levork.org

I’m sitting on the floor typing this in a nearly empty house. Movers came by yesterday; I ended up with over 70 boxes of stuff, not including the piano and other furniture. Starting the drive to Oakland on Saturday morning with a car load of computers. Mom is along for the trip.

Last minute house repairs, selling of stuff on Amazon/craigslist/eBay, donation of other things and packing have basically taken up all of my time since Christmas. Most of that is over and done with now, so I have a few leisurely days to cancel all my utilities, clean, and fill a few nail holes before I turn the keys over to the realtor. Then I have a sixteen hour drive over the weekend and a lot of unpacking to do. The house goes on sale next week after I’m departed. If you’re a single person or couple looking for a nice starter home in Fabulous Funky Fremont (Center of The Universe!) – and don’t have anything against the color purple – you should talk to me.

Website (and others hosted here) will obviously go down for a few days, but will be back shortly, unlike the several month hiatus of last time. A benefit of moving in with someone who already has connected utilities.

Contractors finished up their work today and here’s the result. (Sorry about the crappy pictures. My camera doesn’t like taking pictures of shiny white surfaces, had to fiddle quite a bit in Photoshop.) Fairly happy with their job. A few corners were cut, the tile offset on the center wall isn’t correct, the toilet rough-in is off (this might be a larger problem) and I didn’t pick a bathtub of sufficient depth; but in the end it’s a heck of an improvement over what used to be here.

Now I get to apply marine paint, seal grout, do some more caulking, figure out how to properly put up cheap wainscot planking, and paint.

Tub and tile surround ripped out today. The water damage wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, even though it looks like some previous owner had indeed tiled directly on top of the plaster and paint – no water proof backing board. Looking closely at the layers of paint it seems the bathroom has not only been white and Pepto-Bismol pink, but also lime green and two or three distinct shades of yellow. Seventy-five year old homes are something else.

On Saturday, Susan and I attended Greg and Agi’s wedding up in Vancouver. While we’re a little tired of weddings (this is our third, and hopefully last this summer), this one was special because I was part of the wedding party in a way: I played cello while the groom’s party and groom walked down the aisle. The music was my adaptation of Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters for two cellos, as alluded to before. It went very well. Yousuf (my cello partner, a coworker of Greg’s, Thai kickboxing champion, lead animator, and otherwise all round cool guy) worked very hard on the music and it showed. Those who were familiar with Metallica – if you’re a friend of Greg, chances are you get familiar with them at some point – obviously thought it was cool. I’m not sure what others in the audience thought about the slightly strange music in minor key, nor did I ask the other musicians (a string quartet who followed up our performance with the bride’s music – that wedding stalwart, Pachelbel canon) what they thought, but I think we gave Metallica’s music the justice it deserved. The rest of the day was the usual wedding festivities, albeit with a Hungarian flavour. Finally got to see Hungarian dance troupes do their thing after years of hearing Greg talk about it. Also it was nice to catch up with Reza, my old roomate from Ottawa from exactly ten years ago. He apparently reads this blog – hi Reza!

In a rare moment of verbal wit, I mentioned to my sister that had I the opportunity to play, and the choice of music during Agi’s entrance, it might have been Iron Maiden’s “Bring your Daughter to the Slaughter”. Maybe next time. I’m not sure if anyone taped the performance, or whether Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield will have a cow if I post a recording, but I’ll see what I can do.

For our work (which included a practice in Vancouver the weekend before, the wedding rehearsal on Friday, and another practice just before the wedding itself – so I’ve been pretty busy with this gig) Greg gave me a cool toy: a replica of Darth Vader’s lightsaber from Master Replicas, complete with glow and sound effects. It now has a place of honour above my TV set, and almost immediately proved useful: it was the closest light emitting object available when a rain and windstorm knocked out power to my house late Sunday night.

Dental hygienists who admit to self-diagnosed OCD are a new kind of scary.

Evidently, I’ve been on blogging hiatus lately, enough to cause Leon to link to a certain other website instead. No real excuse, other than discovering BitTorrent and the availability of shows you can’t get on cable around here, plus way too much video gaming. Briefly, what’s happened in the last few months.

I spent five weeks starting in May living with Susan in Oakland, having managed to swing working out of the Emeryville office for the duration. I actually drove the Integra down there in the span of two days and 800 miles. For those attempting a similar trip, I shall simply state that I-5 through Oregon is extremely boring (I counted 27 pieces of roadkill and listened to many country stations), and that Roseburg is not exactly halfway between Seattle and Oakland. Ashland seems to be a neat place though.

The cohabitation experiment went well, although there are some ignoble traits of my personality that are in dire need of deprogramming. More importantly, I think I’m committing myself to moving down to California in a time frame of six months – at least, I’ve started to tell everyone this, canceled my opera subscription, etc. A very important order of business is to get my bathroom remodelled before then. The first contractor I’ve had in recently quoted me upwards of $20 k, which was a grand scale of ridiculousness for a 5×7 room even without the solid gold fixtures which really weren’t on the plan to begin with.

Beginning of July we took a week off work to attend two weddings. Jeff and Cathy were married in Orange County. We looked in at the Getty museum, then jetted off to Tampa via Dallas and drove to Orlando where we spent three days eating too much and getting theme parked out at Disneyworld. Susan now has hard photographic evidence of what happens when I get near the “it’s a small world” ride – it’s quite disturbing. Then it was back to Tampa for Ben and Laura’s wedding. Hurricane Dennis chose that weekend to come ashore but fortunately gave Tampa a miss, although it did get quite gusty at times.

Shades of my former piano life managed to track me down a couple of weeks ago when I went to see a friend play at the Summer Festival of the Seattle Chamber Music Society. Jonathan and I met when we were both winners at the Canadian Music Competition – that first infamous year when due to budget cutbacks the winners didn’t get to play with orchestra. (Story of my life – it took me years to make it to the CMC finals, let alone past the CMC provincials.) Anyways, I think I was 19 and he was all of about 8 at the time. He’s grown up to be a little musical terror since then, studying piano under Lorraine (my old piano teacher) as well as continuing with violin. Lorraine made the trip down to Seattle to attend the concert, so it was nice to catch up with her after a few years and also watch Jonathan, barely a teenager, tear through utterly difficult piano and violin pieces and encore with two Paganini caprice etudes on the violin.

Work has been various degrees of stress lately. SIGGRAPH is next week (begins for me on Sunday morning), if PRMan is your cup of tea you’ll hear exactly what I’ve been working on for the last two months next Wednesday at the User’s Group Meeting. The news may partially excuse my recent mental state.

Finally, I’ll mention that I saw Fantastic Four yesterday, and now I can’t decide which was worse, that or Daredevil with Ben Affleck. Oddity: I saw two people with Incredibles shirts in the span of two minutes while walking to the theatre, one of whom ended up in the audience. Pixar conspiracy? Anyways, F4 wasn’t as bad as Punisher (the Dolph Lundgren version!), but Dolph at least had camp value. Save your money.

First week of the new year and already had to hit the ground running at work, spent a few hours today writing documentation for the next release just to feel like I’m caught up.

As usual spent Christmas with family in Summerland. The usual holiday relaxation – reading, getting fat on sister’s holiday food, trying to burn it off by hiking with the dogs. For a change this year, we learned to play mahjong. Not that dumb variant on solitaire popularised by a certain popular arcade game, we were playing the real thing – the four player game associated with seedy opium dens, and also that annoying plastic clacking noise which goes on for twelve hours every Sunday from your annoying Chinese neighbors. At some point I shall transcribe my mom’s version of the rules here for future reference. There seems to be a lot of ceremony devoted to randomising the input, and Mom gets clockwise and counter-clockwise easily confused when she teaches, which caused no end of frustration for the kids. It’s surprising that she does this because she has a knack for memorising tiles and figuring out what everyone else is holding, no doubt honed by years of playing bridge. Don’t play any games with her involving patterns of cards, tiles, or dice ‘cuz she’ll kick your ass. Instead you should play with Dorritta, who will try to convince you that 5-6-8 is a continuous sequence of integers and claim she’s not cheating.

It snowed on Christmas Day, but quickly melted. Perfect for travel. (Incidentally, it finally showed in my corner of Seattle last night, but 24 hours later it’s all gone. So much for cancelling work.) Drove back to Seattle after Boxing Day and flew down to spend New Year’s with Susan where we saw a somewhat disappointing Nutcracker at the SF ballet (sug to them: please don’t mess with the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies ever again), toasted the New Year with champagne, pizza, and smores, and painted her bedroom despite my claim that I hated painting. Domesticity will do that to you. Actually I rolled, she trimmed and it went painlessly and quickly.

So far I’m making some progress on a vague New Year’s resolution to improve my health. Based on a physical last year, I know I’m bordering on high blood pressure (I’m not THAT Type A, but it does run in the family), and my eating habits are spotty and my exercising has dropped off pretty significantly. Roz and David’s presents this year were a subtle hint that I really should go back to the climbing wall. This weekend I’ve made a large batch of wontons (from scratch! except I bought the skins, because noone makes those from scratch. I think), and today it was steamed fish and veggies for dinner. How’s that for eating healthy? Now I just need to get less stressed by work and hopefully that diastolic number will drop by 10.

Me, on the bus heading home after dinner with family, ABBA blaring from my shiny new iPod; a man, at the bus stop by Denny Park, wearing a jean jacket with the words “DISCO SUCKS” emblazoned on the back. I’d like to claim that we looked daggers at each other, but he never turned around, and the bus quickly passed him by.

Speaking of iPods, I’ve been toting the 4th generation, 40GB iPod around for a week now. The stability of it seems questionable; it’s locked up quite a few times already. Otherwise I appreciate some of the shiny new features it has over my old first generation iPod, although the overhyped “Shuffle Songs” feature is pretty useless to me – they should have made it “Shuffle current playlist”. And I wonder why after three generations they can put in details such as automatic pause when the earphones gets disconnected, but yet haven’t gotten around to labeling the earphone buds with “R” and “L” in a way that doesn’t get immediately obscured by the foam covers.

SIGGRAPH all of next week.

The car has been insured, passed the smog test (needing only a gas cap replacement, the inspection of which seems to fall under the purview of emissions control), and has been properly transferred to my ownership. I have not hit anything or anybody – other than my narrow driveway, scraping the right side of the car three times to date. I’m so glad I swallowed my pride, took advice, and accepted a beat up car which turned out not to be so beat up after all, because I’d be literally crying over the scrapes if it was a new Z4. As it is now I just shrug. In my defense, the retaining walls begin immediately after the sidewalk, and it’s an awkward right turn on a busy street. Despite the added expenses which just add up, the insane cost of parking downtown, and some jittery nerves which haven’t gone away it’s just so freaking cool to be able to go grocery shopping and stock up on lots of stuff. (Those of you who’ve been driving most of your lives are rolling their eyes at this point. Hey, I still take the bus every day.)

The July 4th weekend was an anniversary with Susan, so naturally we spent it together in the Bay Area. We had dinner at Chez Panisse, which was worth absolutely every penny spent, munched on kettle corn while experiencing the superhero angst that was Spider-Man 2, and watched fireworks at Jack London square in Oakland. I thought the display was mildly disappointing, although I was satisfied somewhat by the exploding happy faces. Anniversary: it’s been one year of dating. I can’t imagine life as a single geek again. If I’m lucky (and I have been, to date) she’ll overlook the serious geekiness (Wow, it’s Doc Connors! The Lizard! I had the first issue of Spectacular Spider-Man with him on the cover! And look, there’s Stan Lee!) and also the current obsession with plums and apples (I have two abundantly bearing fruit trees on my property).

A little bit of overdue maintenance: I’ve decided to switch this blog over to blosxom. The easy part is done already – you can check it out here, it looks almost identical at the moment. Since my current scheme is text based to begin with (albeit one monolithic file), and since Wayne already turned my text to html formatting code into a blosxom plugin (which he unfortunately called “fongination” – I need to have a little chat with him about that – yes, we use blosxom quite extensively at work) it was pretty simple to get this far. I have to rethink some of the permanent link, archive page, and navigation stuff though, and I could probably spruce up the CSS a bit.

I finally got my driver’s license today. Ten years behind the curve, but who’s counting?

The test went well, all things considered. My stress levels weren’t helped by the fact that the car sent by the driving school didn’t have up to date proof of insurance. The drive tester was definitely not happy about that. After faxes were made and things were sorted out (including some confusion as to whether I needed a Vietnamese translator or not), we were off and running around the familiar roundabouts of Greenwood. I scored 90 – she docked two for being too far from the curb during parallel parking and four for hitting the curb while backing around a corner (which, incidentally, seems to be a bit of sadism peculiar to Washington State drive tests as far as I know). What I felt was really unfair was taking off four for attempting to move from a parked position while still in parking gear. I mean, in the end I wasn’t moving, so how unsafe could that have been?

So I have a license, and I even have a car. Jamie gave me his old one, a 1990 Acura Integra GS.

It’s a little beat up in the front due to an incident between Jamie and a van, hence the greatly recessed lights, but it seems to run just fine. Note the fuzzy dice, a fitting and much appreciated gift from Susan. I now need to get proper insurance, take the car to get the oil changed, pass a smog test, and get the title transferred, all within two weeks (the title transfer clock started ticking last Friday when the car was passed to me). Over the course of last week I’ve already slowly worked out the backward dependencies: i.e. that title transfer depends on passing a smog test, and the smog test requires driving the car, which requires insurance, which requires having a valid license, and if any forward dependencies exist in these steps then I will be screwed.

I’ve also discovered that State Farm Insurance isn’t the same thing as Farmer’s, and the insurance agents get huffy when you mix the two up.

Of course, having a car just makes it easier to go to home improvement stores. Mimi visited for the last couple of weeks, and relatives are of course most useful for manual labour, so we made the trek out to the Home Depot four times (twice while I was driving – and yes, there was some unclear insurance status during those trips, so it may not have been such a good idea). In between weeding, bookshelf assembling, spackling of lawn, piano polishing, and general cleaning, we managed to paint the guest bedroom/office “hilltop green”:

It turned out a lot darker than I expected. Here’s where the graphics geek in me emerges, because according to the paint manufacturer hilltop is supposed to be #4a5d52, which according to your browser is this color:                   , and as I sit here staring at the wall and my (badly calibrated) monitor I realise they doesn’t match at all, and neither matches the printed color sample either. I’m not sure what lesson there is to be learned here, other than it would be great if someone came up with light emissive paint in monitor color gamut space? Anyways. I like the result, and in any event it’s a vast improvement on canary yellow with teddybear trim.