SIGGRAPH was pretty lame. I’ve heard attendance figures were only around 17,000 or so - even worse than the numbers for last year. In general I ended up hanging around the booth more than I really wanted to, though admittedly there wasn’t really much that I was interested in at the rest of the conference. I saw some excellent technical sketches on Stuart Little 2, some terrible sketches about Ice Age, a good paper on perspective shadow maps, and really not much else. (Okay, there were several papers and courses on rendering techniques I really was interested in, but due to timing issues at the booth, I couldn’t make them.) The art gallery was abysmal, the Electronic Theatre wasn’t memorable, and there were no cool giveaways on the show floor to be had.
Monday I worked on setup at the booth, and ended up staying til 11 pm stuck with the task of editing the network configuration of over 50 machines by hand - one by one. (Jamie switched keyboard cables between machines on the rack, I ran netconf.)
The press release about Pixar and Exluna finally came out on Tuesday. Exluna was bought by NVIDIA, and Exluna has withdrawn Entropy from the market. And that’s all you’ll hear from me. However misinformed speculation started almost immediately (it still continues on the newsgroup today), and there was some reaction over the rest of the week - although not as much vitriol as I braced myself for.
The Pixar user’s group meeting actually turned out one of the more exciting episodes of the week, if only because I nearly derailed the whole thing. An hour before the meeting I was desperately trying to render some images and integrate movies to the Powerpoint presentation on my laptop (the presentation was a conglomeration of nearly everyone’s talks). Half an hour before the meeting started I left the hotel and locked my wallet and card keys in my hotel room; discovered the only connection in the ballroom was a VGA adapter, and that I had forgotten to pack the ADC to VGA adapter for the laptop; ran back to the show floor to grab Wayne’s G3 laptop; discovered after transferring the presentation to his laptop that I had inadvertently created references to embedded movies that were still on a CD-ROM (did I mention how much I hate Powerpoint?) and I had forgotten the disk; and ran back for the CD-ROM with 15 minutes to spare before the presentation started. The presentation itself went fine (except for a few minor glitches - David fell off the stage being the most memorable) until Per’s talk, where he discovered that one of the embedded movies I added at the last moment was too large to fit in the G3’s memory and ended up hanging the machine. Oddly enough my talk itself went okay.
Thursday morning we wandered through the Alamo, where I bought a “Remember The Alamo” t-shirt - made in Mexico. How’s that for Santa Anna’s last revenge? That evening was the only real group gathering I went to - the technical reception, held at a ranch with even an equestrian drill team in attendance (which was cool). I missed out on all other parties this time around, but there weren’t that many to be had in the first place.
Friday I gave up on SIGGRAPH after spending a couple of hours in the animation theatre and wandered over to the Buckhorn Saloon where I stared bemusedly at the “World’s Biggest Collection of Horns and Antlers”. It was certainly the grandest collection of stuffed animals I’d ever seen gathered in one place. And the fact that this quaint museum was the best part of my trip leads to the conclusion: “Worst. SIGGRAPH. Ever”.
They seem to have canceled plans for SIGGRAPH in Atlanta in 2004. I wonder if I’ll even care by that point.