looking young (warning: self-centerdness ahead!)

Four days after I turned thirty, a baby-boomer man I met at a friend's wedding said, "You're what, 22?" in the context of telling me he'd been married to his wife for 33 years. A few weeks earlier, I was carded in a bar -- I was ordering a virgin margarita -- and when I didn't have my ID, the bartender suggested that I go get it if I wanted to keep playing pool there -- not even because she didn't want to serve me alcohol, but just because she didn't think I was old enough to even be in the bar. On my reecnt trips to Microsoft, people I meet often ask if I'm a student, although at least they tend to think I'm a PhD student or post-doc, which would at least be age-appropriate. The last few days, I've been meeting new students, who assume I'm an undergrad. The moment when I say "I graduated in 1997" there's always a pause, and some disbelief, and then some embarassment; am I offended they thought I was ten years younger than I am?

I'm not offended, but I'm curious about it. I think there's a few factors that come together to make me come off as young. In everyday life around Providence, I dress very casually, and I prefer clothes so comfortable I could sleep in them. Not exactly a businesswoman's wardrobe, and in fact when I "dress up" -- or my equivalent thereof, which involves ironed button-down shirts, sometimes a blazer, and slacks -- I "pass" as more like mid-to-late-twenties. I'd like to think that my personal carriage is more of an adult than a college student, especially in the business sphere. The last factor, of course, is my face, and especially the skin on my face... which is as soft, lightly freckled, and pink as when I was eighteen. I also have dark circles under my eyes, just like my brother's. Odd, because I don't think either of our parents have that particular feature. (Do you?) I don't know how i got this skin; I certainly haven't worn sunscreen as much as I should, or moisturized as much as I should. The one thing I do that's theoretically good for skin is drink a lot of water. Relatives out there, do other Beckers look young? Did you look young when you were 30-ish?

I think this all brings me to an awareness that I will need to work extra-hard to come off as professional in professional settings.

G3D, GPUs

I've spent the afternoon getting G3D installed on my tablet. G3D is a platform-independent 3D graphics library written in C++ by several Brown grad students. I had fun keeping track of changes to the install process for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 -- the last documentation had been written for Visual C++ 6 and Visual Studio 98.



I must be better at all this than I was a year ago, or maybe this install process was easier than getting InSpace to run on my machine. I spent days and days on that, but I just couldn't get it to go. I gave up when it turned out that I had spent hours trying to compile some obscure package from UNC with Visual Studio .NET. The definitions of C++ had actually changed between when the code was written and when I was trying to compile it, so that effort was a bear. Unfortunately, I let my difficulties working with InSpace keep me out of doing 3D work. Now I just kind of want to do some 3D work, especially 3D work with the GPU: graphics programming unit: hardware dedicated to accelerating 3D graphics math. It's just all so HOT right now.



Enough writing -- it's time to code!

Apple - iMac G5

Apple - iMac G5

Oh nooooo! Now there's something else I have to hold myself back from buying!

It starts at $1299! Probably $1199 educational! And then if I write it off, then it's like it's only $800. Which is... still more than I can afford. Especially now that my amazing brother has fixed my PowerBook G4, literally by looking at it. It was a total brick -- wouldn't boot, wouldn't power off unless I unplugged it, got hot enough to fry an egg on -- then I put it in a suitcase and went to Seattle. Dan plugged it in, opened it, and it came up pretty-as-you-please. I reset the PMU, and it's been a great bedside dvd player ever since. Yep, see, that's the problem with having hardware stop working for a few weeks: I started relying on my tablet pc. At this juncture, at least, the brand-new tablet pc works. It regularly horrifies me, true, but...



Oh my god, the new iMac comes with wireless keyboard and mouse. I know that's nothing new, it's just so... beautiful.

Microsoft Announces 2006 Target Date for Broad Availability Of Windows "Longhorn" Client Operating System

Wow! Microsoft Announces 2006 Target Date for Broad Availability Of Windows "Longhorn" Client Operating System! There's a date!



Oh! Theyu're going to make Avalon and Indigo available for WinXP in 2006!!!!!! That is huge and I think it's good news for Avalon.



Interesting, though: they're releasing WinFS after the first Longhorn OS release.

Joe Marini on XAML

Channel9 has posted an interview with Joe Marini, who is my main contact for the project I'll be (hopefully) working on for the next year. In this interview, he gives an overview of XAML and talks about what's cool about it.

The blogosphere has much, much, much to say about Avalon and Longhorn. I am overwhelmed. I need to get a schedule out the door, like, tonight, so i can't afford to be sucked into the blogosphere.

entering the mists

I'm starting to look at Avalon, the presentation system within Longhorn, the next-gen operating system from Microsoft. All of what I'm about to say is public; no privileged information.

This interview Joe Beda: Is Avalon a way to take over the Web? and the subsequent discussion gives a decent picture of how Avalon fits into the web technologies strategy.

Joe Beda's article describes and responds to a variety of dicussion that emerged based on the interview. He includes the ridiculous claim, "in some ways you can thank Microsoft for enabling a mostly standards based web by making the browser a two horse race." Thank Microsoft for pushing standards? Hello? Maybe if you mean Microsoft standards. (I could go into a detailed analysis of that claim, but it's tangential, and thus left as an exercise for the reader.) A more helpful quote is, "Avalon, and Longhorn in general, is our attempt to reenergize the rich client at Microsoft." Aha! So that's what Avalon is!

More to follow-- there's an awful lot of stuff out there.

incredibly long travel

It just took me 12 hours to get from downtown LA to my apartment in Providence, moving almost constantly. The last three hours were the most comical. I landed in Boston at 12:30 am, and somehow it took until 1:20 am for me to get out onto the road. The road, in this case, is I think the Ted Williams Tunnel, which not only charged me a $3.50 toll, but also kept me in it for a good twenty minutes, with all traffic in a single lane. It was pretty much a nightmare: a giant Boston Globe delivery truck in front of me, an SUV behind me, and the curve of the tunnel obscuring everything else. My car is a stick shift, so it was neutral, first, neutral, first, neutral, first the whole time.

I emerged from the tunnel thinking "good, exit 23 is 93 south, that will take me to 95" but 93 south had been rerouted onto I don't even know where. I followed the other cars as we crawled through miles of detours in what might have been South Boston. I didn't actually get to 93 until almost 2 am.

Two complications emerge simultaneously: first, the needle hits E, and the rain starts to come down in droplets that are literally the size of those white mice grad students use in psychology experiments. With my high beams on, it looked like I was being assaulted by the ghosts of a million undead lab rats. I'd driven in stuff like this in California, and I've determined the best thing to do is slow to a crawl until I can get to an exit.

Given the empty gas tank and the sudden downpour, I decided to stay on US 1 until I found a gas station, then get back on 95. This was a fine plan except that a) there are no gas stations on US 1 for that particular five mile stretch, and b) US 1 doesn't seem to hook up with 95 again. I drove past the Gilette Stadium, thinking of course there would be gas stations near the stadium, and a 95 exit, but nope.

A few miles past the stadium, rain still pouring, needle still on E, I see a gas station in the distance. Salvation! I pull in, insert my credit card, then... wait. The LED display is asking me to -- and I quote -- "wait a minute." I do. I wait a few minutes. I hit cancel, no, stop, enter -- the display slowly alternates between "Pump is stopped," "Wait a minute," and "Transaction cancelled." Fine, I think, this pump's little brain is in an infinite loop, I'll go to another pump.

The next pump over also says "Wait a minute." So does the next one. The third one down says "Insert Card," so I move the car over there. When I go to insert my card, I notice a handwritten sign: "Credit card does not work on tihs pump." That's all four pumps: three saying "wait a moment" and the other one claiming it doesn't work. Rather than throw good gas after bad, I turn around and head back to 95 where I left it ten minutes and ten miles back. It's 2:30 am, and the needle has been on E for much longer than I'm comfortable with.

I get back on the freeway and drive for a bit. The rain has let up, and there's no one around, so I'm cruising. I resolve not to get off anywhere that doesn't have a "Gas: 24 Hours" sign. Exit 7B promises exactly that, so I get off, and find myself in the kind of trackless darkness I associate with Wyoming backcountry. I won't be fooled again! I get back on 95 and keep going untilj Pawtucket, where I'm sure there's a gas station a few yards from 95.

At this point I'm just smiling. Half-smiling, really. I'm pretty powerless, here. Either I'm going to run out of gas, or I'm not, and either it's going to pour rain, or it's not. I've got two godiva truffles in the trunk, a nalgene bottle full of water, and a fleece sweatshirt. I'm fine. At the same time, I'm just amazed that there's a 30 mile stretch of 95 without roadside gas stations in the middle of BosWash. Mind you, I've driven this road once or twice a week for the last year, just never before at 2 am in the pouring rain with an empty gas tank.

Anyways, the sunoco station is right where I left it in Pawtucket. I gratefully insert my credit card and remove quickly. I select the grade as instructed, squeeze the trigger, then... nothing. The LED helpfully says, "Please see attendant." What attendant? It's the middle of the night, and the station is dark and quiet. It turns out there was an attendant hiding in there. He explains to another customer with hand signals that he can't sell anything, but then he takes the man's cash and gives him cigarretes. I'm confused but hopeful. I hand him ten dollars, and I finally relax when the petrol starts to flow. Half an hour later -- 3:10 am -- I was home.

Next steps: Poisson matting

Returning from SIGGRAPH, I'm wondering what to do next. I'm interested in doing a Poisson matting implementation because it seems like such utter magic. Consider, for instance, Zebediah's hair. It's incredibly fine and blond and wispy. What if I wanted to put a background of flying toasters behind him, instead of the Cyndi's House of Pancakes furniture? Creating the mask for his hair would be incredibly difficult, especially that flyaway bit up on top. Heck, even just getting a mask for all the little wrinkles in his overalls would be a labor of love. (I'd have to really want to put flying toasters behind him.

Poisson matting can do the masking properly, algorithmically, magically. We could put flying toasters behind Zeb, or art from In the Night Kitchen, that classic of somnambulant.baking. See? It's magic.

Two other papers, GrabCut and Lazy Snapping, both by Microsoft Research, address the same problem, I think. (Sorry, no links yet) Now, how about I write a plugin to something that creates the mats via Poisson matting, GrabCutting, and Lazy Snapping? That would be hot. I love doing two-dimensional image processing. This could be programming that I enjoy, programming that gets me out of bed in the morning, or at least keeps me up late at night. I just hope I can handle the math.

giving and receiving

I've been thinking lately about what I contribute to my co-workers and what I ask of them. I definitely ask my co-workers for a lot of things: audio-visual stuff from the audio-visual guy, tablet pc admin from the tablet pc admin expert, tons of technical requests from from t-staff (our general sysadmins)... and it ocurred to me to ask myself, how much do I help them? My responsibilities are fairly fluid; the areas in which I'm the go-to person are consumer & professional graphics applications, anything mac-related, online communties, and web stuff. People don't need to go-to me much, though.

I just saw my cel ringing with a call from the Brown exchange. It was one of my co-workers, asking for help with iChat, so that one of the Brown professors could sit in on a thesis defense in Utah tomorrow. I didn't want to answer the phone at first, but then I remembered that it's part of my job to answer my goddamn phone, especially during working hours on a travel day when I'm just sitting here waiting for a shuttle. When I realized that a) my co-worker was uncomfortable with using the new-to-him technology, and b) I would be back in town for the defense, I said, "I'll take care of it. I'll be there, I'll make sure that it happens. It's my problem." That was being a good co-worker. I'm glad I was asked to help, and it's an easy solution: iChat is incredibly easy to use, and incredibly reliable. It's kind of funny that it intimidates my co-worker, who has a masters degree and regularly works in virtual reality, but I can understand being nervous about using a new operating system to make sure that a professor can attend one of his student's PhD defenses. Call it a win-win situation.

Now, I need to keep looking for other ways to be helpful to my co-workers, and remember to keep doing so, all the time. s

Best of SIGGRAPH: display and input technologies

There are as many SIGGRAPH's as there are attendees, but here's the best of my SIGGRAPH, for display and input technologies.

High Dynamic Range displays are a new display technology which produce a larger color gamut by adding a secondary light source to the standard pixel grid. Mitsubishi had an amazing desktop LED-backlit LCD which gives extremely high-brightness. In Emerging Technologies, there was a demonstration from Sunnybrook Tech and UBC with an even brighter backlit LCD. It really glowed.

The Barco I-Wall is an amazingly bright projection display. I didn't think projection displays could get that bright, especially not in the moderate indoor lighting of the siggraph show floor. Apparently this uses DLP technology, which I don't yet understand. I would love to see Brown upgrade the Cave projectors to these.

Sound Flakes, an installation in Emerging Technologies, was a fun, calm, and pleasant experience. Several faucets dripped both water and colored sillhouettes of stars, dots, frogs, leaves into a small wading pool. A large red spoon could scoop up the glyphs; when it picked up a glyph, the tone associated with that color would sound. The pool/faucet/spoon combination became a serendipitous musical instrument.

I fell in love with the Spaceball, a six-degree-of-freedom controller. The spaceball has been around for at least a decade, but the graphics hardware is finally fast enough to make the interaction feel extremely nuanced. Nuanced, nuanced, nuanced. 6DOF means that I can control x, y, and z translation as well as x, y, and z rotation, also known as pitch, roll, and yaw. I experimented with using the Spaceball for camera and object control in 3ds max, and I was in love. They are priced fairly affordably, somewhere in the $300 range I think.

something's about to happen

There are some talks I could go to tomorrow, because my flight isn't until 4, but I think what I really need to do is go to a bookstore/cafe and just write. There are things I need to figure out. It's bedtime, now, and I shouldn't go into it, and by the time I get back to Providence, it will be time to fall asleep in a major way.

Learning Maya seems to be a necessity. Mel scripting. I think I annoyed the author of a book on Mel scripting; I was trying to get a complete understanding of how Maya and Mel fit together, what audience they're for, what the end products are. This is how I can learn, yes? Asking lots of people who know things lots of questions, and incorporating what they know into my knowledge. So today I was learning about Maya and jobs in effects.

What if I think of my next few months of work as making a demo reel, and learning skills for my resume? Well, the problem there is that I need to be simultaneously doing a good job at my job. It could all go together -- it would be nice if it did: I could do good work, learning new skills, producing good work as work and work qua demo reel. All of this targeting... switching jobs within the next year.

My main goals, as I currently understand them:


  1. Maintain and improve my health, especially emotional and physical health

  2. Be near Zeb and Isaac and Dan and Mel. Be part of their family. Be a good aunt to Zeb. What's the boundary between "extended family" and just "family?"

  3. Become financially stable: out of debt, have a secure income and health insurance, regularly contribute to long-term savings

Those are the goals. Tomorrow, I figure out how to get there.

Careerism

I'm having predictable and in fact predicted spasms of uncertainty and confusion about my career.

Just had a wonderful dinner with Michael Kowalski, whose life story is a cross between Horatio Alger, Thomas Merton, and Michelangelo. In about 1994 he decided that he wanted to work as a computer graphics programmer, despite being a beginning computer user. He put himself through the intro computer science curriculum at Brown, and eventually earned a masters in CS at Brown. He was a co-author on a SIGGRAPH paper, or maybe several, and his work was on the cover of the proceedings one year -- the Dr. Seuss-ish non-photorealistic rendering of a dandelion-ish flower on a green field with a blue sky. Now he works at Rhythm & Hues on Maya plugins, Houdini plugins, and proprietary effects software. I asked him why he learned Maya, and he said that it was because he felt like he needed something concrete to point to, a concrete skill to help in the job market. This seems very savvy. Based on what I saw people asking for at SIGGRAPH, I'm going to leave 3ds max behind and start working with Maya instead.

Michael gave me some badly needly encouragement and perspective. I have built a decent framework for eBooks (my research) which I now think should perhaps be called "PolyBooks." (More on that later.) He pointed out that I have a strong intuition for computing... I think there is something ineffable, but good, about my relationship to computing, software engineering, user interface design, graphics, and art.

Like Michael, I need something concrete to point to. I need a demo reel.

looking my age

After the day's debacle, I went down to the Tiki-themed bar at the Wilshire Grand. I took a stool at the bar and ordered a virgin margarita on the rocks. The bartender asked for my ID. I didn't have it, but I explained that I am, in fact, old enough. My companion also claimed to be over 21; in fact he's thirty, just a few months older than me. She wasn't interested in his ID. Then she asked for $4.00. I didn't have any cash, or in fact, any negotiable currency substitutes. I asked to bill it to my room. She is at this point extremely skeptical. I showed her my room key, which gave me at least a bit of credibility, and checked my last name in her computer. "I'm standing here shaking my head" she said as I patted myself down looking for some proof that I'm over 21. She gave me the margarita -- yes, virgin -- and I went up to the room and found my driver's license before ordering my next drink: a shirley temple.

On the show floor I am regularly mistaken for an undergrad. I'm dressed pretty professionally, trying to make a professional impression, and I replaced my faux-hawk with a restrained bowl cut, but still, I look like an undergrad. I enjoy it, but what do I have to do to come across as my age?

I turn thirty in two weeks.

losing things

I have somehow lost my siggraph credentials. After browsing the exhibit floor, I sat outside Guerilla Studios and looked over the brochures I'd gotten. Did I leave my credentials with the last person who swiped my card? Unlikely; I'm pretty sure I had it when I got on the bus, where an Electronic Arts recruiter started up a conversation with Josh. "Brown University? My sons went to Brown!" Did I tie my shoes? I remember tying my shoes a lot. Probably the cards dropped out of the nametag-pouch when I tied my shoes.

Anyways, this leaves me in a bit of a state. I'm leaving Thursday afternoon, so I just need credentials for Wednesday. Tomorrow morning, Cassidy Curtis is giving a talk on Grafifiti Archaelogy, and I really want to hear it. Probably if I get there on time, Cassidy can get me in. Which leaves the rest of the day. I'd been planning to see Emerging Technologies. I really need to see it, if I'm going to justify the thousands of dollars spent on this trip. And I need to do the other half of the exhibit floor. So, yes, I'm going to have to spend $75 and get an "Exhibits Plus" pass.

The horrifying thing is that I also lost my credentials at my second siggraph, in 1994. Then the "Exhibits Plus" pass was just $35.

ah, the trade show floor

I'm just back from ninety-minutes-that-felt-like-three-days wandering the trade show floor.
I saw some cool things:

Kodak's new 3D display technology: "Autostereoscopic Display:" (Sorry, no url on promotional materials!) I stuck my head into a cowl, and the lenses focused the light onto my eyes. It was easy to position my head to have an adequate view. I can't say I was blown away by stereo, but the brightness and contrast was definitely great. The new mobile version (on a cart -- not something you'd carry in a briefcase) targeted at medical applications, is $23,500, which is remarkably inexpensive for a 3D stereo display of this quality. Perhaps Brown needs one.

The huge alias booth had so much going on that I couldn't take it all in. Apparently they have whole product lines I've never seen: Alias Studio? I got a bunch of demo cd's, so I'll figure it out. They also sell "MasterClasses" in maya, which sound good. I'd like to learn from a master. I don't have a completely cogent reason for needing to learn maya, though.

PI Engineering had a moderately cool programmable USB button pad. A variety of pads, actually, in a variety of sizes. I could see this being useful for VR.

Today I'm going to go see a new 3D stereo imaging technique by Kodak -- high resolution stereo images without special glasses or filters, but with, ahem, floating balls of light which yield a wide field of view. Hmm.

I'll also see a demo from @Last Software of SketchUp 4 Film & Stage. Here's a nice quicktime video of what SketchUp is all about..

It's really hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer mass of things going on here. I'm finding that I could shop presentations forever, but what really works is for me to commit to being in a particular presentation for a natural chunk of time, like I'll satay up until a break. This keeps me from trying to choose where to be when I'm already somewhere. As Ken Kesey used to say, you're either off the bus or on the bus.

That said... I wonder if there will be good shwag at the trade show that disappears early.

I'm currently in An Interactive Introduction to OpenGL Programming, getting comfortable with what OpenGL code looks like. This is probably the most actually educational and useful course I've ever attended.

Maya, Color course, Danah

I spent the morning doing Maya tutorials and feeling vaguely guilty about not being in a technical session. I made a nice bump-mapped orange, and got my head scanned. I look pretty much the way I think I look. It didn't capture my hair at all though, except for the stuff right at the front. I want to make a complete model of my head, with, you know, a back and everything, but I don't have the Maya skills yet to do it.

I spent the afternoon talking to Danah Boyd. She's a total pleasure. I'm so honored to have her as a friend. We talked about how we'd known eachother for eight years and had both changed tremendously, but still like eachother. Pretty amazing; we outgrow so many friends, but Danah and I fit.

I went to Maureen Stone's Color in Information Display course this afternoon, and had an idea: figure out the gamut of the CAVE projectors, then determine good colors for VR text annotations by analyzing the image behind the text and computing a color for the text that will be contrasting enough to read, but not so contrasting that ti's distracting.

Tomorrow I'm going to Emerging Technologiesand the exhibition. I'm ready for the bright shiny lights.

What is the best use of my time at SIGGRAPH?

I'm in the Point-Based Computer Graphics course. I'm not taking in the specifics, since I missed the beginning of the talk where he presented the overall approach, but I'm getting the general idea: hierarchical level-of-detail rendering of point clouds. Now, already, my thinking has been plinked: instead of drawing points as splats of uniform size, draw them at sizes appropriate for each point. I don't know how he decides what size is appropriate for each point, though. Something about the detail, and/or the amount of screen-space they will take up. He's also talking about combining triangle rendering with point rendering. I like the idea of adaptively sizing the points to fill holes in our point cloud.



The question on my mind is, What is the best use of my time at SIGGRAPH?



The papers, frankly, go over my head most of the time. I don't use that much math, so the new algorithms are pretty opaque. If I sat down with one of the authorsand did an interactive tutorial and was highly motivated, I could get it, but powerpoint presentations just don't work for me.



Panels are usually sort of "eh". I wish they were discussions or even debates between experts with different opinions, but they usually end up being more like everybody gives a canned 30 minute talk about their then takes questions from the audience who mostly want to make a point, not really ask a question.



Courses are easier to follow than papers; they present previously published information at a pace designed to teach, not just describe. However, they're interminable. Try to get me to pay attention to the same thing for three hours straight... I can do it, again, if I'm extremely motivated, and I have some of my tools: hard copy, a few colors of pens, eye contact with the presenter, a well-lit room... but it's hard, here. There are no hard copies of course notes! They used to sell them; now they just put them all on a dvd. I'm putting the notes from a few of the courses onto my tablet, so I'll try taking notes on the tablet, but I don't think it will be as useful to me as hard-copy notes. The tactile aspect of note-taking helps keep me engaged.



My conclusion is that I should do the things which I enjoy... the things which excite me... the things that I want to pay attention to. The Emerging Technologies stuff, the art show, hot demos on the exhibit floor-- that's the sort of thing that has the power to really impress and excite me. Inspire, even. Aha! That's what I'm here for: inspiration!



After shopping a few presentations, I went to Guerilla Studios, a roomful of hot computers (PowerMac G5's with apple cinema displays) loaded with tons of hot software: Maya, Adobe Creative Suite, After Effects, Corel Painter, combustion, and probably other stuff I haven't even seen yet. Thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of software, all installed on the same machine, all for me to experiment with. Tomorrow I can get a 3D scan of my head -- then edit it! I'll show my hairstylist exactly what I want next time, with my very own virtual model. They also have a rapid prototype setup, which can take a 3D model and make a 3D print out of it -- from a digital representation to a 3D physical representation. I wonder what I should make... I'm signed up for a chunk of time tomorrow so I should have an idea tonight.