As of last weekend, Susan and I are now finally engaged! Here’s the proposal story:

Saturday May 3rd was the fifth year anniversary of our first date - the Finding Nemo wrap party - and I decided that was going to be the big day. I had the diamond since a little before Christmas (hidden in a box of Lego around the house, which was pretty much the last place Susan was going to look), but decided to wait until Susan had finished up on Wall-E before popping the question. Susan and I also hadn’t celebrated that particular anniversary before, so there was also a nice element of surprise to the date. I had the ring set last month, which involved subterfuge (and some fibbing - sorry Susan) on two consecutive weekends. The last step was to work up the courage to call her parents the week before. Mr and Mrs. Fisher were very nice but they also said they were going to pop a prompt congratulatory card in the mail. That card arrived on Monday - talk about not leaving any room for chickening out!

The plan was dinner at Masa’s Restaurant in San Francisco - fancy French food in a romantic setting. This was actually my second choice, but I couldn’t get reservations at Gary Danko. Since I could only get a 9 pm reservation, I decided to also book a room at the attached hotel (the Executive Vintage Court) as driving back across the Bay Bridge late at night didn’t seem like a great end to the occasion.

So, on Friday night I made a nonchalant suggestion of going out for a dinner on Saturday. Impending minor catastrophe: Susan wasn’t keen on a late dinner, and suggested Sunday. When I shrugged, she said something to the effect of “well, at least I now know it wasn’t a proposal dinner”. I am proud that I didn’t give it away right then and there. I did spend part of that night sleepless in bed staring at the ceiling fretting about the weekend plans.

Saturday morning I presented Susan with an anniversary card and strongly suggested that it would be really nice if we could go out for dinner that night, since I’d actually made reservations to celebrate our anniversary. Fortunately this went over much better than the night before. I spent most of the day in Marin at a chamber music workshop with the rest of the piano trio. Got home, got dressed in a jacket and tie (Masa’s is fancy!), and drove into the city with Susan. When we parked at the garage, and handed Susan a pair of tennis shoes, she knew something was up. I’d furtively packed in secret on Friday and Saturday and had left our overnight things in the trunk, remembering almost everything we needed for the hotel. I’d actually planned ahead, even ensuring Kaylee got walked on Sunday morning when we weren’t home.

Dinner was amazing, although when we looked down at our plates at the first course of the tasting menu - I think I had one solitary octopus tentacle on my plate nestled amongst a few greens - we thought, “wow, we might have to fill up on bread today”. (Actually, what we thought was: my mom is right about French food.) However, six delicious courses and three hours later we were actually full! I lacked the courage to propose during dinner, but when we got back to our hotel room, after a few minutes of puttering and working up the nerve, I said “I have one more thing..” and pulled out the ring box from my jacket. I got down on my knees and asked Susan to marry me. Then I handed her the box. Oops. This was apparently the glitch of the evening that we will be talking about at the wedding. I didn’t know about the entire sliding the ring on the finger part of the procedure. Thankfully she teared up and said yes.

That’s the proposal story. Sorry, it was a bit traditional and didn’t involve something crazy like Lego minifigs (not that I didn’t think about it.) We spent the following day in San Francisco shopping for Susan’s Wall-E wrap party dress and dropped off her ring to get sized. She had to live without it for a few days (we did substitute a Lego piece attached to the tension clasp that the diamond came with), but now it’s permanently attached to her finger as she freaks out about planning weddings in Northern California.

Finished taxes: six grand winging its out of my bank account today to pay Uncle Sam plus the Governator. That’s only how much I underpaid my taxes, nowhere close to what I paid for 2007 overall.

It’s book review time. I’m most of the way through a book entitled Where Does the Money Go?: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis, by Scott Bittle and Jean Johnson. The New York Times business section mentioned it a couple of weeks ago. Despite the goofy Schoolhouse Rock cover, it is absolutely a must read. And very relevant right now: not just because it’s tax season, but because it’s an election year. Wondering where most of your federal tax dollars go? Hint: it’s not (yet) defense, and it’s definitely not pork-barrel, or even earmarked spending. For the most part, I avoid discussing politics on this blog because as a nonvoter for both where I live and where I’m from, I really don’t have a say in the matter. However, as a fiscally responsible (and dare I say, conservative) person watching the economy slide into recession due to fiscal irresponsibleness, I’m still keenly interested in what the presidential candidates have to say about money matters. Yes: it’s about the economy, stupid, no matter which party you vote for. How else are we going to fund universal health care? Or if that’s a non-starter for you, fair enough: replace those last three words with “national security”, and it still starts with the budget.

One of the messages I’m getting out of Where Does the Money Go? so far is this: the federal government (and by extension, Americans as a whole) is in deep, deep trouble unless we address Medicare and Social Security spending, and balance the budget. That trouble might be a couple of decades away in the case of Social Security, or looming on the horizon immediately (Medicare). Balancing the budget means reducing the deficit to zero - and not just reducing the deficit by a few billion dollars - because only then will we start making some headway on the debt (which is not the deficit, as Bittle and Johnson make clear). The authors, in a mostly non-partisan style, go into clear and precise detail about worst case scenarios; and better yet, propose common sense, realistic (yet painful) fixes to the budget crisis. Yes, raising taxes is one of them. After reading this book, it’s worthwhile seeing exactly what the current presidential candidates have to say with regard to these issues. As a single example that affects my financial situation: Social Security taxes now cap at about a hundred grand. Removing the cap means more money into Social Security, which may delay the looming SS crisis for a few years. An important point the authors make clear: the government needs much of those SS tax dollars you’re paying now, simply to pay out this year’s benefits to other people: you’re not just funding your own retirement. (This is why simply switching to a privatized, self-directed Social Security is not an answer in itself: you’re not funding the current generation of benefit receivers.) Personally, I think people who make more than the cap (self included) can well afford to continue to pay SS tax on the remainder: seeing as how they were able to live for some first portion of the year where it was automatically deducted from their paychecks. Barack Obama is in favor of removing the cap, while Hilary Clinton is uncommitted (and in fact, she’s been extremely vague on Social Security in general).

It’s only one issue, but when you realise the candidates aren’t very clear about the basic issues as presented in the book, you start realising they’re aren’t very clear about how they’re going to fund other issues they’re campaigning on. And why am I harping on Social Security? Because it’s the biggest chunk of where your federal tax dollars go. Not defense. Not earmarks. Medicare is #3 (defense is #2), but unlike defense it’s mandatory spending, and its costs are skyrocketing.

After you finish your taxes, go buy the book and read it before you vote. There’s a lot more to it than what I covered here.

So there’s that orchestra thing I do, every Wednesday I lug my cello to Cal State East Bay in Hayward, dump fourteen quarters into a parking meter, and practice for a couple of hours. Our spring end of quarter concert is coming up next Wednesday, March 5th. We’re playing Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn, and Gluck’s Overture to Iphigénie en Aulide. 7:30 in the Music Building Recital Hall. Request your ticket online!.

A few comments about orchestra these last two months. Everyone else in the cello section who was around last quarter is gone. I was the sole cellist for the first three practices, then a ringer from the SF symphony and a high school student showed up. Ringer is gone, but I think he’ll be back for the concert. Meanwhile, it’s been me and the student, who is now the principal of the section. Roz probably thinks I’m annoyed at this, but she showed up and, while sight reading, played the music on the spot better than I after having practiced for three weeks, so .. yeah, she deserves to be there, I don’t.

Susan told me that I’m a cocky cellist based on the amount of practicing I’ve been doing (i.e: none). While I’m probably over confident in some areas, piano probably among them, I don’t think that’s true of cello. I feel like I’m slogging uphill, every step of the way. The Brahms Variations with its five flats in some sections proves that I’m still intonation challenged when it comes to any flats. G flat? Forget it. F sharp? Sure, no problem. Yes, I know it’s the same note, but put the G flat next to an A flat and suddenly I’m the guy playing sour notes in the lower strings. The one area I’ve realised some progress on: while I rarely pencil in bowings (there’s that cockiness again..), that’s partially because I can actually come up with sensible bowings on the spot, or at least remember them from week to week. I’m not at the level of deciding how to bow a phrase based on musical merits - don’t ask me how to bow the Bach Suites, please - but at least I understand that bar beginnings and sforzandos should be down bows, certain staccato phrases are probably easier up bow, and that the string sections should be more or less consistent.

Somewhere I picked up the habit of pencilling stars into my music. I wonder who I got THAT from, and how many stars of hers I ignored over the years.

I’ve been neglecting blog lately. Fifty hour work weeks, chamber music activities for the last three weekends (playing piano, not cello, even though two weekends were devoted to cello sonatas), plus family in town and the last thing I’ve been wanting to do is bang out a screed on the keyboard. Nonetheless here’s one to round out the second month of the year.

Screenshots released today of Harley Quinn from Lego Batman: The Videogame, which means this is probably what the actual minifig will look like in a kit released later on this year. I like the head, but I still think my torso design is better.

More screenshots at Shacknews.

On a related note, I love Paul Dini’s current writing on Detective Comics. More Harley and Zatanna (in April)!

The majority of my friends and peers have always been older than I am, so carping about my new status as a trigenarian garners little to no sympathy. I seek solace instead in a poem by one of my favorite authors, Lewis Carroll, from Alice in Wonderland: “Father William”.

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head–
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,
“I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door–
Pray, what is the reason of that?”

“In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his gray locks,
“I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment — one shilling the box –
Allow me to sell you a couple?”

“You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak–
Pray, how did you manage to do it?”

“In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw
Has lasted the rest of my life.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose–
What made you so awfully clever?”

“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”
Said his father; “don’t give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I’ll kick you down-stairs!”

This is a bug fix release.

• When playing a closed game, the plugin no longer uses PHP sessions. This avoids problems with PHP configurations where output buffering is disabled (thus preventing cookies from being set correctly in the plugin) - this would manifest as an inability to post a move in a closed game. Note: this requires the WordPress nonce feature, which was introduced in WordPress 2.0.2.
• When playing a closed game, users with Contributor access or lower (or those without the unfiltered_html capability) no longer corrupt the special div tags in the post after posting a move.
• For closed games, players are now only required to have the Subscriber role. Unlike the previous version of the plugin, this should work in versions of WordPress prior to 2.2.
• Draw offers, acceptance, and refusal should now work as intended.
• A bug which allowed a player to force an opponent to castle in certain circumstances has been fixed.

As usual, here is the Chess By Blog blurb page.

And here’s the download - ChessByBlog-1.0.3.zip, 213 KiB.

Please post any questions or issues in the comments. Happy chess playing!

Picture from my new camera, a Canon EOS 40 DSLR. Especially with the image stabilizing lens, it’s a huge step up in low light quality from my old point and shoot digital; and so much more convenient than film. Especially after my roll of Leica-shot from London came out blank.

This is the first Christmas for us together at home! Our wonderful tree went up the day after Thanksgiving, complete with ornaments I grew up with that were sent down by my family. Happy Holidays!

A bit late, since the official notice went out when I was in London (more on that later when I get film processed), but if you’re free this Thursday evening:

Now excuse me while I scramble to rent a tux.

You did know I was a comic book/Lego geek, yes? ‘Cuz I would hate to have misrepresented myself.

Custom Justice League & Harley Quinn Lego minifigs — click to enlarge

So I may have mentioned a silly Lego minifig customization project a few posts ago. It started out with deciding that the current line of official Batman minifigs sorely needed a Harley Quinn (given that Joker, Poison Ivy and Catwoman were represented) — so I built one. Then in typical fashion it quickly spiralled out of control after surveying the rest of the DC comic book universe. So it’s been a hobby of sorts lately, getting me through the otherwise grim November doldrums. Picture of some of that work above. Batman’s the only stock character; all others designed by yours truly (well, original characters designed by DC, of course).

Construction notes in brief: those are all water-slide decals, drawn in Illustrator, printed on an Epson color inkjet. Other than Harley, I used Lazertran paper — the stuff is expensive, but great to work with, for one simple reason: on the same decal, you can choose areas to have either transparent or white backgrounds simply by choice of painting with water or oil varnish. (Why care? Inkjets generally can’t print white, relying on the color of the paper instead, and if you’re trying to keep most of the decal transparent, not being able to print white is a huge issue. Plus areas with white background also end up more opaque, so they keep the color truer if you’re sticking on a colored torso. Case in point: Superman’s chest shield would be green — yellow on top of blue — if I hadn’t painted that area with water varnish.) I was still figuring out techniques on Harley, so she ended up with Krylon Fusion paint under decals printed on cheaper (and much inferior) paper, and tiny amounts of Sculpey on parts of the hat. The bow and hammer came from BrickForge. I’ll be happy to answer any questions in comments.

Update: I’ve finished a few more characters, and started a photoset for them on Flickr.

5.6 on the Richter scale according to the USGS report. The biggest one I’ve ever experienced yet. We could feel the entire house shake for upwards of twenty seconds before it subsided - no obvious damage, fortunately, but I’ll have to check the plaster for more cracks in the morning. And right now it’s the top headline on CNN. Woo, earthquake country!

Update: quake may have “heightened the possibility of more quakes farther north along the much more dangerous Hayward Fault”. Aw, crap. (That’s the one closest to our house.)