New Orleans

Went For Siggraph, came back with a Hang Over

Somehow the production coordinator found a site that showed the location of the homoscides in New Orleans in the last 6 months. There was a staggering number of dots, but a there seemed to be a pattern - the dots were gravitating towards my Hotel. Cool. I arrived the night before the show (I was cost sharing and even the marginal hotels weren't cheap) so I spent most of my days in the show. Thankfully it was my second Siggraph so I wasn't so overwhelmed by the show that I missed the city.

The show itself was, as expected, amazing. Sony showed off their GS Cube (they had a shot from the Final Fantasy movie rendered in realtime on it). The company that did "Bullet time" for the Matrix showed off their many camera rig. The papers were amazing - inspiring - a kick in the pants.

My first trip into the city was to see the above ground cemetary. As usual, I missed the details - the cemetary "closes" at 5pm and I wen after the day's conference so it had already closed. The old homes really caught my eye though - I walked good distance back to the hotel just to get a sense of this place.

On futher days I explored more of the French Quarter and the area around my hotel. I visited Cafe Du Monde - one of the local coffee shots and it just about killed me - the food was so fattening. Love it.

A lot of the area is old (in the Vancouver sense, not the Europe sense). There are places you can drink outside (as long as your drink isn't in glass). They had these fish all over the place - they had been painted by local artists and were to be auctioned later. I've since seen this model replicated - Toronto had a moose project (in most cases, way too corporate), Vancouver had an Orca project (some cool - just too few of them in the city) and New York had something really bland that wasn't even worth remembering.

Night got exciting. The conference and most of the conference accomodation was within walking distance to the French Quarter. Perhaps the best marketing I've ever seen done - NVidia (who at the time had ripped the brains out of SGI and was starting to feed on 3DFx) sponsored Burbon street. Show your pass and you got free drinks - just that simple.

Apparently the city had to put on extra police for the week because there were so many "I live in the lab" geeks with expensive looking digital toys who weren't accustomed to a slightly dodgy street environement. The city ate them alive.