So much has been going on, it’s hard to believe that it’s been since April since I made my last post. Well, aside from being quite busy I was pretty annoyed at the spam I was getting before, so I guess a break was a good thing.
It’s been a while since i’ve posted though, and heck, Gamefest is right around the corner! There are a number of presentations there covering Xna, and I’ve personally been hard at work getting ready for the conference.
In the meantime lots of other things have been happening. David posted an entry that started a buzz thinking we were removing a lot of functionality. I enjoy seeing the passion people display when talking about these things. We’re trying real hard to develop a framework you’ll enjoy using.
Then you have people like the folks at Garage Games (they make the Torque engine) who are doing a session at gamefest. They key quote from that one?
“GarageGames, in collaboration with the Microsoft XNA group, recently ported its full-featured game engine to managed code for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Xbox 360.”
Pretty exciting stuff there too. Plus, maybe we’ll have new announcements. That’s always exciting.
Then you have other randomness going on just in the world. The other day I went out to Olive Garden for dinner. The first 15minutes were spent waiting for a table, which wasn’t that bad. It was pretty fast for Olive Garden, plus the most attractive woman I think i’ve seen was there waiting as well. Everything went down hill from there. While we were being seated a party of 9 showed up and were told they’d have approximately a 20minute wait. That becomes important later in the story.
After 15 minutes of sitting down looking at the menu (really, it’s not that big), our waiter finally arrived to get our drink order (we already had our entire dinner planned out by then).. So we order everything. 10 minutes later our drinks arrive, one of them wrong. 5 minutes after that, our appetizers arrive. Those are wrong as well. Oh, and one of them is missing completely. So, it’s been 30 minutes, half our orders have been wrong, and we haven’t even gotten our main meal yet. Good times!
15 minutes later the wait comes back and informs us that he had just left the kitchen and our food would be right out. Good thing, we’re getting pretty hungry.. 15 minutes later, he stopped back by the table. He apologized profusely, but they are short two cooks, and the food will be right out. He also asked if he could get us some more breadsticks. We were pretty hungry, so we said sure.
15 minutes after that, he stopped by the table again. He apologized some more. It’s his first day, he’s overwhelmed (wait, I thought there cooks missing?).. He doesn’t have our breadsticks, but we’re in luck. Our food will be right out. 15 minutes after that, the manager comes to our table (he doesn’t have the breadsticks either) and apologizes. But our food will be right out.
10 minutes later (100 minutes since we’ve arrived if you’re keepign track) our food finally arrives. Yay! Out of the four entrees we ordered only three show up, and two of them are wrong. Another 10 minutes goes by before our final entree shows up. It’s also wrong. As our last entree arrives what do we see? The party of 9, leaving. They had already been seated, ordered, served, eaten, and were leaving.
After two hours of some of the worst service I’ve ever had the manager apologized a lot. They gave us the meal for free and added a $50 gift card, but even then I wasn’t overly happy about it. Crappy service is bad enough, but when the waiter is directly lying to us? We never did get those breadsticks either.
ZMan also made sure people knew that he’ll cover the Xna Framework on his site once we go live as well.
I also noticed that Dave is “slowing down” his playing of World of Warcraft. I had done the same thing due to a variety of factors, namely frustration with the end game, and the extreme amount of work I have to do. I’ve been playing again more recently, and although I only have a small amount of time a day I can actually play, i’ve been enjoying myself again. My current guild isn’t looking to do any big 40man raids, but we’re working our way into 20man content soon, and that’s good enough for us for now. I’ve been playing on the Eitrigg server, and while I’ll probably regret this, feel free to stop by and say hi sometime.. You can see our guild forums @ http://www.darkcrusade.org
I must say.. I typed a lot more than I expected.. Now I guess I’ll crawl back into my hole and write some more code.. =)