Author: bryan

weekend in the snow

A friend from Apple invited us out to spend the weekend in Bear Valley, in the Sierra Nevadas between Yosemite and lake tahoe. Day one was skiing (I actually did ski, instead of snowboarding, to see if I could remember how). The snow was amazing! Feet of soft powder everywhere:

I had never been in anything like it, looking down and seeing my knees disappear into the snow as I went along. Day two was sledding and snow-shoeing and general playing in the snow.

It was awesome. Check out all the pictures in the usual place.

couch! (some assembly required)

We finally did it. We replaced the couch that was gifted to me by Ali’s sister when I moved into my Speedway apartment. When I got it, it was a beautiful, happy, white couch with floral print pillows. It followed me across the country to the bay (after a brief pit stop in Seattle), and served us well here in cali. It being white and we being “heavy” couch users, it was a bit worse for the wear by the time it got to Fremont, so we got a slip cover for it, which is sort of a two-edged sword. It did look better, but was continually getting disheveled and generally driving me insane. So we decided we should replace it sooner rather than later, since we might be picking up and moving to another country in a few years anyway.

We didn’t want a nice couch, because nice couches cost real money, something we don’t have. Plus vis a vis our international living plans it would have been a rather rash purchase. So we did what all good poor students do and hit IKEA up for the best that $500 or so could buy. What we got was a couch that came in four (4) boxes, only three of which they actually managed to find the day we were there buying it, which was probably just as well since the last one may not have fit so well into Leslie’s jetta. The whole process of turning boxes into couch can be savored on gallery. I’ll leave you with the afterglow:

Red, and long enough for a 5′ 10″ person to stretch out on, or three people to sit together on without cuddling. I’m satisfied.

Google Maps fun.

I always sort of wondered what all the hubbub about “AJAX” and “Web 2.0” were, so when my viz class assigned us to build an apartment finder thingy based off of data scraped from craigslist, I decided to do it using the Google Maps API. It uses all the buzzwords: DHTML, Javascript, XML, Asyncronous RPC. Turns out all this stuff isn’t new at all, it was just waiting for someone (read: Google) to show that it could be done well. Anyway, if you want to see the fruits of my labor (still in progress) they’re here.

v-day dinner

Les and I try to cook when we can, and it had been a while since we’d done anything fancy, so we hit up epicurious for something challenging. Our Valentine’s day dinner, illustrated edition:

Main Course: Beef Tenderloin with Cranberry-Port Sauce and Gorgonzola Cheese

This was absolutely amazing. An “instant classic,” you might say. We were skeptical at first, since it incorporates so many random tastes (cranberry + port + blue cheese?!), but we were very pleasantly suprised. The preparation was easy, we just started with the base of every tasty western dish: butter, garlic, and onion (shallots, to be exact)

you can smell it...

We then added the port, broth, and cranberries, and reduced about 4:1. Then we soaked up the juices from grilling the beef with it and poured it over the top.
The package total.

The overall taste was perfect, and unexpected: the sweetness of the port, the cranberries combined with the sharpness and pungence of the cheese: heaven! I absolutely recommend this, and we’ll definitely do it again, though maybe not with $30/lb beef.

Side: Saffron Orzo with Asparagus and Prosciutto

Orzo is a tasty pellet-shaped pasta that I like to begin with. Throw in saffron, ham, and asparagus, and I’m in love. Step one was to fry the pork in some butter. After this, add more butter, then let the orzo just soak it up:

Mmm. Finish hydrating it with chicken broth and add the saffron for a beautiful golden color, adding the asparagus later for maximum crispiness.

Drink: Bishop

This tasty way to finish our bottle of port involves roasting an orange studded with cloves for 90 minutes then quartering it into simmering ruby port. Delicious accompaniment to some chocolate mousse we bought for desert.

all is bliss

The pace of life post-SIGGRAPH has been quite agreeable. I’ve got two classes: Visualization, which has been a lot of fun so far, and if nothing else a great excuse to buy beautiful books from Edward Tufte, as well as another graduate math class that, instead of having 20 hours/week of homework, has exactly zero.

tufte pic

I’ve had time to start work on my master’s report (then I’ll just one more to complete the set!), finish Dragon Quest (I give it rave reviews all the way through), as well as generally get back into all the parts of my life that withered during the madness. I’ve been back at yoga, back to climbing, back to eating sushi, drinking at Triple Rock. Yes. This is what grad school is all about.

survival

I know you know. But I’m going to tell you anyway. The story of my life for the last month and a half (except, of course, the beautiful respite of my 10-day winter break). This is what I’m going to tell you. It won’t take long. You wake up. You shower. You eat breakfast, and make 2 sandwiches. You take these up to “the lab,” which is really just an office but you call it the lab to differentiate it from the place where you got a salary and fringe benefits. See, it’s better! It’s THE LAB. It’s SCIENCE. So you settle in around 9am, knowing that there won’t be any company until early afternoon, because you’re only hardcore if you work in the lab from 2pm until 3am, the 9am to 11pm guys are weaklings.

You settle at your tiny desk (tiny because there are already 7 students in this office, but the alternative is to sit alone in a room with no windows), and you spend roughly the next 12-15 hours rearranging the magnetic fields on a hard drive. Change this one to a zero, this zero to a one, etc. Nothing fancy. Somewhere along the way eat your sandwiches or go out for fast food that isn’t any better for you because it’s Thai rather than Burger King–coconut milk is a bitch. Go home. Pretend you have time to do something before sleep, realize you don’t, sleep.

Now, fundamentally, this bitching is bogus. We both know it is. And yet, no matter how perfect the scenario, there is always something to bitch about. So I’m just going to bitch away here. The last 36 hours or so were excellent. Deadline: 2pm Wednesday. Go in on Monday, work your “normal” hours. Tuesday, after 8 beautiful hours of sleep, head in around 9am. Finish the crucial elements of the submission around 10pm. Decide to do another example. Spend the next 12 hours or so getting that working. Around 5am, decide to only allow changes to the paper text by 3-way consensus of the authors (language faculties slipping). Submit final paper around 7am. Order delirious co-authors to sleep as necessary, sleep none at all yourself until the last frame is rendered, roughly noon. Submit.

SUBMIT! Submit. submit.

And then, it’s over. The last few days have been a beautiful, chemically-induced haze. I think I may almost be ready to face normal life again.

texas again

It’s amazing after having been away from Austin for 1.5 years until this thanksgiving that I should be back only a month later. We only had a day down there, leaving yesterday morning from Dallas and turning right back around today to head back. Still, the trip was worth it. We saw some of the development that’s been going on downtown (including a visit to the huge new Whole Foods on lamar, it’s like the IKEA of hippie food or something). We also had the chance to spend some quality time with my parents, who had us over for dinner on Friday (ham, yum). We also exchanged gifts, although Jeff wasn’t there (he’s in SoCal with Sophie and her family) it was still nice to get to sit around and talk a bit.

The most amazing thing happened last night–an old friend of mine got a bunch of other old friends from high school together in some random bar east of 35. It was quite a crowd… something that hadn’t coalesced at least since ’99 (6 years ago? Really?). It was great to talk to people I hadn’t seen for so long, and I really hope that lines of communication that were reopened last night will survive.

Now it’s 24 Dec, and I’ve still got quite a bit of time (8 days!) away from SIGGRAPH to look forward to, including 4 bopping around NYC, which should be a blast. We’ve been using the new fancy camera we bought, so expect some pics on gallery soonish.