The trip was fun. The highlight was of course the two and a half days of climbing at Red Rock. Alas, we didn’t experience a variety of climbs - when we got there we found the majority of the intermediate routes (5.9, 5.10a) were lead-only routes with bolts at least 15 feet apart, requiring protection in between the routes if you were nervous. Neither David nor Rosalind wanted to chance leading them, and the few lead routes which were less intimidating were in very crowded areas (i.e. the Magic Bus, the Black Corridor, and the Gallery areas were swarming with college kids). In the end we ended up close to the parking lot at the Sandstone Quarry pulloff for the majority of the time, climbing in a

I am climbing in Red Rock and hiking in Zion or Joshua Tree over the next week. If nothing is heard from me ever again, it’s because I’ve fallen off a multipitch route while trying to rappel for the first time ever.

If that happens maybe some glamorous CSI person in Vegas will try to make sense of a helmeted skeleton lying next to some frayed nylon rope at the bottom of a rockface.

Well, actually they never seem to go after the trivially easy cases on that show..

During climbing on Sunday I was hauled up a 5.10b, then attempted four clean 5.10a routes in a row (topping out on two, almost finishing the other two). Finished up on a 5.9. Then ached for two solid days. But it was a good ache.

Met Jan the realtor today. Things went well, although I am depressed to learn I will probably be looking at a townhouse or condo sort of dwelling. We will go looking at them on Saturday.

Work is going pretty well. When not distracted by bugs or other people’s projects (unfortunately this happens a lot) I have been making solid progress on improving PRMan’s occlusion buffer (this should have tangible performance benefits). There will be other cool projects over the next few months to keep me occupied.

Too bad the ugly credits issue has arisen again. The first draft of Nemo’s was posted without our names on it. They’ll apparently rectify the situation, but it is annoying that we have to specifically point this out to the Powers That Be. I don’t want to claim that my personal contribution as it directly relates to the movie is at all comparable to any animator or TD on staff, because frankly, it isn’t. I can’t point at any pixel and say “hey, I helped draw that”. Hell, I’ve barely seen any finished pixels or reels for that matter. On the other hand, I (and everyone else in Seattle) have had large or exclusive roles in improving and maintaining a significant chunk of software being used by the studio (and yes, this doesn’t just include PRMan, all of RAT is used now). Even more so now than in previous productions.

I just passed my fourth anniversary of starting work at Pixar. Ultimately it would be nice after that long to finally be able to point at a screen and say, “Hey, there goes my name. See, I really do work there. I don’t just fill coffee cups.”

I’ll stop carping. My birthday is coming up. Please feel free to buy me loot.

Yeah, that’s all I do - haul ass without any style. More pictures from last week in Skaha.

I’ve still been somewhat in crunch mode for software release over the last week. This is not all bad, because most of the work been interesting, but it also meant I was at the office Saturday and was pretty busy all of last week. So it’ll be just two observations today, both related to climbing. And for those of you sick of my enthusiasm about climbing, note that the other thing I’ve been enthustiastic about recently has been multivariate calculus, so I could be writing about that instead. (I mean, I finally get it! It only took me seven bloody years! I was going through the drudgery from that damned blue Adams book this weekend - Thompson and UBC classmates will undoubtably know exactly which cursed series of tomes I’m talking about - and it finally gelled! So I had no excuse for flunking out of honours math! Okay, I’ll shut up now.)

So, first observation: in some ways, I’m a lot stronger than I thought I was. I rigged up a temporary chin up bar yesterday and was astonished to find myself being able to do over twenty consecutive pull ups. The last time I remember attempting a pull up, I was seventeen, I was in a gym at the Rideau Centre in Ottawa, and I couldn’t do a single one. It’s kind of heartening to find out I must be doing something right.

Second observation: when it comes to climbing, strength alone isn’t enough. I went climbing last Monday and Wednesday and was pretty abysmal. Basically I was trying to power my way up the wall with my arms, and this is really not a good thing if you want to last more than two climbs. Yesterday, after getting a haircut in Berkeley, I picked up a book at Borders (The Complete Rock Climber, Malcolm Creasey), and learned a few techniques which I applied at the wall today which made an enormous difference - scaled three 5.7’s in a row without breaking a sweat, had no problems getting through the night. That was pretty cool.

Been a while, for which I can blame being busy with work, having some computer downtime, and find other more recreational things to do.

Work for the last couple of weeks has mainly been dealing with the pending software release. That’s really it in a nutshell, but as they say the devil’s in the details. Over the last two weeks I’ve ended up writing a lot of documentation, thinking about software installation details, writing and running regression tests, and finally today setting up some cgi-bin scripts to control who really gets to download the software. Hopefully we can get this damn thing out the door tomorrow.

Computer downtime was started about two weeks ago, when I finally concluded the mysterious crashes of my Win2K box was due to CPU overheating. While addressing that problem I decided I’d better upgrade some hardware and operating systems - hence the downtime last weekend, in case anyone noticed.

As far as recreation goes, on Wednesday I finally found myself a climbing partner via Ironwork’s online message board, and so on Friday, I went climbing for real for the first time. Kristin and I got along well enough, and despite some initial concern about my being an utter novice, it turns out we have nearly commensurate ability. So it looks like I’ll have a climbing partner for the next while, or at least until we both “get off the ground” (her words). Tonight I spent another hour climbing, got my permanent belay card, and finally managed to complete one 5.7 route. I was quite pleased with that, although relative to the other routes, this isn’t much - the Ironworks is a pretty spartan place for a newbie climber. Besides a couple of kiddie routes (mislabeled 5.10 as pointed out by Kristin, much to my chagrin on the first day when I charged up them gleefully), there is one 5.3, one 5.5, and maybe three or four 5.7 routes at the place. (No idea what these numbers are referring to? Check out the Yosemite Decimal System.)

Haven’t really been to TKD practice - turned my left ankle badly couple of weeks ago, but that really has been just a lame excuse since unlike my other ankle twisting, I was mostly fine by the next day.

The other recreation aspect is that I’ve been spending too much time on my current video game addiction. I’m glad my only PS2 game purchase so far has been Gran Turismo 3, because it’s just way cool - and this is coming from someone who generally thinks that cars and car-related games suck. The driving engine is both hard enough to be challenging, yet not completely impossible for driving challenged folks like me. The car collecting and upgrading aspect is pretty mindnumbing - just think Pokémon: “Mazda Miata, I choose you!” or “Mitsubishi Lancer has evolved to Turbo Level 4!”. And the brain dead AI and non-existent collision damage leads to some fun tricks - ie scraping up against another car on the outside lane in order to make a corner faster.