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Tonight is my second night here in SD at a hostel. I didn’t have much of a chance to update or post some pics and I really should be sleep like right now. I’m going to make this quick so you’ll have to bear with me without any pics for now, sorry.

(Gun’s and Roses’ Sweet Child of Mine playing outside in downtown SD @ 1am right now, nice!!!!)

First day was so fun, I met so many people, starting with my hostel mates which I just happen to ran into as soon as I got into downtown on a trolly. A trolly is SD’s version of a street car in Toronto. All I did was go to orientation later in the afternoon and met some other student volunteers (SVs). Everyone is so friendly and psyched about SIGGRAPH just as much as I am. It’s almost like frosh week back in first year, except 100x better. Everyone’s there for the same reason and have similar interests, whether it’s computer animation, rigging, modeling, graphics programming, and all that jazz. It’s soooooo awesome.

Here’s a pic of the hostel I’m staying at (it looks hippie-ish):

And the orientation office white board:

Day two today was even more of a blast. I had a shift at registration – greeted nice folks and help them out using the computer. There were a couple of ticked off attendees but I don’t blame them since they went around in circles just to try and register but most of us got them help to sort things out.

Then there was an interview/demo reel review session that was really cool too. Lots of useful tips on resumes and reels. I probably will post more details later. Then after that I went to a 20th celebration of this Japanese artist (I don’t have his name on me ATM, will update later…) and they had free sake for everyone!

Then were was a CG part at the Mariot hotel right beside the convention centre. I meet a bunch of interesting people who’re working, but not quite “there” yet but it was still interesting to see what they were up to. I busted out my laptop to show a demo of Chariot of Fire to this guy… it was pretty cool. He seemed to like it (I hope). Then I wanted to use my laptop to see other people’s demo reels but I didn’t have Quicktime installed… and I was shunned upon LOL. We did end up finding someone who happened to have a Mac and asked him to use it to show people’s demo reels. All was fun and awesomeness until…… I accidently spilled beer on the back of the guy’s MacBook… and the end. I still feel bad about it. But aside from that, Day 2 was even more fun than day 1. The week hasn’t even started yet and I can’t imagine how exciting it’s going to be once the show starts kicking. Stay tuned. Time for bed.