2008 San Diego Comic Con

This is the first year I went to the International Comic Con and it was amazing and claustrophobic. They had some really cool sessions about the new season of HEROES & LOST. I also got to see the pilot for a new show called FRINGE by J.J. Abrams. Its kinda like a X-Files meets CSI. The pilot was very good...can't wait to see more. Plus they had some kick ass movie previews of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Terminator: Salvation (which by the way is shaping up to be a really good movie on how John Conner becomes the leader of the resistance) & The Watchmen.

The Comic-Con offered a little bit for everyone. They had ANIMA, Movie & Show previews, Video Games. How To Sessions on the entertainment industry like, breaking into game development, becoming a custom designer for shows and movies & portfolio reviews by the big guys at Marvel, DC and many others. In the booth section you had the WB, Marvel, DC, XBOX, Playstaion, artists and of course comic book sellers. They also had great panels with Matthew Fox and the writers from LOST, Kevin Smith, Frank Miller, director and stars from Terminator Salvation and ton of other guests.

Not everything was great. The amount of people that were their was astonishing...125,000 people attended! That's like the amount of people in an average city squeezed into one building. You felt like cattle...Mooooo!! Also if you really wanted to see a certain session, be prepared to get there early and get used to waiting in lines.

Overall though it was a great experience and something any scfi or comic book nerd should experience at least once.

Here are some pictures from the Con...

ArcGIS 9.3 License Manager...Where are my licenses!

Don't know if anyone has had this problem. I just updated our license manager to 9.3 and now it doesn't want to dish out licenses. This drove me a little batty for a while because I would run through these trouble shooting steps and it would work and than later in the day it would stop working again. Well I finally noticed that when I would log out of the machine, the ARCGIS.EXE would stop running. That's when it hit me, the windows service isn't running. So I took a peek at windows services and what do I find? No ArcGIS License Manager Service! For some reason the install didn't create it. Well luckly I have this sweet little tool that I've been using since my VB6 days that can create a windows service from any .exe. Once I ran the tool and created the service everything was at one with the universe.

Update 08-29-08:
Use this exe "C:\Program Files\ESRI\License\arcgis9x\lmgrd.exe" to create the service and name the service "ArcGIS License Manager".