You know you've been in graphics too long if...

"Terrence, Believe it or not I'm the original author of this now infamous list on computer graphics. I was working at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Cntre when I wrote it way back in 1992 or so. Its amazing that of all the things I did in my life, this seems to have lasted longest!"

Chris Thornborrow (ex-graphics guru) kronowicz@onet.pl

- Most of your friends can pronounce Gouraud first time. - When you fist heard that some people used 16 million colours you wondered whatever for and continued to write colour-map tables for correct highlights on objects. - You remember comp.graphics when there weren't enough articles for you to read, none of them included the word PC and nobody ever asked the difference between raytracing and rendering. - You insist that DOOM does not use raycasting. (Technically, as it was first introduced, and anyway, who plays games at your age?) - Your partner knows the difference between scientific visualisation and photorealistic rendering, even though they wouldn't know a polygon from a camel. - You think an SGI Indy is OK for a quick hack but not a real graphics machine. - You remember discussing how one day there would be graphics hardware to support rendering in desktop machines and people laughed. - You watched the Last Starfighter in an empty theatre and marvelled thinking it was even better than TRON. - You remember thinking that parallel computers would solve your graphics problems. - You remember when you thought X was a high level graphics language. - You get drunk and suddenly get really excited examining the light reflected through the whisky. - You get despondent while walking in the woods and think "I'll never be able to render this in real time." - You once sat up all night watching your home computer calculate the mandlebrot set with 16 colours and a resolution of 200x200. - Your address book has email entries for Benoit, James F, and Prof David R and Eric. - You think being a computer geek is only half way there. - You wonder how nature processes all those photons so quickly. - When people mention the word graphics you really insist they are more accurate in their terminology. - You get irritated by people who say, "Oh, graphics, that's a solved problem" (even if they then go on to be precise about what they mean by the term "graphics"). - You own one or more of the following: a glass sphere or a prism, more then two copies of Foley and Van Dam, a computer which cost more than your car, a computer which cost more than your house, a pet named Phong, a graphics board from a defunct supercomputer (properly framed) or a Rubics Cube (original). - You get 75% of the above. Please submit your own!

Just email me: Terrence "Tman" Masson, at tman@visualfx.com