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Next week is going to be intense when I head down to San Diego for SIGGRAPH. There’s gonna be tons of stuff to do and I already see myself being deprived of sleep throughout the week. Here’s my schedule for next week, so far:

That schedule doesn’t include Saturday which me and David will be flying down to SD. Our flight leaves at 6:25am from Pearson airport Terminal 1, so we’ll be heading there at around 4am or so. Saturday will be orientation day and we’ll have to check in at 3pm PST or so. Our flight arrives at 10am… but I don’t know if it’s EST or PST however since the itinerary didn’t make it clear.

I did end up getting housing accomodations at a hotel after all! But that means I’m scheduled to work 30 hours instead of the original 25. This makes things a little bit more complicated for me now:

• I already paid $163 for the hostel and it’s too late for me to back out now.
• There are two full day courses that I want to attend but I’ll might have to miss a few hours because of my shifts.

I’m probably gonna bite the $163 loss and go for the hotel instead of the hostel.

Most of my shifts right now are at the registration desk and the store, so I’ll be talking (a lot) to the attendees. FJORG! is a competition where a team of three CG animators have only 32 hours to create a 15 second animation clip. I have a 6 hour shift on Monday night for this event in addition to my morning shift which starts at 7:30am. Monday is obviously going to be the most intense day – gotta remember to pack some energy drinks and bars. I’m looking forward to see what the teams will come up with.

There are three courses that I want to attend at the conference that are game dev related, obviously. First one is on Sunday from 8:30am to 5:30pm which is an Intro to DirectX10. Second one is called Mobile 3D Ecosystem and it’s basically about developing 3D applications on mobile platforms and also runs from 8:30am to 5:30pm on Tuesday. On both days I have two shifts which I’m hoping to find someone to swap with so that I don’t have any conflicts during those times. The third course that I want to go to is much shorter and it’s called Visualizing Quaternions. This will be a math-y course that’s useful because it let’s you do rotations in 3D space, which I encountered while working on Chariot of Fire. (From my understanding, quaternions are a four tuple and it provides a nice way of representing rotations in 3 dimensions. One of it’s advantages is that it’s more efficient in terms of space than using matrix rotations because a quaternion only requires 4 variables, where as a rotation matrix requires 9.)

Since the Canadian dollar is almost equivalent to the US dollar now, I gotta do some shopping while I’m down there too. I probably will do that on one of the nights I’m free. There’s also gonna be a few parties going on too and I haven’t even looked at that yet. So many things to do, so little time.