i finally figured out how to get pictures off my phone so i can now post about sasquatch!  :)  it was awesome!  of course!  nine inch nails... the gorge... come on.  it's a long drive from seattle to george wa, so i took the day off work, slept in, then drove the 140ish miles.  the drive is beautiful.  i made it to the gorge in record time because 1) my car likes to go fast and 2) my foot gets realllly heavy when i become bored of the cds in my car. 

i took only this photo and this photo with my phone before the battery died.  oops, why do i never charge that thing??

the bands were great.  wolfmother caught me by surprise.  i had never heard of them before they got on the stage then they totally rocked.  i mean the dude had a cape!  i also really enjoyed tv on the radio.  by the time reznor was up i was verrry tired but after march of the pigs my body had enough adrenaline to keep me up till 4 in the morning.  i didn't camp this time so that 4 in the morning meant a very long dark drive home.  yeah i'll recommend camping even when the second day bands are lame.

UNTIL NEXT YEAR!

dell stock right now is a bargain.  i don't know why their stock is getting hammered so badly, but whatever - it's a great opportunity to make some money.  microsoft would be a good buy now but i think its long term potential is bleak unless balmer is ousted or gates steps back in to run the show.  if you already own shares it's definitely not a good time to sell.  hold on to this dog a couple more years.  one more tip: buy amazon stock this july and sell in december.  investors seem to get bored of amazon every summer then everyone buys it again in the winter when the hundreds of news reports come out about the growth of online sales and how more and more people will do their christmas shopping online.  yeah everyone should have caught on to this by now but i think there's at least one more year of free money with this trick.  ;)

ok e3 this year was awesome.  the biggest thing at the show was nintendo's wii, but the lines to see it every day were crazy so i didn't bother.  i did wait in line to see spore
though and that was totally worth it.  will wright didn't show too much
more than he had previously at gdc, but it was really cool to watch him
go through the latest version of the creature editor and the different
game modes.  man, i can't wait for that game!  i had also been really looking forward to seeing c&c 3, but all ea showed was like a 10 second video clip.  oh well.  as for other stuff, aion was sweet, tabula rasa is looking very nice, crysis is amazing, quake wars looks purchase-worthy, flight sim x is solid, hellgate london is quite fun and the ps3 does in fact look like a george foreman grill.

back at the ncsoft booth we had muytator playing again which was excellent, but this year they were backing up... wait for it.... CHRIS VRENNA!  i'm not joking.  i was so happy to get his autograph.    i also got clint walsh's autograph and autographs from members of muytator.  i hope they play again next year, but there was a big deal made at the end of the show about ncsoft violating the rules for noise levels so who knows.

it's time for another e3! 

for the last week i've been spending a lot of my time at home standing up to try and get my legs ready for all the e3 standing.  my plan was that by e3 my legs would be super strong, but i think it may have backfired!  my legs are already so tired and sore.  hopefully today and tomorrow is enough time for recovery and by wednesday, when the show starts, my legs will be extra strong and my plan will pay off.  time will tell. 

i'm most looking forward to seeing spore, c&c 3, aion, and quake wars.  i bet there'll be a lot of surprises though.  last year i was surprised by spartan total warrior and stubbs the zombie.  those were way too fun.

quick macros is a killer feature in devstudio i use all the time that not many other people seem to know about or use.  it's perfect for quickly automating repetitive changes.  for example if you want to take a large enum and turn it into a table of strings that's a lot of typing!  instead, using a quick macro just go to the first line, hit ctrl+shift+r then add your quotes, delete any enum prefix, ctrl+u after the first character to get some nice lower case, then finish it off with the cursor on the next line.  now just mash ctrl+shift+p and watch your productivity soar.  in some cases you can accomplish the same thing with regular expression find and replace, but i find it way simpler and faster to just do what i want done to one line then let devstudio repeat that for me.