GDC 2011

Explosion! GDC25! Flash to me, John Spellman, arriving in Oakland by plane at dusk. Carrying two large bags and wearing an out of town teams bright orange beanie on my head, obviously not from around here. I wander around the airport, then the train station, finally catching the right train and heading into downtown San Francisco and to my Hostel. Unfortunately, though I didn't know it at the time, I was heading to the wrong location of the same chain. Thankfully I had time to fully regret that and came to learn my lesson while wandering down a street lined with folks who may not have been junkies and crack addicts... but they sure as hell looked like it. I was going to be robbed this trip, but not tonight. This night, I made it safely to the correct hostel safe and sound and ended up getting a good nights sleep.
That's how my fifth visit to San Francisco started. Fortunately it was about the only time that actually felt like I was going to be robbed this trip. Usually you can always count on San Fran for at least two of those occasions during a weeks worth of late night stumbling through the off streets, but this year was good to me right up to the very end. When I was robbed in the lobby of my hostel. But it was only thirty bucks and I wasn't in any real danger, so I didn't let it get me down.
In fact, he pretty much did me a service by waking me up, after I fell asleep in the lobby. I'm not sure why the receptionist let a random person walk in and not even ask them who they were, but she did. And when this stranger wakes me up asking me if I called a shuttle, I figure it's the driver. Same as when he says "Okay so it's going to be 30 bucks", the same number I was quoted over the phone. As soon as I hand it over to him he runs out the door and up the street. Meanwhile, just outside the door, my shuttle sits there waiting. Driver making no attempt to see if the sleeping guy with the bags sitting by the window of the hostel is the guy he is there to pick up.
Despite the very beginning and the very end, though, I loved every minute of this year. It actually ended up being my luckiest year at GDC yet. Intel gave me a tablet, as part of a promo program for AppUp & MeeGo, their development center and new OS. It took a little getting used to how buggy it was, but it's only in Alpha and you could see the potential of the OS. I also won a Chromium Laptop (CR48) in the CA Raffle at the end of the trip and have used it almost daily every day since, though mostly out of necessity and not love for cloud computing. Still its nice to have a laptop that is ready to use in 8 seconds, on or off.
What was better than a touch tablet, better than a Google laptop, better even then winning a Xperia play for drinking for free and watching beautiful girls dance was landing a job at Bioware Austin. I had a phone interview with them the first day of the conference and a skype interview the monday after GDC. Luckily for me things went well and one week after the conference I was planning a move to Texas.