Siggraph 2006

Getting serious now finishing my Siggraph stuff. I’ll be in Boston all of Tuesday (Aug 1st), doing the user group (and assorted Softimage parties) in the evening. I don’t know yet exactly what material I will show at the user group, but you should expect everything that was shown at this March’s GDC session – and maybe some extra stuff as well. Looking forward to it! It will be a hectic schedule, but fun nonetheless.

Montoya And NASCAR

Well, this will be interesting. I grew up on Formula 1, and I grew tired of Formula 1 before Montoya even entered the circus. It just became so painfully obvious that in F1, races are never decided on the track – they’re decided in qualifying and on the pits. Nothing against a little pit strategy, but it’s almost like there’s “No Passing!” signs posted along the entire track. Oh, and as soon as two cars touch they fall apart and the drivers are out. Not all that much fun to watch, no?

So to see Montoya get into fulltime stock car racing (and NASCAR in particular) should be fun. Passing aplenty, bumping aplenty. Not enough road courses for my liking, but it sure will be interesting to see how that goes. In the meantime, I will watch the World Cup Final

Killer Tadpoles From Hell!

A while ago I posted pictures of my little frog tank at work. I picked up some tadpoles off the side of the road, they grew into cute little frogs, and the 11 I now have are still going strong. They are slowly growing and currently between 1 and 2 inches big.
Enter the Sonoma Creek. Last Tuesday Victoria and I were passing a bridge and I noticed some movement down there. “Look, there’s fish down there!”, I said. Big ones, too, idly floating in the warm water. But something didn’t seem quite right, and a second (and third) look revealed the truth: those were bullfrog tadpoles. Half-foot long tadpoles with bodies as big as golfballs. Tadpoles that could swallow my 2 month-old frogs in one gulp. If you’ve been growing up in America this might not be news to you, and I’ve certainly seen my share of tadpoles in the last 30 years. But growing up in Germany I’d never seen anything that came even close in size! I haven’t been able to go back yet to take pictures, but maybe I’ll do so this weekend.

Lecker Mittachesse

Immer noch (mal wieder?) genial Das waren doch noch Zeiten, wo man nur “Duschhaube” sagen musste und jedermann lachte automatisch!

Gone for a Few Days

Going to Tahoe for the weekend. Happy 4th of July everybody!

NASCAR Race

Last panorama shot for a while, I promise! This one is 12405 * 1351 pixels (1.7mb) big. I got hooked on these shots 4 or 5 years ago, when I found that my Canon camera came with a program that automatically stitches these things together for me. And then I promptly forgot about it. Here’s the starting lineup from this week’s race as seen from our (really nice!) seats.

The race was a lot of fun! We got to our seats in record time, 35 minute drive to parking and 25 minutes shuttle to the grand stands. And then we waited. Live races are a weird kind of affair – you don’t mind the initial wait much because there’s enough entertainment around you (this year they had an air show and a mini Chris Isaak concert) and you get to see the cars getting readied. The start of the race gets your blood pumping and you follow the race as best as you can, getting excited about the position changes and crashes.

But after about two hours of racing, the sun, alcohol and constant noise are starting to take its toll (unless your name is Victoria and you just take a 45 minute nap in the midst of it all). The field gets drawn out so much that there’s always a car racing by (making it hard to understand the track commentators), and you kinda lose track of the running order past position 8. But the last 10 laps make up for it as the action gets more intense. Crashes happen more frequently and you get to see if the winner can hold on to his lead. Then you watch the burnout, try to catch a glimpse of victory lane – and attempt to leave the racetrack while keeping your sanity. When 100,000 people leave at the same time there’s bound to be some traffic jams! This year it took us over two hours to get back on the road towards Sonoma. We skipped the long shuttle lines and hiked back to our parking lot instead (getting marginally lost in the process), then needed another 45 minutes to exit the raceway.

Anyway, back to work now, there’s just as much excitement around the office (albeit of a different kind). We recorded the race, gonna finish watching that sometime to see all the stuff we missed. IRL race coming up in August!