Underwear Ninja comes with Space Suit: seattle: day 3

Underwear Ninja comes with Space Suit

to blog or not to blog, which is the path a true underwear ninja must take? whichever path it be, it will surely be a rough-hewn one. argyle, possibly.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

seattle: day 3

the first class of day 3 was an XACT workshop. Yessssss!
(XACT stands for "cross-platform audio creation tool" and is the toolset that microsoft uses to implement audio for all their stuff. PCs, xbox, and 360)
definitely been looking forward to this so i can get an idea what the heck they're all talking about and ask some questions.

it was a class of about 30 computers with windows vista on them. pretty cool. they look a little different but i can't see any MAJOR differences from xp.
the xact toolset actually isn't able to run on vista... so we all had to restart the computers in xp mode.
derrrrrrr..
so our instructor starts right in. before we all even have our computers rebooted he's going through all the features of xact. then some staffers suddenly remember we're all supposed to have hand-outs that help us follow along on paper. they do a little scrambling and leave the room to get to the copier.
then he's pulling up all these sounds that we're "supposed" to have on our computer, but don't for some reason.
so we have no sounds to work from.
i end up doing a computer search for .wav files and found a sound of a gun shot.
too bad i can't hear what it sounds like though coz there an error message that tells me there is no audio hardware or no support for audio or something like that.
might as well though, coz the headphones we were all supposed to be supplied with never showed up...
so at this point he's chugging right along and i'm really trying to figure out what he's talking about by using my gun shot sound in the same way he's doing it. going through the motions and hoping that mimicking him enough will produce the same effect.
the whole workshop was a fiasco in my opinion and i let them know that in the survey.
i went up after the class and asked him about implementing and
basically how to start from the ground floor of all this business. it turns out that i actually don't have to write code, like i thought i would have to do from all that talk on day 1.
i thought i would have to learn c++ or c#
but instead, you tell the programers where to put the sounds and they do it.
et voila! the rest of sound implementation is giving them instructions. you make sounds and set parameters using XACT or middleware, and then those programs spit out instructions that look a lot like hypertext and you hand that over to the programers.
well, that's the simple way to explain it anyway.
after that workshop, i had a clue what this was all about.
i went to look at middleware booths. booths for audio, booths for graphics, booths where they show middleware that mimics human expressions. cri, wwise, fmod, creative labs.... all these are just for audio. pretty cool. they're all trying to demonstrate how easy their programs are and

how great you can make things sound.
then in the afternoon, after lunch, there was a panel for audio middleware. for those of you that don't know what a "panel" is at a convention: they each give a presentation and then there's a Q+A at the end.
it was awesome being on the other side of a convention like this instead of running A/V gear. thing have a much different perspective.
after that, we were done. and it was time for exploring the city coz it was still day out.
*see pic to the right..... leaving gamefest*

one thing to note about seattle is the trollys. they're not like "trollys" but more like buses with rods on the tops of them to catch the wires strewn about 10 ft above the street.
its kindof an eyesore but maybe they save gas. that's chris in the pic...
that's another thing.
chris is in a lot of the pics i have. i'm not in a lot of pics because noone takes pics of me. and if they do they don't do it right.
we walked down to the port. where i snapped this pic...
of

course i contrasted and darkened it a bit, but only coz i wanted to use it as a wallpaper. its more interesting to have a highly contrasted pic as a wallpaper than just bland buildings. you can see the port cranes and the 2 stadiums (i think one is baseball and one is football).
i also saw a sign that looked kinda like the starbucks sign, but it was scary.
actually, it WAS starbucks. but it was one of the first ones. this IS the land of starbucks after all... and every restaurant and hotel served starbucks coffee. and i took all the starbucks coffee packets from my room all 3 days so i have about 6 days worth of coffee yay.

but anyway i didn't think to take a pic... you can probably find what it looks like online. it was the same girl, but brown. and instead of just her face, it showed her whole body. which was nude. turns out she's a mermaid with two tails (that's the freakish part). the hair goes to her waist and doesn't cover her up.
and then i was looking for totem poles. the map showed totem poles. my mom said there were totem poles. and i was like "hellz ya das what i'm talkin bout!". thinking i was gonna see some crazy totem poles. but... i only found 1 and it was lame. it only had 1 carving way at the top. and the back of it was flat. in fact, you wouldn't even be able to tell it was a totem pole if it had wires strung to it (like a telephone pole).
how disappointing.

the from the totem pole was this shot of people laying on the grass. i thought it was pretty and kinda showed "seattle by the water".
we started getting hungry and looked for a place to eat. the criteria: find a place that serves alcohol and find a place that serves something like a menu from applebees or friday's.
actually, there are NO places to eat along the water unless you want fish. and i didn't want fish.
i ended up eating fish.

and before it got too dark chris wanted me to take a pic of this ring in the sky. he was actually quite urgent in how he told me to take a pic of it. i don't think chris had every seen something like that before coz he was absolutely amazed. i was like, "uh, it looks like a plane made a u-turn". it was still cool nonetheless and i guess if i was from the early 1900s i would think it was a sign from aliens.
the Public Market stretched for at least half a mile. for some reason they were really big on this whole "pig" theme. everywhere you looked in this market was a pig statue or pig sign telling you where to eat. why pigs? why not fish? its not like the restaurants sold any pork products anyway. apparently the Public Market was in a levi's jeans commercial in the early to mid 90s. guys throwing fish. guys catching fish. all done in levi's jeans. and i think that tradition is real and still goes on. something about throwing fish. this is a big thing to the seattlites and they play up the whole "famous Public Ma

rket" thing because of it.

these shots were taken at the top of a san fran-esque hilly street. i couldn't make up my mind which pic i liked better. it all depends on which setting i use on my camera how it color balances. here's one that looks more green/blue and one that looks more pink/orange.
so that's basically my trip to seattle. left in the morning to get to the airport by 1p (seattle time)
heard about a bomb scare at the port about 20 min into the flight, got back about 9p (ny time).

now to download all these middleware sdk's and figure 'em out!

posted by underwear ninja 6:24 AM

2 Comments:

At 9:20 PM EDT, Iris Blue said…

Almost like being there. The photos would make nice posters, too. This makes me want to travel to the west coast again. It's soooo far by car.
At 6:58 PM EDT, Anonymous said…

good pix and comments, un. almost like being there. --nbk