incredibly long travel

It just took me 12 hours to get from downtown LA to my apartment in Providence, moving almost constantly. The last three hours were the most comical. I landed in Boston at 12:30 am, and somehow it took until 1:20 am for me to get out onto the road. The road, in this case, is I think the Ted Williams Tunnel, which not only charged me a $3.50 toll, but also kept me in it for a good twenty minutes, with all traffic in a single lane. It was pretty much a nightmare: a giant Boston Globe delivery truck in front of me, an SUV behind me, and the curve of the tunnel obscuring everything else. My car is a stick shift, so it was neutral, first, neutral, first, neutral, first the whole time.

I emerged from the tunnel thinking "good, exit 23 is 93 south, that will take me to 95" but 93 south had been rerouted onto I don't even know where. I followed the other cars as we crawled through miles of detours in what might have been South Boston. I didn't actually get to 93 until almost 2 am.

Two complications emerge simultaneously: first, the needle hits E, and the rain starts to come down in droplets that are literally the size of those white mice grad students use in psychology experiments. With my high beams on, it looked like I was being assaulted by the ghosts of a million undead lab rats. I'd driven in stuff like this in California, and I've determined the best thing to do is slow to a crawl until I can get to an exit.

Given the empty gas tank and the sudden downpour, I decided to stay on US 1 until I found a gas station, then get back on 95. This was a fine plan except that a) there are no gas stations on US 1 for that particular five mile stretch, and b) US 1 doesn't seem to hook up with 95 again. I drove past the Gilette Stadium, thinking of course there would be gas stations near the stadium, and a 95 exit, but nope.

A few miles past the stadium, rain still pouring, needle still on E, I see a gas station in the distance. Salvation! I pull in, insert my credit card, then... wait. The LED display is asking me to -- and I quote -- "wait a minute." I do. I wait a few minutes. I hit cancel, no, stop, enter -- the display slowly alternates between "Pump is stopped," "Wait a minute," and "Transaction cancelled." Fine, I think, this pump's little brain is in an infinite loop, I'll go to another pump.

The next pump over also says "Wait a minute." So does the next one. The third one down says "Insert Card," so I move the car over there. When I go to insert my card, I notice a handwritten sign: "Credit card does not work on tihs pump." That's all four pumps: three saying "wait a moment" and the other one claiming it doesn't work. Rather than throw good gas after bad, I turn around and head back to 95 where I left it ten minutes and ten miles back. It's 2:30 am, and the needle has been on E for much longer than I'm comfortable with.

I get back on the freeway and drive for a bit. The rain has let up, and there's no one around, so I'm cruising. I resolve not to get off anywhere that doesn't have a "Gas: 24 Hours" sign. Exit 7B promises exactly that, so I get off, and find myself in the kind of trackless darkness I associate with Wyoming backcountry. I won't be fooled again! I get back on 95 and keep going untilj Pawtucket, where I'm sure there's a gas station a few yards from 95.

At this point I'm just smiling. Half-smiling, really. I'm pretty powerless, here. Either I'm going to run out of gas, or I'm not, and either it's going to pour rain, or it's not. I've got two godiva truffles in the trunk, a nalgene bottle full of water, and a fleece sweatshirt. I'm fine. At the same time, I'm just amazed that there's a 30 mile stretch of 95 without roadside gas stations in the middle of BosWash. Mind you, I've driven this road once or twice a week for the last year, just never before at 2 am in the pouring rain with an empty gas tank.

Anyways, the sunoco station is right where I left it in Pawtucket. I gratefully insert my credit card and remove quickly. I select the grade as instructed, squeeze the trigger, then... nothing. The LED helpfully says, "Please see attendant." What attendant? It's the middle of the night, and the station is dark and quiet. It turns out there was an attendant hiding in there. He explains to another customer with hand signals that he can't sell anything, but then he takes the man's cash and gives him cigarretes. I'm confused but hopeful. I hand him ten dollars, and I finally relax when the petrol starts to flow. Half an hour later -- 3:10 am -- I was home.

Next steps: Poisson matting

Returning from SIGGRAPH, I'm wondering what to do next. I'm interested in doing a Poisson matting implementation because it seems like such utter magic. Consider, for instance, Zebediah's hair. It's incredibly fine and blond and wispy. What if I wanted to put a background of flying toasters behind him, instead of the Cyndi's House of Pancakes furniture? Creating the mask for his hair would be incredibly difficult, especially that flyaway bit up on top. Heck, even just getting a mask for all the little wrinkles in his overalls would be a labor of love. (I'd have to really want to put flying toasters behind him.

Poisson matting can do the masking properly, algorithmically, magically. We could put flying toasters behind Zeb, or art from In the Night Kitchen, that classic of somnambulant.baking. See? It's magic.

Two other papers, GrabCut and Lazy Snapping, both by Microsoft Research, address the same problem, I think. (Sorry, no links yet) Now, how about I write a plugin to something that creates the mats via Poisson matting, GrabCutting, and Lazy Snapping? That would be hot. I love doing two-dimensional image processing. This could be programming that I enjoy, programming that gets me out of bed in the morning, or at least keeps me up late at night. I just hope I can handle the math.

giving and receiving

I've been thinking lately about what I contribute to my co-workers and what I ask of them. I definitely ask my co-workers for a lot of things: audio-visual stuff from the audio-visual guy, tablet pc admin from the tablet pc admin expert, tons of technical requests from from t-staff (our general sysadmins)... and it ocurred to me to ask myself, how much do I help them? My responsibilities are fairly fluid; the areas in which I'm the go-to person are consumer & professional graphics applications, anything mac-related, online communties, and web stuff. People don't need to go-to me much, though.

I just saw my cel ringing with a call from the Brown exchange. It was one of my co-workers, asking for help with iChat, so that one of the Brown professors could sit in on a thesis defense in Utah tomorrow. I didn't want to answer the phone at first, but then I remembered that it's part of my job to answer my goddamn phone, especially during working hours on a travel day when I'm just sitting here waiting for a shuttle. When I realized that a) my co-worker was uncomfortable with using the new-to-him technology, and b) I would be back in town for the defense, I said, "I'll take care of it. I'll be there, I'll make sure that it happens. It's my problem." That was being a good co-worker. I'm glad I was asked to help, and it's an easy solution: iChat is incredibly easy to use, and incredibly reliable. It's kind of funny that it intimidates my co-worker, who has a masters degree and regularly works in virtual reality, but I can understand being nervous about using a new operating system to make sure that a professor can attend one of his student's PhD defenses. Call it a win-win situation.

Now, I need to keep looking for other ways to be helpful to my co-workers, and remember to keep doing so, all the time. s

Best of SIGGRAPH: display and input technologies

There are as many SIGGRAPH's as there are attendees, but here's the best of my SIGGRAPH, for display and input technologies.

High Dynamic Range displays are a new display technology which produce a larger color gamut by adding a secondary light source to the standard pixel grid. Mitsubishi had an amazing desktop LED-backlit LCD which gives extremely high-brightness. In Emerging Technologies, there was a demonstration from Sunnybrook Tech and UBC with an even brighter backlit LCD. It really glowed.

The Barco I-Wall is an amazingly bright projection display. I didn't think projection displays could get that bright, especially not in the moderate indoor lighting of the siggraph show floor. Apparently this uses DLP technology, which I don't yet understand. I would love to see Brown upgrade the Cave projectors to these.

Sound Flakes, an installation in Emerging Technologies, was a fun, calm, and pleasant experience. Several faucets dripped both water and colored sillhouettes of stars, dots, frogs, leaves into a small wading pool. A large red spoon could scoop up the glyphs; when it picked up a glyph, the tone associated with that color would sound. The pool/faucet/spoon combination became a serendipitous musical instrument.

I fell in love with the Spaceball, a six-degree-of-freedom controller. The spaceball has been around for at least a decade, but the graphics hardware is finally fast enough to make the interaction feel extremely nuanced. Nuanced, nuanced, nuanced. 6DOF means that I can control x, y, and z translation as well as x, y, and z rotation, also known as pitch, roll, and yaw. I experimented with using the Spaceball for camera and object control in 3ds max, and I was in love. They are priced fairly affordably, somewhere in the $300 range I think.

something's about to happen

There are some talks I could go to tomorrow, because my flight isn't until 4, but I think what I really need to do is go to a bookstore/cafe and just write. There are things I need to figure out. It's bedtime, now, and I shouldn't go into it, and by the time I get back to Providence, it will be time to fall asleep in a major way.

Learning Maya seems to be a necessity. Mel scripting. I think I annoyed the author of a book on Mel scripting; I was trying to get a complete understanding of how Maya and Mel fit together, what audience they're for, what the end products are. This is how I can learn, yes? Asking lots of people who know things lots of questions, and incorporating what they know into my knowledge. So today I was learning about Maya and jobs in effects.

What if I think of my next few months of work as making a demo reel, and learning skills for my resume? Well, the problem there is that I need to be simultaneously doing a good job at my job. It could all go together -- it would be nice if it did: I could do good work, learning new skills, producing good work as work and work qua demo reel. All of this targeting... switching jobs within the next year.

My main goals, as I currently understand them:

1. Maintain and improve my health, especially emotional and physical health


2. Be near Zeb and Isaac and Dan and Mel. Be part of their family. Be a good aunt to Zeb. What's the boundary between "extended family" and just "family?"


3. Become financially stable: out of debt, have a secure income and health insurance, regularly contribute to long-term savings

Those are the goals. Tomorrow, I figure out how to get there.