Slashdot Mirror
Jeff & Rob Visit Lucasfilm
Last fall Hemos started working for Perforce: one of their clients is Lucasfilm. One thing led to another, and last week I got to visit their Presidio facility in San Francisco. Their security policies prevent me from saying anything about the super sweet things I saw inside the building, but I can post this picture of us next to the Yoda statue outside the front door.
Thanks to Matt Janulewicz for getting us in the front door and showing us around, Daryll Jacobson for opening a cool door and Tina Mills for pressing click. I can now say that I've been physically closer to Starwars.com than I have to Slashdot.org since the 1998 when it lived under my desk.
Finally, the gauntlet has been thrown: if you work somewhere cool (Pixar? Apple? NASA? The White House? Comerica Park?) drop me an email! I am not above using T-Shirts as bribery to see cool places!
Why is yoda pouring his load behind you guys?
What do you think this is? Your personal blog?
;)
(And for those who don't get the joke, yes, i know
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
While I suppose it wouldn't mean all that much when it comes to day-to-day work on some level it would be nice to work somewhere "cool". A company with "mythical" server parks rather than the typical "one small server room per site plus a couple of rented racks in a datacenter for external stuff".
Oh well, maybe I'll find a job at one of those places someday...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
You can see the dungeon where Lucas rapes our childhood memories.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Whatever happened to the scrappy twenty-somethings I met at the Hilton annex at Comdex?
Best Slashdot Co
Nerd goes to Lucasfilm; can't talk about it. No news at 11.
See? http://www.mrericsir.com/blog/local/yoda-statue/
Jeez, why don't my personal blog entries make the front page of Slashdot?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Didn't you notice? Slashdot.org is just a seamless redirect to Digg now.
Why isn't this in Idle?
Oh yeah, never mind.
All of life is a, "Hey, look at me!"
Or, "Hey, look at my stuff!" But that's just look-at-me by proxy.
Their security policies prevent me from saying anything about the super sweet things I saw inside the building...
Their security policies sound more like industrial trade secret policies, unless the cool things they have inside are anti-terrorism devices.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Finally, the gauntlet has been thrown: if you work somewhere cool (Pixar? Apple? NASA? The White House? Comerica Park?) drop me an email!
Why would you need to be emailed when one could just post their cool job in the comments section?
HELP ME! SAVE ME! Nobody reads the messages I code in braille on Hamburger Buns using SESAME SEEDS!
That had better be banta drool on Luke's landspeeder!
Whew! This water sure is cold!
I kinda like this sorta post. I used to feel a closer connection with the /. mods back in the day than recently. It didn't always feel like one Apple/Google press release after another like it does nowadays. It seemed like there was more editorial content. (Not that I'm asking for JonKatz to return...)
frog blast the vent core
I used to come to slashdot for a does or three of daily nerdism. Then I came for techy news. Then I came to watch the flamewars when I needed an excuse to eat popcorn. Now? Now I come to see that life really is about who you know.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
Seriously, what is the point to this post.
Nothing worth remembering, nothing highly interesting.
Just a pathetic paragraph piece with links pointing to a software company & media production company. Why, because "nerds" like starwars? What a bunch of smug time wasting a$$clowns. There should be a purgatory page for posts like this.
Kristopeit, have you considered turning your anger into creativity?
For example, I looked at, "Slashdot = stagnated," and I noticed the anagram, "That LAN SSD goatse'd."
I thought this amusing because LANs, SSDs and goatse are frequent topics of Slashdot.
I transformed hate into a smile.
*places a flower in your musket*
Uh, you do realize that Slashdot actually *is* Rob's personal blog, right?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
A fair percentage of the posts on this page is you and your fleet of sockpuppets shouting about how stagnated this site is. Butthurt much?
..or is that "Rob and Jeff"?
I'm not a Star Wars geek but I seriously want that Yoda statue.
Oh, and I thought Episodes II & III were better then Episode VI and quite possibly V.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Well yesterday I went to an even cooler place, but I can't tell you. There was so much amazing stuff, I was shocked. This was like a million times better than going to Lucasfilm. After the first couple of things happened I knew that my life had changed forever. Thanks to Frank for telling me about this fantastic place, Joseph for pointing out the last things and letting me take one home, and Sarah - you know exactly what for! I'm going to go post this on slashdot now so that all the nerds can get jealous! /sarcasm
also, seriously slashdot, wtf?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
you believe that anger and creativity are mutually exclusive?
He never said that, merely indicated that it's obvious you have the one and not the other. As your entire vocabulary seems to consist of a half-dozen or so Eliza-like stock phrases.
Can't wait for the pics in front of the Orc on the Blizzard campus. Far more impressive than Lucas' Yoda. ;-)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/anshinritsumai/4799301377/
[Innocuous comment]
[awaiting reply]
Now that everyone on slashdot knows where to get a real yoda statue, are we already taking bets on how long it'll be still there...
can anger not be created? can the perception of anger never be incorrect?
cower in my shadow some more, feeb.
you're completely pathetic.
Was this just "click-mongering"? Glad I have ads disabled...
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
Been wondering what happened to him.
No way, not "the" 1998.
[witty retort]
[awaiting reply]
Or maybe Bill and Ted, but older, and that Yoda statue is filling in for George Carlin.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you were an animator or technical director at Pixar, you could expect to live there during production. The film has to be done on time, you can't miss the Christmas season, etc. I saw many families bring dinner to Pixar almost every evening so that they could eat together, as mommy or daddy wasn't coming home until really late. I was in studio tools, not production, and thus was allowed to have a normal life - and seeing what happened to the production folks, I never wanted to be a technical director.
The pay was OK, but not great, and for technical folks the attribution was something you might have to slo-mo your VCR to see. There were 20 people who wanted a job standing behind every one that actually had a job in film, so there was no incentive for studios to pay better.
At the time (it may be better now) the tools were the result of 30 years of evolution, and you had to know about 30 languages to be a TD.
I've found my involvement in Open Source to be a lot more fulfilling.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Who?
I work in an ICBM launch control center. Not surprisingly, though, I can't take pictures. No t-shirt for me. :(
Am I the only one who sees eerie similarities between Michael Kristopeit and that guy who shot Congresswoman Giffords in the face and killed 10 people?
I'll bet Kristopeit's YouTube videos are incomprehensible and slightly frightening.
Do yourself a favor - put down the Adderrall and come back to the real world.
Congratulation to that -1 Insightful.
Seriously? Leaving one dead-end company for another.
What I got from this story is that Slashdot pays so poorly that one of their major Admins has to work a day job to make ends meet.
It's not that big a deal. I've been to Lucasfilm's sound stage at "Kerner Optical" (which used to be a cover story for Lucasfilm.) That's where they do physical effects and model work. Got to see their prop and camera shops, and some cameras used for notable shots that fans probably care about but I don't. They were the first to put a camera in a carbon-fibre housing, that camera has been through many crashes and explosions, and it still works. Nice engineering.
They were doing some R&D work on 3D cameras where the separation between the cameras could be varied dynamically. Watching that on a 3D monitor while someone twiddles the interocular distance is a non-fun visual experience, close to headache-inducing.
They were showing off FrameFree, which is a frameless video compression technology. It decomposes the image into layers which are then morphed from frame to frame, allowing arbitrarily slow motion. They sold that off, but some of the technology for cleanly decomposing images went into 2D to 3D conversion technology.
The most unusual thing about the place is that almost all the employees have been there for decades. Someone who'd been there three years was referred to as the new guy. You just don't see that kind of low employee turnover any more.
I've been to some computer animation places. They're just cube farms, not very interesting. They used to have high-end SGI workstations, but now it's all PC. (I saw that transition between 1998 and 2002; on my first visit to Sony Imageworks, the shop was 90% SGI machines, with a few PCs. Four years later, 80% PCs, with a few SGI machines for legacy work. SGI's "Silicon Studio" division is long gone, and the Computer Museum has their building.)
Watching a really good animator use a high-end animation package makes you realize that some people have really, really, good 3D visualization skills. There's a classic comment from some sculptor that he just chips away the stone until the object emerges. That's what working 3D artists do all day. Fast. There's much drawing and little adjustment. Pros don't tweak meshes; they draw them.
If you're not into either the "Hollywood thing" or fandom, dealing with the film industry is generally frustrating. Either they're in pre-production and have trouble coming up with a valid credit card, or they're in production and want a new feature yesterday.
This is like walking into the locker room in high school and saying, "I just slept with the head cheerleader," and then refusing to give out any details. Party foul!
http://www.bynarystudio.com
HELLO WORLD
38836 38836
HELLO WORLD
98481 98481 14101 14101 27700 27700 35003 35003 78743 78743
55984 55984 36482 36482 48376 48376 17577 17577 25568 25568
41432 41432 33120 33120 71600 71600 37482 37482 72016 72016
18165 18165 97172 97172 06235 06235 09179 09179 66815 66815
39131 39131 02234 02234 37138 37138 05015 05015 18609 18609
15481 15481 26568 26568 76909 76909 14869 14869 84844 84844
98467 98467 15173 15173 91438 91438 01957 01957 83393 83393
55263 55263 02335 02335 39565 39565 33152 33152 48263 48263
85656 85656 69752 69752 84232 84232 87361 87361 24560 24560
98390 98390 28772 28772 59461 59461 31312 31312 14942 14942
68574 68574 70946 70946 49109 49109 19694 19694 45323 45323
65157 65157 98866 98866 64012 64012 72983 72983
K-BYE
At least he's not "nothing" nor "pathetic".
What's with the fountain in front the of Yoda statue? It makes him look pissed.
I was working there last year. Why couldn't you visit then?!
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Actually for you SFX challenged people out there, Kerner Optical is/was Industrial light and magic, not Lucasfilm per se.
Geez wont you young whippersnappers get you facts right?
This is a nice story and all, but I was hoping to see photos of Hemos and CmdrTaco at Lucasfilm, not two random old fogies hanging around next to Yoda.
I have been at ILM ( in the old space) - got a great tour and the new Pixar space ( with my students from Stanford via my Facial Animation course), heck I gave a recent talk at Google and saw things I can't talk about either but why would I blog about it or put it on Slashdot if I do not have something informative to say. I sure there are 200 more folks like me who have done this who are slashdot members. Including folks who work at these places. Seems like an ego post.
But I'm still stuck with RCS you insensitive clod!
He never mentioned the NSA visit ##@!!..line error
A few years ago I posted an ad on Facebook aimed at Googlers. Said I wanted to see their town. Cost me $40 but got to see the campus :P
I've seen Matt Janulewicz put cashews in his nose. He's a Legumist.
Keine eier