We spent last weekend in Southern California, sweltering through a heat wave at Disneyland, being tourists in Hollywood, and attending the world premiere of Wall-E at the Greek Theatre. Getting to go was Susan’s privilege as a lead on the film and I got to tag along and pretend to be famous. Although not your A-list Hollywood event, there was still a red carpet scrum which we were mostly tangential to. Susan claims her foot is visible somewhere in a publicity photo next to some Disney Channel starlet, while I as usual am the invisible, not even implied presence. We did play spot the celebrity and at the after party, we hovered for a moment, one mere foot away from Sigourney Weaver (she’s the voice of the ship’s computer in Wall-E) - alas we were too awestruck to introduce ourselves.

That wasn’t the first time I’ve seen the film; that would be the end of last month at the Wall-E wrap party. A lovely event, made more so by an especially touching thanks from the director to the crew. As for the movie itself, I’ve sat through it three times now and it holds up well. It is truly unlike anything we’ve ever done and works brilliantly.

In other news, CSUEB orchestra is done for the school year. This term our cello section was reduced to three (yours truly as principal this time around), but we padded out the rest of the strings with more professionals and we sounded excellent at the concert. We have come a long way since last September. The program this term was the Marriage of Figaro Overture, Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, KV. 488. The last was weird: the first concerto I ever played with orchestra back when I was ten. Two decades later and I’m on the other side of the piano playing cello. No real regrets, just a small irony. Cello’s not in storage for the summer. I’ve been dragooned into playing the bass part for some Slayer noodling at work. An honest to goodness bass amp has been ordered and is on its way. More on this furious acoustic metal assault soon.

We finally shipped PRMan 13.5 yesterday. Wow, has it been that long in gestation? Just about as bad as giving birth to a giraffe.

The toughest release I’ve ever had to work on; and that included 13.0, the first multi-threading capable release. (And I moved in the middle of 13.0.) February and March of this year were particularly killer months. I was a particularly mean SOB during that period, and not too proud of it. Refactoring a lot of code and redesigning rendering algorithms in multi-threading land does that to you. Anyways, I’d take a bunch of time off now, but there’s the small matter of getting another dot release out the door within a month to wrap up some ends here and there. And so the software treadmill churns along..

Three smallish reasons why last weekend was not, in fact, the best weekend ever:

• I took the dog to the vet and got her the one shot I wasn’t supposed to get (live vaccine, dangerous to immuno-compromised sweeties). As a result, Kaylee was quarantined from Susan until yesterday.
• Susan fainted. Very scary. I’m glad she’s okay.
• I hit a jogger while driving, turning right around a corner. Just nudged him, braked hard thankfully. I like to think I wouldn’t have run him over even without Susan yelping a warning, but I wasn’t looking right when he came jogging along. I’m bad like that. Fortunately the jogger was nice enough not to sue my ass over the incident.

Just one more day to the long weekend. Should be a marked improvement.

I spent all of last week in San Diego, attending SIGGRAPH 2007 - the annual conference for computer graphics geeks. I drove there and back instead of flying. Not sure why I thought this was a good idea, particularly since I’d just done the trip up to Oregon the previous weekend; basically doing the length of California within the space of a week. So I found out I-5 between Oakland and Los Angeles is a boring wasteland, interrupted only by the bovine gulag that is Harris Ranch (which I’ve mentioned before). I did want access to the car over the week, but paying for parking at the hotel pretty much negated the savings in not buying a plane ticket.

I’ve come to the realisation that I don’t get much, if anything, from the academic reason for the conference: the papers. I enjoyed the paper fast forward, but my job nowadays rarely involves cutting edge research, just a whole lot of software engineering; one of these years I probably should go to a compiler or perhaps a multi-threading conference and that might have more relevance to what I do. So apart from a sketch and course, I pretty much stayed busy mainly at the Pixar booth meeting RenderMan customers and fending off schwag hounds (”come back later - teapots at 1 pm; posters tomorrow at 9:30 pm”). Every year for the last six years, we’ve given out a little plastic walking teapot, which is symbolic of computer graphics in general and also serves as marketing material. They’re pretty slick packaged - metal box and everything - and somehow hugely popular with the show floor crowds.

A few things:

• At the Disney R&D mixer, I met Turner Whitted, the inventor of CG ray tracing (as alluded to by Mark V). That was cool. We talked briefly about FPGAs, and he graciously downplayed my Verilog shortcomings.
• The RenderMan User’s group meeting went very well. This is our annual RenderMan community get together where Pixar books a hotel ballroom, orders wine and food, invite many of our customers to hear us talk about our software for an hour, and then invite a few other people to talk about obscure, novel and often brilliant RenderMan techniques - the “stupid RenderMan tricks”. It’s about the geekiest user’s group meeting you can possibly imagine, and we’re proud of that. I had to get up and talk about stereo rendering, which was made easier by a generous glass of wine. People happily ignored my bad attempts at humor.
• Didn’t do much in the way of exploring San Diego, since Susan didn’t come this year, and we’d done the touristy things four years ago at SIGGRAPH 2003. I did finally go to Legoland for a few hours. Miniland (the part of the park with buildings rendered in Lego) is very cool, although I was surprised to see the lack of minifig scale stuff.
• I have to admit, after having seen stereo projections of Meet the Robinsons at the Disney booth, and the Muppet Vision thing at California Adventure, I don’t find it all that compelling. Which is horribly ironic, given that I’ve been responsible for the stereo rendering support in PRMan lately. The 3D spinning mirror display at Emerging Tech was pretty cool though.
• Speaking of Emerging Tech, there was a nipkow disk there and I actually knew what it was as soon as I saw it. (I have to thank Mark V for that as well.)
• I’m glad they reduced the number of incomprehensibly French, spirographic or generally blobby amorphous art pieces in the Electronic Theatre this year. On the other hand, the Best of Show (”Ark”) was depressing, and inexplicably followed up by CG shots of the World Trade Center aftermath. Which was awkward: were we supposed to applaud at the CG skill involved, no matter how truly tragic and painful the footage was?

On the way back, as I was driving in the carpool lane 20 miles south of LA, on an impulse I took the exit to Disneyland and spent an hour in California Adventure. (Disney Silver Pass perk, hasn’t proved useful til now; blackout on Disneyland proper though.) Only had time to do one Pixar themed ride - Mike & Sulley to the Rescue - and the aforementioned Muppet thing. It’s very odd to see characters from Monsters done as animatronics, but the factory door floor was pretty impressive. After that, it took me 3 hours plus to get from Disneyland to the LA city limits and another 5 hours to get home after that. Definitely flying down to Los Angeles next year instead.

Busy weekend here. Susan and I dressed up for the Ratatouille wrap party on Saturday, this year at the Masonic Temple in SF. Started early for us since she had singing dress rehearsal in the afternoon. The Pixar singers outdid themselves this year; there were the usual speeches (Brad Bird had some moving things to say); then we got to see a hilarious featurette about motion capture which I hope will make the DVD, the new short Lifted, and finally the movie itself. I was seeing it for the first time (as usual, I avoided reels) and it was quite wonderful. Storywise, easily in the top three of Pixar’s output to date, and artistically and visually amazing. Congratulations to everyone on the Rat production crew.

No pictures yet. I took lousy ones, so I’ll have to hope the photographers circling the post movie soirée took some decent snapshots of the two of us in our fancy clothes.

Unfortunately we had to leave the wining and dining early - I had an early Sunday morning to prepare for (an all day chamber workshop at the College of Marin to get to). Sorry to those we missed at the party!

Coinciding with my eight year anniversary at Pixar, I found out today I’m moving offices soon, to another building. Neither my current office nor my new one is in the main Pixar complex. This will be my sixth office move. This is probably about average for employees of my tenure - as productions wrap up, a lot of people get moved around at the same time. On the other hand, I’m also probably above average in terms of number of different buildings (six for six!) and zipcodes (three) that I’ve worked in.

When I moved into my current office a year ago, I discovered it was one of the few that had a steel I-beam smack in the middle of the back wall. This didn’t bother me very much, I was happy to have an office and not a cube. Then I realised the beam width was almost exactly the width of a 48-stud light grey Lego baseplate. Score! 75 2×16 plates, 25 4×12 plates, and 100 2×2 by 2×2 brackets later (all ordered from bricklink), along with a bunch of Scotch mounting squares, and all the unique minifigs in the collection had display shelving less than two feet away from where I sit, happily hidden by the I-beam sides from casual passerby. (Which I have to admit isn’t really a big concern here, no public tours in this or the next building.)

Two separate Scrabble games yesterday - spelled HIDER in the first game, DICING in the second, at which point Susan sternly told me to stop thinking about work. Somehow this overshadowed scoring a bingo in each game, and in any event I have many a ways to go til I get 830 points a game.

It’s a new look, mostly inspired by Edward Tufte. The old look, with its ruled elements that drove down the data-ink ratio - or should that be the data-pixel ratio? - is still available as an alternate stylesheet. I shouldn’t dwell on the pain necessary to get this so-called two-column fluid layout all working reasonably with CSS, and particularly with Internet Explorer. I’m just glad I program renderers, not web browsers.

SIGGRAPH happened at the beginning of the month. It was a reasonable diversion this year, mainly because it took place in Boston instead of the city on the Hellmouth that is Los Angeles. Traffic was notably bad. Actually, it was worst than bad: it was random. No reasonable guess could be made as to whether a taxi or the shuttle bus would beat out walking to the convention centre on any given morning. As for the new bracelets that got us onto the shuttle buses, they were touted by a coworker as our way of showing support for Floyd Landis, and not say some scheme to deprive student SIGGRAPH attendees not staying at the conference hotels the luxury of travelling by coach.

The technical content was more of the usual. Everyone is doing fur, and doing it the same way (except for Blue Sky). Fulfilled my annual geometry tolerance by learning about geodesics and physically impossible soap bubbles. Finally caught a Denis Zorin course. Missed the must-see 3D laser plasma display in the Emerging Technologies section - instead I vacuumed ghost shadows. The usual. As for the show floor, the surprise this year was the lack of demand for posters. It took us almost an hour each morning to get rid of three thousand tubes, and that just isn’t the norm. The real chaos manifested when this year’s model of teapot was given away, but I’m not really sure people knew what it was they were lining up for.

Non conference activities: I met up with Gloria, who is doing very well in Boston. She’s the friend I’ve known the longest - we had the same piano teacher before we ended up attending the same high school. I’ve always been slightly envious of how much she’s managed to do in life: learn multiple instruments (and learn them well); spend lots of time working and travelling abroad; go dragon boating, etc. We all had a nice dinner in the Italian district of North End and reminisced about old times. When we got away from the conference on other days, we took the Old Town Trolley Tour around Boston. I managed to lure everyone on to the U.S.S Constitution (I am reading the Aubrey-Maturin series, after all) and geeked out at the rigging. Alas, we were too late to go below decks. On our last trolley go-around, it was our tour driver’s last day, so we ended up being trolleyed off the beaten path.

SIGGRAPH is in San Diego next year. I’m looking forward to Legoland.

Very busy. We were at work late on Friday, then from 9:30 am Saturday to 2 am Sunday. It was for a good cause though: volunteering for JDRF’s latest Bay Area fundraiser, a Cars pre-release screening and gala. I’d volunteered for a different JDRF gala event last year; this year I got to see up close just how much volunteer work goes into setting up one of these things. So after over sixteen hours of making decorations and gift bags, draping table cloths, moving boxes and gift bags, entering data and swiping credit cards, and in Susan’s case, many more weeks before hand of rounding up volunteers and coordinating them, was it worth it? Sore muscles aside, it raised almost a million and a half for juvenile diabetes research! So answer: yes.

Donna, an old friend (we had the same piano teacher as kids) who is now touring as part of the Claremont Trio (they have a tour blog!) visited. We saw her play at Stanford, got a CD signed, and had dinner at Fonda in Berkeley (quickly becoming a favourite spot to eat in the East Bay). It was very nice to see a fellow classical pianist with a successful performing career. And the Claremont Trio is very good - if they come to your city, you should go see them - assuming that the venue they’re playing at has a decent piano. Because Donna can’t be blamed for the quality of the piano.

Susan and I have tickets (a Christmas gift - thank you Susan!) for Thursday’s Canucks game at San Jose. Vancouver is currently ninth in the Western Conference and the Sharks are tied for seventh; only the top eight teams make it to the Stanley Cup playoffs. Assuming the Canucks don’t blow it tonight tonight or Wednesday, that game is going to be a must-win for Vancouver. Heck, it might even be the deciding game for who limps into the playoffs. I’ll let a statistician work out what would have to happen for that to occur.

Back in May, while they were filming the documentary for the Toy Story 10th Anniversary Edition, Susan and I nonchalantly wandered into the Pixar atrium to get coffee and to make sure we’d finally make it onto a Pixar DVD.

It was released on Sunday. Got my hands it today, loaded the documentary, found this is the best view you get of me: slouching in some very weird posture, only the back of my head visible. Susan is recognizable at least.

At other times (probably when I actually peered over my shoulder), Pete’s head conveniently blocks me from view. That’s Brenden in the red shirt.

Sigh.