Saturday, August 05, 2006

Siggraph 2006: Saturday July 29

I stayed at the Colonnade, one of the hotels on the Siggraph shuttle bus list. It was a nice hotel, far too nice for my 2-days-of-train couture. It has a pool on the roof and like the Chelsea as shown in Sex and the City, is also open to the general public who want to purchase a membership. Waaaay too high-rent for me. I wanted to take a little dip, but felt my Wal-Mart bikini and body sculpted only by Tae Kwon Do would be laughed out by all the plastic surgery wrapped in Gucci, Prada, Chanel, etc. As I walked back to my room, I laughed because I was teased for over-packing and it turns out I majorly under-packed by several million dollars.

I ate brunch in Brasserie Jo, the restaurant in the lobby. Very nice, although a bit too French for my taste. I had a really cute French waiter (I found out later he's an Albanian who speaks French)....almost model cute, really, with dark eyes, curly black hair, and rather friendly. After the train and the bus, it was nice to get a smile and some casual flirting.

After brunch, I went walkabout to see a bit of the city. The storm front that delayed my train hadn't completely blown through, so Boston was also an armpit. I rarely sweat, even when working out, and I was drenched after walking around for an hour. Lovely city, though.

I brought my laptop (sans battery and disk drives to save on weight) and wanted to get online, but the Colonnade charges an atrocious $14 for 24 hours of internet. What?!?! Even the most low-rent motel offers free broadband. I didn't know if work would pay for it, and since I'm responsible for anything they won't cover, I decided not to chance it. Maybe I would drag it to Siggraph itself and hook up there. Maybe. As a Siggraph newbie, I really wanted to do other things than check work email. :)

Jane Doe (pseudonym, duh!), the co-worker who would be joining me on Sunday, had been to Siggraph the year before, and she recommended I skip the Pathfinders thing on Saturday night. She thought I would find it boring. Now I'm bummed I listened to her (for more than one reason) because apparently there was a bit of a party with free food. Argh.

Note: As it turned out, she and I had very different ideas about what we wanted to see and do and accomplish at Siggraph, which caused some disconnect. She wanted to look at a lot of things and say "gee whiz." (She doesn't watch TV or see a lot of movies, so she has little exposure to animated shows). I wanted to talk to a lot of people and say "So, where do you work and what's it like?" She didn't understand, at least not at first, why I wanted to talk to anyone and everyone. Heck, even if I wasn't trying to network, I'm still lonely in the job. All 11 of us who do 3D for our company work independently of each other. I'm the only one who does what I do in my whole building, and for once it's nice to be surrounded by people who understand what a bitmap is and are willing to compare the number of computers in their render farm!



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