Welcome to Texas

So this is where y'all are from

My flight arrived at 5:30PM, and I had the opportunity to scope out the lay of the land. Yep, every restaurant in sight advertised steak, ribs, or Tex-mex. Stick to the main course here, and you've got yourself the ideal protein-only diet, and maybe a bad case of colon cancer in the later years.

It's QuakeCon again!

My arranged hotel was the Dallas/Mesquite Hampton Inn and Suites, a venue which should be familiar to any QuakeCon 99 attendee. The Hampton Inn was the most recent host for the annual event, and its convention and ballrooms were a lot larger than what I expected.

It was there that I met my roommate for the 2-night stay, Dave "Wino" Miller, Quakecon organizer and EFNET #Quake l337-dude. Dave was kind enough to give me a quick tour of the premises, and show the newly installed optical networking jacks installed at the Hampton Inn. Quakecon 2000, he says, will be held in the enormous loading room adjacent to the ballroom that housed the 1999 event. Sounds like it's going to be a blast. The best part of the hotel, of course was that it was right across the street from a rodeo. Now that's authentic!

Though evening was quickly descending, we could see the black cube of id's building from the entrance to the hotel, perhaps a mile or so away. There were two things dragging in the back of my mind. First, Texas is pretty damned flat. Not as flat as Indianapolis claimed Dave, but to me it was like watching a smoggy Space Harrier game.

id's office tower above all

A truly Texan dinner

Since we were both starved, we called up Anna (who was still at work!), and she took us out to dinner. Now, my friend Brandon is from Texas, and all he does is talk about how good the BBQ and steaks are down there, and how our BBQ "sucks ass." All right. I'm ready to experience some real Texan cooking. So we pile into the car, and Anna takes us to...California Pizza Kitchen. Now, I don't have to explain the irony of flying a thousand miles to eat at CPK, but I guess we still had 2 days to get ahold of some Tex-Mex.

After dinner, we met up with Steve Gibson (Scary), Mike Wardwell (Giggler), and Jack Mathews (Morbid) at "The Horny Toad," a small bar/restaurant next to the id office. Conversation over white Russians obviously moved towards Quake, future FPS games (and FAKK) and the like. All in all, we had a good time, and it's always cool to meet up the upstanding citizens of the gaming community.