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Life has been eventful; this blog has not reflected that. Random noteworthy happenings from the last few months:

High school friends visited for a Sonics game a couple of months ago, and I was dragged out to the golf course for the first time in my life. On a beautiful Saturday morning, I shot 68 – albeit on a short 9 hole course. The one shot I managed which actually had any loft to it was ironically out of a bunker; picture perfect, with barely any sand flying. Otherwise it was a lot of ugly short hacks, but it was still fun – I feel like some time spent at the driving range might be in my future.

Two good friends from university got engaged. It’s spring, and matrimony is in the air.. anyways, congratulations Greg and Agi, and Jeff and Cathy!

Susan introduced me to horse back riding a couple of visits ago. I remain convinced that I radiate an aura that broadcasts loudly: “here is a man uncomfortable with animals larger than a cat”. My horse – a resident of the Sea Horse Ranch – completely ignored the annoying human on his back, and proceeded straight for the hay bales or pawed his hoof in the tall grass rather than trot along the trails. We were forced to get a guide, whom the horses obviously respected; and it was fine after that.

Speaking of transportation modes: after the first two awkward sessions (where I had difficulty with turning radii), driving lessons have been surprisingly smooth. I’ve had four and a half lessons and will be hopefully passing the test soon, and that will draw to a close a ten year era of forced transit and mooching of car rides. Apparently, this will be disappointing to some; not at all to me, especially with the renovations I’d like to start soon, the climbing and taekwondo that I’d like to get back into, and the general frustration I have with wasting so much time waiting for the bus on weekends.

I spent last week in London, mainly to talk shop with customers. After three days interacting with the UK studios (who, by the way, do excellent work – go watch Troy or Harry Potter 3 for evidence of that), I had just one day to myself which was spent in Westminster Abbey, the Victoria and Albert, and the Tate Modern museums. I’d been to London, when I was twelve and still in orchestra; we dropped into London for a couple of days after three weeks in and around Bath, Wales, so I’d already been to some of the landmarks in England as well as the British Museum. Lasting impressions? Well, London has the greatest museums on the planet, a pretty good subway system, real CG production jobs, and friendly people (as evidenced by an animated chat with the ex-CEO of Scottish & Newcastle who was sitting next to me on the Heathrow Express) – but the sheer population in the city and the cost of living is just astronomical, even by Bay Area standards. No, I don’t think I could live there.

Susan bought a house!

Finally, PRMan 12.0 was announced today. Yep, work was computational geometry and data structures for a very long time. If you have any questions about Loop subdivision surfaces.. well, at the very least I know what papers to point you at.

Sombre anniversary. Anvil Island was eleven years ago today.

Here’s why I should screen my calls more: because when I pick up the phone, it’s a very nice lady from Seattle Opera, who for ten breathless minutes tells me about how her foundation has brought opera singers to high schools, and how student opera clubs spontaneously start, and it’s such a pleasure to make a difference, and by this point she knows she’s got me guilt tripping since I haven’t hung up yet, so now how about a donation? And my pathetic attempts to make excuses about tax bills are swept aside, and before you know it I’ve just pledged money to be paid in June. I am such a sap.

Paintball tomorrow. Sometimes you just need to unwind in dramatic fashion. I hope this doesn’t scare anyone, however it’s been one of those weeks where the right half of the brain just shuts down and the left takes over, and boy do we already know just how left brained I am, so what do we get as a result? Hyper-efficient robotic coding by day, utter torpor and lassitude by night. At least subdivs are done with, for now.

The house guests who came during the early part of the month for the Northwest Garden Show decided to make my house a miniature gardening and interior decoration project. As indirect and direct results of their visit, I’ve learned how to make thin crust pizzas, install insulation, prune fruit trees, and how to coordinate area rugs with walls. My slacker bachelor existence is in jeopardy, I think. We also discovered that Ikea makes their most promising furniture from repurposed kitchen cabinets and custom sawn counter tops. Think the one nice looking floor model that isn’t made of particle board is representative of a standard boxed take-and-assemble kit? Think again.

The birthday came and went. I’m 26 now, which means it’s a slow steady slide until I’m 30 and I lose all my hair. Susan came up during that weekend to make the birthday much more bearable. After Susan’s travel nightmare with Alaska Airlines, we still made it in time to an early Valentine’s dinner at Le Gourmand, and finished with a ride home from Cab Elvis, which was memorable. It’s too bad we both somehow forgot about the holiday that was President’s day.

Work continues in its current vein: busy. I’m proud though that we did just win the best animated film Oscar. Yeah, I have credit on an Oscar winning film! Woo! Too bad our short “Boundin’” didn’t make it. Yes, it’s a Pixar short, and no, you’ll have to wait til November to see it when it’ll be attached to the Incredibles. Although I still haven’t seen Boundin’ myself (drawback of working up here), I believe it was the first bit of footage by us that showed off our kickass PRMan raytracing technology.

There, that’s my entry for February – didn’t let the leap day go to waste. March should be a more happenin’ month.

I spent too much time during the holidays travelling (by train, plane, and bus), but it was good spending time with friends, family, and girlfriend. I: bowled for the first time (and found myself surprisingly good at it); caught up on gossip about fellow high school classmates (the ones who aren’t in jail – not kidding, by the way); watched an exciting hockey game (a come from behind effort for the Canucks to tie with the L.A Kings); received great presents; and found out just how hard it is to take apart an artificial Christmas tree.

It snowed nearly five inches yesterday. Driving was a gamble for the locals, especially for those silly enough to brave the hills of downtown Seattle without snow tires or chains. During the two hour trip home yesterday I passed at least four abandoned buses, half of them at funny angles blocking medians, or intersecting trees or other vehicles. Today it’s rained steadily and the snow seems to be washing away. So that ends the freakish weather for the season.

It’s a new year, and it’s time for resolutions. Examining last year’s, I realise the only resolution I actually fulfilled was buying a house. I didn’t even come close on most of the others. The number of Chinese characters I learned can be counted on my fingers (I remember “guo” – “fruit”. Why? It’s a box on top of a tree.) I can barely manage 5.10a climbs right now, haven’t been to the gym in months. I am still sullen (if not outright grumpy) on occasion, and even more of a hermit than I was a year ago. I did manage some chamber music during the summer but did absolutely nothing in terms of taekwondo or tutoring.

So with last year’s performance in mind, here’s this year’s somewhat more realistic resolutions, with more commentary:

• Learn to drive (and get a car). After moving to Fremont I’ve felt hampered by not having a car. The local grocery situation is lame (expensive organic food), and going to the climbing gym (or anywhere for that matter) is awkward; the local bus schedules suck. Getting a car will just make life easier and is way overdue, even if it feels like I’m somehow giving up a cool idiosyncrasy (“I don’t drive because my karma is better for it.”)
• Become a volunteer tutor. Same as last year. I need to do something useful for society (and no, my job doesn’t qualify). I thought I’d actually do it after moving to Fremont, but the closest school is B.F. Day Elementary, and I’d prefer tutoring middle or high school.
• Get the piano tuned and practice on it. The piano hasn’t been tuned or overhauled since I left Vancouver. This is horrible neglect and abuse for an expensive instrument, especially since I had it moved over a long distance twice. As for practice, I can feel my piano skills slipping away.
• Climb (top roped) at least 5.10a reliably by April, and be able to lead 5.8. I actually feel confident about the toproped part (since I was doing that pretty well last summer), but I need to learn lead belaying and climbing as well. The deadline is imposed by Roz’s plan to do outdoor sport climbs in Joshua Tree during spring break, and based on last year’s experience in Red Rock, top rope anchors are far and few in between.
• Blog better and more often. Looking over last year’s entries, I notice I’ve just reported on life, and have offered far fewer opinions or rants than in years past (okay, the geekiness has also dropped significantly, but this may not be such a good thing either). This has contributed to a drop in perceived amusement value for readers which should be rectified.

Last year’s resolutions are still noble, but hey, that was so last year. Let’s see how I manage with these.

Goodbye Squeak. You’ll be dearly missed. I’m sure Morley and Meggy and all the other Fong cats are already waiting for you in a place where mice scamper through endless apple orchards filled with perpetual sunshine.

Despite the blissful respite from gloom afforded by the visiting girlfriend this last weekend, I face reality – November is here. I seem to whine about this every year. I don’t think it’s seasonal affective disorder; I just hate the shift from daylight saving time back to normal time, and suddenly finding myself having to trudge home in the cold wet darkness after work. Am I turning into a sun worshipper?

Earlier in the month I had a small hernia scare – almost couldn’t sit down for a good hour and then dull pain in the upper thigh which lasted through a weekend. Saw a GP about it; first time in years I’d been to one. She referred me to a specialist, who told me in all likelihood it wasn’t a hernia, more likely some mysterious muscle tear and that it’d go away in a month. So far it hasn’t completely gone, but it’s better.

That was followed up by the plumbing emergency. After the heaviest recorded rainfall in Seattle history, my sewer line backed up due to tree roots, causing seepage in my basement. Fortunately it wasn’t a catastrophe, and was solved with a quick call to Roto Rooter, a root cutting machine, and some magical powder flushed down the pipe; but water did crawl through my basement, ruining around twenty of the tiles in the piano room, and leaving a foul-smelling mess of soaked insulation behind that I have yet to fully clean up. As this seems to be a recurring problem, I may eventually have to kill some trees on the property, or worse yet dig up the sewer pipe (which is of course underneath the wall of ornamental rock in the front). And of course there is now some mysterious leak in the bathroom which I suspect is due to cracks in the wall of tile which will ultimately need to be replaced.

Housing is sometimes overrated.

We moved offices to Smith Tower. I was grumpy about the move at first (I pushed for suites with individual offices – sometimes I really just want to close a door and geek out uninterrupted, heavy metal in the background), but I’ve adjusted to it now – I’m in the corner farthest away from everybody else, away from the windows, and I get work done same as ever. It’s very nice to have daily cleaning service as opposed to, well, no cleaning service whatsoever – no more dust bunnies on the verge of intelligence! Unfortunately we’ve traded hardwood floors for carpets with a dizzying pattern, and the neighbourhood isn’t great; we’re a few blocks away from the scarier denizens of Pioneer Square.

For some reason, I have accumulated a todo list a mile long, work and personal and otherwise, and I find myself paralyzed trying to figure out what I should be doing next. House maintenance of all sorts. Thinking about getting that driver’s license. Reading I should be doing. Volunteering I keep putting off. Recreation and exercise. Blogging more often. Argh! At least I did buy a lot of candy tonight to hand out tomorrow. First time I’ve been able to do that in more than a decade – the last Hallowe’en was tragically cut short by the explosion of stink bombs at the grocery store.

Despite being a procrastinator in everything else though, I did manage to add a RSS feed to this blog tonight – proving once again that I’d rather be a geek than be productive.

Susan came up last Thursday and visited over the long weekend, which was very nice. We went to Bumbershoot on Saturday where we saw a lot of people (many of whom were dancing energetically to their own beat), a couple of buskers, some pretty slick break dancing, and the Dusty 45s. On Sunday we took the water taxi over to West Seattle for the walk to Alki beach. The 2.5 mile stretch leading to the beach felt a lot like being back along the boardwalks in Southern California. It was perfect beach weather, surprising for the Northwest in September, and the first time I’ve been to a beach after moving here. It was great to just lie there basking in the sun and read. Afterwards, I tried to create the traditional Labour Day barbecue followed by apple pie and instead made a minor disaster of things (broken dishes, raw corn, bad pie crust). In spite of that it was still an excellent weekend.

It turns out my picture did get published! No scan of it yet, but I’m sitting behind the monitor with the usual glazed expression. Only the “lica” in “Metallica” showed up, but on the other hand you can just about make out the 15 Lego skeletons on top of the monitor prostrating themselves in my general direction.

Since Eurographics 2003 is this week, I can finally put our raytracing paper online – check out the addition to the output section. Woohoo, I finally have an author credit in my field! Note that Per actually did all the work on the paper, but I’m still happy to be the Al in “et al”.

I flew up to Penticton last Wednesday and spent two days up in Summerland last week checking up on Mom. It did turn out to be a triple fracture in her femur. Surgery was apparently fine and she was probably good to go on Wednesday, but due to low O2 levels in her blood, they kept her on oxygen for a couple of days. She was glad to check out on Friday morning, especially after reaching her limit of burnt toast and soggy sandwiches. She’s now comfortable in the downstairs bedroom at Rosalind’s place, reading the Harry Potter books, watching terrible martial arts movies (courtesy of me, of course) and promising to stay out of further trouble.

Flew back to Vancouver on Friday afternoon. That evening turned into a scheduling disaster for the intended night out with friends, so Mimi and I went out to CinCin on Robson for a late dinner instead. My eyes rolled repeatedly over the discussion of feminist modernist literature, and her proposed Phd thesis topic (which involved the words “aliens”, “race”, and “diaspora”). And I’ve decided CinCin is really overrated; still looking for that decent, nonpretentious restaurant in Vancouver.

Went for lunch on Saturday with Manh to Joe Fortes where over brunch he decided we could distill our personalities into a single word – apparently I’m a spaz. I swear I’m only that way when greatly provoked (ie by him).

Jeff bought a house!

Other than my paranoia about developing Lyme disease, little else going on. I’m sitting at work blogging this since our internal network connection is dead, and I can’t get much else done – even though SIGGRAPH in San Diego looms ahead.

My mom is in the hospital in Penticton this evening with a spiral fracture in her leg. Apparently she fell off a three step ladder while picking cherries. She’s now on morphine, and will have surgery tomorrow to set metal pins in her femur (or tibia? not sure which one broke). Fortunately both sisters are up in Summerland to help see her through.

I am both relieved that it wasn’t anything more serious (i.e breaking her hip), but also somewhat annoyed (and somewhat ashamed to be so). The last time she was in the hospital was around five years ago, for a bone chip out of her elbow incurred in a fall while getting off the bus, and I’ve been harping at her since then to get more calcium in her diet – she doesn’t drink milk, and is terrible about supplements.

She’ll be on crutches for a while and will need physical therapy after this; hopefully she’ll now be inclined to take better care of those brittle bones of hers. (And I feel terrible for adopting this “I told you so” attitude, but I did see this coming.)

Flew down to the Bay Area again last Thursday and spent the holiday weekend. Partly this was about Sam’s wedding, as well as spending a half day at Pixar. The wedding took place on Friday (the 4th) in Fairfax, just over the Golden Gate bridge in Marin. It was very Californian – no nudity (two coworkers here separately and automatically jumped to that conclusion), just eclectic, with Jewish, Zen, Buddhist, and modern influences, accompanied by gamelan instrumentalists, and taking place in perfect weather in a redwood grove. The bridge and groom exchanged their own vows as well as those contributed by guests. It was a simple, yet moving ceremony.

The half day at Pixar and the wedding itself gave me opportunity to catch up with people I haven’t really talked to since I left California last March, especially since the wrap party didn’t provide much opportunity to chat.

The rest of the time was spent hanging around San Francisco with Susan, on an extended date. We admitted the attraction a few weeks ago and decided to spend time together over the weekend. Yes, for once, I’m being up front about it; I have finally recovered from the mental scarring due to the infamous Breath Mint Incident in high school. With gossipy friends who seem to be frequenting this blog more often than usual, I’m not sure there’s much point being reticent. Anyways, I think things went really well: the initial awkwardness which I thought would last all weekend faded quickly. Whether sitting on the (very cold and foggy) beach near Seal Rocks, or wandering through the lately reopened Asian Art Museum, or driving around lost (my fault), I found myself appreciating and enjoying the company, feeling blissfully happy, and somehow forgetting to be nervous, stressed or just plain weird. Even the mental case at the Krispy Kreme or nearly losing the luggage at Seatac on the way back couldn’t put a dent on the best weekend I’ve had in a long while.

In typical fashion, I can’t help but be worried about where this is going, and have already embarrassed myself badly today by displaying signs of thinking too hard about it. However, I’ve been very risk adverse all my life in the relationship aspect and am willing to try to break my ways; surprising as this may be to myself and to others who are resigned to my hermitdom. One of Sam’s vows involved mountain climbing and the implication the journey was more important than the view at the top. There is some lesson there I can probably use, although the metaphor has been ruined in other ways..