The Power of the Floppy

Oh, the frustration. Oh, the humanity. Oh, the rotten technology. The first two days of GDC have been laced with troubles. After attending several wonderful sessions and taking notes on plenty of delicious tidbits that I've wanted to share, I quickly sat down and wrote out a complete summary of the attended sessions only to find frustration in not being able to connect to the Internet and post my report to the Gamedev.net site.

After trying all the available connections that my fellow writers offered, I ran in a panic to the local Radio Shack desperate for someway to connect and purchased a USB/Ethernet connector. It took another full frustrating day to realize that I couldn't get the drivers to recognize the device on my laptop. At two days into the conference, I felt like a runner who tripped and fell flat on my face during the first ten feet of a race and as of this morning, I was questioning whether I would finish at all.

As a last resort, I purchased some 3.25 floppy disks (when was the last time you've done that) and saved the file to a floppy. I then loaded the file on the a connected PC's desktop and copied and pasted it to make a post. Success for me was found in the most roundabout way and I never dreamed that sneakernet would be my salvation. I actually considered this morning re-typing the entire report into a connected PC and the only thing that saved my fingers from exhaustion was a simple floppy disk.