Part 1, Thursday, continued.  Previously:

• "The Independent Developer Shall Rise Again" - Grey Costikyan (Keynote),
  
• "Programming is easy, Production is harder, Design is hardest" - Jonathan Blow
  
• "Inside Out Game Design" Stéphane Bura
  
• "Zen and the Art of Project Maintanence" - Risa Cohen
  

Now:

• "Pragmatic game development practices for small (and not so small) companies" - Noel Llopis
  

Part 1, Thursday, continued.  Previously:

• "The Independent Developer Shall Rise Again" - Grey Costikyan (Keynote), &
  
• "Programming is easy, Production is harder, Design is hardest" - Jonathan Blow
  
• "Inside Out Game Design" Stéphane Bura
  

Now:

• "Zen and the Art of Project Maintanence" - Risa Cohen

To follow:

• "Pragmatic game development practices for small (and not so small) companies" - Noel Llopis
  

Part 1, Thursday, continued.  Previously:

• "The Independent Developer Shall Rise Again" - Grey Costikyan (Keynote), &
  
• "Programming is easy, Production is harder, Design is hardest" - Jonathan Blow

Now:

• "Inside Out Game Design" Stéphane Bura

To follow:

• "Zen and the Art of Project Maintanence" - Risa Cohen
  
• "Pragmatic game development practices for small (and not so small) companies" - Noel Llopis
  

Part 1, Thursday, continued.  Previously:

• "The Independent Developer Shall Rise Again" - Grey Costikyan (Keynote)

Now:

• "Programming is easy, Production is harder, Design is hardest" - Jonathan Blow

To follow:

• "Inside Out Game Design" Stéphane Bura
  
• "Zen and the Art of Project Maintanence" - Risa Cohen
  
• "Pragmatic game development practices for small (and not so small) companies" - Noel Llopis
  

Part 1, Thursday.  First up:

• "The Independent Developer Shall Rise Again" - Grey Costikyan (Keynote)
  

To follow:

• "Programming is easy, Production is harder, Design is hardest" - Jonathan Blow
  
• "Inside Out Game Design" Stéphane Bura
  
• "Zen and the Art of Project Maintanence" - Risa Cohen
  
• "Pragmatic game development practices for small (and not so small) companies" - Noel Llopis
  

Fame of sorts.  Linkspam inside.  Also, vote-poll.

Statistics don't help.

"After a miscarriage, you grieve for a person you never knew, and for a relationship that ended before it really began. You grieve not for a person who has lived and died but for an unlived life. You grieve for the loss of your future as the parent of the baby who has died. You are sad not just because of what you have lost but because of what will never be." - (source)

This was in the leaflet we were given by the hospital. Reading it made me cry for the fist time, nearly 24 hours after Andie called me at work on Friday.

I'll keep this brief: I've written a small piece of similation software (I'll go into details on that at a later date, I promise), which spits out some potentially very large CSV files, and I need some software to visualise the data on OS X.

Free software.

That I don't have to pay for.

I tried a couple of "evaluation" spreadsheets, but they were either rubbish, restricted, or crashed on my dataset.

Yesterday I finally gave in and, with great reluctance, signed up on Facebook. The reason for my reluctance so far is bad experience with the previous generation of social networking sites, my disdain for which is summed up perfectly by a certain Beth Rowell from Oxford in this technology editorial on the BBC website:

"It's not about KNOWING the people you add as friends, and you don't have to say anything to them. Just add them and make yourself look more popular - it's what all the cool kids are doing,"

. Blech. :S

I was going to witter on about how I yesterday I got the last part of my Merciless Gladiator's set, and also by the way, my raid group beat the Lady Vashj and High Astromancer Solarian encounters in World of Borecraft, but all that is out the window now, you've been spared.

Rather, I'm going to just link to Video: Zero Punctuation Dissects Heavenly Sword, a highly entertaining monologue set to amusing images, covering two subjects; first a review of the demo of Heavenly Sword for the PS3, and secondly a commentary on the (previously mentioned) Resident Evil "racism" controversy.