Panic at the desktop

It’s well established that I’m a writer and a mom. This means that getting ready for work usually doesn’t involve more than brush teeth, shower, lotion, clothes. To get ready to look my best everyday, this morning I practiced adding in the other things, like killing my hair with heat blowdrying and curling my hair and slathering dirt on my face applying makeup.

It is fun doing those things, but I do a lot of beauty resting from them, if you know what I mean

While going over some Siggraph presentations last night, I went to seamless.usgs.gov, the website I use for Digital Elevation Models. (Basically models of landforms that I can use in my 3D art.) And it wasn’t there. The rest of the USGS site was in attendance, but the seamless server threw me a DNS error. In a small corner of my brain, I freaked out and blamed hackers in China. I checked that website the whole rest of the evening, while the calmer parts of my psyche told myself it was probably just some kind of wierd snafu, or server maintenance, or (joy!) maybe even an upgrade to a better server interface.

As you can guess, since this freaking out wasn’t the first thing in my post, it came back this morning. And since upgrading is not something we can expect from our governments, the interface is as ugly as ever. So now I can go to my Vue Siggraph presentation and show with confidence how one can create scenery using real world landforms.

There probably isn’t much else exciting about preparing for this. Tomorrow I pack, get kids ready. Saturday I drive the kids to Idaho so my parents can watch them, and then fly out of Idaho to New Orleans on Sunday for Siggraph. I love airports. People going places, meeting loved ones. One of the best places in the world to people watch.

If you want to follow the adventures of an exhibitor at Siggraph 2009 just come back here, or follow me on Twitter @amichopine.