I recently completed the first day back from a 4 day weekend. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were pretty much exclusively taken up going to, attending, and returning from, PAX. The nerd conference/expo of choice for the Pacific Northwest it seems. I went w/ Pat, and we stayed at my uncle’s, so thanks uncle. Keston was also there, so I spent some time hanging out with him and his companions from Intel. The experience was much as years prior, only bigger, so fun and entertaining and expensive parking.
PAX is one of those things that is difficult to explain to people. People always ask what you do there, and when you answer the question literally, you say something like, “walk around and look at video games that are going to come out, and go to panels about video games and stuff, and sometimes play video games that haven’t come out yet.” But that’s not really what PAX is about or what’s cool about it. Part of what is cool is taking what is generally a isolated minority, nerds, and making them an overwhelming majority. Putting 50,000 nerds into one building has a strange effect. Everything kinda goes backwards. Like, you get peer pressured into playing Magic or D&D, and if someone finds out you don’t know what keyboard cat is they laugh at you. It’s a good change of pace from real life. So I’m going to say that this upside down social world is the real reason to go to PAX, and there are panels and video games as bonus. So PAX was a success. I mean, Pat had never seen another gphone in the wild, and I musta seen 20 @ PAX w/o even looking.
Pat was pretty sick on Sunday, so that sorta sucked, mostly for him. I’m told he feels mostly better at this point, and I still feel fine so I think I’ve resisted infection, so those are good things. News is out about a confirmed case of swine flu at PAX and a whole website has sprung up to report confirmed cases and what flights you were on and stuff, so if you went to PAX and you get sick, go to the doctor.
Monday, day of labor, I pretty much just watched Mythbusters. It’s a pretty amazing show. For me it’s a show I watch w/o really knowing why I like it. Although I have identified one aspect, and that is the actual building. I have very little experience, and, I think, probably, very little skill in the area of mechanically building stuff. The mythbusters are really good at it, and the show presents rapid fire problems and solutions in an interesting way, so I like that aspect a lot. Plus, I think I like guessing the outcomes of stuff and almost always being right, but not always always.
I also downloaded and watched the pilot of Leverage, which I didn’t really know anything about except all my celebrity nerd friends on twitter are talking about it, and Wil Wheaton is somehow involved. Anyway, it looks kinda cool. I have to watch more before I can really comment.
Yeah, so life is good I think. My newest pay check indicates that the amount I’m losing to taxes and other automatic subtractions is 3% greater than previously estimated, but that’s not very much. 😛 Closer to what I expected anyway. Lauren is starting school in Spain in about 6 hours. Everythings pretty standard and genial. ttfn