Last Sunday, immediately after my Yongmudo belt test, I rode home as quickly as possible, took a quick shower, and frantically packed my bags. Tom and Dominica were on their way over to pick me up, and by 4pm, we were well on our way to Los Angeles for E3. We stopped off for lunch at a rest stop on the way down and ate some of Dominica's yummy tofu, humus, cheese, and other goodies. My week vacation was off to a great start.

We got to our hotel pretty late (I think it was somewhere around 9 or 10), so we went to sleep soon after getting there. The hotel itself was pretty bad. The internet hardly ever worked, and when it did, we usually had 3s one-hop ping times and 20-30% packet-loss. The place always had a weird smell, and I was allergic to something in the room (probably the same thing... mold most likely). On top of that, the manager was a complete scum-bag with horrible PR etiquette. We are definitely staying somewhere nicer next year.

Oh my god. Last week was crazy! E3 was so awesome!! Tom, Dominica, and I drove down to LA last Monday with plans to goto E3.

Our industry credentials were rejected as insufficient to get us free admittance, so we had resigned to pay the $300 admission, BUT I convinced Tom to let my try once more. We went to the show the day before it opened to scope out the scene. We saw everybody scurrying to setup the expo which kinda reminded me of episodes on The Apprentice. I talked to people who told me to talk to other people who finally gave me the name of someone important who dealt with admission. So I went to see her, and she said that we were rejected because they never received our credentials and if I could prove that we sent everything in on time, we'd get in. So I was lucky enough to have a friend in the area who let me use his computer to get access to the fax log from back home. I printed it out, went out to lunch, and on the way back to the hotel picked up our badges =).

I played Starcraft today for the first time in a long while. It started out as a way to test point2play on the TV computer, but it turned into me playing the first 2 missions of Broodwar on the big screen TV. God that was fun. The cool things is that once we get the wireless mouse and keyboard, Ryan will be able to use that computer in the living room to join in our LAN games instead of the poor old box in his bedroom...

I'm getting the itch to install other classics on that box too. I should try getting some NES, SNES, and Genesis emulators up as well.

So, last week, I met up with Steve to discuss designing a video game. We planned out some stuff, and I came home and started working on the game engine. Right now, I've completed the sound engine, and I've started working on the game database. Unfortunately, I'm pretty much the only one with spare time to work on the project... Catherine's going to be in Europe, and Steven's got a lot on his plate as well. I was really looking forward to working on a game this summer... especially since it's been a while since I've done any substantial coding... Luckily, I've stumbled across planeshift. It's a MMORPG (like Everquest) being developed by a small (read: needing more volunteers) group of open source developers, so I've started helping them out with development.