Plaidophile

Just as it began... not with a bang, but a whimper.

Pros, cons, and more uncertainty than I had when I started.

So today I interviewed with a guy from NASA Ames. Needs a graphics programmer for realtime visualization of active data streams and stuff. Not as sexy as Alienskin, but on the other hand, they'd pay for me to continue on with my PhD, at a decent university (namely Stanford or any of the other universities in the area). The availability prospects would be long-term, too; starting in January is perfectly reasonable.

The Alienskin job would be a lot more fun, but I'd have to start more or less right away, but I wouldn't know for as much as a month. I ran into Jeff in the hallway again just an hour ago or so, and he said he just couldn't rush a decision. But I really don't want to have to quit my TA position mid-semester; that'd be a great way to piss a lot of people off. (But at the same time, if he's going to wait a month to make such an important decision, can't he wait until December/January for me to start?)

The NASA job wouldn't be nearly as much fun, and honestly I don't think it'd be as stable or secure either. But the prospect of still completing my PhD is rather nice. But then again, Alienskin is near UNC Chapel Hill, and there's always the prospect of that there too.

I really like the flexibility Alienskin is offering. And my exact job duties are the sorts of things I was born for.

I think no matter what decision I end up making, I'm going to second-guess myself for a long time.

Anyway. To the SIGGRAPH fuckers, who charge even more money to the people who even make this event possible, while scaling back on what we're given in return, and while selling our information to fucktons of advertisers under the guise of providing a service: I hate you all. Die, plsthx.

To the vendors who are involved in my field of interest just to make a quick buck: Same to you.

Conversation I had not too long ago with a vendor of anaglyph 3D glasses (among other things):

fluffy: Do you have any green/magenta anaglyph glasses?

venduh: No, why would you want such a thing?

fluffy: I have a theory that it'll work better for full-color anaglyph rendering, since it has better luminance balance between the two eyes.

venduh: Have you tried our ChromaDepth™ glasses?

fluffy: Um, ChromaDepth™ wouldn't work for a monitor. It'd only give three layers.

venduh: Most people can't tell the difference. Look at this over here... [gestures to a crappy display which is obviously for "wow" factor]

fluffy: Well, I want this for realtime 3D rendering, on a computer screen.

venduh: But it would work for that!

fluffy: Not with the effect I want.

venduh: What effect do you want? We have all of these special-effect glasses here—

fluffy: I mean, I'm trying to do realtime 3D rendering using anaglyph glasses for the purposes of informational display. I'm interested in the scientific visualization and virtual reality aspects of this.

venduh: Well, I'm just interested in making money. [laughs callously]

Meh.

That's sort of abridged though. I talked about how I have a realtime 3D engine which does interactive anaglyph rendering and can work with any colorpair, and talked about eye-dominance effects and so on, and he was just totally uninterested in anything beyond making cheezy 3D displays for the purposes of advertising. He loved to point out that Disney and Universal Studios and so on used his products for their advertising displays.

Fucker.