re-nest: SIGGRAPH #16

Why?

After 14 years of LA, the things we didn't like about living here finally wore us down and we decided to move away. Our first choice was Portland, Oregon. After months of interviewing, neither of us could secure a job. We turned our sights to the next city on the list, New York. We lined up jobs and moved at the end of March 2008.

Apparently this was a bad idea. Things were not as they seemed and New York was not a good fit. We learned some good, hard lessons about life. We moved back to LA (four months later!) because the most important things were:

- be with our friends and close to our sisters

- advance our careers in a market we understand

- enjoy a low cost of living so we can save & travel

This is what makes us happy and apparently we had to move away to get our priorities straight. We still LOVE NEW YORK! We just enjoy it more as tourists...

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

SIGGRAPH #16

This week X & I are celebrating our 16th SIGGRAPH convention. We went to the show Tuesday and got free passes from a friend who runs the conference (like she does for us every year - thanks J!) and walked the floor. We saw friends and demos and cool technology. My favorite was the Latte Foam Printer that shot caramel out of an ink jet printer to scrawl a design onto the foam of coffee! We rode the VFX connection bus in the afternoon; a group I'm in rented a double-decker London bus and put a keg on it. Silly :) But great for networking!

We checked out the Computer Animation festival screening in the evening and then walked back to the garage. We had a little surprise when we went to drive our car out...they had closed at 8pm and it was 8:20. YIKES! I was running around with my phone out looking for numbers to call when a guard found us and let us out. Whew.

This evening we went to the "Massive House Party" at the Custom House Hotel, which was awesome! They had Brazilian gogo dancers, fire dancers, synchronized swimmers, and burlesque dancers. Oh and open bar and passed hors d'oeuvres. Nice!