levork.org

The apocalypse can’t be far off, since my mom just sent me her first ever piece of e-mail. (I can already picture her saying “Bad son!” if she ever reads the previous sentence.) Anyways, here it is:

This is a screen shot because I’m lame and can’t figure out how to save Chinese characters to a HTML file in a way that displays correctly. (Unicode? Big5 Encoding? UTF-8? WTF?)

Of the ten distinct characters there I know 7. This is a completely misleading indication of my familiarity with written Chinese, because two of those make up my name, two are pronouns, one (repeated twice) is my sister’s nickname, and the last two in combination with a pronoun make up a standard greeting. In particular, I’m missing all the verbs in the second sentence. Verbs are highly useful for comprehension. Mimi me. Is this a desperate cry for help from Mom’s part? Has my sister finally snapped and done something drastic?

(Okay, I’m being a dork: my mom helpfully appended an English translation. Bleh.)

Drafting a reply will not be fun, judging by the last time I played around with Chinese input methods (when I was back home setting up her computer). I just need to remember the most important thing: after I enter the Romanized pinyin “ma” on the (thankfully multilingual friendly) Mac, of the pictographs presented, “mother” will be more complicated than “horse”. I think.

I’m not sure what I hate more – business presentations, or business presentation software.

Threw out part of my wardrobe and went on a clothes shopping expedition today – decided I should look more hip than rumpled at SIGGRAPH. Found some nice Gramicci duds at REI and a pair of Ecco shoes at Nordstrom. Couldn’t find what I really wanted though – an Ozzy Osbourne shirt – although it’s probably just as well that I didn’t, given the city I’m going to.

So I’m gone for San Antonio tomorrow – back in a week! If you’re there, try looking for me at the Pixar booth.

July 4 was fun – spent the morning making a pumpkin cheesecake which was then taken to a barbecue party on Jamie’s houseboat. Food was good, the cheesecake was very well received, someone fell into the lake, and the fireworks over Gasworks Park were spectacular – there were even happy face explosions that I’d never seen before.

Last weekend’s activities included a session at the rock climbing gym which will be repeated tomorrow; looks like I have a climbing partner for regular excursions. This will be good since I’m planning on climbing Skaha bluffs with Rosalind and David the first week of August.

A large part of Sunday was spent installing an internal lighting kit from Triton Labs into my

On Sunday, Rosalind and I ended up watching “World’s Most Dangerous Police Videos” on TLC. The last segment featured the 11 hour standoff which took place in April 1997 between a katana wielding nutcase, and a bunch of police right in the heart of downtown Seattle – in fact, just a couple of blocks away from our office over at 2nd and Pike. The footage of the guy showed him shrugging off attempts at subdual via beanbag grenades and tear gas, with the whole thing ending only after he got hosed down with multiple jets from water cannons.

Coincidentally (really!), I went to my first kendo class on Monday. It was great, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the classes this summer – but afterwards, I ended up having to carry a newly acquired, difficult to conceal, wooden bokken on the bus – and then walked with it through the length of downtown Seattle on the way home. I like to think the passerby gave me a wider berth than usual.

I told Jamie the next day I was well on the way to being the next wacko to try my luck with the local police. His response: “Well, I think someone’s already done it since then, but this time, he got shot immediately – I think the police here is displaying less patience for that sort of thing nowadays.”

Having just spent a very bland weekend in Vancouver, I’m starting to really appreciate the potential entertainment value of living here. (And since my green card application was finally approved last week, I guess I’ll be sticking around to enjoy it for a while yet.)

I woke up Sunday with a splitting headache which lasted all morning. This was unusual: I never get headaches. Since then I’ve had a couple episodes of throbbing temples, and brief spells of dizziness – and I’ve decided to blame work-related stress. Despite what I said in the last entry, the reality is we’re still under a fairly aggressive deadline – and serious mind bending problems just keep getting added to my plate. I suppose then that it’s a good thing that I’m hopping the bus to Vancouver for the weekend and getting away from having to think about work for at least a couple of days.

Did I mention that I now have to give a short presentation at SIGGRAPH – in front of several hundred people? Argh.

There’s other reasons to head north – Mimi’s coming back from Kingston next week (she’ll be starting her PhD at Simon Fraser in the fall) and so now is a good time to loot the apartment she shares with Mom before her 20 boxes of books show up and hide anything that I might have claim to. And since Rosalind already planned a trip down here (Monday off for her – Canada Day – so she wants to see Chihuly glass sculptures in Tacoma) I can grab a ride back with her on Sunday.

In the long term though, I still need to do something about the stress. Since I still haven’t yet found a taekwondo gym here, perhaps whacking people with sticks might be the next best thing. Comments, anyone?

My first ever auction on eBay – I’m selling my PlayStation.

The Mystery of Britney Spears’ Breasts. Don’t try denying that you’ve wondered.

Two Fridays ago, Tom and I took pictures of the elevator to nowhere.

Seattle blurb tomorrow.

Je suis en vacances. Joyeux Noël!

Got through work today without having a meltdown, though it was a close shave a few times. I was glad to bail out at 5, and headed out to SF for a bit of productive last minute Christmas shopping.

After a couple of telephone calls, it has somehow been arranged that my mom’s friend’s son Mike will pick me up tomorrow morning at 5 am, saving me an expensive taxi ride to the airport. Bless him.

10:30 PM: It is raining outside, and I’m feeling petty, and cooped up, and irritated, and frustrated, and dehydrated, and I feel like venting. And I’m not really sure why, or what I have to vent about.

(And for some reason, I’m fucking itchy all over, dammit.)

I notice from the logs that Jeff’s just read the previous version of this entry. It was a short blurb about a compiler bug and pointing out some interesting google referrals, and he’s the only person who’s read it before I deleted it since I felt the need to incoherently ramble instead.

I’m pretty ambivalent about moving to Seattle. I’m going because I know the job awaiting there will be more interesting than what I’m doing now. Other than that, I don’t seem to be excited about it, or joyous, nor am I sad to be leaving here. I just don’t have any strong emotion one way or the other.

Come to think of it: when was the last time I felt any sort of strong emotion? Where’s my passion about things? When was the last time I felt passionate about anything? Anyone? Any cause? Any war? Any belief?

I seem to progress from one level of moderate irritation to another. Getting angry over a stupid compiler bug today and banging the desk a few times was the emotional highlight of the week. The rest of the time I lurch from mild irrational paranoia over company politics, to mild uncomfort over my social retardedness. Emphasis on mild.

I’m really good at being negative about things though. Not that I actually feel that way. It’s just what I seem to be good at: finding flaws. Picking holes. Maybe that’s why I’m a good debugger. Ha ha.

Why do I not feel any strong ties to the East Bay? Or to anyone in the East Bay? I’ve been here for three years already!

I’ve been escaping reality. Reading a lot more web comics lately. And instead of taking joy in other people’s work, I feel jealous of their obvious talent in telling stories through drawing, and I get more and more annoyed about my lack of creativity. Why am I not doing something about it? Is what I’m doing truly not creative in its own way? Should I explore some other outlets for that sort of thing?

I feel sour. Not bitter. Not crusty. Tangy? Tart? (Why are some food-related adjectives useful for describing emotions, but others aren’t?)

Why don’t I feel alive?

11:00 PM: Great: a set of spinning color cubes just told me that I’m stressed out. Maybe they’ve got a point.

Two notable things happened today.

First: I made it official with the boss. I’m Seattle bound in the new year. Anyone in Seattle with leads on a cheap apartment, preferably downtown, with neighbours that won’t mind the occasional burst of piano music – let me know.

Second: my climbing partner nearly got injured when didn’t she tie in correctly (she hitched in for belaying instead of tying a double figure eight), and when I stupidly didn’t check her knot. Thankfully, she was only around 15 feet up when she yelled “take”, and she also hadn’t taken her weight off the wall before we noticed the rope was loose, so she was able to do a controlled jump from that height without a scratch. Moral: always, always, check your partner’s knot, no matter how smart your partner usually is.

Random net thing: google has finally put old USENET postings online for searching. And so I’ve rediscovered what looks my very first post, dating all the way back to late 1993:

From: Julian Fong (fongj@unixg.ubc.ca)
Subject: Re: GEOS and Bubble/Ink Jets
Newsgroups: comp.os.geos
Date: 1993-11-14 19:20:51 PST
 
 
Dave Batchelor wrote that he has problems with the Geodraw printer, his
text comes out funny in Geoworks. (I can't figure out how to include his
text since my editor is screwed up.) I have not had any problems with my
setup, which is a Deskjet Plus and Geoworks 2.0 (same as Dr. Batchelor);
perhaps the method of printing which is selected in preferences (BIOS,
DOS, 5 or 7, I'm hooked up to 7) does matter and may be the reason why he
gets strange results in Geodraw..
 
 
--
======================================================================
Julian Fong        | "All the wastes in a year from a nuclear power
fongj@unixg.ubc.ca | plant could be stored under a desk."
(604) 325-5476     |                             --- Ronald Reagan

From that message, you could draw the following conclusions:

• I was at UBC. In my very first year, in fact, and quite likely by then already regretting signing up for Science One.
• I’ve been online for over 8 years now. I feel old.
• The net certainly seemed safer back then – I can’t believe I had my phone number in my .sig!
• I apparently had a penchant for pithy signature quotes.
• I had a HP DeskJet Plus. (And I still have it, and it still works, and I am inordinately proud of that fact because all other bits of hardware I owned from that era are long dead.)
• I was, even then, playing with funny operating systems. (Geoworks Ensemble was sort of a Windows-like program which ran on top of DOS, except it was way spiffier, and actually worked very well on crappy hardware – remember, this was the Windows 3.1 era.)
• I was apparently having difficulty with my news client (probably trn), and I was already in the habit of blaming the software. That much, at least, hasn’t changed.