The gamedev.net D/FW locals meeting went well. IIRC, we had seven folks show up, along with three "guests" (read, a dragged-along wife, a dragged-along girlfriend, and a dragged-along daughter). The format was basically "what format should we go with?", so it really ended up just being a 90-minute chat session on games. We had two full-timers, myself (as I don't consider myself a full time game developer), and four guys who were wanting to get into side projects.

I brought my laptop, but I got in a hurry at the end. I loaned my cheapo little MP3 player to our tech (who's been ordered to walk more). I then found that I needed an MP3 player for my D/FW Ethical Society Platform on ethics in game development, so I was kinda screwed. We just got a way-overdue payment on a very big very old project, so I decided it was time to buy a non-crappy MP3 player. I ended up buying a Samsung YP-T8 from Circuit City. They had a deal where you could the 512mb one for around $150 and you'd get a $40 CC gift card out of the deal. I wasn't planning to store Every Song Ever Recorded on it, so I figured 512mb was enough.

And since it plays games, Shelly convinced me that it's worth investigating. I was hoping that it was using Flash Lite for its games (as Macromedia's licensing FL to damn near every little gizmo on the planet nowadays), but it's using something from "Xeovia" for its games, and I can't find a single English page on it. It just plays a couple of cute Japanese Tetris knockoffs. Funniest thing is that it's got a darts game that uses a built in tilt-sensor to aim the darts. What on Earth was somebody smoking when they decided to stuff a freakin' tilt sensor into a cheapo MP3 player for the sole benefit of a darts game?

But I digess. . .pretty badly.

Anyways, I got home just in time to load the songs on the player, and I didn't have time to put Duck Tiles on the laptop, so I just threw it up on the code zone's FTP server figuring I could use the unprotected hotspot in the building to get it on the laptop when I got there.

And somebody shut down the hotspot. So I ended up booting up the laptop, then shutting it down later when we discovered that downloading Duck Tiles just wasn't gonna happen.

In any case, people were lukewarm about the Grapevine location, mainly about the location. Pretty-much everyone was from Dallas, so a central location wasn't all that good. Some folks said "Hey, let's meet in Irving instead", which is their way of saying "Hey, I've never been a location manager for a club before", as getting meeting locations around here is just a wee bit more difficult than simply saying "let's meet at X". Unless you wanna meet at a hotel meeting room where you can get top-flight meeting space for only $375.

Next meeting's over at a member's house in Dallas. He's got a couple of terrifically pumped up machines along with an XP Media Center box hooked up to a big TV, so we should have fun showing off stuff there.

We'll probably keep things monthly (or at least biweekly), as we don't wanna fill peoples' schedules, so I wanna see you there next time. . .provided you're in the area.

The McDonald's Monopoly contest starts tomorrow, and I'm ramping things up a bit from last year. Last year worked fairly well, so I'm keeping the process much the same only scaling up a bit. I'll keep you posted on that.

My only real risk is that I'll be beaten to death by an angry mob when I show up in an overcrowded Best Buy on Black Friday trying to buy one of those really nice vacuum cleaners with McDonalds tickets.