All right, I’ve been to lazy to write again, but I guess this one needs to be finished. So, together with a few of my fellow gamer-FM colleagues, I went to Leipzig last weekend to do the audio/video techie stuff for a booth there. Read on for a small recap and the link to the few pictures I made.
The 8 hour trip to Leipzig was quite OK. It actually went much better than I had anticipated it. The only thing that annoyed me a little was that my HP PDA gave up work even before I started to venture onto unknown roads, forcing a revert to ‘manual navigation’ (fortunately I had my laptop and some mapping software with me as I don’t actually own a real paper map).
[For those who wonder about the PDA failure: Having had an accident with its battery charger and a crappy power strip (not one of mine), my HP rz1710 was already flaky long before this trip. It kept thinking it was on charger, even when I disconnected it, and the battery never managed to hold much current any more. Earlier this year, during my CeBIT trip earlier this year, I had to constantly leave it hooked up to the AC power in the car in order to keep the data on it, and the cradle also developed a bad habit of detaching itself from the windshield from time to time. And that is exactly what happened after I cleaned the windshield in Heiligenhaus, where I’d picked up the teammember that shared the trip with me: the PDA dropped and switched off. After that drop, neither the PDA, nor the cradle showed any signs of life. I haven’t had the time and energy to perform any tests on them, but I assume something must’ve short circuited and fried the entire electronics. Anyway, I ordered a new one, the rz1710 was a crappy PDA anyway and never managed to replace my Palm Zire 21.]
But enough of that, the event itself was a nice distraction, allowing me to do something different from my usual work for a few days, and this event in particular was quite distinct from what gamer-FM usually does, having to manage only the booth display, and a simple video stream with mostly entertainment and informational programing: there were no e-sports games, no tournament schedules, just some video playback work and keeping track of cameras and recorded video data. The setup also involved a video wall consisting of 4 large TFT/Plasma flat TVs, instead of the usual one beamer single output, allowing for several different video input signals to be fed to the respective outputs. I also got to chat a little with the friendly people from the GameStar and GamePRO magazine, but apart from that, didn’t see anything further of the entire trade show.
The trip back was mostly uneventful too, apart from the bad hailstorm that struck the highway three times on my way back home from Heiligenhaus through Belgium (visibility was near zero, even with the wipers set to maximum speed).
Oh, and here’s the promised link to the Games Convention 2006 gallery. I didn’t shoot many pics, but you’ll see the booth and some of the tech stuff that we worked with.