Tag: personal

new paper, CA weather returns

So, while in NYC I got an email from James about another paper, this one for SCA, that extends the one we submitted to SIGGRAPH. It should certainly shake things up for this semester. Due on 20 April or thereabouts.

In other news, we have officially reverted here in norcal to the standard 70-and-sunny configuration which should persist until November or so. It arrived just in time for Ali, who visited for a few days at the end of his spring break. He came in Wednesday night. Thursday he came up to Berkeley with me, saw the campus, had lunch with the graphics folke, and then we went to Ironworks to climb. He witnessed first-hand the shockingly over-rated (in difficulty) routes. Friday we worked, went shopping for a delicious lamb and mint sauce dinner Ali came up with, then went home and got (almost) too drunk to cook it. After dinner was savored, we went to a go-cart racing track we found in Fremont (Doug, reluctantly sober, drove us) and managed to place 1-2-3 (Doug, Ali, Bryan) despite our mild inebriation.

Saturday we slept in, visited SF, and ultimately ended up at my place. I took Ali to the airport the next morning.

Spring break. Two weeks. Nutty.

nyc coverage soon

We just stumbled in a little while ago from an amazing trip to New York. I didn’t post any updates after the first day because, basically, we were always either out or asleep. Soon pictures will be posted with the full narration of our adventures.

Also, the new server is live (whee!). You might notice an improvement in performance (I do, anyway). Let me know if anything seems weird.

nyc arrival

After an uneventful day of travel, we’re in New York. The view from the plane as we flew in was great… right up over Manhattan. We got in a cab and told the driver where to go. “Where is that?” he asked. So, I oddly found myself looking through a street map of New York finding the place. I really didn’t expect to be giving directions to a NYC cabbie, but hey.

Dinner was had at an excellent, mellow sushi place near George’s. George’s place itself is outrageous. A co-opy warehouse loft that get’s rented out for yoga and whatnot with about 10 people living in a cordoned off section. Infinite points awarded. I may die never living in a place as cool as this–fundamentally because I hate sharing a kitchen.

Tomorrow we’re tentatively scheduled to wander around Brooklyn, then make our 1pm reservations at The River Cafe, the swank-ass joint that Cam and Matt gave us brunch at for xmas. We’re also going to try to get in to see a UCB theatre show in the evening, but tickets are up in the air for that.

it is done.

My typical day for the last week before the SIGGRAPH deadline went something like this:

Wake up at 8, shower, dress, eat. get on my bike about 9:30 and ride to the BART station. Spend the next hour in bliss reading a book or a magazine that has nothing to do with smoke. Get out at Berkeley, walk up the hill to Soda (since the campus buses mostly weren’t running). Arrive at Soda about 11am, an hour or so before almost anyone else will show up. At noon, join the author of the paper I was helping with (also named Bryan). Work on getting smoke to look right until the last train home (usually 11-11:30pm). Repeat.

Now, to be honest, not every day was like that. I took a few nights off to spend with Les or to hang out with friends and exercise, but mostly that’s the way it went. It was gruelling, but mostly fun. The atmosphere in the lab of all the people working day and and out on the papers was electric. I was usually one of the earliest to leave. Bryan stayed many nights until 3 or 4, and he had company.

At the end I got to help out with more than just rendering. I put together figures, and also helped on the text. In the end our product was a 5-page paper and a 2-and-a-half-minute video. I think, in sum, the work I did for those two weeks exceeded that which I did in any three months at Apple. But what motivation. Looking into the future, I hope that writing the paper can be done another way. It’s just not my style to pack it all into a month of frenzied work at the end. Hopefully I can exert enough control on the process to work mostly during the day the next time around–when I’ll hopefully be working on my own paper.

Anyway… quite an experience. It has triggered some serious slacking this weekend, so I’ll probably only start thinking about my classes tomorrow when I have to go back to school again.

suddenly busy

I was at Berkeley yesterday, helping another graphics student on some renderings for his paper. We went in to talk with James in the afternoon, at which point I was invited to take a bit more responsibility for doing the renderings and, in return, maybe be an author on the paper. This was very flattering–that James thought enough of me to give me the assignment, and thought the work merited authorship on the paper. It also means a lot of work, and expectations of accomplishment. Well… it was about time for this vacation to officially end. Things should be kind of hellish until the 26th–the SIGGRAPH submission deadline–but also a lot of fun, I hope. Graphics is weird in that there’s really just one conference, and so everyone in the graphics hallway is there, with a mug of coffee, hunched and typing. I am, too, but in the first-year office where there is currently no one else. I pulled an old, crappy pair of speakers off the shelf and hooked them up so I could code to some Phish and Orbital (the more mindless, the better). Once I make sure that it’s kosher, I’ll post some pictures of what I’m working on, but basically, it’s smoke.

a slow week

I’ve been back in town a week now, but I’ve decided to ease back into real life instead of going for the stark change that Leslie went through on Monday. You get the luxury of these choices when all your vacation is unpaid.

It’s been almost a year since we stopped freeloading off of UT and moved overt to a professional hosting service. Over the last few months, we discovered that the hosting service we picked also likes to host spammers. Because of this, we’ve had a few emails blocked from our servers because the host in general is being blocked. We called and bitched at Servepath (the host), who calmly told us that they have a zero-tolerance policy toward spam and that the offenders’ accounts would be cancelled. All lies, actually–they seem to have a policy of lying to customers and taking spam money, so we’ll be leaving them shortly for a new host–I’m not sure yet which, but I’ll try to make the swap as trouble free as possible. If you have any ideas, let me know.

Most absurd xmas present award goes to Doug, who bought me a 27″ HDTV. Damn. I’m still reeling from that one. My favorite thing about the HDTVs is that they don’t make the whine normal TVs do when turned on. The whine is caused by the refresh rate, which is 15KHz, outside of some peoples hearing range, but not mine. HDTVs refresh at twice that rate, so only dogs are in trouble, I guess. In any case, I love it.

Leslie has entered into her last 100 teaching days. Praise jebus. I have been officially classified as a California resident for tuition purposes, which means I’m free to travel where every I want this summer… finally. Whether I’ll actually go anywhere… that remains to be seen. We do have this wedding to attend and yet another move to yet another Bay area town.

It’s been raining here all week. I feel justified in extending my quasi-vacation to prevent myself from being soaked on the way to the train station.

colorado

We got into denver without incident. The airline (Frontier) was cool, in that it had little TVs in every seat, but uncool in that you had to pay $5 to watch. They also get bonus points for handing out Sun Chips as snacks and giving you the whole can of Coke with your little plastic cup of ice. I read and dozed as I always do on planes.

We met my parents in their rented Oldsmobile and drove the hour and a half out to (not Breckenridge, but) Winter Park. I guess technically we’re in a suburb of Winter Park called “Tabernash.” Monday we went out to do some cross-country skiing, which was interesting, as most new things are, but eventually just exhausting and vaguely frustrating. I’m sure people who really like hiking (ick) could get into it. I’m glad we all got to do it together as a family, though, because it had been too long since we’d done something like that.

We decided to move our plane tickets back to a return date of the 30th instead of the 1st. Doing so cost us, net, about $220 each. Yeowch. But I think the extra couple of days will benefit Les’s preperations for school greatly, and I won’t mind it either. Also it means we don’t have to be here when everyone is cleaning up the cabin to leave. Hee.

Tuesday we hit the slopes of Winter Park, for one of the most crowded skiing days of the year. Renting stuff took a while, but it was tolerable. Once we got up on the slopes, things were actually great. Practically no lift lines, not too many people in your way as you skied, my brother picking up the technique just like I did two years ago after 15 years of disuse. At the end of the day I crunched my knee, so we called it quits. Today’s doctor visit and x-rays confirm that there’s nothing really wrong with me.

Tomorrow we head back home. I’ve started to feel that longing at the end of a trip to be back in my own space again. To ignore other people, to not do things, and bury myself in my private world. This vacation seems like it’s been so long. But full.

snow! and comment spam

We’ve been in Dallas a few days now, having a grand time of it. Food has been consumed, movies have been enjoyed (or not), and much slacking generally accomplished. Last night I had genuine crab legs, which if you’re not familiar are in fact the greatest substance to have been placed on earth for human consumption by the intelligent designer who has just as much of a right to play time in our science classrooms as any other alien invader. Leslie and I gave Cam an early present of World of Warcraft (the first one is always free), and as a pair of cows we’ve been gallavanting about the country side, cursing, skinning, and riddling with bullets all recalcitrant bundles of pixels we happen across.

Today, in Texas, it began to snow. At first tentative, wet and flighty. Then with confidence, big hulking chunks of uniqueness smacking you in the face and momentarily blinding you. We hopped–there exists video evidence of this will I will shortly point you to–and I can say with confidence that never has bouncing been more justified.

On the docket for the coming days is more of the same sort of blatant, selfish loafing, with an eventual sojourn to Colorado for some even colder weather and potentially some skiing. Overt has been hit with more comment spam, with over 200 interesting and informative posts about gambling online. I’m not quite miffed enough to resort to a technical solution, but when I do, so help me, I’ll make those inanimate programs wish that they’d never been set to work in the basement of a rich suburban spammer.

snow report

Just returned from “Trek to Tahoe” ’04. Fun as always. Leslie took off school on Friday and we drove up early, grilled some steaks, sat beside a crackling fire, talked. The next day we skied/snowboarded in gorgeous weather on mediocre snow. I snubbed the SSX-style high jumps and bars this time in favor of the company of others who are not as insane. We wore ourselves out by early afternoon, napped, I cooked up a pasta dinner, enlightened the 9 women I roomed with on the evils of the male psyche, played a half-assed round of King’s Cup, and then slept. Today was absorbed by the drive back, studded with fast-food sins and the smell of snicker-doodle coffee from Truckee.

thxgiving

What a wonderfully lazy holiday. I kicked things off on Tuesday by purchasing “World of Warcraft,” a video game I’ve been waiting on for some time and participated in the beta test of. I spent most of the rest of the day wasting time with that, and on Wednesday we headed off to Sebastopol for Thanksgiving festivities with Johanna and her family.

Wednesday night we spent with some good pizza, and then a trek out to “Old Main,” one of three bars in Sebastopol, which had approximately 2000 people stuffed into it, all of who’d just gotten in for the holidays. I met a wide array of high-school friends of Johanna, had some bad beer, and eventually retreated with Les and Peanut around 11:30 to home and bed. Thanksgiving was classic: buying food, fixing food, eating food, with all the nooks and crannies filled in with board games. Huge quantities of board games, including Lord of the Rings monopoly (Park Place / Boardwalk become Mount Doom and Barad Dur) and “Loaded Questions,” a suprisingly fun get-to-know-you game that will hopefully be converted into a drinking game for our upcoming ski trip.

Nothing was accomplished for the rest of the weekend other than slaughtering virtual wolves and human zealots with flaming bolts of death from my undead warlock (disarmingly named “Arla”) and her trusty imp Grimnar (he prances).