Andee from the internet.

SIGGRAPH is now over - as I type the gang are breaking down and striking their stuff from the show floor. They'll be done in probably three hours - I feel real sorry for the people who had booths with components big enough to ship here in friggin crates. I'm pretty glad it's done - three days of crazy drooling geekage is quite enough. :)

Ran into Melissa from WAG there today though! She's in town shopping her resume around. Which is wicked cool, since she was one of the best 3d people we had in there at one time. Glad she's at least attempting to parlay that into a career. She says hi (to relevent folk) and to pretty please not kill her for not being in touch, and maybe we should have a WAG reunion at the next SIGGRAPH in San Diego. Heh.

I turn into a real bitch if I haven't had caffiene. no seriously, all week, I've been getting by on these piddleshit little cups of coffee and the occasional pepsi and waking up too early and taking the obvious detriment to my mood out on Carole. Then I have a large Dunkin Donuts coffee with way too much sugar and it was like someone flipped the on switch to my normal personality. Yikes. Speaking of which, we caught anzovin drinking a diet pepsi today on the show floor. THINK OF THE GLACIERS, PEOPLE! DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY BABY SEALS YOU ARE KILLING WITH YOUR HEEDLESS CONSUMPTION OF THE WRONG TYPES OF BEVERAGES FOR YOUR PERSONALITY TYPE???

One cool thing that happened in the past 24 hours was that an offhand comment C made about characters in a world I was slowly building for one of my stories sparked me to think about them more, and at one point this afternoon I sat down and spewed a whole bunch of ideas into my laptop, and today I spent a good amount of time thinking about characters. though admittedly I was quite heavily influenced by my environment seeing as I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to model them as well.

C and I are being extremely lazy and hanging around the hotel. We head back tomorrow. Sweet buttery home sweet home, freshly heatwave free.

So it's actually way easier to navigate around Boston on foot and via T than in cars, seeing that the one way street issue becomes moot. sunny and I didn't get lost at all today, and we did a fair amount of tramping about. Even if I grossly overestimated the walking distances of things.

So we started our journey by taking the hotel shuttle to the JFK-Umass T stop. I actually really like how Boston calls it's transportation system the T. It's actually kinda neat how every city with some sort of intracity rail system has it's own name for it - the T, the Metro, the Underground, the El, the BART, the Subway... yeah. Anyway, we took it up to Park Street, and got on the green line for a couple of stops (trolleys! squeee!) and got out at the public gardens.

(...yes, I have a crapton of crappy cell phone pics. No I'm not downloading them at this time. Laaaaaaaaaazy.)

We actually spent about an hour and a half here watching the various antics of the waterfowl and bowling the extremely fat and rather pompous male pigeons fool enough to come up to us. There really is something very satisfying to the soul about yelling "BOOGA!" at a pigeon and have it go flapping off in utter terror. But seriously, there was much with the very fat canada geese, tons of ducks (including a family of small fluffy ducklings - soooooooooo cute!) and there were, of course a couple of swans, which seemed quite fabulously annoyed by the tourists getting up in their faces with expensive cameras and snapping their picture. We didn't actually ride the Swan Boats, but it was fun watching them paddle around the pond periodically with cargos of little kids screaming at the ducks.

We then wandered up Charles Street, which is quite full of teh schiggity schiggity schway. :P Seriously, even the Sev's is unbelievably swanky. *giggle* while I'm sure Boston's cost of living is quite a bit lower than New York's, this place might be the exception. But we had fun looking in all of the little shop windows, and we managed to succesfully navigate the massive construction zone that they're doing around the Charles/MGH station and actually wander into the Mass General campus...

... Which is ginormous. O_o Seriously, it's got to be one of the biggest hospitals I've ever seen, and I've been to Kings County. What was sort of funny was that I wasn't actually sure where Bosslady's tests were happening as something went wonky with Gmail this morning, but I remembered she said something about a white building and the room number - little did I know that there actually was a White Building! Ha ha, it was a name, not a description!

So we actually beat Bosslady and D.Lo there, but they showed up after a bit and Bosslady was really glad to see us! We actually wound up staying for much of the afternoon telling the two of them stories, and I demonstrated Lego Digital Designer for them (they thought it was wicked cool). And while Bosslady was actually off having her tests, we went down to MGH's cafe for lunch. Boston's best kept secret, I tell ya. Not only is the food good, it's dirt cheap. Reminded me of a slightly swankier version of the Amherst dining common.

After that C and I turned out to be a little tireder than we expected so we cut our wanderings short, hopped back on the T and headed back to the hotel, where we napped and hung out for a bit before the Studio crew trooped back, collected us, and went to the restaurant next door for a SIGGRAPH strategy meeting. The restaurant is actually at one end of the Boston Bowling Center, which had 1/3 of it's lanes dedicated for candlepin (thought of morlock). Maybe if I have a moment one of these evenings and a little money left over I'll slip off and do a set. Maybe.

Tomorrow and Wednesday are apparently going to be hellacious temperature-wise, which makes me glad I'm not at home, because while quite all right normally, my very non-air conditioned bolthole would not be fun to be in when the temperature is supposed to cap out at 110. (that's what we heard for the valley - it's about ten degrees cooler out here by the water.) So I'm rather psyched to be spending two of the hottest days of the year in a nice air conditioned convention hall in the company of international geeks. sydneycat really needs to lay off the regular soda. I warned her hell was going to freeze over and all that extra heat was gonna have to go somewhere but did she listen? noooooooooo. ;)

In other news, jaicat apparently has been spotting God tooling around New York, and I managed to bite my tongue while sneezing today, so I'm slurring a bit cause there's a big welt on the side of my tongue. It's rather uncomfortable, though talking around it is interesting.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming, already in progress.