SIGGRAPH Day 3
Aug. 3rd, 2005 12:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walbournAnother 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.
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.
