, giant red exclamation point saying simply that “The iTunes store has had an unexpected error: please try again later”. What the hell?
So I quit iTunes, restart, and try it again. Same thing. Then I realize something. It’s 11:04pm, central time. Midnight on the East Coast. It’s no longer the 14th, it’s now the 15th. Since it’s the 15th, I can’t actually pre-order something that’s been released. I go back to the iTunes store, search by artist, find the CD and this time select the regular, non-bonus CD. It starts to walk me through the purchase process and I nearly loose it.
The iTunes store had updated the CDs status from “preorder” to “purchase” while I was looking at it, eliminating the version of the CD I was trying to buy. I can’t buy a CD with pre-order only songs if I’m not technically pre-ordering it. The only problem is, they left all the ads, albums and descriptions up. I checked back at a little after midnight (central) and they were still up. The big “pre-order” button was still featured on the homepage.
So, fuck the iTunes store. You know what I did? I went to Target, my go-to for everything these day. They opened at 8am, had the album displayed in a big “new releases” rack, complete with a deluxe 2-CD edition featuring not only the bonus songs but an entire bonus 6-track Live CD, for $9.99! So, fuck iTunes. Fuck it and it’s pre-ordering bullshit right in it’s $14.99 face. Midnight on the east coast is NOT midnight to ME. If I was waiting at a store for a “midnight” release, I’d have to wait one hour longer than my east coast counterparts, that’s just how it is. Just because it’s the 15th in one time zone doesn’t mean it is in all the others. What if I was on the west coast, that would have been 8pm. That should have left plenty of time to preorder it if I was living in Cupertino. If we’re going to ignore timezones so completely, why couldn’t I “buy” the full release at 6pm? That would be midnight in Europe. Asshats.
Luckily, the only things I missed out on were the two Who cover tracks, which, to no ones surprise, are now floating around on a torrent raft in the middle a certain notorious body of pirate waters. Double fuck you iTunes, complete and total fail. Ha!
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