[iamelgringo]

I lived in LA for 2 years, and attended meetings for the LA chapter of ACM Siggraph. They really have some kick ass presentations in graphics. When I was there, pretty much every month, there were VFX supervisors talking about the effects done on a movie that was just released.

It's a great resource if you want to learn about graphics, and cutting edge parallel processing environments (huge render farms). There's a lot of great graphics/CS work that's done in LA. If that's the route you're interested in going in, it's a great option.

It was those meetings + Hackers and Painters that got me to switch from being a design/animation geek to studying software engineering.