Flutterby™! :

Well, SIGGRAPH is effectively over. A relatively static year for the conference itself, but the parties were fun, I met a lot of people, and ended up staying up way late Thursday night listening to Dick Dee too loud in the Wilshire ballroom. Next time around I need to pick a career with a better gender balance. It'll be good to get back and catch up on sleep, and it'll take a bit of time to catch back up on everything. While waiting for Phil this morning I was watching the news on KTLA. I'd forgotten just how vapid LA is. Although it does occur to me that rather than trying to render hairy monsters or furry animals we should just put newscasters in our movies, that way we can model their hair as a single monolithic object of plastic. Updates from Wednesday that I didn't have a chance to send: AMD's new processor (what would have been the K7) is called the "Athlon". The Wall Street Journal reports that "Athlon" is also a registered trade mark of Trespa North America Ltd. for "a material used in partitions that separate toilets in office bathrooms." Also from Wednesday's WSJ, a note that Proctor & Gamble, GM, IBM, Johnson & Johnson and Sears Roebuck are commissioning "family friendly" TV scripts to air prime time on the WB network. I suppose it should come as no surprise to anyone that these corporations are helping to create the culture that would encourage passive consumption. It's a shame that "family friendly" has become a euphemism for promoting consumerism.