travel

seattle trip, awesome

awesome. that's the word of the week. for two reasons, the trip was awesome and i totally over used and abused the word.. awesome this. awesome that.. damn you average joe 'brian'.

for the job the trip was perfect timing. our 'client' (hehe) was at a good point where they could sit down and finally help out . previously they were so busy that we did not get any help. it was basically a clean room reverse engineering jobby. those are always fun. we too were at the really good point to talk to them. we had just started reaching diminishing returns with our development.

the first meeting was around 3 hours. the second unscheduled meeting the next day lasted many, many hours. i think by the time we left the offices we had been hanging out there for over 6 hours. crazy. it was a lot of fun though.. so 'job' often meant shooting the shit with my old friends and it was actually very relevant to our business. that's awesome. haha. i really miss having the opportunity to do that on a regular basis. man, i hate to say it, but i miss game developers.

i must say, this reinforces my believe that being friends with other developers is a very, very important thing. if just some random programmer or marketing guy had been sent, there would of been a single 1 hour meeting and that is that. our 9 hours of meetings were worth way more than 9, 1 hour meetings.

anyway. on to hanging out with my friends..

brian (currently, haha) has a higher coefficient of 'chris hecker' than i do. now i specifically mean coefficient instead of 'degrees of kevin bacon'. that's because in the gaming industry everyone is '1 degree of chris hecker'. he knows everyone directly. the coefficient is the fraction of people you know that checker also knows. of course, it is impossible to have a value higher than one. so because of that i got to hang out with one of the leads at bungie. it was good to finally meet one of those guys and he was really cool. i also finally met another i had wanted to meet for awhile. i always enjoy attaching a name/personality to a real life face/personality.

in closing, ahha, i got to spend a good amount of time with almost all of my friends. some of these friends i just appreciate way more than they know and are so special to me. the trip was a perfect length and i am really good at riding the seattle bus now (which is awesome btw, haha).