David summed it up best: it was the Prozac SIGGRAPH. No lows, no highs, just sort of boring. To summarize the conference:
- Sunday: Things started out badly: had to haul a “diskpack” along with my luggage onto the plane. It turned out not to be a smallish hard drive, but a set of them in a box the size of a large stereo system, and the damn thing was twice as heavy and probably fragile too (which didn’t stop me from kicking it a few times). In short, not the sort of thing one wants to haul through the length and breadth of LAX.
Got into LA around noon, checked in, hauled the diskpack to the conference, then stayed around til the evening first setting up the computers for the booth, and then testing software. And right on cue, the programs started breaking down late in the evening, which was not a good thing. We finally gave up around 8 and went back to the hotel for some (good) Korean barbecue.
- Monday: The software inexplicably started working again, but we still spent the day testing as well as checking demos. In the evening, we headed out to the Electronic Theatre, where we got the first indication this was going to be a humdrum conference by sitting through humdrum material – the immediate consensus was that while there was no terrible material (like last year’s glut of PlayStation 2 FMVs), nothing really stood out either. And I hope never to see another mouse and cheese entry in the Theatre. The biggest audience reaction was for Blue Sky’s trailer for Ice Age, which I thought was odd since I didn’t find it that compelling (I did, however, find it more so than our clip from Monsters, and I guess so did the audience).
We spent the late evening in the bar of the hotel, where I had the quintessential LA experience: a striking blonde woman wearing shades and a tube top sat down at the counter, and glancing over at our geeky selves asked us if we were webmasters. Upon finding out we weren’t, she looked relieved and introduced herself as “the owner of fifty adult web sites”, and then started a fascinating conversation about how the dotcom bust was affecting her business. Unlike a few years ago, she was now having no difficulty getting resumés, all from dotcom refugees willing to settle for 40K a year; on the other hand, she was now finding it difficult to filter through the glut of (in her words) useless dotcom people in order to find someone who wasn’t lying about knowing something about – you guessed it – video compression techniques. It was completely surreal yet somehow also completely normal to be having that discussion with someone who fit the image of an ex-porn-industry-worker, somewhat beyond her prime (if only by being over the age of 30), and who at the same time was one of the most level-headed, no-nonsense persons I’ve ever talked to. Unfortunately she left fairly early and the evening got boring after that.
- Tuesday: We were only giving out 500 posters a day this year, and so the poster crush at 10 am each morning resembled 5 minutes of an angry soccer mob. But if you looked beyond that, the main indicator of the lack of energy at SIGGRAPH this year was that probably less than half the time slots for the internal booth demos were filled up. It seemed a lot of companies just didn’t show up at all – too busy with productions to bother. We also heard news of layoffs at the large companies (at Disney, ILM, and SGI, with the last happening on Thursday – some of the people on the exhibition floor no longer had jobs!), and that probably didn’t help the atmosphere much either.
Went to the “Ex-Pixar” party by the pool of the Figuoeroa Hotel in the evening. It turned out to be depressing, in part due to the presence of people reminding me of the unfortunate competitive situation we were in, and it was enough for me to eventually skip the DD party to which I had been lucky enough to be granted a couple of tickets. Heading back to the hotel I bumped into my boss in a rather squiffy condition. He herded me toward the bar, where over the course of a couple of hours we were eventually joined by more of the Seattle office (also leaving the Fig). Then at some point the evening again turned entertainingly surreal when a weird chap decided to buy us a round of drinks while giving a virtuoso yet incoherent monologue. It started out as declaration of Irish patriotism, then turned into anger directed at me for not grokking some subtle Cantonese nuances I was supposed to understand (“Are you from up the hill or down the hill?” “What does Fei Loong mean?”), took a meander through some ramblings about his life as a paratrooper in Lourdes and some other mutterings about not trusting a heart surgeon because her name was Wendy Su, and then ended up in some tantalizing bits about being a cryptographer, before declining into some belligerent interplay between him and one of my coworkers. In short, it took another weird LA denizen to salvage the day and turn it into something memorable.
- Wednesday: The lack of internal booth demos didn’t stop me from being on the show floor 9 to 6, doing external demos on the Linux machine. I made sure my accidentally granted full conference badge didn’t go to waste by trading it with another coworker.
The evening was occupied with the Pixar user’s group meeting. I was stuck having to get up in front of the 450+ attendees and introduce the winners of the Stupid RenderMan Tricks contest (for which I was nominally responsible), but other than a bad case of nerves, it was a great evening – all of the speakers put a great deal of effort into their talks, showed off some genuinely useful tips and tricks while being entertaining, and made the meeting a highlight of the week. Tal (of renderman.org, among other things) will be arranging for the presented material to appear on his website.
Oh – I guess it was nice to get a round of applause when I introduced myself to everyone as the tech support guy. It’s nice to be appreciated.
After that, some Seattle office people and I met up with Wayne and his friend Heather. She drove us over to Hollywood for the Blur party (the tickets to that were labeled “admits one guy and three girls” – how typical) but that turned out to be the hip party, with a very large crowd of people lining up for a long time trying to get into what appeared to be a way too small venue (the Hollywood Olympic Gym, or something of that sort). We gave up on that and headed back to the scary Flower district for the Nothing Real party, which seemed much more low key, although I vaguely recall that it was marked by once-per-hour pretentious art events involving naked gymnasts, playing with fire in some way. And that turned out to be THE one real party I attended this year at Siggraph.
- Thursday: The last exhibition day. I was relieved when the bagpipes started blasting through the speakers at 5 pm, signifying the end of the exhibition, although I must say all of the demos we did were very well received, and we got some good dialogues with the customers. Most seemed to be excited about the stuff going into the next releases, which is a good thing.
After tearing down the booth a bunch of us headed out for for Mexican food and margaritas – apparently an annual tradition which I somehow missed the last two times (I was probably at the Papers reception those years). We went to Olivera Street, which is the oldest district in LA – it’s runs for all of two very quaint blocks near the Union train station. Despite my dislike of Mexican fare, it turned out to be pretty good, and the atmosphere was cheerful. Afterwards I packed it in for the night and caught up on sleep.
So that was SIGGRAPH, and yes, for a second year, I didn’t attend a single paper or sketch. I apparently did miss a few good ones – oh well. I found out later attendance was around 34K, 9K less than the last LA conference in 1999 – this in part explains how dead it felt. Fortunately, the weekend made up for it and more, but I’ll write that up tomorrow: it doesn’t help that as I type this, I have all the early symptoms of some sort of cold or flu.
