Leaving for New Zealand and Australia

I'm leaving for a month long vacation to New Zealand and Australia. I probably won't be updating this blog during the next month but when I get back in January and I'll tell you all about the trip. I'm so excited!

Great Times at Work

Today I was just promoted to an MTS Software Development Engineer at AMD. MTS stands for Member of Technical Staff. While this is only one level higher than my old title of Engineer 3, it sounds way cooler. It's great being appreciated!

In other news is that my lecture to the Games Developer Conference 2008 got accepted. This means I'll be teaching a course at GDC called Next-Gen Tile-Based GPUs. I've had a lecture rejected to GDC before, but this is the first time I've been accepted. GDC is pretty much the biggest video game developer conference in the world and I'm lecturing at it!

In even more good news I've written a chapter about tile based rendering that is going to be published in ShaderX 6.

It's been great few weeks at work!

Kite Flying

Devon and I went to fly some kites we made a few weeks ago. Our kites didn't fly very well, but they did fly. They were not aerodynamically stable and went crazy whenever they were in the air. Actually this made it more fun since it required a lot of interaction from the flier to keep the kite in the air. I think our longest flight was about 30 seconds. I now realize the flaw in the design and am sure I could make a better one if I try again.

While building the kites, I was a little concerned about strength so I built mine with a thicker vertical dowel than Devon choose. It turned out the thicker dowel wasn't necessary, but checking the dowel for flaws and flexibility would have been a good idea. The thinner dowel kite never broke, but on the third crash my thicker dowel snapped into three pieces. I looked at the dowel and the wood grain wasn't perfectly parallel and the dowel snapped easily.

It was great fun!

Blue Man Group

My company bought a bunch of us tickets to the Blue Man Group. It was certainly my highlight for this weekend.

If you're not familiar with them check out this link for a little video. They mix comedy and music to perfection. Great show!