Austin adventures

Last Thursday and Friday were the Austin Game Conference, so I travelled to Austin with a few co-workers to drop in on some local middleware companies and check out the show. Dave and Peter gave a talk on the PlayStation Portable – as much as we could say at this time, so close to Tokyo Game Show. It was well received, with about 100 developers attending the session. The conference overall was 1000-1500 people.
The conference was good, but there wasn’t much there for you if you weren’t into MMO’s. What was most valuable to me, frankly, was spending time with developer friends who are usually incredible busy at conferences, but were much more relaxed during this one. At AGC we were able to spend some time together drinking and catching up.
After the conference I spent some time wandering around the city of Austin looking for interesting architecture, and also catching up with my good friend Robin.
There doesn’t appear to be a lot of interesting architecture in Austin aside from the old cathedral and the capitol building. These are probably the most extensively photographed buildings in Austin, so why bother reproducing them here? 🙂
The most interesting building I saw was this one near the convention center. Its front wall is littered with translucent solar panels – every other pane, that ones that are not blue, is a solar panel. Very cool!

I loved this worm building; not sure what it is…

This statue at the state capitol really sums up the Texan philosophy, or at least W’s philosophy:

And of course, this wouldn’t be complete without a photo of the lovely Robin. We grabbed lunch at Changos (yum), then scoped for cool toys at ToyJoy, and stopped in to quench our thirst at Mojo’s and have a nice chat in the sun…