Geek Boxing
I was almost knocked out by a Russian last night.
Microsoft Tech Ed 2003 is going on this week in Dallas, and last night was their Attendee Party. Microsoft developers from all over the world were lavished with food, drinks, music (Smash Mouth and the Wallflowers), casino and interactive games. My temp agency helped staff the event.
Since I volunteered myself as “good with high-tech things”, I was placed in charge of Virtual Reality Boxing. Two players virtually boxed each other for three rounds. Things weren’t exactly fair. One of the punching apparatuses was only half working, so one side almost always won.
Imagine, if you will, an event with 9,000 geeks in attendance. Now imagine two of your most stereotypical geeks with gigantic headgear on punching into thin air for three minutes straight and talking smack. Now multiply that by three and a half hours. That was my night. Let’s just say that hilarity ensued. (Sidenote to geeks: please don’t think that I am making fun of you. I love you. I am you.)
The Russian didn’t realize the game was over, and when I moved in to let the two players out of the playing pod, almost cold-cocked me. I saw a flash of fist go by the corner of my eye.
It occured to me, upon seeing all the digital cameras around and having SXSW flashbacks, that this place was probably full of bloggers. Sure enough, they even have their own blog about Tech Ed blogs: TechEd Bloggers. I went through the list tonight, just hoping someone wrote something like, “I played this great VR boxing game. The chick running it was [insert adjective here (example: cool, funny, sassy, cute)]“. No such posts yet.
I did get myself a free lime green Microsoft Office t-shirt.
Tonight, my dear friends Tina and Amanda are planning some sort of celebration for my forthcoming birthday. I normally don’t like celebrating my birthday before the actual day, but as I will be out of town on June 13th, I’m going to suck it up and let them celebrate me. You should come. I’m not allowed to know the details, but Tina knows them and you should ask her.
Just to clarify, not everyone there last night was a developer. With all of the content that used to be in MEC now in TechEd, you have a lot of sysadmin types (such as myself) here now as well.