Thursday, August 23, 2007

Paying Attention to the Small Things

My thought for tonight is that life is happier when we daydream more.

This is a tree from Zion's park. I loved the texture of the bark, and wanted to try and catch it in a picture. I found myself in forced idleness for several hours, with little more than a camera to play with, and some interesting pictures resulted. It was a great trip.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Goal setting and tracking

I imagine that most folks set goals for themselves sometimes. New Year's Day is especially popular. Thomas S. Monson has (famously) said "When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates." My old set of goals was looking a bit stale, so I've spent some time over the past couple of weeks revamping my goals, getting them written down, and figuring out how to keep track of whether I'm meeting them or not.

Most of the goals are pretty simple things. Being more regular about giving to charity, for example, or having an exercise program. Some of them are really difficult to define, though, like trying to spend more time doing social things. It's a little difficult to have a check-box for "yes, I did something social today!" What counts as "something social"? I have a few ideas, but I don't think I've nailed it yet.

My current approach to tracking is to print out a bunch of small paper booklets carefully sized to slide into the billfold of my wallet easily. I tend to have my wallet with me all the time, so it's easy to pull it out and write on it (this is really useful for tracking eating and exercise). I haven't found a writing instrument that fits in my wallet yet, and I haven't gotten in the habit of carrying a pen everywhere, but other than that it's worked pretty well.

So, readers, what do you do to track your goals?

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Literal virtuality

I'm back from SIGGraph in San Diego and I have Internet again. The hotel had Internet, but it cost ten bucks per night per computer, and it wasn't particularly fast. If I were paying three-hundred bucks a month for Internet at home, I'd expect my downloads to be leaving skid marks when they finished, so I put off posting till I got back.

I'm back to the old cell phone for pictures. I do have good intentions about getting a new and better phone (not to mention a new and better camera), but these intentions were stalled when I discovered that the phone I actually want is hard to find outside Europe. It exists here, but it's not available online from the major stores. Meanwhile I'm still using my poor, half-broken old phone, which limps gamely along like a wounded elderly cat. Today's first picture is Harbor Boulevard, which runs past the convention center. The hotel was walking distance away, so I walked this route a few times a day.

Next up is the convention center itself. Here you're looking at gate A. You can just see the sign for gate B in the distance. Gates C through H are beyond that, so it's a pretty big building. Their biggest event of the year is Comic Con, which pulled in 125,000 people last week (and not everyone could get in). SIGGraph only pulls in about 30,000 people, so comparatively speaking the center was pretty empty. By the way, for those who are curious about this sort of thing, the largest convention center in the world is the Hannover Messe (Hannover Fair), which has half a square kilometer of exhibition space. By comparison, the San Diego monster is a cozy, friendly sort of place.

One of the fun sides of SIGGraph is that the motion picture industry shows up en masse (this is a great place to get hired for jobs in animation or special effects), and they like to show off all the neat stuff they've done this year. Even more fun is they tell you how it works--this is the place for special effects wizards to get together and trade war stories about how they pulled off the latest batch of movie visuals. There are usually a bunch of composite scenes playing at the electronic theater, showing you how everything works. They'll start with the actor hanging from a blue screen with a few real-life props, then gradually fade in the wire frames and other animated objects until he's climbing onto the side of an airship, or plunging on the back of a dragon into the ocean below, or what have you. The effects folks also wander around looking at all the latest research, scavenging for cool ideas for the next batch of movies.

This is also a neat place to check out new devices and ideas. There are usually at least 3 or 4 new ways that someone might implement a 3-D television. Some of them are serious commercial attempts, and others are set up purely for fun or for art exhibits. The one you see in this picture is more on the novelty side. It's a spinning globe with a pattern of lights on the outside. Right now it's got a sliding checkerboard pattern, though it had a rotating map of the world a few seconds before. Like every 3-D display ever invented so far, it gives you a splitting headache if you stare at it for too long--the real problem is not figuring out how to make a 3-D display, it's keeping that display from giving you horrible headaches after ten minutes of use.

A more practical demonstration was a high-resolution color display that works well in bright sunlight! It reflects lightly effectively, so it looks as good as a piece of paper. It didn't use or need a backlight, and the surface looked almost like color printed on paper. The entire display is based on bazillions of tiny mirrors, which is terribly cool, besides looking good. They tell me that a black and white version will be available in commercial products pretty soon, but the color version still only works in the lab -- and at SIGGraph, of course.

I also got to play with the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), a $100 computer that they're going to sell to developing countries for education. At that price, you have to be a sort of intermediate-level developing country to afford it, but it's still a really cool idea. The computer is pretty nice and definitely usable--as long as you have VERY tiny fingers. The keyboard is just a little too large for adult hands, which made typing awkward.

Of course, most of the time I was just working. This picture is of our booth on the convention floor. The guy on the left is the CEO, and the guy on the right is a coworker. The glowing rectangle in the back is playing a looped video showing pretty pictures of our stuff. I spent most of my time at the conference standing around that booth and answering questions. Mostly, it's just the one question--"so, what's a T-Spline?"--over and over and over and over. I got asked again at the Salt Lake airport while I was heading home (I was wearing a T-Splines shirt), and it was funny how it gave me flashbacks to the booth.

Probably the most exciting moment for today was packing up the booth. Imagine this schedule:

3:30 Exhibition floor closes
4:00 Shuttle departs hotel for airport
6:30 Flight boards at San Diego airport

You may notice a very small gap between the closing of the floor and the departure of the shuttle. To make matters worse, we couldn't find taxis that could fit our booth in the trunk, so we really needed to make that shuttle--and waiting an hour for the 5:00 shuttle could make it tricky to catch our flight. We tore down and packed the whole booth frame in ten minutes flat, and I ran from the conference center with a one-hundred pound wheeled booth box in tow, trying to make it to the hotel in time to get the booth taken by shuttle to the airport. We all made it in the end (with 90 seconds to spare!), though we spent the first part of the shuttle ride catching our breath.

Anyway, now I'm home, with full access to a proper kitchen and a multitude of liquids and pastes containing more than 3.4 ounces, and it's great. And since it's getting late and I still have work in the morning, I need to head to bed.

Friday, August 03, 2007

California AGAIN

I'm going to California. Despite my frequently avowed dislike for the state, I just can't seem to avoid it. On the bright side, this time I'm going to San Diego. Most of my dislike of California stems from having to spend too much time in Los Angeles. There is much good to be said of San Diego.

One of the good things to be said for San Diego is that Allaryin (Ammon) moved there just a week or two ago, which means I'll probably get a chance to go say hi. He started life in Texas and has been drifting gradually west ever since. Ammon recently acquired a new baby girl (with the esteemed assistance of his wife, of course). I have been informed that said baby girl is adorable, and if I visit I'll probably be observed making silly googly noises. That should be fun.

Another good thing to be said for San Diego is: the weather.

Now, my purpose in traveling to San Diego has nothing to do with either the weather, nor the fact that Ammon just moved there. These are merely happy coincidences. No, I'm going to go play salesman at some conference for the week. The conference is to be attended by, and I quote, "Digital innovators, creative researchers, award-winning producers, provocative artists, energetic executives, and adventurous engineers." They really seemed to be stretching on some of those adjectives--engineers are very nice chaps, after all, but "adventurous" is not usually a defining quality. The conference is a lot of fun because there are a lot of very smart people there, and very smart people are a lot of fun. Unless they get drunk of course, in which case they're pretty much like drunk people the world over, but that doesn't happen all the time.

It is possible that, by now, you are wondering why on earth there is a picture of a mutant cow for this post. Interestingly, it's not entirely unrelated. Said mutant cow was made using software that I wrote, and which we'll be hawking at the conference. So, in essence, I'm traveling to California to sell software that lets you make your own mutant cow. Admittedly, it can be used for things other than mutant cows. Some folks have even used it to make weird horned monsters.