I arrived Sunday.. very tired. Also because I was preparing some stuff for some meetings and I worked non-stop for a day and a half and then some more (wasn't really worth it to go for such a stretch).

For this trip I thought about getting a new laptop. I wanted Vista to run some DX 10 stuff.
I went to a shop in Tokyo at the last minute but I eventually gave up and installed Vista on my Vaio SZ70. It runs fine.. but it's the little things with the drivers that upset me (now almost everything works, but the camera doesn't work, and some other quirks).

To get the proper Vista upgrade I should call Sony in Japan.. ehhh !
The SZ has an NVidia card, but I realized that it doesn't really support DX 10, so I plan on reinstalling XP and selling it.
It's made its time.. but it's still very much a great laptop (dual core, 2GB RAM, relatively light, etc etc).

I'm planning on getting a Vaio Z.. it's lighter than the one I have and has a better graphics card. Actually to get the 256MB VRAM version one has to make a custom order. Same if one wants a 7200RPM disk instead of the standard 5400RPM.

..so many issues, so much waste of time after those things, when will I learn ? 8)

I don't think I'll be buying a Mac laptop though. Apple offers little choice and recently I've grown tired of Apple. MacBook Air didn't really fit my needs plus there is this constant "wait for the next model coming out maybe next month" kind of feeling.
I also use Windows for development and I find that OS X's interface is somewhat outdated.

One thing I can't stand is the global menu bar on top. It's terrible to have to look up to pick something from the menu. It gets silly if your monitor is a 24 inches like for my iMac. With a dual monitor setting, the global menu bar thing really becomes stupid and the usability level drops in the realm of serious frustration.

Vaio is a nightmare if you try to install the OS and the drivers by yourself, but I think I can live with it.. English Vista would be great, but I can survive with the Japanese version.

..about Siggraph.. I've been so tired and sleepy. I thought I got rid of jet-lag but it's actually all screwed up because of many overlapping things: I normally sleep at weird hours, but here I also have to wake up early.. and I really don't know exactly what's going on.

It's my second Siggraph here in Los Angeles (first being in 1997). Compared to last year in San Diego, the convention center here is kind of dark.
I think I see a lot less people. Los Angeles downtown also is basically bullshit. It's got the be the most fake downtown of all America. There are no residences, some skyscrapers but those are bank buildings. The rest is the usual mom&pop's shops that look like the electricity-based version of the Far West shops.

Without a car the only things I can do is take the shuttle from the hotel and take the shuttle back to the hotel.

I've never been to New York or Chicago. I've been to San Francisco.. some say that you can get around with public transportation in SF but that wasn't my feeling.

You can't really live in a big city without pervasive public transportation or a car.. Los Angeles (which is an area rather than a city), was made for cars.. by cars (?)

Another thing that hits me, as usual, is the public restrooms. I've tried to stay away form those at the convention center.. but it's impossible not to smell feces at peak times.
I find it pretty hard to smell other people excrement and to listen to everything that happens in the adjacent "stall". With a full picture of the other persons' shoes and lowered pants.

I guess it's all about culture, standards (not meant in a denigrating way).
If I came from the jungle, I'd probably think that public toilets in USA were luxurious.. but coming from Japan, if feel like I'm taking a shit in the jungle 8)
Of course this is just me, I've always been sensitive about restrooms..
Also there are pretty bad toilets in Japan too... it's never matter of white or black, but more of average white and black cases.

Overall this Siggraph is a bit depressing (they even skipped the Electronic Theater). A lot of talks seem boring and a lot of stuff is more rehashed than usual..

ummmmmmmmmm

I've been coding at home.. with my iMac.. only, using Windows XP 8)

While learning new OSes and new development environments or even new languages (Objective-C !) can be a great thing, my current focus is really mouse about graphics that application interfaces or multi-platform development.
I'm also so much used to Visual Studio (.NET 2005, using VC6 key mapping) and Visual Assist X.

I'm only now managing to get a decent setup and here is a list of things that are helping me:

VMWare Fusion

Fusion can actually display single application windows mixed with the OS X windows, but personally I prefer to leave it in a single window, better if full-screen.. because I can get OS X windows on top of it (basically full-screen means "maximized", though there is no "maximize" in OS X).

One problem I had, is that the cursor stays the Mac one, meaning that I get a black caret on my black background code editor windows 8)
For that I went to change cursor type on the Windows side.

Another key factor is having 3GB of RAM..

A Real Mouse !!

With one button one has to use the Control key to simulate right click. Which is fine, until you try to do Control+LMB 8)

Only today I discovered that Apple's Mighty Mouse (standard for iMac) can actually handle a right click !! Great ! ..not really: it's very easy to accidentally do a right click while trying to do a left one. A very frustrating experience, possibly worse than the unwanted side buttons clicks, the scroll ball/nipple getting stuck and sometimes the inability to click at all. What a crappy mouse !

My solution was to plug a regular 2 buttons + Scroll Wheel mouse.. much better now.

Key and mouse mappings

I set the middle mouse button (clicking on Scroll Wheel) to show "All Windows" (see Expose' video). The "All Windows" view is actually very useful.

Then I swapped Control and Alt (Option on Mac), because on the iMac keyboard Alt takes the place of Control which is too much an important key to try attempt relearn it's position (when I'm not at work !)

...And ?

My smallish "computer desk" is still lacking. Must get rid of it, but trashing old furniture and housing large furniture does require a certain will power if you live in Tokyo 8)

I wish I had two smaller monitors rather than a large 24 inches one. In the office, I like how I can maximize Visual Studio in the left monitor while doing something else in the right monitor.

Still, I'm much happier now. I can use the same computer using applications from both OS X and Windows.
Interoperability is great. Copy and paste, drag and drop works both ways.
Keyboard and mouse are just too important, and while I can tolerate XP not recognizing the Japanese layout (could overwrite a DLL for that, but I prefer the English keyboard layout for code anyway), I definitely needed to remap the Control key and to get a decent mouse.

I'm writing this with an editor on the Mac while the Windows screen saver runs in the background. Putting an x86 processor on the Mac is the best thing Apple could have done for the machine at least for those of us that can't get into serious relationships (with operative systems 8)

woooo !!