The text of Bruce Sterling's keynote address for this week's Austin Game Developers Conference is now available online.

I'm trying to set up a meeting on Saturday morning with someone who's in town for the Austin Game Developers Conference. He wants us to meet at a coffee shop near the Austin Convention Center. I'm not terribly familiar with the coffee shops downtown. Could someone suggest a place?

Most of today was spent at the Austin Game Developers Conference. I saw demos of games and the software used to make them, and visited with several game companies who have booths in the exhibition.  I dropped off resumes with a couple that had interesting job possibilities, and this will hopefully lead to some interviews ( Read more... )

Cray and Microsoft have teamed to create an affordable supercomputer. The Cray X11 will run Windows HPC Server 2008, with prices starting at $25,000. It will be possible to order this computer online with a credit card.

Things have changed dramatically since I was a summer intern at Cray in the 80s. Every new machine they made was the World's ( Read more... )

My mother and I had a nice visit over the weekend. Today she returned home. Her house is undamaged, and all of her essential utilities are working. She feels much luckier than a lot of people in the Houston area.

At tonight's meeting of my book group, we discussed a novel that no one liked. We had a fascinating discussion of how and why it failed ( Read more... )

Early yesterday morning, my mother drove up from Sugar Land to Austin to stay with me until Hurricane Ike passes. Her drive only took a little over 3 hours. We've been monitoring the weather news from Houston. There was a power outage in Sugar Land, and she's glad not to have gone through that. The storm passed last night with (so far) only ( Read more... )

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Yesterday we had the breakdown meeting for ArmadilloCon 30. This year's con overall went quite well. Total attendance was 455, and we had more younger attendees, more non-US attendees, and more first-time visitors than usual. Media coverage of the con in the Austin Chronicle and Austin American-Statesman were no doubt a factor in the increased ( Read more... )

I realized that many of the game companies with which I've been setting up interviews are making Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games. I don't have much experience with this genre. To remedy that, today I bought World of Warcraft. I'll be exploring it over the next few days. People have been telling me for a long time that it's a really ( Read more... )

I just got back from a trip to my sister's wedding reception in Iowa, where everything went smoothly (travel, meeting the groom's family, and the reception itself).

This week I have a busy schedule of job interviews. Wish me luck.