SiteLight: Brainwagon

Why I read this site:

I can’t remember how I to turned onto Mark’s site, but he’s got an engaging podcast and his blog covers a fascinating array of topics, including robotics, telescopes, a little about his work at Pixar, politics, and other interesting bits. I asked him some questions about his blog, blogging, podcasting, and Pixar.

Why you should read this site:

For any geek, Mark is an interesting and engaging writer (and podcaster). he doesn’t spice things up with a lot of music or “Radio Voice!” (in fact, he’s taken to recording on his PDA on the way to work, which makes the sound quality worse and the conversation quality better, IMO). Check out his site, if you find that interesting definitely subscribe to his podcast.

Q & A:

Blogging:

Steve: Obviously most of us know you through your blog or more likely through your podcast. What got you interested in starting a blog?

Mark: I wish I could say that it began with some master plan, or some keen insight on my part. In retrospect, some of the actions that I took (perhaps accidently or unconciously) make it look as if I knew what I was doing, but it would be a mistake to pretend like it went smoothly or continuously. But here’s my (too long) story that will serve to fill in background:

Early in my career, back in the 1980s, my path in life was changed significantly by people whom I never met. I was a graduate student at the University of Oregon in Eugene studying computer science. It was a small department, reasonably isolated, and while they had a number of good faculty and gifted students, it wasn’t the kind of environment where one does cutting edge research. I studied lots of topics: computer languages, operating systems and theory of computation. In about 1985, I read some of my first computer graphics papers: the proceedings from Siggraph 1980 and 1984. I never took a graphics class, although I later served as teaching assistant for a couple of them, but I began to experiment with programming some of the stuff that I read about, mostly having to do with the relatively new field of raytracing. What was cool was that I began to post questions to the USENET network, and began to strike up conversations with people who had greater expertise and knowledge. People like Eric Haines and Craig Kolb sent me ideas and encouragement, and ultimately in 1987 I released the code for my own public domain raytracer (my first and perhaps greatest contribution to the world of open source). I thought that the world of computer networking and the online community (such as it was back then) had helped me, and I returned the favor by giving something back. Ultimately that work would help me to secure a job working on rendering software for Pixar Animation Studios only six years after beginning my explorations into computer graphics.

That was perhaps too long, but what does that have to do with blogging?

When I began working on raytracing, I didn’t know where it was going. I had no idea that it would pay off either intellectually or financially: I just was a guy pursuing something he was interested in. And yet, inexplicably, I was able to be at the right place at the right time, and ride the wave of something really great. I didn’t really appreciate this until about five years ago. And I began to think: well, if it happened once, why not again? I adopted a new philosophy, grounded in my previous experience: “Don’t try to imagine what the next big thing is: just try to figure out what the next thing you want to do is, and do it.” And I thought that perhaps the help I needed could be found on the Internet, just as it had helped me before.

I’ve got a wide variety of interests. Over the years I’ve dabbled in all sorts of subjects, and I continue to read and experiment. I’ve helped hundreds of people build telescopes at the Chabot Telescope Maker’s Workshop here in Oakland. I’ve studied biology. I’ve studied ancient writing systems like Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs. I’ve played with puzzles and robotics and cryptography. I read about sixty books a year, mostly on scientific or academic topics. So, I started to blog about these topics, and began to read other people’s blogs. And, over the span of the last three or so years, I’ve begun to do it regularly. I probably spend at least an hour a day scanning other people’s blogs, and cross posting little bits of information.

I also try to make room for my own projects, my own diary, and my own rants and raves. All those things help make the online world more informative, more interesting and more human by adding my own personal insights and knowledge to the searchable content of the web. Lately I’ve been trying to figure out ways to spend less time maintaining my blog, and more time generating material that’s worth blogging about.

I’ve still got a long way to go. But since I don’t know where I’m going (anymore than I did back in 1985) the only thing I could really do wrong would be to stop. Perhaps my second career will be some unforseeable outgrowth from my current activities on brainwagon. But even if it isn’t, it’s been a total blast.

Steve: Where did “brainwagon” come from? Sounds a bit like you’re referring to our bodies as just ways to carry our brains around. :-) I seem to have heard the concept before but I can’t place where. Thoughts?

Mark: Actually, I like your description better than the way that it actually came about. The truth is that I had registered “vandewettering.net” as my personal website, but when I would talk to people, I’d say “yeah, go see my website: vandewettering.net” and nobody would know how to spell it. I wanted a catchy domain, but I couldn’t really think of it.

I was discussing this dilemma with a number of people at Pixar, and Tom Lokovic told me the secret of how he had generated his weblog name: monkeyspeak.com. He simply jammed two common, easy to spell words together, and then checked to see if they were taken. While brainstorming, I believe he blurted out “brainwagon” and it was available and cool. That’s really all there is too it.

In doing several web searches, I have found a couple of other references to the term, including a very old black and white photo of a (so they tell us) yellow locomotive which was called The Brain Wagon, but that’s just accidental.

Steve: You’ve said in your podcast several times that Dave Slusher encouraged you to just keep going, to not get discouraged in those early days where many pocasters (writers, bloggers, other creative types) give up. What made the difference for you and how has your understanding of the medium and where you see it going changed since you started?

Mark: Another good friend of mine, Tom Duff, has a passion for experimental music. I often tease him about it: when I walk into his office and he’s playing something obscure, I often tell him that he should check out his CD player, claiming “it’s obviously broken”. But all kidding aside, Tom helps to run Acme Observatory (http://music.acme.com), a series of contemporary music here in Berkeley California. I’ve had a number of conversations with him about it, and have asked him why he works so hard at it, and he replied simply that if he didn’t do it, nobody would, and the kind of music that he thought was interesting would simply disappear. Music to him is something that you participate in, rather than listen to.

That impressed me. It impressed me a lot.

I used to think of computers as nifty toys, something that you could use to help expand your mind by writing programs and exploring esoteric worlds consisting of mathematics or abstract computations. But I was hopelessly shortsighted: the real power of computers is in the world of human communication. Exchanging views with interesting people. Writing, singing, playing musical instruments, exchanging ideas, plans, and goals. Learning and sharing. Those had always been a part of what attracted me to computers, now I recognized them as the primary reason to use a computer.

Of course, at the same time, the world of computers has become dominated by traditional commercial interests. Email seems to be principally the distribution mechanism for spam. Most websites seem to exist solely to sell pornography. The promise of this new communication medium was simply not living up to its potential. So, I asked myself “what can I as an individual do about it?”

I did what Tom does. I simply started trying to do what I wanted to do. If anyone else follows, I’ve done something cool. If nobody else does, I’ve still done what I wanted to do. I’ve made the Internet just a tiny bit more of an interesting place to inhabit. More than that, perhaps my example will encourage other people to express their own interests and knowledge on the web.

Against this backdrop I heard my first podcasts, and it was like a light bulb going off in my head. You see, I love to listen to talk radio, but it also annoys me beyond all belief, largely because it is so often terse and interspersed with commercial messages that preclude you from having any larger thoughts. But podcasting offered another promise: the idea that you could listen to someone who was interested in a topic, that could take as long as they want, and weren’t constrained. Early on, I listened to Dave Slusher and Adam Curry. Later, I expanded into the terrific IT Conversations, Geek News Central and the Linux Link Tech Show. These were shows that treated me as an intelligent, thinking being. That didn’t pander or talk down.

For the most part, these voices were rough. But the roughness of their format didn’t detract from the earnestness of their messages. And I found that very compelling. So, I started to podcast, very near the beginning. My first podcast was recorded September 10th, 2004. I produced a little Windows Media File that showed how I recorded my podcasts, and people liked it. I decided that it was more important that I simply keep doing it, and keep explaining why I was doing it than to expand my efforts into making a huge studio or spending hours doing it. Now I record most of my podcasts just using my PDA on the way to work. Yes, the sound quality isn’t great. I don’t have musical guests or bumper music. I don’t have the radio voice. All I have is a slight deficit in attention and a lot of time spent in front of computers and books. From my best estimates, about 300 people are willing to download the thoughts of somebody like that a couple of times a week. Hopefully half of them actually listen to me, but even if they don’t, I consider the effort useful, if only as a model of what anyone can do. I met Michael Geohagen of Reel Reviews at last years Bloggercon, and he gave me some credit to inspiring him to his vastly better, vastly more interesting podcast. Even if you don’t think my podcast is cool, it served as some inspiration to other, more talented individuals. I take some pride in that.

Looking towards the future, I’m almost dismayed at how “successful” podcasting has become, because as the medium itself becomes more successful, it attracts all of the interests which made traditional media such a wasteland in the first place: advertising, messages which pander to popularity, and a more and more impersonal look at the world. But I try not to let it bug me: I’ll just continue to try to shape my little corner of the world in the way I think it should.

Pixar:

Steve: You mentioned that your raytracing work early on helped get you the job at Pixar. What about it caught the right person’s attention, and how did it come about?

Mark: Well, after I graduated in with a M.S. in Computer Sci from Oregon, I interviewed at a bunch of different places, and finally took a job doing Scientific Visualization work at the Applied Math department at Princeton. I must admit that the job didn’t really work out to be what I wanted it to be: I was hoping to work closely with scientists and trying to help them use scientific visualization tools to aid in their work, but mostly I ended up cutting together video tapes, making pretty pictures, and only occasionally writing interesting bits of code and working with real scientists.

The job did have one major advantage however: I met Pat Hanrahan , who had left Pixar to help setup a computer graphics lab for Princeton’s Computer Science department. I started having occasional lunches with Pat, and would drop in and see what he was up to from time to time. Pat is without a doubt one of the most intelligent and innovative thinkers I’ve met, and I enjoyed our interactions greatly. After a year and a half of Princeton though, I was ready for a change, and began interviewing again. My lunches with Pat (as well as my honest desire and hopefully some of my knowledge) paid off, and I managed to get an interview at Pixar.

In those days, Pixar was still manufacturing computer hardware, namely the Pixar Image Computer. Most people won’t remember these, but they were used heavily in image processing and medical imaging, and Disney also used them to implement CAPS, their computer aided paint system. Still, it was a fairly smallish company (maybe 100 people) when I interviewed.

It was intimidating: I interviewed with Loren Carpenter and Ed Catmull, people I only knew from their work which I admired greatly. My manager would be Mickey Mantle and other group members would be Dan McCoy and Tony Apodaca. They were interested in writing a raytracer which was compatible with RenderMan, and had a prototype which was a good start. They thought I would be a good fit, made me an offer, and I filled 13 boxes with every possession I had and boarded a plane for California.

Mickey met me at the airport, greeted me, and then let me in on some news. Pixar had decided not to continue in the hardware business, and roughly half of the employees were laid off. Through some miracle, they decided to keep me on. It was a stressful first couple of days though: as I was setting up my desk with pencils and staplers, others were loading boxes with their stuff up and hauling them away.

But, I did get my own office.

Steve: How long have you been with Pixar now, and what about it do you find challenging or rewarding or even frustrating?

Mark: I joined in February of 1991.

I think the most rewarding thing about working for Pixar is the uncompromising quest for quality: we simply don’t allow ourselves to put bad work on the screen. Everyone is committed at doing the best job they know how. It’s humbling, to work with so many talented and gifted individuals. It sounds trite, but it’s true.

For a decade, I worked in the RenderMan group at Pixar. I’ve worked with some of the best minds in rendering: people like Tony Apodaca, Larry Gritz, Eric Veach, Craig Kolb, Matt Pharr, Dan McCoy, Don Schreiter, Tom Duff, Tom Lokovic, Julian Fong, Sam Black and Rob Cook. I’m proud to have worked with each of them, and am glad to call some of them my friends. I took great personal pride in the quality of the renderer we put out, and took great satisfaction in the large number of films that used RenderMan, and the large number of awards those films garnered.

But all good things must come to an end: now I’ve moved on to work in production (in other words, I work directly on films, rather than on software tools) which still makes me feel like a fish out of water. The challenges are different: before I was mostly a technical software engineer type weenie, and while those skills still help me, they are insufficient to the large number of tasks that one must perform as a technical director on one of our films. Still, you can teach an old dog new tricks, and I had a blast working on The Incredibles, due in no small measure to the terrific and fun group of people we collected in the Rendering Group.

Steve: What does a technical director do, and what new skills/roles did you learn in the process?

Mark: A technical director (or TD) is basically a person whose job it is to handle nearly everything which isn’t animation in a shot. TDs are responsible for building models, laying out shots, developing effects, lighting, and rendering shots. Most TDs by necessity tend to specialize in a limited subset of the available tasks: superstars can handle a much larger section of the pipeline.

To be a successful TD requires a good grasp of the technology underlying your particular chunk of the production pipeline, flexibility, knowledge of dozens of programs and scripting languages, and ability to communicate well with your group and others. It’s a real jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none proposition.

Except of course sometimes it requires to be a master as well.

My areas of expertise still are in rendering, so I tend to be called upon to optimize shots which are running too slowly (many hours per frame). Sometimes I end up getting to do something more fun: I created the “Dash Super Motion Blur” effect that you see in Incredibles, as well as the star fields you see in the background of some shots. I also worked on developing our pipeline for doing “ambient occlusion”, the soft looking shadows that you can see mostly in some of the early office sequences. My two big sequences were Family Dinner and 100 Mile Dash: I rendered almost all the shots in both of those rather long sequences, and probably helped out significantly on half a dozen other sequences.

I don’t mean to make it sound more grandiose than it is: it takes dozens of TDs (and lots of skilled animators) to take a shot from idea to screen. I’m just a cog in the great creative machine.

Steve: Steve Jobs, everyone’s favorite “mercurial” personality and the Apple/Pixar resident demagogue: does he have an impact on daily life and culture at Pixar or is he more of an unseen “force” in the halls? [Ed: As an Apple geek, I had to ask. Sosumi.]

Mark: I’ve experienced Steve only somewhat tangentially: I tend not to travel in his circle. He’s an inspiring leader, very gifted, a true visionary, and also very firm in his conviction. His success is no accident or lucky convergence.

Links

Brainwagon (RSS and Podcast Feed)