SIGGRAPH Day 3

Another day at SIGGRAPH, another early morning to catch a course. Again, my original choice turned out to be too basic, so I moved over to a course on HDR and Image-based lighting. Mostly it was about HDR photography, but it also discussed file format standards and using the images in Monte-carlo ray-tracing engines. Since today was the first day the expo was open, I spent a few hours checking it out. The usual assortment of high-end workstations and supporting hardware, educational institutions, book publishers (my personal favorites), 3D digitizers, awesome Wacom LCD displays that double as tablets for a mere $2500, and mocap demos with tightly-clothed chicks and the occasional muscled guy. There were a lot of cool display systems on the floor this year: HDR LCDs (which were in the Emerging Technologies demo last year), wide-spectrum displays that cover more of the visible gamut than traditional RGB, and stereo displays that look like live versions of those holographic cards--which unfortunately are still in the realm of 'woozy-tech' so bring on the Dramamine. I dropped by the job fair to chat with someone I met back at E3, and gave her a bit of information about the conference since she is new to the whole industry.

Because I've been going four days without much sleep, I skipped out for a few hours to get some food and a short nap before going to dinner with some folks from Autodesk. They gave us passes to their private party being held in Hollywood, co-hosted by Blur, Intel, and ATI. Good party, excellent DJs (Crystal Method), great venue. They even had a ton of women from the conference show (the invite jokingly said "this pass gets 1 guy and 3 girls into the party"). And that was actually their mistake. They had hired women for the party (as often is the case) but dressed them up a bit too slutty. Unlike most technical conferences in the computer biz, this one has been going on for 30+ years and attracts a broad audience including many women. As such, they were pretty turned off by entering the dance area to see an array of 20 year old girls dressed in hot-pants dancing like they either were or thought they should act like strippers. It wasn't until the "escapees from Burning Man"-like fire twirling started that their desire to dance overcame their distaste for the pseudo-strippers, so they spent most of the first few hours in other areas of the venue drinking.

Still, I had a good time. Met a nice girl who I couldn't manage to have a conversation with due to the noise-level, but proved yet again that the most attractive girl to me in a room of scantily-clad bimbos is the brunette wearing clothing from head-to-foot and little hippy sandals who is there to have a good time and not for the purpose of 'eye-candy', and is actually there because she is attending the conference.

SIGGRAPH Day 4

More courses. More walking the expo floor. More parties. Need sleep.

The key lesson of the day was that I don't particularly value things whose key attribute is exclusivity. The SIGGRAPH reception was too large as always, and the private party was too cliquish since it was held in probably the most cliquish club in downtown LA and had to make people sit around and wait until other people left to be let in. Maybe I'd have been more impressed I was into boozing. Still, I suppose getting what is on the other side of the velvet rope and realizing it isn't something I wanted in the first place is a valuable lesson.