Memoirs of a CPUNERD

I went to three sessions this time, instead of the usual five. All three were on OpenGL, and they were some what informative. The last session not so much, it just talked about how there is a fast track through the driver code down to the hardware, and that you should always program your applications to hit that fast track. The speakers were okay, the last one was extremely nervous, which made for an interesting talk. About the first presentation: It was primarily on new features in OpenGL for Mac OS X (which means three year old features for Windows and Linux). Alex Eddy, my usual contact at Apple made two really freaking cool demos, each supposedly in a day and a half.

We had a two hour break for lunch, so Ray and I went to one of the labs and just screwed around on some new macs. I got to mess around with FBOs, and then we ran out of time. After the third session, I went back to the labs to talk with some of the graphics guys, but they were really slammed with questions from developers, so I just split. I went back to NVIDIA, collected as many other badges as I could (we now had five) for the campus bash, then Sean, Ray, Carl, Chris, and I headed off to Cupertino for the Apple headquarters.

The bash was a blast. There was cool techno from a DJ with a nifty lights show, tons of free beer, and an insane amount of nerds wandering the Apple quad. I got to meet a few new people, including two interns from Florida A&M and UT, and the guy who wrote the O’Reilly firewalls book. After we finished up at the bash, we went to Murphy’s Ave. for a drink or two and some darts. I called it a night at 12:45AM, and took everyone back to NVIDIA.