Milwaukee -> Texas -> Milwaukee -> BWI -> MKE

A little over a week ago I drove from my place in Milwaukee to my Grandparents house just south of Dallas, and saw my grandfather who had just gotten out of the hospital. It was good to see him again and see that he is ok, even though there is a bit of weakness in his presence. I also saw my grandmother and had the opportunity to talk with her about the way that things are happening and affecting their life there. I also saw my Uncle, and talked with him about his family and my cousins.
After talking to them, I went on to my parents house, which was good. I had not seen them in a while, and I was glad to be able to talk to them and find their output on the future and their immediate environment. The first day that I was in Houston, I saw my aunt, uncle, and cousin downtown, and I even saw Kelly very briefly as she was visiting her mother at her brother's house, who happens to live near my parents. I also saw my sister, and got to talk to her briefly about her new position as a head librarian at a new school. After spending a few days with my family, and trying my hardest to remove the infection that their Windows machine had "caught" I took off to go to Austin for a while.
When I went to Austin I, and while I was in Houston, I was very divided in what I was doing. In addition to being on vacation, and actively trying to interact with my family, I was working non-stop on an intense project for a Midwest Motorcycle Manufacturer that apparently must remain nameless. I am using Maya to render the bike in a way that illustrates a major new function of the 2008 model. Unfortunately the rendering environment that I am dealing with is not the optimal one. I am working on my MacBook Pro, which is a very powerful machine, however it is really underpowered for production based rendering. Also, I am using Mentalray to do HDR-based Image Based Lighting, which is a time consuming process, but it looks very beautiful. In an ideal world, I would be able to work on my laptop, which is working very well despite the *.ma file being 1.2Gb in size, and submit my scenes to a render cluster where there would be many machines with fast processors and multitudes of RAM that could just chew on the frames as needed. This is not an ideal world though, and I am using my laptop for the whole process, which is taking a while.
Anyway, digression of freelance work aside, I spent my time in Austin with Kelly, which was an absolutely awesome time. While its not frequent, whenever I find myself in her presence I become immensely happy. While we were together we were able to hang out with my old co-workers from National Instruments, and to just hang out with each other. It was a joyous time to go for Mexican food, and then stop off at Amy's Ice Cream, and just genuinely waste time together. One of the days that I was there I got to see Anne Marie, which was awesome. We talked about her new job, which she was just starting, and the outlook that she had for it. The last night that I was in Austin, Kelly went with me to my cousin Laura's graduation party. She had just graduated from UT, and the majority of my mother's side of the family was at her house for a party. I was able to see her sister and mother who I am pretty sure I had not seen in 10 years.
After leaving Austin, I proceeded to head out on a 19.5 hour drive back to Milwaukee. I did not intend to make the drive in one jump, rather I intended to drive to Bloomington and get a hotel room, which would leave me just a few hours the next morning. This was a plan, however it was not what happened. In contrast, I found myself stopping at hotel after hotel and either finding signs on the door saying no vacancies, or getting told at the desk that unless I had a reservation they didn't have any rooms. By the time that I had gotten almost all the way to Rockford I decided that it was no longer worth it to pay for a hotel room, so I just got a cup of coffee and settled back in for the next hour and a half to two hours. I finally pulled into Milwaukee at 4AM, and started my computer rendering again, and went to sleep. I had been rendering off and on as I could as I was driving, however the electrical draw was too much for my car to render the whole trip.
When I woke up at 11AM, I repacked my bag, and grabbed my stuff, exchanged some brief pleasantries with my room-mates, and headed to the airport to grab a plane with my co-workers to Baltimore. When we got to Baltimore, it was a very weird situation, that had the entire city in a strange hesitant mood, like they were waiting to see what we were going to do before going about their normal business. We got to the hotel about 10PM, got to our room, ordered some chinese food because everywhere near the hotel was closed, and had a brief chat. The next morning we finally made our way to MICA, and got to see the campus, and started meeting people and listening to presentations.
So far I would say that the majority of my experience here in Baltimore at the AICAD Technology Forum is good. I have meet lots of people who share the same work place issues that I deal with in my environment. Its a great validation to see that the work I am doing is in line with our peer colleges. I was amazed that the majority of schools have a much larger daily fine than we have in place, with the average fine level being 5x our rate at $25/day for late items. In addition most places are also tagging little incident items, and using a tiered checkout which keeps track of the actual items, but still records the whole transaction as one single checkout. The largest lack that we have is probably the lack of a reservation system, which implementation of which would require much stricter adherence to the return policies than we currently have. I have to be honest the opportunity to speak to the AV department here at MICA, and hear them say that a year ago they were running through all of the questions I was asking, and had no idea where to turn, or where to look for advice from other institutions was great, because I have been in that situation for the last 9 months.
I am a little nervous, I present my presentation on Render Farms in about 2 hours, and this is a knowledgeable group of people. These are IT Directors who actually know what a "snapshot" is in reference to filesystem maintenance, and they understand a lot of higher technology concepts and actual implementation of these technologies. My presentation should be good though, I wrote it with a case study sort of approach, starting with basic understanding and into what we are looking for and how we are looking to get through it, and into the problems that we anticipate seeing in the implementation of a spare-cycle render farm.
Ok, back to paying attention, I will post more and add images soon, including the images from Camden Yards...