events

Another year, another Anime North. Thanks to the convention, I had only eight hours of sleep (total) between Wednesday morning and last night when I got home. When I got back, I slept for 13 solid hours.

As usual, the con was a lot of fun! The final numbers aren't out yet, but as Friday felt as busy as a Saturday this year, there were a lot more people attending again. Like last year, I ran the DDR room, this time with the addition of BeatMania IIDX.

Next Saturday (that is, May 3) I'll be at GameCamp Toronto 2, to give a presentation on the IGDA Indie SIG. The next week will be spent working on the presentation so that when I'm on the stage at GameCamp, I'll wow everyone so much that they'll all join the IGDA. You can find more information on GameCamp Toronto at <http://www.gamecamptoronto.com/> or just go straight to registration.

As a big thank-you for attending the Toronto launch of Visual Studio 2008, I got in the mail today a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate as well as a CD containing a bunch of Live products (including a 90-day subscription for OneCare).

Now, I just need to get a new computer, one which can run a version of Windows newer than 2000.

Hello internet, what's happening... I finally got around to updating the various Drupal modules that had fallen out of date on here, and patched up Token with some event-based, well, tokens. I'll pass them upstream some point today, and perhaps they'll even be committed by someone.

Considering that the first Thursday of the month was only two days after New Years, it's not surprising that the IGDA Toronto chapter moved the January gathering to a different date. It's more than just a regular meeting this month, however – there's a quartet of presentations this month, including Jason Della Rocca (the IGDA's executive director) and a guy from the OLPC project.

It'll be a blast. Come on out!

So I attended Energize IT today, and did I have a good time! While I didn't really pay attention to the security keynote, and skipped the virtualization one, the rest of the day was great. I got to hang out with other game developers in the GameCamp track, as well as spread the word farther about TIGC.

I'm happy to announce that the Toronto Independent Games Conference is now open for both attendee registration and presentation submissions. We're seriously gearing up to have the biggest, best game conference ever seen in Ontario!

One of the great things about attending Microsoft events, especially their launch events, is that you almost invariably walk out of the place with some quality software for free. Back in 2005 when the latest version of Visual Studio was released, attendees of the launch event received a free copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition, SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition, and a download for BizTalk Server 2006. But with the launch of Windows Vista and Office 2007, there wasn't any software being handed out. What happened?