Birth of the Beast

To me SIGGRAPH is like the condensed version of the life of a great beast. After a very long gestation period (two years!) it is born, grows to huge size and then dies, all in a week. The past couple of days has seen the birth as crews of contractors and volunteers have been working feverishly to put everything in place. This afternoon Registration and the S2005 Booth opened. The L.A.Convention Center (LACC), which has been empty, has started to fill with people.

Tomorrow morning the Courses and Sketches begin and most of the Posters will be up. The pace quickens!

Spam begone!

A few weeks ago I switched my email client from Microsoft Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird and my browser from Mozilla to FireFox. Thunderbird is, simply put wonderful! I use an IMAP mail server at Georgia State Unversity and our sys admin has put spam_assassin on it. He has it set so that it detects email with viruses and labels them with "****VIRUS****. So I trained the Thunderbird Junk detetector to classify these as junk. I also have any email with strange characters in it classified as junk. Just these two steps have gotten rid of over 90% of my spam. I no longer dread opening up my email.

SIGGRAPH 2004

I've been consumed this past month getting ready for SIGGRAPH 2004 which starts this Saturday. SIGGRAPH is the conference for computer graphics and covers everything from high end technical research to very creative art and animation. The algorithms discussed in the papers and sketches sessions will be used in games and movies next year. The new display and interactive techniques technology that is shown in the Emergng Technology Program will be in commercial products in a few years or not - it may just be fun to play with. SIGGRAPH is about learning and about having fun. A recent Newsweek article called it "the Woodstock of Computer Graphics".

It is also very much about a sense of community, I characterize it as a gathering of the tribes (or since my ancestors are Scottish - a gathering of the clans). And we all wear our "colors"- T-shirts and informal attire are the norm - no suits need show up.

To facilitate this we have been setting up a blogs and a wiki. Danah Boyd has set up a blog for S2004 news and events at http://www.siggraph.org/s2004/blog/.
and a wiki at http://www.siggraph.org/s2004/wiki/. We have also set up a general ACM SIGGRAPH Blog for general community discussion.

So, I'll be having fun with 25-30,000 of my closest friends in the LA Convention Center.