SIGGRAPH at New Orleans

I went to my first SIGGRAPH at New Orleans last week. It was an interesting experience. Much different from the other conferences I've been to due to its size. Unfortunately, according to my coworkers and others, it was much smaller than previous SIGGRAPHs. The economy has hurt a lot. Still, it was very impressive to me given that there was a huge party at the beginning at a club, a parade to the reception at the end of the week, and attended by several thousand people.

Much of the technical graphics talks were above me. But there was such a huge range of topics that I did find some that I could relate to, such as OpenCL, animation talks for fun, and physics simulation in games. Will Wright's keynote was interesting and inspirational, even if it was so fast I don't remember most of it. He went through ~240 slides in 2 hours. @_@

I also did some limited touring of New Orleans, and ate a LOT of good food. I was not expecting to see so many strip clubs on Bourbon St. O_o Most of the bars did have decent live bands though. We ended up just walking around and talking on the street. I visited Emeril's Restaurant, where I had an excellent pork chop. The sauce had an interesting contrast between the mango mole and tamarind. Most of us were sick of Creole and Cajun after a couple days because there was just too much fried foods and too oily. Another treat we found was Cafe Adalaide, which had 25 cent martinis at lunch. I had a terrific shrimp salad, to try to clear my blood vessels a bit. :) Rio Mar was an excellent Spanish restaurant, and then lunch at Cochon blew me away. The oysters were fantastic and the meat plate was very interesting. I loved the bacon. ^_^