I am currently trapped in the middle seat for a two hour flight to Seattle.

The fact that I am traveling on business is, into and of itself, somewhat unusual, I usually try to restrict my travel to places where I already have a couch to crash on because all of this is out of pocket for me.  I don’t work on high budget products, I don’t work for a big name publisher who is willing to send me out on these little jaunts and foot the bill.  When I do work for a “Big Name” its on a freelance basis these days, which means I have to use the tradesman’s entrance, and my name never appears int he credit.  I am half past indie both in development and mindset at the point, which puts me in the budget hotel and hoofing it categories.

Still this is an exciting trip for me.  I’ve not had the chance to be a panelist or a guest speaker prior to this, sure, I’ve applied to be on one occasion or mother, but my subject matter is a little bit quirky and a little too directed and he introductory crowd.  I’m in this from the artistic side of development and, as such, this means I don’t have a new and nifty way to handle shadows in a mobile environment or a great new powerful graphics engine I developed in my basement.  I have a host of useful information for the artist, how to shave an extra 5kb off your title image, different programs you can use to kill your image down to 64 colors without losing too much in the way of image quality.  I have solutions for design issues and a boost of from the tranches commentary on the process of development but not so much of the newer better faster hard core programming that is such a valuable commodity in this industry.