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This doesn’t really belong in the same blog entry as the house cleaning, so it’s a little out of order. Anyways, last Saturday I flew down to Oakland to attend the Finding Nemo premiere, and the wrap party which followed.

The movie was presented in digital at the Paramount Theatre. The good news is that Finding Nemo is visually the most stunning film done by Pixar to date, and quite likely the most stunning piece of animation I’ve seen. Things were so well done it was almost jarring at times to see the stylized fish characters pop out against the gorgeously rendered underwater backgrounds.

The not-so-good news is that I felt the story, characters, and emotional depth of the film were a little subpar compared to any film Pixar’s done to date. Note that I still think it’s better than most other movies; I just felt that it wasn’t up to our usual high standards. Some parts of the film felt like a video game chase sequence; I didn’t really care for some of the main characters; and the secondary characters were amusing but at times felt a little forced. In defense of the film, I think it will be very appealing to the kids, maybe more so than the last couple of films; but as an adult film goer, it lacked a little something.

The wrap party afterwards was at the Oakland Museum. I guess I’m going to come off sounding like a spoiled whiner to anyone at Pixar reading this – but the fact remains that the company has done a pretty job of spoiling us to date, so I do have to say: it wasn’t very good. Compared to the last wrap party for Monsters, Inc. which was at San Francisco city hall, it was far too crowded. We were all crammed into makeshift bubble tents set up on the grounds, and most of the museum was off limits. And the food wasn’t great; okay, there were sushi and oysters, but we had just gotten out of a film with a “fish are our friends” message, so eating seafood seemed a little heartless. Thankfully, I still enjoyed myself, but it had much more to do with the company I was keeping than anything else.

Susan already has the only picture with me in it up on her website – not that she needs more strange web traffic to freak her out, but I couldn’t get the red eye out as well as she did. (My camera has a terrible flash.)

Short, random things. I am somewhat frazzled of late and can’t come up with much in the way of coherency. (For example, I really want to rant about why music “sharing” sucks, in light of stupid comments on Slashdot; but that will have to wait for another day.)

In the trip write up, I forgot to mention the cheese incident. Midweek, someone broke into our motel room, and stole all of my pocket change – and a block of cheese sitting in our fridge. They ignored: cans of Coors and bottles of Guinness; collection of my CDs; my cell phone; and all of our climbing and hiking equipment. I guess someone just really craved some Oregon cheddar and didn’t like our taste in beer. David was unduly upset at this incident, especially during subsequent cheeseless lunches out at the cliff.

I have a new camera: a Canon Powershot S400. The old Kodak felt like a brick particularly on this last trip, and the Canon is just so much better all around – way lighter, better battery life, and double the resolution too. Having no better inspiration (it has been drab in Seattle), I took a picture to illustrate my daily point of view.

Leon was back in Vancouver this past week, so I went up last weekend and we all went out for dinner at Sammy J. Peppers to watch the second Canucks playoff game. Sadly, dinner wasn’t very good. I will never allow friends to choose restaurants again based solely on the pulchritude of its waitstaff. And speaking of playoff hockey, I have of course been avidly watching the Canucks/Blues series; quite exciting hockey so far with Vancouver back from a 3-1 deficit to tie the series at three apiece. If they make it past the first round tomorrow in game seven, I will be happy.

I am actually attending the Finding Nemo wrap party. I had some silly unprincipled stand against going which is best left forgotten. With that happening on the 3rd, and my house move-in date on the 1st, and a whole lot of work going on (I gave myself an insane deadline for the most recent project), I have been – frazzled.

Computer graphics is the coolest computer science discipline imaginable, because even silly bugs sometimes lead to accidental art. I hereby present: Subdivision Surface Study – No. 3.

During climbing on Sunday I was hauled up a 5.10b, then attempted four clean 5.10a routes in a row (topping out on two, almost finishing the other two). Finished up on a 5.9. Then ached for two solid days. But it was a good ache.

Met Jan the realtor today. Things went well, although I am depressed to learn I will probably be looking at a townhouse or condo sort of dwelling. We will go looking at them on Saturday.

Work is going pretty well. When not distracted by bugs or other people’s projects (unfortunately this happens a lot) I have been making solid progress on improving PRMan’s occlusion buffer (this should have tangible performance benefits). There will be other cool projects over the next few months to keep me occupied.

Too bad the ugly credits issue has arisen again. The first draft of Nemo’s was posted without our names on it. They’ll apparently rectify the situation, but it is annoying that we have to specifically point this out to the Powers That Be. I don’t want to claim that my personal contribution as it directly relates to the movie is at all comparable to any animator or TD on staff, because frankly, it isn’t. I can’t point at any pixel and say “hey, I helped draw that”. Hell, I’ve barely seen any finished pixels or reels for that matter. On the other hand, I (and everyone else in Seattle) have had large or exclusive roles in improving and maintaining a significant chunk of software being used by the studio (and yes, this doesn’t just include PRMan, all of RAT is used now). Even more so now than in previous productions.

I just passed my fourth anniversary of starting work at Pixar. Ultimately it would be nice after that long to finally be able to point at a screen and say, “Hey, there goes my name. See, I really do work there. I don’t just fill coffee cups.”

I’ll stop carping. My birthday is coming up. Please feel free to buy me loot.

Yesterday, my mortgage was finally preapproved. And what it took to get there this week: on Monday, the loan officer at Wells Fargo left me a message indicating the underwriter wanted me to provide letters from two utilities proving that I paid my bills on time. There was some issue about not being able to correlate my credit record with the utility record, whatever that meant. (Don’t we have databases and computers for this sort of thing?) Yesterday morning I returned her call and flat out refused. I told her I was willing to deliver an entire year’s worth of assorted utility bills but that was all I would do since it was going to be more pointless delay tracking down someone at Cingular and convincing them to do me a special favour; oh and by the way, isn’t this your job, not mine? She must have detected I was nearing the limits of my patience, and by the afternoon, after receiving my twenty faxed pages of utility bills, I was told the good news. So now truly begins the house hunt.

Yesterday I also managed to destroy all the data on our database server. I swear all I was trying to do was install a printer driver on the stupid machine (which was running NT 4.0, by the way), but it locked up during the process, and then after the first reboot it refused to let me in past the login screen without complaining about corrupt data on the hard drive. After the next reboot: “No operating system found”. Even the partition table was utterly gone. Thank god for backups. I’ve managed to also kill two SGI monitors since moving here, both times just by turning the damn things on. Susan: “Were you magnetized as a child?” Hmph.

The Shostakovich cello sonata is pretty cool, discovery made courtesy of a City Music performance I attended on Saturday with Per and My. My used to play chamber music, I must convince her she needs to pick it up again, then find a cellist (me). Everything is coming up Milhouse, trail of broken computers notwithstanding.

I left my leather jacket at Larry’s at lunch and it was gone by the time I went back after work. If it was a wallet, fine; I wouldn’t have expected it to be there. But a jacket, now, that’s different. What kind of weird person just steals, and presumably wears, clothing that’s hanging there on a peg, in a public restaurant/bar? What if I were infested with scabies? I’m not, but whoever you are that took my jacket, you don’t know that.

Spotted a really excellent post by an ILM guy comparing PRMan and Mental Ray (scroll down to the comment by “gga”). ILM is one of the only companies I’d trust to make a fair comparison of the two renderers, due in part to their unique relationships with the companies involved.

Our work for the next year seems clear.

Now that I think about it, Larry’s is close to Pioneer Square, so some homeless guy probably has my jacket. And my favourite pair of gloves too, dammit. Must stop obsessing about it.

PRMan 11 shipped today. Huzzah!

Another beta completed this week, and a good one too. After a stunning revelation (involving code reuse, of all things) we solved all the geometry problems that have been haunting me for the last 5 months. We’re essentially feature complete now, things seem to be stable and fast, and hopefully just one more release til the final gold release is done.

Rock climbing is going well too – finished a record three 5.10a climbs last week; finished one and nearly topped out another today.

On Thursday I saw the band Swarming Hordes at Chop Suey – turns out Neil used to be a roomate of one of the band members. Excellent, amazingly technically proficient speed instrumetal along the lines of early Metallica (only faster).

Besides losing money at Big Two (a weekly thing, lately), and a spot of overindulgent eating (had a good brunch at the Coastal Kitchen last week with Greg, who was here for one morning; then there were steaks at Ruth Chris’ the day after with Jamie and others; and the requisite Red Mill burgers after climbing), not much else is happening. Yes, I avoided Bumbershoot since I missed Hell’s Belles and wasn’t really keen on much else. So I’ll insert some plugs instead. Like for the newer sites of a couple of friends who are doing more interesting things. Manh’s experiments with Javascript are over at manhtran.com – really folks, it’s just a front, he’s really not all that demented. (Although I’m getting annoyed at having to help him debug his cookies. Stop it.) And Mark V has a new blog over at brainwagon with cool stuff as usual. Speaking of plugs, The Stranger gave Salumi an excellent review this week. We eat lunch there every Wednesday – yes, my boss is the son of the owner, and he happens to serve lunch on Wednesdays as well, but the cured meat there is really, really good regardless.

Yet another beta crunch at work – long days and stressed hands as a direct result of subdivision surfaces and displacement, so I haven’t felt like updating lately. Besides, nothing of great import has happened, just a sequence of minor things. Like most days.

Mimi visited last week. She spent most days by herself wandering Seattle, then watched endless Powerpuff Girls reruns with me in the evenings. We did go together to the zoo last Saturday to gawk at some depressed animals. The only animals I was interested in were the big cats, and they were either impossible to find (the lions), asleep and barely visible (the tigers), or bored and behind bars in an ugly exhibit (the sole jaguar). And so I had to settle for the cloud leopard who seemed more interested in looking cute while licking his toes instead of showing off what a vicious big (well, medium-sized) cat he was.

Pixar’s stock inexplicably hit record highs last week. I managed to sell off some options just in time.

Kendo session is over for the summer. I’m debating whether to go back in the fall since the last two sessions (the last one, especially) were exercises in humiliation – particularly when confronted by a ratbastard yudansha (black belt holder) who seemed to take great delight in mocking my utter lack of form and zanshin (the quality of follow through after delivering a strike). On the other hand, we’ve actually progressed to real kirikaeshi practice drills involving strikes with our shinai on armor clad opponents, and I must say it’s rather therapeutic after a day at the office to really whack someone with a stick. (We’re not allowed the bogu armor yet, so I’m not yet in danger of being whacked.)

My OSX 10.2 cds arrived. It’s really sweet – although really there’s no excuse for charging me for something that 10.1 really should have been.

I nearly finished a 5.10a today. I’m much stronger in climbing now than I ever was.

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.