the morning was off to another early start with the keynote speaker esther dyson speaking on digital identity - well that was what the program said...but she instead focused on icann and the concept of freedom of presence. very interesting particularly given her x-role as chairperson of icann. briefly - her view is that icann is less then ideal but that it is better than the alternatives. as usual i was struck by the complete lack of blushing around the issue of internet as global but internet management/policy as US centric...

health warning: all day 2 entries preceeded by very little sleep. hebetudinous prose sure to follow.

"so what do you do?
"computational geometry. wanna dance?"
"sure"

the start of a great opening night reception. This was an unexpected bonus of the conference. lots of dancing, lots of playing of computer games, lots of digital camera action and lots of chances to see rhythmically challenged folks ignoring their usual inhibitions and dancing the night away complete with laptop on back :)

gotta go...will share the details of today with you tomorrow...must eat/sleep now
stuff to remember to talk about tomorrow...svg and real time emotive daemons, wireless is the coolest, battery and/or wireless power is the constraining factor, digital humans "we will be the last generation to be able to tell the difference between real and virtual", digital humans vs digital citizens, someone else is pondering the importance of imperfection in identity, installing wireless into studio so that folks can network at window pane, coolpix vs ixus...and much, much more

last night was the opening event for the early arrivers. a classic nerd event (needless to say i loved it!). the discipline leads from industrial light and magic formed a panel and told us all about how they built the digital components of the attack of the clones...the designer, the animation director, the software engineer for fabric, the team lead and the software engineer for solid state stuff (space ships, robots and how to blow them up...this guy loved his work).
It was all really cool but most interesting element for me was the fact that the digital character of yoda was intentionally built to reflect the limitations of the original puppet animated by Frank Oz. turns out that when they took out the puppet characteristics it no longer looked like yoda - haven't figured out why this has captured brain space but think it has something to do with embyonic thoughts on digital identity, the woman from dirty dancing having a nose job and no longer being recognisable and the role of imperfection in building identity - mmm...sorry will work on articulating how these fit together.
note to munchy: you must work at ilm

after a few hiccups got the wireless thing going on so i am blogging live from san antonio, texas, the foyer of the san antonio conference center.
today was about xml and manifestations thereof for me - most of the day going over some xml basics and then looking at smil and svg. Matt and Brendan reminded me of svg during their presentation on friday and today has just filled in some gaps. the more i get into this stuff the more interested i am...notes from this morning available soon at www.javakathy.com.
alice was "building interactive environments" all day but i'll leave her to tell you about that later.
svg - scalable vector graphics
cool because searchable (text based), text editable, rendered on demand, scalable, lots of very nice modules available including smil 2.0 animation module.
searchable means that this is potentially a great storage and retrieval medium for graphics.
note to self: want to think about rendering on demand and potential for tie in to alice's world - "real time emotive daemons"

for the truly awful template...particularly if you viewing on anything other than pc,windows, ie. Will work on it more after siggraph.

This saturday sees Alice and I off to siggraph 2002 in San Antonio, Texas. To say we are bit excited doesn't even begin to describe how much we are looking forward to this brainfest.