We just stumbled in a little while ago from an amazing trip to New York. I didn’t post any updates after the first day because, basically, we were always either out or asleep. Soon pictures will be posted with the full narration of our adventures.
Also, the new server is live (whee!). You might notice an improvement in performance (I do, anyway). Let me know if anything seems weird.
After an uneventful day of travel, we’re in New York. The view from the plane as we flew in was great… right up over Manhattan. We got in a cab and told the driver where to go. “Where is that?” he asked. So, I oddly found myself looking through a street map of New York finding the place. I really didn’t expect to be giving directions to a NYC cabbie, but hey.
Dinner was had at an excellent, mellow sushi place near George’s. George’s place itself is outrageous. A co-opy warehouse loft that get’s rented out for yoga and whatnot with about 10 people living in a cordoned off section. Infinite points awarded. I may die never living in a place as cool as this–fundamentally because I hate sharing a kitchen.
Tomorrow we’re tentatively scheduled to wander around Brooklyn, then make our 1pm reservations at The River Cafe, the swank-ass joint that Cam and Matt gave us brunch at for xmas. We’re also going to try to get in to see a UCB theatre show in the evening, but tickets are up in the air for that.
The semester has worked it’s way up to a gallop. One of my classes, “computational geometry,” has been computationally kicking my ass. My current plan is to stop taking it for a grade for my sanity’s sake. Otherwise things are peachy, I need to restart my research engine after the long burn of SIGGRAPH. Cool things of note:
cameron — 2005-02-18 08:45:13
I hope it is one of the newer Xboxes, not one whose power cord will burn down your apartment!
I can send Halo back with Leslie in March if you haven’t acquired it by then.
bryan — 2005-02-19 23:12:00
i tried halo on my mac, and was unimpressed, but i’ve heard it’s better on the xbox. i also have halo 2 (a friend gave it to me), but i don’t want to play it until after i play the original, so it would indeed kick ass if you sent her back with it. you may just have to sneak it into her bag.
So, our year with Servepath (SUCK!) is almost over, and Ali found a great place to colo in Michigan, so we’re going to set ourselves up with a little server there and hopefully things will work out better. It’s actually not all that little–the new box is a 2.8GHz P4 with a gig of RAM and 240GB of space… quite a step up from our current 20GB. I imagine the switch over to the new server will be sometime in the next couple of weeks. Nothing should change for anyone using overt, but there might be a few problems here or there. Just let me know if there is any trouble.
My typical day for the last week before the SIGGRAPH deadline went something like this:
Wake up at 8, shower, dress, eat. get on my bike about 9:30 and ride to the BART station. Spend the next hour in bliss reading a book or a magazine that has nothing to do with smoke. Get out at Berkeley, walk up the hill to Soda (since the campus buses mostly weren’t running). Arrive at Soda about 11am, an hour or so before almost anyone else will show up. At noon, join the author of the paper I was helping with (also named Bryan). Work on getting smoke to look right until the last train home (usually 11-11:30pm). Repeat.
Now, to be honest, not every day was like that. I took a few nights off to spend with Les or to hang out with friends and exercise, but mostly that’s the way it went. It was gruelling, but mostly fun. The atmosphere in the lab of all the people working day and and out on the papers was electric. I was usually one of the earliest to leave. Bryan stayed many nights until 3 or 4, and he had company.
At the end I got to help out with more than just rendering. I put together figures, and also helped on the text. In the end our product was a 5-page paper and a 2-and-a-half-minute video. I think, in sum, the work I did for those two weeks exceeded that which I did in any three months at Apple. But what motivation. Looking into the future, I hope that writing the paper can be done another way. It’s just not my style to pack it all into a month of frenzied work at the end. Hopefully I can exert enough control on the process to work mostly during the day the next time around–when I’ll hopefully be working on my own paper.
Anyway… quite an experience. It has triggered some serious slacking this weekend, so I’ll probably only start thinking about my classes tomorrow when I have to go back to school again.
Ali — 2005-02-03 23:28:23
I hope it can be done to…. However, all my group has ever managed is all-nighters the last couple of days before a paper deadline. Yuk.