Meanwhile...

Greatness, insane or otherwise

2011-10-11T23:15:00.000-07:00

I've got to admit I was a lot more affected by Steve Jobs's death last week than I expected. If you asked me a few months ago, I would've figured I'd be bummed out for an afternoon and then obsess about AAPL's stock price for the next few days. The only other public figure that actually saddened me tremendously when he died was author David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in August of 2008 at the age of 46, after battling depression for years. Both were figures that died in the prime of their careers, succumbing to afflictions they had struggled with even as they produced some of their greatest work.

While it might be understandable to feel such emotion for an artist or writer, many remarked at the time at how unusual it was to see such emotion for a high-tech CEO. We know intuitively such a glib description doesn't do service or respect to what Mr. Jobs accomplished. But it did make me wonder why I don't expect to feel the same intensity of emotion when such other larger-than-life figures in the tech industry pass on, from Bill Gates to Sergey Brin and Larry Page, or even to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. No doubt many like myself will express their respects for their great achievements and how much better the world is for their work. But I doubt we'll see quite the outpouring we saw last Thursday.

Speaking for myself, I flashed back almost immediately to my first experience on a computer that I actually wanted to use, the Macintosh at my friend's house back in 5th grade. He insisted I head over to his place after school one day to play on his dad's new computer. Up until then, that generally meant me sitting around fiddling with Transformers while my friend fumbled around with a computer for about two hours, be it a C64 or DOS, loading several floppies or tapes, screwing something up, flipping through manuals, starting over, rebooting, and so on before we finally could play, say, Pirates or maybe some text game for maybe half an hour before it was time to go home for dinner and then miss my TV show because my homework wasn't done. It wasn't anything I even remotely had any kind of interest in.

The Mac changed all that. We played lots of games (we spent weeks on "Deja Vu"), of course, but oddly enough it didn't stop there. We would eventually just start messing around with the computer itself, messing with settings, desktop patterns, and then eventually playing around with text in word processing apps, trying to draw in paint programs and so on. I was always the artistic kid (boy has that changed), and spent tons of time in MacPaint and was the only guy brave enough to try the 'Draw' (vector) programs and have any kind of success with them. After we got my own, even my writing improved as I started keeping a Doogie-style journal and gagging at how awful my writing was upon review a few months later.

It was a powerful experience, and no technology quite matched it for some time (though Unix came close in college). I didn't know about the 1984 ad, I didn't know about Steve Jobs, I just know this thing was awesome and made me want to understand things like hard drives and memory and processing speeds. My enthusiasm for the Mac and the knowledge that resulted has been responsible for many positive development in my career, from my first job as a computer lab geek at UC Santa Cruz to my first job at ILM as (and many are surprised at this) a Macintosh Technician.

I only first learned about Steve Jobs in sort of the past tense as I entered college, because he was long gone from Apple by the early 90s. Lacking the vast archives of the internet, it was amazing what a strong impression he was still able to make as people spoke of him reverently while simultaneously keeping him at arm's length because of the rather volatile reputation he had earned in the early years. Even as Apple showed all the signs of a failing company after nearly a decade of mismanagement since his departure, people were wary of bringing him back in 1997.

The rest is history, of course, but it didn't take long for me to see a very direct connection between that amazing piece of technology I first used as a kid in 1985 and the amazing individual who drove its creation and resurrection while envisioning with near clairvoyance the role it would assume today, and possibly for some years to come. We're reminded nearly every day of how much his work has improved the world. I have no doubt that I would not be where I am today without him.

Thanks, Steve.

Shields Up

2011-09-25T19:58:00.000-07:00

The 'coons will have to roll 20s.

Hexes. I'm seeing them a lot these days in games and movies as effects for energy shields or invisibility cloaks, enveloping that awesome ship or sexy covert agent in a shimmering protective grid. At the advice of the folks in the garden shop, a protective hexagonal grid of chicken wire will do the same for my nascent lawn, shielding it from the surprising number of skunks and raccoons in my neighborhood. They've been flipping up large sections to dig for grubs and worms. I was skeptical at first, but it's been remarkably effective in one test area. I didn't buy enough to cover everything, but it seems the coons have only been hitting certain spots. We shall see. Hopefully I'll only need this up for a few more weeks to let the grass's roots grow stronger.

A case can be made for a strong offensive option, though:

I'm trying to talk myself out of buying this, but don't expect much success.

EDIT: Go Bear!

It's the customers, stupid

2011-09-20T20:53:00.000-07:00

(Like a lot of topics, there are surely more scholarly viewpoints on economics, but because everyone's involved in it and affected by it, I think we're all entitled to a reasoned opinion.)

Whenever debates on increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations come up, the conservatives generally go to the very tangible bottom-line arguments about wealth redistribution, with some class warfare accusations thrown in to give their arguments a dash of cultural incredulity. Liberals go heavy on the bleeding heart cultural arguments, trying to appeal to notions of fairness and sympathy for the less fortunate, and act like money isn't an issue.

While the bleeding heart arguments do resonate with me, it'd be insane to support something just because it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. If that was it, I'd give to panhandlers all the time for that quick nice-guy feeling, all the while encouraging and enabling behavior that nobody thinks is good. (Ever see people give to panhandlers inside a restaurant? Ugh.) The main reason anybody should be advocating higher taxes to support government work projects and social programs is because it'll make us all richer.

Just about anybody who works in a high-income profession relies on broader economic activity. We rely on large numbers of people buying more goods and services so that we benefit either directly if they buy products and services offered by the companies we work for, or indirectly when they buy the goods and services produced by our clients, or even less directly when the quarterly filings come in and the companies in our portfolios show stellar sales and revenue.

Absolutely none of this happens when there aren't customers to buy these goods and services. And when there are no customers, there are no profits. So my company might lose clients or have less sales. So it may need to cut costs and lay a bunch of people off. Or my stocks might tank from poor earnings reports. So I'll have to re-think getting that new computer or 60" plasma. So I become one less shopper at the AAPL store or AMZN. And the cycle repeats.

If lack of tax revenue forces government to cut medicare and social security, suddenly I have to consider setting cash aside should I need to support my elderly mother. If you have kids, you may need to re-think using the public schools, and look to spending on private. Or possibly moving altogether to a better, more expensive part of town with solid schools. And again, even if we're gainfully employed in the middle class, we're a few less customers at the BBY or the F or GM dealership.

Through work programs we can create moderate income jobs for people that need to get a computer to replace their 8-year-old Compaq still running MSFT Windows 2000, buy a digital TV instead of the dumb half-assed $40 adapter box, maybe sign up for a VZ or S cellular plan (a career necessity these days), and of course, buy food and clothing at the WMT or M. All this while fixing roads, bridges, and pipelines so that we don't have to contend with catastrophic infrastructure failures that end up costing everybody even more money. Infrastructure that, by the way, support vital delivery services such as FDX and UPS, that allows them to charge rates low enough so that most of the stuff you buy from AMZN will have the free 3-5 day shipping. Which makes you that much more likely to click 'Buy'.

This goes for the Social Security and Welfare too. The money doesn't just go into a hole. It goes right back into the economy when they become customers (instead of shoplifters, if worst comes to worst) at the SWY or TGT. Maybe even take the kids to MCD every once in a while.With sufficient income, they might even need to open accounts at WFC or BAC. Are there lazy douchebags on welfare? Sure, but so long as I don't have to hang out with them, get mugged or burglarized by them, and not have them become homeless and screw up my downtown area, I'm not too bothered by it. But by all means, seek and prosecute fraud.

Frankly, I'm sick and tired of the bleeding heart stuff. I like captial-L Liberal policies because they make sense for me as somebody who wants to live comfortably and even maybe get obscenely filthy rich. This is the sort of thing we Liberals/Progressives should open with. Feeling like a good human being stuff just helps me sleep at night, which is important, but that's far from the only reason.

Rocking Out, The Thrilling Conclusion

2011-09-11T20:59:00.000-07:00

This lawn project is definitely one of the more challenging home improvement projects I've taken on. One thing I was thinking about often while working on it was how different this was from building the fence.

It reminded me a lot of the difference between the more creative work I'm doing now an the more technical work I'd been doing for the last several years. The fence was kind of like the more technical tasks. It was easy to get a sense or progress while I was working on it and seeing the end to it. Once a piece was in, I could look it over, maybe test it a little, and be pretty sure that part was done or at least was going to perform properly under the expected conditions.

The lawn felt more like the creative work in that it was hard to progress through all the phases sure that I had truly finished them. It seemed that every time I stopped to level or took a closer look at a particular part, I could find some reason to re-rake or re-till to get more rocks out, or re-grade to get a better slope. What looked good one day looked awful the next. All of this while not being totally sure if I was doing any of it the right way! After a certain point you have to just say it's good enough, but whether or not it wasn't will always sort of nag at you.

Anyway, for posterity, here's the breakdown:

A fair amount of gravel and rocks/concrete was mixed into the soil under the tarp.

Pick-axing up the yard. This went quick, but wow, was it tiring.

Lifting up the tarp revealed that, along with the gravel that made it under the tarps, there were a lot of rocks and concrete chunks mixed into the topsoil. Maybe from a previous project. I didn't know what was under there, so it wasn't a good idea to run the tiller through it with out breaking up the surface first.

After tilling, adding in some fresh topsoil, re-tilling, planing & grading, rolling, more planing, etc...

A bunch of hastily selected sod pieces from the Depot.

It's not a fatal mistake, but I really wish I had a quick look at *all* the sod pieces I picked up. A fair number had yellow/brown spots or were totally yellow, probably from having been out on their lot all day. They seem to be all greening up, but it wasn't very satisfying to look at the finished project and see all these dead patches.

The morning after.

After five days...

About two weeks.

All new sod will look okay the first 4-6 weeks, supposedly. After that, any problems with the soil or setup will start to emerge. I just used my snapshot cam on these shots (didn't want to risk the new SLR), so I see the exposures were different. Eh.

Some notes:

Before/after dusk-masks. Be kind to your lungs. Use a dust mask.

20 or so pieces of sod may stress your suspension.

Most of the gravel, rocks, and concrete dug up.

This actually isn't all of it, the rubble pile is now probably taller by about half a foot. Next step is to find some way to get rid of all the rocks/concrete/gravel. Apparently most garbage services have sites called 'transfer stations' that accept bulk waste from construction (which this qualifies as). Fees vary based on weight. Berkeley's will take up to 330 lbs. for about $30 (per one visit). The trick is getting it all there in one visit, which probably means a rental. Arranging for some special bin or hauling costs about $200, again depending on weight. Some places recycle, some don't, I'm just going to go with what's closest.

My guess at the work is roughly two good 40-hour weeks to do this. If it wasn't for all the gravel and rocks I came across, it might have gone faster. It might also have helped if I opted to just dig up and throw out the entire top six-inches of top-soil instead of trying to rake the rocks out of it. That would have been complicated for other reasons.

Rocking out, Part 1

2011-08-15T00:32:00.000-07:00

I don't typically like to write about home projects in progress, but I figured I had to write about something or I'd fall out of the habit again.

The main thing on my to-do list since the fence project has been establishing a lawn in my backyard. Lawns are supposed to make weeds easier to deal with and I figured it'd be better for when I finally get a dog. It seemed like kind of a daunting task, so I've been sort of been procrastinating on it. I finally decided to take it on in early August. (Fence was last August, too. I guess something about August kicks me into gear.)

Previously, on 'Kai's Old House'...

So the previous owner tarped over the yard and spread gravel over it, which I guess is supposed to deter weeds. Maybe you didn't see it in the photos from when I did the fence project last year because of all the weeds. This is apparently one common strategy for dealing with weeds, but most people find it doesn't hold up past, say, the 9-12 or so months it took to sell a house in 2009.

The common problem is that the tiniest bit of dirt in the gravel will let a weed sprout up. Once that happens, it's a matter of days before it shoots roots down right through that bio-degradable 'weed blocker' tarp. After that, the tarp makes it that much harder to pull out the weed completely, leaving the roots. What really helped get dirt into the gravel was the really half-assed garden the previous rental tenants set up. That would be the little green patch in the photo that I hesitated to blast with weed-killer at first.

The gravel, after I scooped it all out of the backyard.

I hacked at this in the spring by trying to just yank up the tarp, imagining the gravel and dirt would neatly roll off as I went along, gathering in a neat pile on one side of the yard. But that didn't work. So I finally got a big scoop shovel, a wheel barrow, and went to work scooping the gravel out. It turned out to be relatively easy, about 6-8 hours work. I tried to see if I could do a little separating by raking the dirt/gravel mix around a bit first, which was semi-effective, but I imagine I'd still need to do some sifting if I ever wanted to re-use the gravel or dirt for anything.

The bio-degradable 'weed-blocking' tarp.

The results, at least so far, do not look like an improvement, but trust me, it is.

BEFORE: From Spring, so yes, the green weeds look deceptively pretty.

AFTER: A barren, desolate wasteland. Mission accomplished.

If things go as planned, I'll be able to do some tilling next weekend and maybe even start laying down some sod!

SITREP - August, 2010

2011-08-11T00:40:00.000-07:00

There are few things that make you look more like a douchebag than having an entry about your phone at the top of your blog page. I really need to write more often.

Used to be that I did actually blog a lot, but then Facebook came along and I sort of got that writing fix from trying to craft short, succinct little statements to express my impression of something or an event, while also trying to capture a sense of the context. It's a nice thing to exercise, but I feel like my long form's gotten sloppy since it feels like status updates are the only recreational writing I've been doing the last four(!!!) years. I'm finding myself straying a lot whenever I write something long.

There's also that need to just sit and rant or vent sometimes that goes unfulfilled if you're trying to keep something brief. If that need goes unfulfilled, I think I tend to seize the opportunity in conversations to go off on long rants with very little (or frankly, NO) prompting.

Let's clear the gunk out of the pipes by just sort of updating a few items I'd mentioned before...

House

Have a rapid-deployment X-mas (set the tree up hours after closing)

The house hunt had been going in fits and starts since 2006, frankly, namely marked by periods of going to open houses and generally coming to the conclusion that nothing about the housing market made sense. 600 sq ft studios were going for about $450k. After clearing out all my debts (except for a bit of student loan), saving up, and spurred by that housing tax credit, I attacked the issue again 2009. After a six month ordeal dealing with a short sale with a bit of an inexperienced buying agent (at least with short sales), kind of a sketchy selling agent, and a seller who was sort of coming unhinged from having four properties on his hands that were now worth barely half of what he paid for them, I finally closed on a house.

The deal closed about a day or two before x-mas, which was a nice touch. It's been great for the year and a half I've been in here, but yes, I have not had a house-warming or any kind of event whatsoever. It always seems like there's one more thing I want to take care of before I do that, but soon, mi amigo. Soon.

Fence under construction last year.

The insides are fine, I'm mainly bothered by the outside. There's no lawn, there's some rusty chain link up around most of it (a large section that I just replaced with a wood fence last summer, if you follow me on FB). I've got a bit of a lull in my schedule, so I'm using it to really attack the back yard. The previous owner did some kind of gravel mulch thing that I'm digging up. I'm going to lay down some sod next.

Movin' on up

Pre-emptively drowning my sorrows

After nearly FOUR years in the role of Assistant Technical Director (I really need to check if that's some kind of record), I've finally moved up to the role of lighting TD (and hopefully some sims). I've done some semi-shot production tasks in the past so the whole review/feedback process wasn't totally alien to me, but there's definitely a different feeling when you're fully accountable for a major aspect of a shot. I generally feel like I did alright. Had a few things I was really proud of, one I kind of wasn't, etc.

Unfortunately, you'll probably never see my work because I worked on what by now is an avowed flop. With the talent behind it, I think you would've been right to expect more from it. It works on some levels (at least for me), but I think people would be justified in feeling a little disappointed.

It's sort of an uninteresting failure, relative to my previous project. Now *that* was fascinating. In the case of Cowboys, you had a bunch of really talented people trying to adapt an odd piece of work from a static medium (meaning print, even if it's a comic book) that had a fringe following at best. In the case of Airbender, you had wildly successful source material that had been executed almost perfectly in its animated form. You'd think it would have taken willful, directed effort to screw it up, and I wouldn't blame you. But it certainly wasn't willful. I could go on, and maybe I will in some other post.

Travels

Three generations, three continents

Up until recently I haven't traveled much, and I've been trying to sort of make up for lost time trying to take care of some things and visit places I've sort of been overdue for. This past winter, I visited relatives on my dad's side of the family in the city of Jinan, in the Shandong province in northeastern China. I hadn't seen them since I was sixteen. Besides, that, my father passed on quite suddenly over ten years ago in China, and his brother/my uncle went through a pretty spectacular ordeal dealing with crooked doctors and hospital administrators to settle his affairs. As bad a problem as corruption is in China, you can imagine how much worse it was before the boom times.

It was definitely one of the more fulfilling trips I've ever been on, on par with my first visit back to Brazil in 2004. I visited with my Mom and my niece Mariana from Brazil. About all I remember from the last visit was being a teenager and downing shots of baijiu with the older cousins (and my parents, actually). It was kind of like that again, except the little kids from back then were now the ones taking me and Mariana out to clubs and for Karaoke.

One of the few good bars in Rippongi. Everything else is for expat douchebags.

Also stopped by Tokyo for about a week. Pat referred me to a bunch of great people in Tokyo involved in various aspects of the entertainment industry and I had a good time just experiencing a place that, 'lost decade' or not, still felt light years ahead of us socially and technologically.

Atlantis, minutes before liftoff!

From this summer, I'm coming off of a trip to Florida to take in the very last Space Shuttle launch back in early July. I had booked two weeks expecting there would be scrubs, but amazingly enough, Atlantis lifted off for mission STS-135 a mere minute-and-a-half behind schedule. I took a bunch of pics with an SLR that I was frankly still getting used to, and some video of the launch itself. I spent the rest of the time just kind of relaxing on the various beaches in the Cape Canaveral area, getting an impressive sunburn in the process (I've got this big diagonal tan-line from the camera bag strap).

Whedon makes an appearance. Have to admit he was a pretty cool guy.

After recuperating from Florida for a day or two I drove down the coast to San Diego to check out Comic-Con with Luke and Brenda. It was a nice way to wind-down from Florida, geeking out over TV shows and movies and going to talks. I gotta admit I still have a bit of that judgmental a-hole in me that kicks in when I sit in the huge studio/publisher talks and hear rapturous audiences cheering at announcements for marginally improved re-releases of books, movies, or trinkets that they probably already have in some form or another. I guess it pays the bills.

Anyway, that's it for now. I've written long enough. Hopefully (at least for me) more soon.

RIP RAZR

2010-07-26T00:25:00.000-07:00

"slam it on ur palm like a new pack of cigarettes"
-- Guest, fixya.com

This actually worked, believe it or not. It took me a while because I've never smoked, so I'm not entirely familiar with how one slams a new pack of cigarettes on your palm.

Discovering this fix for a problem I was having has affirmed my belief that this crappy old Motorola RAZR I've been carrying around since 2006 is one of those few devices I have that can actually be said to have personality. I've even become sort of fond of all the scratches and dings it has from sharing my pocket with my keys. It's a phone that one imagines might exist in a high-tech world where space smugglers would have had to do something similar to get their after-market Corellian transports to start up as well. As I look ahead to picking up my new 'smart' phone tomorrow, a moment of silence for my semi-trusty companion.

SITREP

2009-11-30T20:27:00.000-08:00

I just find it inexcusably lame that my last blog entry dates back to the Bush administration! Some quick updates. Politics free, except to say that, yeah, I'm generally frustrated with the things I expected to be frustrated about, and happy about the things that I expected to be happy about.

I'm really glad the last show turned out well. It was a real crunch -- remember that the original release date was xmas '08, but got bumped to May '09. I'm generally of the understanding that this was because the studio thought it had a real hit on its hands, and indeed it did. Unfortunately *we* still had the deadline set for the xmas release, and that didn't budge. Either way, definitely the absolute best project I've worked on so far in my not-so-short-but-not-exactly-long career in vfx. Get the dvd/blu-ray -- the deleted scenes are pretty great and explain a lot. I kinda think they shoulda stayed in. Current show is looking good, and I'm excited that I'll be seeing a good friend in the credits several rows/sections above me!

Embarked, once again, on the quest to get a house in the East Bay. Sorry to say that it's still a pretty frustrating process. Though prices have dipped, places have been hard to find because sellers have been trying to sit on their properties as long as possible to try to ride out the dip. It seems to be working -- prices have been going back up, spiking around the deadline for the tax credit. Sucks for me. I have one prospect that I'm in contract on, but being a short sale, crap just seems to keep coming up. I'll know for sure pretty soon if this will close or not, otherwise, back to the listings.

Da Bears. Went and splurged on some season tix to Cal Football the last two seasons along with John and Melinda. Because the Bears generally win at home, that's worked out great, though of course there were the two really bad losses to USC and Oregon State this year. While no one in their right mind who remembers the bad old days in the 90s can complain about Tedford's record, it's becoming apparent that there's some final piece to the coaching puzzle that he doesn't seem to have to help the Bears live up to pre/early season expectations.

Speaking strictly from my armchair, it does seem to be that 10% inspiration to go with the 90% perspiration of the old cliche. The sort of meltdowns we've seen against USC/UO just don't make sense when far inferior teams have at least managed a touchdown against those teams. Whatever it is, the team needs to find something in those situations to steel their resolve to go out and play hard and play smart, win or lose. They may have found it in those last two terrific games against ASU and Stanford, but we'll see if the lesson will stick with them past the regular season and the (thankfully inevitable) bowl game into next season. I've got to admit I still see some profound problems in special teams, pass protection, and offensive playcalling. Riley gets more crap than he deserves -- I see an awful lot of dropped passes, and I wonder how many of those overthrows are the receivers not maintaining speed in their routes, assuming the o-line even gives him a chance to squeeze off a decent pass.

Still not watching much TV, but absolutely loving Mad Men and Friday Night Lights. Both are great little snapshots into certain times and places in American culture that have a certain resonance with the current environment.

The Indiana Adventure

2009-01-20T00:43:00.000-08:00

Even with less than 12 hours until the inauguration, I've got to admit that there's still some neurotic little part of me that can't entirely believe this is really going to happen. It's not that I fear the unthinkable. Mainly I fear some 'crisis' will erupt elsewhere that can be used to justify a 'delay' of some kind, leaving us all in kind of this ambiguous state where we won't know what will happen next without some thorough discussion and study of constitutional law and legal precedent. What with the Minnesota recount, Burris, etc. I've had enough of those for one election season!

That neurotic little part of me is obviously batshit f'ing loco, but I gotta say that this anxiety was kind of a helpful thing to have during the campaign, if only because it finally got me off my ass and into the campaign offices to help out.

Though I was in Chicago the days up to November 4 mainly to check out a town I've been wanting to visit and take in some sights with an old college friend before the big, big night in Grant Park, I felt the need to spend at least one day helping out the campaigns in the battlegrounds around Illinois.

But which one? Illinois bordered two major battleground states: Missouri and Indiana. Mizzou seemed to be the sensible place to go -- so much hay was made of Missouri and its bellwether status, and none other than fivethirtyeight predicted that Indiana was going to be close but ultimately lost. Indiana has been pretty safely Republican since the 60s! Clinton lost to Dole (Dole?!?) there by 6% in '96!

But laziness won out: St. Louis, MO was a good 5-6 hour drive away while Lake County, IN was (in theory, at least) about 41 minutes away. So I signed on with the Gary Office for what I expected was going to be the go-down-with-your-guns-blazing fight in Indiana, bellwethers be damned.

While Indiana was safely red, Gary, however, was a different story. It was run down but had a large black population that tended to swing Lake County blue. It was because of this that the networks just could not call Indiana in the Democratic Primaries until all the votes came in from Lake County the morning after.

The Indiana Primaries, as best experienced...

Gary was kind of a bleak place, as I had been warned, but I've got to admit I've been in more dangerous parts in East Oakland.

Seen better days

The places I visited had obviously seen better days, but they were actual bedroom communities -- neighborhoods, not the high-density projects that I had grown up around in Oakland. In spite of it all, Gary had a certain kind of look that makes me wish now that I had taken many more pictures.

The Gary office was, as might be expected, much scrappier than the Reno office I was in weeks earlier. It was in a run-down strip mall in a shop that still had the signage for a computer parts store. Next to it was a police department inside a converted mall shop. It didn't have nearly as much schwag to hand out, which kind of bummed me out because so many people wanted it when I went out. I guess it's kind of the penalty of being a safe territory. Like many in California I had to buy my schwag, but in tightly-contested Reno, NV we went out with armfuls of yard signs, buttons, and stickers to hand out at will. But Gary's schwag supply could've been sparse because we were there on election eve -- that sort of thing wasn't going to do that much good anymore.

Appearances aside, the campaign was tightly organized. They had staffers there recently pulled out of South Carolina and they still had the nice packets and lists put together for us. Being election eve, we were now in the GOTV (Get Out The Vote) stage of the campaign. Our mission was no longer to cajole and persuade, but to talk to everyone on that turf about voting and blanket a it with literature with precise instructions on the polling location and what to bring and be prepared for, Obama supporter or not.

Who's turf? No really, who's turf???

This was where that good sense of map-reading and checking lists helped me out quite a good deal. I can't be sure if there was some kind of electoral board chicanery was going on, but it did seem to me the turf for a given polling place was particularly small, so that many people across the street from each may well have had entirely different polling places to go to. I canvassed with a guy who had worked the Gary office before and felt comfortable just heading out after a good look at the map and lists and leaving them back on the car.

The first 3 blocks were good, but after that I noticed a copy of literature already posted with a different polling place on it. Due to previous mix-ups the office told us to go ahead and destroy any of these we found and place our 'correct' information, and my canvassing partner was ready to go ahead and do that. I got antsy and insisted we go back and re-check the map, and indeed, we had gone outside of our turf. Luckily we didn't get far (and we removed our bad info) but I shudder to think about how many votes we could've lost if we'd just tore up the 'wrong' literature and replaced it with ours. I think we wouldn't have been more than a block off, but you never know how this kind of thing could add up. What could that be? 20 votes? 50 votes?

I mainly thought about how crushed these people would be if the campaign misled them. Unlike the sheltered suburbs of Reno, the people in these neighborhoods were thrilled to see us and incredibly kind. Many appreciated seeing an Asian guy out from California and a White guy from Illinois coming over to help out. One old guy undid several deadbolts and a unlocked a screen door to come out and shake my hand and talk. Amost teary-eyed, he told me he had been a lifelong Republican but told me he had to vote for Obama. People hailed us from across the street. It was great to see a bunch of people who have obviously seen a lot of tough times finally have something to be really excited about. "Flip Indiana and we can start the party early tomorrow!", we often told them.

And so it was -- Obama squeaked by in Indiana by 0.9%, the first time the state went blue since '64. By the time it was called, Obama had already clinched the win with the results from the west coast (so 10pm CST, a reasonably good time to kick off a party). But winning states like IN and NV were the kinds of firewalls we needed to keep us from repeating the nightmare scenarios where one silly electoral college-heavy state could've swung the entire election sometime in the wee hours of November 5. IN was particularly sweet since it was a state many had not expected to win.

I actually caught the moment we clinched the win with some shoddy camera work on my digicam in Grant Park...

Countdown to victory!

The whole experience was terrific and I actually find myself looking forward to go back into the trenches in 2012! Hopefully I'll see some of you there.

All you need to know

2009-01-04T20:15:00.000-08:00

The hours tick away on this last weekend before I head into work on what looks to be yet another very busy year for me. I've been going through the cartoon series and have been pretty surprised at how much I'm enjoying it. Toon to live-action transitions are tricky, so we'll see how it turns out.

Like some dingy stock room full of heavily-discounted-yet-unsold inventory, I find myself sitting on a stack of bloggable moments from 2k8 that I wish I had unloaded over the holiday season. One item that I think 'must go!' follows...

My usual enthusiasm for presidential politics went up another level this year as I not only signed up to volunteer for a political campaign – I signed up to travel to neighboring battleground states to try to help swing those. The weekend after wrapping up a show which had me working six-day weeks since early summer, I joined up with the Obama campaign in NV to do some canvassing. (Canvassing is basically going around knocking on doors.)

I was at least a bit nervous about the whole thing. This was that week in early October when we started seeing some disturbing behavior pop up at the McCain-Palin rallies. NV had gone red twice the last two elections, though it was pretty close. It was about as close when Clinton won there in the 90s as well, though.

And I actually wasn't totally sure how well I'd behave. I may be used to launching into some rant here in the people's republic of Berkeley among comrades either too gracious, too concurring, or too dismissive to argue, but what if I had to talk to some nut who really thought Obama was a secret Muslim terrorist?

By then, though, these people had almost gotten to be a curiosity for me. It wasn't so much about enlightening them for me as it was just meeting them in person and confirming that they exist outside of crazy youtube videos.

I also found myself sitting next to two conservative-leaning folks at work for a few months in the spring and got into various little debates over issues like global warming, Al Gore, and the electoral college. Usually I was smart enough to just let these guys be, though. After all, anybody who still thinks conservativism makes sense after the last eight years and remains unconvinced otherwise after having lived in the SF Bay for several years probably isn't going to change their mind on account of me.

Swingin' Reno

There were various offices in NV, so I was tempted to do the fun thing and go down to Clark County. Besides being the county where Vegas is, it's also a pretty safely liberal county that went Democratic even in the last two elections, so it might have been an easier place to go for my first time. Washoe was more rural/suburban, with Reno probably being the only town that you might be familiar with. It had gone red all through the Clinton years and especially so the Bush years. But I kind of felt guilty going for the safe/fun option, so suburban/rural Washoe it was, 'Mississipi Burning' paranoia be damned.

I chose... wisely!

Guess who's coming to Reno?

That was the week Obama went back to Hawaii for an emergency visit to his ailing grandmother. On his way back, he stopped in Reno for a quick rally. I first heard word of it on Thursday when I was reading the Caucus blog on the NYT. Apparently word had spread quickly -- it was the buzz in the hotel lobby as people were checking in on Friday night. Basically, instead of the campaign office, people were being told to go to one of the softball fields over at UNR in the morning.

A 'small' rally

It was a relatively 'small' crowd for an Obama rally –- only about 10-15k (some say 20k), I figure. As might be expected, several elements of the big guy's speech were familiar to anybody following the presidential race, though I heard a few odd lines and jokes not usually seen in the news or the interenets. There was also an unusual thing that happened when the power went out for about 10-15 minutes so he just hung out for a bit shaking hands and greeting folks until it was fixed.

Keepin' it cool during the outage...

Meeting the people

It was a nice surprise and a great way to kick off my first time volunteering in a political campaign. Besides general enthusiasm, I think the rally had the campaign offices absolutely flooded with volunteers. There'd be long lines to get assignments and I ended up splitting lists with groups of people because they'd flat ran out of assignments.

The satellite office

As I discovered, a well-run campaign reduces the chance of confrontation almost by design. The materials the campaign sent out specifically instructed the canvasser NOT to get into arguments and to only offer information and corrections on areas they were fluent in. Furthermore, it's not like you sweep through an entire neighborhood. The campaign specifically targets persuadable or undecided voters based on previous canvassing and phone bank results, so that in some 'turfs' you may only be given as few as 1 or 2 addresses to contact. If you found a house festooned with McCain schwag, you'd basically skip it and mark it down on the list as a strongly decided voter for McCain to save any future volunteer the hassle.

There's apparently more to Reno than the strip!

The extent of any hostility I encountered was people totally ignoring the doorbells because they were so sick of being contacted all the time. There was one old man in a trailer park who drove by joking that he wanted to make sure we weren't Acorn people (which of course was neither here nor there -- the Acorn 'scandal' was about voter registration. By then the voter reg deadline in NV had long passed.)

The only real 'argument' I had was with one really nice lady whose husband was strongly McCain and had her take down an Obama sign she had put up a few weeks ago. She said she was back to undecided after she got a mailer saying that Obama was going to repeal the 2nd amendment. She was pretty open minded and I think we were able to reassure her that this wasn't the case. She also wasn't too sure about 'spreading the wealth' with boosts to entitlement programs, so we talked about the pragmatic thinking involved in these kinds of economic programs from the banking bailout to very basic programs like these that try to prevent greater, costlier problems with comparatively cheap solutions now. When we left her she said she liked Obama and was probably going to vote for him, but seemed to want to be visited again. Talking to other volunteers, it wasn't altogether uncommon to come across a split household where we'd be looking for the lady of the house, but the husband would answer the door for her and pretty much shoo us away. A look at the list (your list would often still include contacts for voters recently marked unpersuadable) would usually show that he was leaning McCain.

Exploring a 2040 run...

I really enjoyed meeting other volunteers and talking to voters. I worked with some recent Cal grads the first day, and on the second day I joined up with a family to double-check any folks that were missed on Saturday. They had this little 10-year-old that was remarkably good at belting out the talking points, which was really cute. She kind of helped warm people up a bit if they weren't so enthused about answering their door on a Sunday morning.

I just generally had a great time with the experience. Goals were so well parsed down that it almost felt like a video game: You'd start out with this nice packet with maps, voter lists, and campaign materials. Simply hit as many of the addresses in that territory as you can, marking your progress and distributing campaign materials as needed, and do your best when somebody may need a little persuading. If you're not versed on an issue they're worried about, simply say so and refer them to the material. Or hopefully you'll be paired up with somebody who can cover on that.

Objective lists. Map reading. Processing lists and lists of info. Managing your items. This is pretty much what anybody racking up achievements on their 360 or raiding dungeons in WoW is doing. I found that this and just a basic interest in the process was all you really need to know to get started. Frankly, it may have helped me save a good turf's worth of votes in Gary, IN when I worked there on election eve. (I'd like to get out a write-up on that soon as well.)

In the end Washoe went blue for the first time in at least 20 years, and Obama won Nevada by a pretty healthy margin!

SITREP

2008-09-08T00:36:00.001-07:00

Just didn't want the headlining entry on my blog to be a political rant from waay back before Super Tuesday. A few updates:

- Busy as hell on the current show. Had a great time wrapping up this summer's shows, Iron Man and Wall-E (very, very minor role on Wall-E). Took a few days out of my one week off to finally go check out tapings of the Daily Show and Colbert. A co-worker got me and a few other co-workers backstage for Colbert which was absolutely awesome. I took pictures, but I think they don't want me to put those up on the blog.

- I swear to God my body is just deciding to fall apart on me this year. The ankle thing from early on got re-aggravated three times through the spring/summer, putting me back on a cane for about a week or two each time. Now my back is acting up. I think a lot of it is the heavy work schedule resulting in lack of exercise and probably a bit too much 'comfort food'. Looking forward to spending time working out more and recuperating after the show wraps.

- I'm working with Milo to give up Tuna (the cat). I've got to say that folks really undersold the issues involved in getting a cat when I was originally making my decision. Contrary to what I was told, yes, I'm too busy, and yes, my apartment is too small. Maybe she's comfortable with the apartment's size, but even with daily litter changes, my apartment regularly smelled like poo. I also was never told about the kind of 'blame-the-victim' outlook on pee problems. If a cat pees somewhere, it's your fault, and there's no point in scolding or spanking them because they don't understand why you're upset. In my case it's probably the erratic schedule that upset her, which just can't be helped. I've seriously had a much easier time with dogs. While I still like cats, I can pretty firmly count myself as a dog person.

- A bit of a political rant: We're in the middle of the post-RNC bump for McCain, which is naturally disconcerting to see. Though I'm still somewhat confident for Nov. 4, I've got to admit that I've gotten pretty disappointed in Obama for not taking the offensive early and often. Like so many times before, it seems like the Democratic candidate is constantly on the defensive when the opponent has so much more to answer for. This campaign has managed to surprise me several times before, though, and we are still nearly two months out.

We're Super! Thanks for asking

2008-02-03T00:30:00.000-08:00

Given my demographic, my location, and that I'm even writing in a blog, it's probably no surprise that I sent my mail-in last week with the little line filled in for one Mr. Barack Obama. Strongly so -- never has a mark been filled in as darkly or more completely and clearly!

As glad as I am that we're one of the headliners for Super Tuesday, looking at the polls now I can't help but wish that we had just a little while longer for people here in Cali to size things up and realize just how badly we could screw it up by throwing our many, many delegates behind the esteemed opponent. Of some solace is the proportional delegating system, so any momentum gained in recent days should be realized in the actual delegate count.

But still, I really want to shake people sometimes. There's so little substantive difference between what drives the policies of either candidate that electability becomes a perfectly reasonable thing to consider. And as such, you have to wonder how any Democrat old enough to have a fond memory (as I do) of the Clinton administration could forget just how much the GOP loathes the Clinton brand, particularly how well it endured all their attacks during that era. A rematch-by-proxy with the less popular half of the duo has been a wet dream openly expressed by most conservative pundits in the 24-hour news cycle. (As I said before, I'm watching *a lot* of this -- I can say that confidently.) With a base demoralized by the current presidency and a lethargic candidate pool, revenge could be just the motivation they need to bring out their vote.

Beyond the real enthusiasm that many in the Democratic party feel for Obama's message, one can't help but sense a tinge of exasperation in the flood of endorsements from the party leadership and interest groups this week. It's as if they can barely restrain themselves from screaming at the base, "WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE??? DO YOU KNOW WHAT WE'RE IN FOR IF WE SEND HER UP AGAINST MCCAIN???" Seriously.

I'd actually love to see her run again and win it, but now just doesn't seem to be the right time. With Obama we have a real opportunity to change the tone of politics in the nation and produce an environment in the future that may allow her to run without as much of the baggage of her hubby's admin. As Jon Stewart himself said, an Obama-McCain race would be "such a tonic for this country."

And if you think that's just a parroting of the Obama talking points, here's one thing to ask yourself: Do you think Thursday's CNN debate, by all counts the most substantive, civilized, and even fun presidential debate in the last several election cycles, would have even been possible if it wasn't for Obama and his commitment to taking the high ground through all of the abuse he took from his opponents? Imagine if we could sustain this through the General Election.

UPDATE: I guess it's a statement on just how fricking nuts this election is -- a Zogby poll released minutes ago shows him leading in CA 45%-41%. But, of course we know how good polls are this year...

I can stop anytime

2008-01-28T01:19:00.000-08:00

It's an election year, and despite better efforts, I'm sure a political rant will crop up here every so often, starting with this one.

For most of last year, I wasn't paying much attention to the races. But then I hurt my foot and spent the days leading up to the IA caucuses stuck at home watching just enough CNN that, coupled with my NPR habit, pushed me from an ambivalent observer to a hopeless election news junkie. Over the past month, I've bookmarked political blogs, election '08 sections from the major news sources, and have been checking in on them far more often than I'd care to admit throughout the day. I'm watching CNN as much as your dad does. When Stewart lampoons network news clips, I've often seen the original broadcast. I turned down a night of drinking to watch the SC primary returns, candidate speeches, and analysis (okay, I was really tired too from a few 50+ hr work weeks).

Folks, if you're not paying attention, you really are missing something that at best will make history, and at the very least will be referenced heavily for years to come in discussions of politics and the nation. You could be experiencing all of it first hand, right now.

I can't conscientiously encourage the kind of habit I've developed, but research will surely show one day the benefits of recreational use!

Season's Triage

2008-01-01T21:22:00.000-08:00

I've been a real frequent flyer at the ER this holiday season. On Xmas eve I finally got fed up with the cough I'd been dealing with for about two weeks and checked in, eventually picking up some fine Codeine syrup and antibiotics.

Then on New Year's even I went in for some odd foot pain that I originally woke up with on Friday. I had figured I maybe slept on it wrong or something and just needed to walk it off. By Monday it was excruciating so I was right back into the ER (couldn't find a Podiatrist open) and they figured it was some kind of ligament tear/partial tear in the foot. Raised a fuss and got some vicodin which even then only barely helped.

So I rung in the new year on my couch with my foot propped up and popping pain meds while watching the local news anchors cavort at various local festivities. Probably will have to take the rest of the week off from work too.

Quite a way to kick off '08. I'm really starting to wonder if, contrary to Chinese numerology, 8 is actually a bad number for me. I actually got laid off from my job back on 8/8/01 (though obviously I'm back now), dropped out of Cal in 1998, and probably my worst primary school year ever was 8th grade (but I hear that's the way it is for most people), which started in 1988.

Any way, happy new year, everybody! As for myself, I'm going to be busy watching my back!

Cal Band Great!!!

2007-11-16T22:22:00.000-08:00

Well, the season didn't quite turn out the way we would've hoped, but I think 2007 will be forever remembered as the season the Band did THIS:

I was there, and I was just standing there in awe and forgot to take a single picture. You can take yer BCS rankings and shove 'em! None of you guys will top this!

I'M IN UR BASE

2007-09-18T01:21:00.001-07:00

...KILLIN' UR IKEA COUCHEZ

Yup, picked up a cat from Milo. Besides the furry companionship, I got her in self-defense against the fleas that had begun to invade my house from all the goddamned strays the old lady downstairs keeps feeding. (Any pet owner will tell you -- furry companion + Frontline or Advantage = flea problem solved.)

Been great so far. Generally she just hangs out on a sunny window sill and then comes out to goof around with me for a bit and goes back to doing her own thing. Just need to get her to actually start clawing the 'iScratch' thing I got her instead of my !%$!@# couch! Other than that, she seems well house-trained and in good health.

Her original name's Tuna, not that it matters since she doesn't come when I call it. I'm thinking of calling her Decoy instead.

Open Letter

2007-08-21T00:43:00.000-07:00

In quasi-socialist Bay Area, Radio listens to YOU!
... even if you never got around to writing in about it.

Sent to the listener feedback line:

I noticed after I got back from vacation a few weeks ago that Christopher Lydon's "Open Source" was taken off the air, and have been meaning to send in a note to heartily applaud the move! It seems he has a bit of a following, at least the last time I Googled the show, so I figure KQED's probably picked up some flak for taking it off the schedule.

But I think anybody who's been exposed to a show like KQED's own Forum or such NPR staples like Fresh Air and Talk of the Nation would have picked up within a minute what a total phony Lydon was. The man has no place conducting interviews or moderating discussions on anything more pressing than how to cook Thanksgiving Dinner. I've never heard a host press a guest to answer a question the guest himself insisted he was unqualified to answer, nor have I heard the phrase "Actually, that's not what I meant..." more often in a single show on 88.5. That "Talkin' with the Ghost of Thomas Jefferson" (or whatever the hell he called it) bit really sealed it.

I'm often listening weekdays in the wee hours, and I really appreciate the quirkier stuff that got programmed into the 11pm and later slot like Day to Day and especially News and Notes. But when 1 am rolled around I often found myself lunging for the off-switch! The only thing that show was good for was reminding me that I really should be getting to bed!

Anyway, rant over. Thanks for making the airwaves safe again, and please hold the line against anybody misguided enough to lobby for it to come back. I promise you there's a silent majority out here that feels just that much better now about how our pledge money is being spent. :)

EDIT:
Alas, a Google search later revealed that the show itself tanked due to lack of funds, so its absence isn't necessarily a brillliant, brave move by the local program director so much as it was a sensible, prudent move by the funders. Net effect is the same, though, so it's still a win.

EDIT:
The station's reply was fun.

New Digs

2007-07-08T21:32:00.001-07:00

I'll try to get something together about the TW trip, but in a nutshell it wasn't terribly eventful, though I had a good time over in HK. I've been back for over a week now and have been mostly trying to make my new apartment semi-presentable. Thought I'd post up a few pics.

I was wrong when I told people it's four to five houses from Pac Wushu. It's actually TWO houses and a street. In the picture above, the foreground is, well, tenth street, but in the mid ground is the apartment, and in the background is Pac Wushu. I can't really say I'll be training there more often, though, since my schedule usually doesn't let me out in time to get to class on time. But I'm sure it'll be handy for various other reasons.

Here's the living room. In glorious high definition you can see the A's getting their asses handed to them by the M's. I still need to bring my fish tank over, no small task.

The bedroom. Furnished by Ikea, more or less.

The kitchen is pretty scrappy. I had to do a lot of work fixing the pipes on the sink -- it's absolutely amazing what passed for 'repairs' by the previous tenant. Basically, instead of buying a $2 slip nut that had broken, the guy layered on about 2 inches worth of caulk to try to 'glue' some pipes back together. Naturally, that didn't work.

I'm not much of a chef, so besides getting a microwave, I haven't felt too much pressure to improve much on the kitchen. I'm still tempted to get a new stove and fridge, though. What's there is old and not working terribly well.

Bathroom still needs some new paint, so no pics yet.

I wish I had taken pics of the place before I started. Across weekends and whatever spare time I could manage, I tore out the old, dirty, smelly carpet, stripped and re-finished the floors (though they probably should be replaced), and repainted all the walls (the Moms helped on some of that). There was all kinds of junk and furniture in there that was in no condition for me to use.

It is a rental, so it may sound odd that I've put so much work into it, but the thing is, the rent really is so absurdly cheap that I figured I'd eat the cost and 'sweat equity' to turn it into something I'd actually enjoy living in. Folks have been living in that place for over thirty years, and I could see myself spending quite some time here as I save up to get my own place.

Green Acres

2007-06-19T03:20:00.000-07:00

Been there, done that

Islands can be quite big, I'm discovering. Formosa can seem quite the insignificant spec, but about two hours into the drive out from the airport, I had to accept that the entire island was not essentially a suburb of Taipei.

Spent the last few days in Taipei and am at this very moment sitting at Taipei Taoyuan International waiting for my flight to HK. This is all after a pretty arduous first several days on this trip in Taichung, which was not the sort of place I had in mind when I envisioned a vacation in the metropolitan centers of expatriate or formerly expatriate Chinese territories.

Given the relations many of us have to the folks here, let me warn the uninitiated that, at least for the next five-ten years, you will want to regard any warm-hearted and generous offer of lodging and visitation in Taichung with measured gratitude and great caution. When I heard 'rural' I pictured rural Marin relative to SF Bay, or even Narita to Tokyo. In fact it bore much closer resemblance to some of the provincial towns I visited in Rio recently or in China several years ago, though by many counts it still compares favorably.

But still, the streets are often unpaved, traffic is total chaos, the skeeters are numerous and very hungry, stray dogs and cats wander the streets, and the weather is a hot, sticky, muggy mess. Internet cafes were remarkably hard to find -- I finally had to take my laptop out and find WiFi hotspots at coffee shops.

Pretty rural street. Not pictured: mosquitos, strays

It all made for kind of an awkward situation when I really wanted to take off for Taipei. Uncle #2 was generous and hospitable to a fault, but the whole place got to be a terrific downer. Most days we'd spend sitting in the house watching TV as the rain came down in sheets. When we wanted to go out he or his daughters would insist on driving us, which became problematic as they tended to miss turns and get lost a lot, which only added to the list of things they were constantly bickering about. Meanwhile we'd be doing our best to stifle gasps and shrieks as we rode shotgun to the kind of driving that'd reinforce your worst stereotypes of Asian female and elder driving.

And obviously this is nobody's fault, but it got incredibly depressing because #2's wife had a stroke a year or so ago and was now wheelchair bound and vegetative (not in the clinical sense, but she couldn't talk or interact much). She'd sit there and kind of gaze around, looking at each of us and grin or chuckle occasionally. She'd still eat normally if spoon fed, but it was hard to figure out what was going on in there. I remember her from when she visited several years ago and was one of the few family members I had that enjoyed having my dog around.

Basically it was a good bunch of people that we wanted to see, but there really wasn't much to do in that town and they really seemed to want to monopolize our time here. My mom had been there over a week and only planned on spending a few days originally. I went to bed last Saturday night thinking we'd be on an HSR to Taipei by noon Sunday, but woke up to find that they didn't help reserve the tix they said they would and were suggesting we stay on for another 2-3 days. I put the proverbial kibosh on that and we were in Taipei by Sunday night.

Taipei 101 -- I've rarely been this happy in a mall

SITREP

2007-05-17T23:57:00.000-07:00

Work's been mad these last few weeks. When I get home I only have the intellectual (ha!) capacity left to pop open a video game or tear open my netflix DVD. Items:

*Joyful sob!*

- The current project finishes end of the month. The latest trailer has been taking the fanboy community by storm today -- discuss amongst yourselves. People are getting pretty excited, but I continue to caution folks to keep expectations realistic. Whether that's true trepidation or the shrewd management of expecations is up to you. I may be in it -- I was in some extras shoots. I also got a chance to work on a shot, which I believe went really well.

- It's my general feeling that this is the year that over- and under- rated film franchises of the recent years will come into balance with their true quality. SM and Shrek have always been incredibly overrated in my mind (not bad, just overrated), and it seems that this is the year they will finally be viewed as such. On the other hand PotC has been a little underrated recently in my mind, especially P2, and I'm expecting critical consensus to jibe a little better with public perception for P3. SM3's BO has been dropping precipitously, and I expect Shrek to do the same.

- I've finally gone through with signing up for b2b, that annual event designed for drunk, naked people that like to run/wander aimlessly across a 12 km course through SF. I've actually been training semi-consistently for this, but I'm still not sure how serious I'll be when I run it. On the one hand it's my first time, so maybe I should just walk most of it and take it all in. On the other, I'm pretty curious what kind of time I could make, especially since they now give you these tracking chips.

- 300, which is what we've come to call my new apt based on the rent, is almost ready for move in. With a little help from blee I hope to have my HD tv set over there for HD cable installation on Saturday morning. I've learned an awful lot about plumbing and floor finishing these last few months, as well as just how inept people can be about these things. I hope to be in there by the end of the month or early June.

- I am positively burning out! I've scheduled a full 1 month vacation. I will be visiting relatives on the Mom's side in Taiwan for two weeks, and then spend another two wks futzing around in the US, maybe taking a road trip up to see some friends in the midwest. I may try to swing by HK while I'm in TW. That would be something I'd arrange while I'm over there if I find myself with the spare time.

Post Meridiem

2007-03-28T00:01:00.000-07:00

... very post meridiem.

Well, at least they're in their PJs

True to form, cmat 2k7 kept its intrepid crew and young competitors up past their responsible bedtimes to finish sometime around 10:30 or 11 pm. It's somewhat lurid the sort of things I've learned about what this year's crew had to overcome to stage it. New leadership at the 'MAP has apparently been a little unkind to the event, upset over the absent (or perhaps VERY delinquent) tournament report from last year. Consequences of this included drastic cuts in the hospitality budget that discouraged attendance of at least a few would-be officials known to your correspondent.

This put a lesser official like me in the unique position to judge the Nandu events this year, mixed in haphazardly with far more qualified ex-professionals. A fascinating but ultimately excruciating duty as always, the Nandu system reminds me of something some Soviet-era bureaucrat might devise. I escaped many of its technicalities by going for the B-category, which in many ways seems a kind of throwback to traditional-style judging based on more nebulous terms like 'spirit' and 'intent'. By now subjectivity is something I revel in, so I got the hang of things pretty quickly. Subjective as it was, my B-category cohort and I were in pretty good agreement for the majority of routines.

One thing I've become pretty aggravated with is how so many routines today have large pauses that have no stylistic function beyond setting up some snazzy trick. I miss flow, kids. Flow is where the rhythm comes out, and rhythm, like in music, goes a long way towards defining the accents and flavor of a particular style. I can't help but wonder if the Nandu system's rigid requirements for certain difficulties is discouraging that kind of aesthetic. At the very least B category is there as a kind of hedge against such dogged technicality.

After party in the Free Republic of Berkeley was chaotic, uninterrupted by law enforcement, and as always, remarkably responsible. It's become such the cliche for me to consider not going to these events, but I ultimately end up having a terrific time and always come out impressed in some way.

Misnomers

2007-03-04T21:33:00.000-08:00

I don't tend to get colds, but when I do, it's a doozy. Being cooped up at home the last few days hasn't been much help, so I'm hoping the semi-fresh air and semi-bright sunshine out here at Strada will do me some good, disease-vectoring be damned.

Belated topic: Oscars. My giddy, incoherent babble aside about the company's win, I had planned on writing a bit about the movies, but never got around to finishing anything. So here goes.

I don't think anybody's really 'into' the Oscars per se, but it seems everybody has an opinion. I finally put my actual money where my proverbial mouth was and took a dive into the office pool(1) this year. Looking down the ballot, I felt the same queasy cluelessness about some categories that I did about some offices and measures on a far more important ballot last November.

It made me wonder if the actual voters are similarly underinformed. While the vetting process is performed by the tradesmen, the final decision rests on the oxymoronic wisdom of the voting-eligible mobs. Much like me, I figure a good number of people don't manage to see many of the films on the list and go purely by hunches and buzz.

Which is probably why I did so well, all things considered. I tied for second in a pool of 17, correctly guessing 14 of the winners. My proudest picks were for the animated categories, which I felt most informed on and where I made resolute, independent choices that bucked the majority. It seems the animated short category is one in which looking too polished has become a bit of a handicap, explaining last year's "The Moon and the Son" and this year's "Danish Poet". I enjoyed the entries from the likes of Blue Sky and Pixar, but one can't help but feel like this isn't really a category for multi-million dollar animation studios.

I actually hadn't seen Happy Feet, but I know most people were disappointed in Cars, and that Happy Feet had exceeded a lot of people expectations as a film, so it was worth the risk.

In the other categories, I'm not sure how it compared to the previous, but there was a real problem I had this year motivating myself to even watch most of the Oscar-worthy films. I've rarely seen a collection of such outwardly depressing movies in a long time.

General Spoiler Warning: S/he dies in the end

A recap, in ascending order of mood (sorry about the length):

The 'tween
When a film opens with a 12-year-old collapsed, bleeding, and gasping for breath, you gotta figure your discomfort is the least of its concerns. Keep that in mind pretty much anytime the antagonist is on screen in Pan's. I wouldn't say I so much enjoyed this film as I appreciated it deeply, even if I had to forgive some bits of melodrama and "don't go in there" moments of the kind you're used to seeing in b-horror matinees. A bit of a shock it lost Best Foreign, but I didn't see the winner, so I can't say.

Children of Mobs
Never saw the original HK film, but I doubt I'd like it as much as I liked Departed. I can't imagine how I could've dealt with a version of this where, instead of the slicingly-vulgar rapid-fire barbs from Mr. Wahlberg, you got some lame toilet gag haltingly interjected into an exchange as HK films are so wont to do. On second-viewing, I felt the length more, but it was a sensible pick for Best D. Best P was a little dubious, I felt.

Man's Labyrinth
Maybe this was a bit over-hyped to me, but Children of Men strikes me as a film that gets most of its mileage from a really great premise. I liked it, but outside of the setup, you've got to admit it's kind of a conventional run-and-hide-and-getaway kind of film. Much of the hub-bub seems to come from some brilliant casting (in the narrative sense as much as performing) that's inspired all kinds of allegories for contemporary issues. Some people cried bloody murder, but I think it was rightfully panned in some categories.

The Imparted
The significance of Princess Di's untimely passing in '97 is one of those things I'll have to appreciate without feeling directly, a view which is actually sympathetic to the title character in Queen. With all the little bubbles people enclose themselves in (both public figures and increasingly, regular citizens), I found a lot to like about this story that attempted to explain actions seemingly inexplicable at the time. Mirren's gold tchotchke was well-earned in this one.

Stop that! Cultural Learnings of CO2 for Make Benefit Glorious Planet of Earth-istan
Yes, you in particular may not need to see Inconvenient Truth. The movement had you at 'Greenhouse Effect'. But if you just want to see a good movie, you should want to see it. Think of it this way: this is a film that managed to portray Gore, who probably gelled today's stereotype of the wooden Democratic presidential candidate, as a brilliant, witty, and passionate orator. If that's not deserving of an Oscar, then I don't know what is. The song was a surprise winner, but shouldn't have been -- the three songs for Dreamgirls undoubtedly split the vote, leaving the underdog the victor. Really kicked myself over that one, especially since I didn't see Dreamgirls and randomly picked one of its songs. (And for the umpteenth time, Gore didn't win the Oscar, it was the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim. It's staggering how many reputable outlets keep saying that, mostly as part of a lame joke or segue.)

Little-missed Funtime
Everybody's seen this. Everybody's talked about this. Everybody. I don't think there's much left to be said, but I guess I'm obligated to lamely say that it is indeed brilliant and had people literally rolling in the aisles at the theater when we saw it. If you didn't catch it, make the effort to find find Baron Cohen's acceptance speech (for actor in comedy or musical) at the Golden Globes. (Catch it before the lawyers do -- It's not on youtube anymore!). It would've been awesome to see what he would have pulled if it had taken screenplay, but I can't quite say it would've come on merit.

An Inconvenient Trip
I had the benefit of having this over-hyped and then over-trashed for me so I'd say I took Sunshine on a mostly even keel. I enjoyed it, but I can't say it was outstanding. Unique is what I sincerely hope are scripted contestants and antics at the the pageants, but other than that, it was seemed kind of a typical dysfunctional family comedy. It seemed to deserve some kind of award, but I can't say what in particular. The two that it did get all managed to surprise me.

1) There wasn't a company-wide pool or anything, just one a bunch of us put together.

Cheeze it!

2007-02-26T21:28:00.000-08:00

Gotcha!

Here's the plan. You distract them with questions about their childhood growing up blind in Brooklyn while I make a run for it!

Explanations:
1) In the opening monologue, Ellen joked that those stuck for an acceptance speech should fabricate a miserable childhood growing up with some disability in Brooklyn. As a joke, Knoll decided to make a remark to that effect. I think it went over alright.
2) That goldish thing is indeed the Oscar our company picked up for Pirates 2.
3) It kind of looks like I'm stealing it in the pic, see?

Never left

2007-02-25T23:48:00.000-08:00

It may not have been as bad as Marty or Peter's dry spell, but going 12 years without a visit from Oscar has been quite long enough! The last one the company picked up was for Gump in '94. Up until then it never went Oscar-less for longer than two years.

The articles on the subject so far (all, um, two of them) have this "They're back!" tone to them, which I enjoy, but I don't think there was any real doubt about the quality of our work as it was that we weren't getting a good chance to show off what we can do. Hopefully this will help bring in more of those kinds of projects.

Stimulus Package

2007-02-16T22:49:00.000-08:00

It's good for the economy!

When the overgrown local gossip rag we like to call the SF Chronicle did a feature on the dip in HDTV prices, I finally had a look and found that a position had opened up for an HDTV in my household. I picked this (Sony 50" WEGA SXRD -- yes, it's 1080p) up on Superbowl Sunday with the help of Lumberjack, setting it up just in time to watch the most honorable and exhalted artist formerly-and-then-currently known as Prince do the half-time show, singing Purple Rain with, indeed, little rain drops glistening purple from the stage lighting during the 1080i broadcast.

I think I need to explain myself. Ask anybody and you'll know that my spending habits are hardly stingy. But when it comes to the big ticket items I'm pretty level-headed -- I don't get any kind of high from buying big toys. Frankly it causes me as much anxiety as exuberance, because I really do worry if I've made the right choice when I buy something hideously expensive.

Given the habits over the last few months, though, you wouldn't think so. Since September, I've picked up a new Macbook, a new mattress (not cheap!), a Wii + games and extra controllers, lots of games and DVDs (slightly above normal), a video iPod, and now this. There's probably a lot of odds and ends I've forgotten about. I've also picked up a lot of home improvement stuff, for example.

The knee-jerk diagnosis for all of this would be some strain of fractional-life crisis, of course. I suppose some of that's always at least somewhat true -- I don't think I've been sure of most of the things I've done in my life since Jr. High. But still, yes, it's worth wondering if that's what this is ultimately all about.

On the other hand, though, you could look at actual facts and numbers. Like the fact that the last laptop I had was a PB 1400 that's been boxed up for 6 years now. And that the TV I had strained my eyes and is 5 years old. That I didn't pick up my PS2 or Xbox until prices had dropped precipitously 2-3 years after their initial release. That my mattress predated my residency with Lumberjack back over in Albany in 2000. That I'm spending about 1.5 - 2 hours a day commuting, downtime that goes by much faster with a quick round of Advance Wars DS or an episode of Heroes.

It's a convergence in the upgrade cycle, is what I'm suggesting. With a lot of these technologies finally hitting maturity and concurrently dropping in price, it seemed like the reasonable thing to do. I'm not dipping into credit debt at all for this -- it's all been paid off, my saving's still building up, and I expect to finish paying off my X within two months, over a year-and-a-half early.

That said, I think I can set some indicators for me to watch out for. Generally if I start buying unproven next-gen stuff like a blu-ray or an HD-DVD player, another console when I barely have enough time for my Wii, an SLR without advancing in photography or enrolling in a class for the same, or even something relatively justifiable like buying a new hybrid when I don't commute to work and my recreational driving tends to be long-distance highway, or an iPhone when I barely use the cell phone I have and save my Macbook for long trips.

I may be a consumer whore, but I'm picky about my clients.

It's cold outside

2007-01-30T00:06:00.000-08:00

So I take cameras to the 'cons or what have you thinking I'll snap tons of photos of freaks but end up chickening out because I start feeling like such a prick for shitting on what generally are a bunch of people just goofing off and having a good time.

But I found that even I have limits.

What devotion! ... for me to poop on!

So what were all these folks doing in front of a computer store on a Monday night in January? Another new video game console? Some Apple product? Perhaps a DVD release? A game or game expansion pack? Celebrity appearance?

Not really.

The swearing starts at 10:01pm

The little crusade I went on for the Wii over x-mas, which involved way more standing outside in the cold than I'd care to admit, was probably among the most degrading experiences I've been through. But for my troubles I knew I'd be rewarded with amusements well-documented in the press and expressed by the lucky colleagues that managed to get one themselves.

But an OS upgrade??? Even in the best cases, OS upgrades are huge, tedious ordeals that require re-entering settings, file copies, installing new hardware, resolving driver issues, patching software conflicts and incompatibilities, and restoring the functionality that often took years to establish. To stand out in the cold for even an hour in anticipation of this seems a little nuts to me. And yes, I include the beloved Mac in all this -- it's a lot less painful, but a chore no less.

The analogies abound. I'm most reminded of those times when your prof didn't have his act together enough to assemble your midterm for you, so he had you queue up and pick up sheets of the test in sequence and staple them together yourself.

Anyway, things being as they are, I'm sure Vista will find its way onto a computer near me eventually. I'll have these poor saps (all of which were Asian, which struck me as interesting) to thank when I go on google searching for the solution to those obscure problems that are never properly documented anywhere.

Godspeed, you nerds. Godspeed.

DISCLOSURE:
As to why I was there in the first place, I was out trying to pick up a USB 2.0 card. The new video iPod I just upgraded to over the weekend won't sync over Firewire.

Let the pun begin

2007-01-23T22:08:00.000-08:00

Finally got it! Actually making this entry one freaking character at a time through its web browser just to see if I can. They have this word completion thing that kinda helps.

SITREP

2007-01-03T00:22:00.000-08:00

Man, I really need to update more often. I gotta blame all the video games I've been playing lately.

Back at work after the xmas-nye break we all get. A week seemed like it would be an incredibly long time heading into it, but now I'm wishing for more. Gotta put in for a month-long dealie when the current project finishes.

Break was quiet, but with some good developments. The Moms found a new apartment and I've been helping her re-finish the floors and re-paint for move in. The current plan is to sell the current house, which I'll still be in until we sell. After that, us kids will get some proceeds from the sell to boost us along at whatever stage of our lives we'll be at. Should be helpful on the ol' house hunt.

2006 was pretty intense in a lot of parts, but overall a bit too quiet. I'm about ready for things to pick up a bit this year, so here's to a more exciting 2k7.

Jingle all the Wii

2006-12-26T20:04:00.001-08:00

What ever the !#@% happened to taking pre-orders???

Anyway, hope y'all had a good holiday.

Still looking...

In the day

2006-12-17T22:31:00.000-08:00

My brain feels like mush these days. While I try to redevelop the focus to write coherently about something, let's enjoy this nostalgic little video clip somebody forwarded around the other day:

I didn't see Tron in the theater, actually. My little elementary school in El Cerrito screened movies after school from time to time, and somehow got this for us. In hindsight, this must have been a real coup since it can't have been any later than 1983 when they screened it.

23 years later, there I was watching it one evening while waiting for a render to finish on a project related to something else that was a huge part of my childhood. Sometimes you just gotta be a sentimental schmuck and appreciate the poetry of these kinds of things.

Fun for the whole family

2006-11-16T10:39:00.000-08:00

Fake or Foto quiz

What's a photo, what's fake? Only got 9/10 on the first try, tricky bastards.

Keep the change!

2006-11-08T00:59:00.000-08:00

Is it me, or do the NPR correspondents sound a little giddy tonight?

I swear they change the voting technology in CA every other election. They had some paper system today where I had to fill out an arrow next to my vote, and then feed it into a giant reader machine. For the past two we had the Diebold machines. Frankly, I kinda like Electronic voting. It's just unbelievable how many problems there are with it.

Midterm Cramming

2006-11-06T23:46:00.000-08:00

It seems like 2k4 pretty much tapped every single drop of energy and enthusiasm I had for blogging about politics, which I frankly have come to view as a good thing. I tuned out completely from the topic for months after -- I even stopped watching the Daily Show for a while! Then the local public radio affiliate plugged that asshat of a show 'Open Source' into just that part of the day when I'm often tuned in at home, and I realized just how obnoxious uncredentialed political blogging can be.

There have definitely been some cases where blogs had a huge influence by picking up on topics the media neglected, but let's be honest. Outside of a few truly dedicated and hard-working folks who do serious research and actually hold their work to certain standards, most of what counts for political blogging are guys like me spouting high-falutin' rants to the like-minded.

As with many things, I think it's not so much the deed itself as the hype around it that bothers me. That anybody actually cares enough about politics to write a few hundred words about it regularly should have any civic-minded individual doing cartwheels. It just bothers me when it's viewed as anything more than some random guy venting some thoughts about what he heard in the news.

As I'm about to do.

Election eve, and I find myself once again kind of cramming so that I can fulfill my civic obligations with at least some competency. Thoughts:

- In spite of my bitching and moaning in '03, I do believe I'll be voting for Arnold this year. Let it be recorded that Nov. 7 will be the day Kai voted Republican for the first and probably the only time ever. You have to understand how uncompelling the alternative is. There's just no way around it. If he gets in, it will absolutely be politics as usual in this state. Arnie's really done some interesting things with politics, and having been tamed from the special election, did some pretty good things with the legislature. I also just saw the most ridiculously desperate ad against Arnie that kept cutting shots of him at a 2k4 presidential rally for shrub with figures from the war and the national economy or what have you, and absolutely nothing about California or his actual record.

- Kerry needs to shut the hell up. I brought it up earlier elsewhere, but Ira Glass's piece(1) on Kerry precisely reflects my frustrations with him and my deep desire that he go work quietly for a long time on good causes to build up the karma he'll need to re-enter public life.

- Do Rove and shrub's confidence about the outcomes on Tuesday really creep anybody else out? The press is challenging that by pressing them on poll figures, but the question in my mind is just what the hell are they planning??? I don't think much doubt remains that they stole Florida in 2k, and I count myself among the reasonable people who really think Ohio was more than a little suspicious in 2k4. Add in e-voting and I think it's seriously time to talk about UN monitoring.

- It will be a sad, sad thing if 87 doesn't pass. The cynicism reflected in the no campaign is profound. And I love how their attack ad points out the "12,000 legally-binding words!". Oh no! Words! Whatever will we do? Wherever shall we go?

That is all. Vote, dammit!

(1) The Cat Came Back -- This American Life (cue 24 min)

On second thought

2006-10-25T23:50:00.000-07:00

I think I'll drive down to LA tomorrow. Back Saturday, so no RT party for me.

Some stuff I wanna check out, and hopefully I'll get to meet up with some friends. As much as anything I'm going for the drive. I think I'll swing by Yosemite along the way.

Coming up to the end of my vacation, and no real regrets about staying arount town. If anything I was a little aggravated about some stuff I couldn't get my mind off of, but I remember feeling the same thing when I was in Rio last year. Gives truth to that hippie bumper sticker, 'Wherever you go, there you are'.

Consider the Reader

2006-10-19T16:13:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading "Infinite Jest", just in time for me to have nothing quite as fun to read during my two-week vacation.

It's a bizarre book. Lacking the background to draw good comparisons to other literature, I'm stuck comparing it to movies, which isn't such a bad idea, actually. A lot of the movies it reminds me of actually came out after IJ, so I can't help but wonder if it had some influence.

Imagine if Wes Anderson directed a film of a Chuck Palahniuk novel like Fight Club that incorporated the sort of multi-faceted geo-political intrigue of a film like Syriana or Traffic. Then imagine the story being broken up and told out of order like Tarantino often does. Then toss in some Pythonesque absurdity for good measure and even some elements that you might recall from Max Headroom. Then stop the novel just as everything seems to kind of be coming together, leaving readers to piece together what really happened from indistinct flashbacks and vaguely clairvoyant dreams or hallucinations laced throughout the novel.

The over-achieving and highly dysfunctional Incandenza family that the main thread follows recalls/portends the family in Anderson's Royal Tenenbaums, right down to the crash-n-burn tennis career of one of its characters. The family itself lives on an elite tennis academy James Incandenza (the father) founded after becoming successful with some kind of cold fusion and optical technology. The halfway house setting for the other thread recalls/portends the group therapy sessions and brutality of Fight club, packed with sardonic-yet-revelatory descriptions of AA meetings and recollections of past physical and sexual traumas expressed vividly through a deft use of slang and turns of phrase instead of explicit details.

This is all set in an absurdist near future where the US, Canada, and Mexico have been coercively united under the Organization of North American Nations (forming an unfortunate acronym in the process, one of many in the book). Instead of numbered Julian-calendar years, ONAN accepts corporate sponsorships to determine the name for each year, leading to calendar dates such as "May 19, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment". Interdependence Day is celebrated in commemoration of the union of the three nations instead of Independence Day. Years before sponsored time are referred to as Before-Subsidization time, or BS time. The Internet has given way to the Interlace, whose data are transmitted to tele-puters, or TPs.

A massive cold-fusion accident and toxic-dumping in the US's northeast has lead to the forcible ceding (as in we force the 'nucks to take it) of a massive chunk of the US northeast to Canada, now referred to as the great concavity. Dumping privileges are retained, though, accomplished through garbage catapults located throughout the northeast that launch garbage payloads into the concavity with a funny 'Shoop!' noise.

Getting the picture? And I'm seriously just glossing over everything.

International intrigue comes into play as an extremist cell of Quebecois separatists, already frustrated from union with Canada and now inconsolable from allegiance to ONAN, hatch a plot for a terror campaign to finally gain independence. Infinite Jest, a film made by James Incandenza shortly before he went mad and microwaved his own head, had apparently achieved such a level of entertainment that it was lethally addictive to anyone who viewed it. Viewers surrender completely to it and die after losing control of all bodily functions. The terror cell, many of which are legless and wheelchair bound from a bizarre initiation ritual, hopes to find the one hidden master copy of Infinite Jest and threaten to distribute copies throughout a US they view as helpless to resist the allure of such entertainment.

As the terror plot progresses, the story hops around various points in the characters' lives to develop the connections between them and the various members of the Incandenza family and ultimately to the senior Incandenza himself and IJ. All of this is necessary because nobody can directly view IJ without succumbing to it. Pro- and anti-ONAN bodies are in pursuit of information on it either to use it or to develop an antidote for it.

That's the basic setup, but one can't help but feel as if the plot is somewhat besides the point of this whole 1,079-page tome. There's a story, and you definitely are driven to find out what happens to its characters, but there's so much hopping around that reading it feels more like reading a collection of short stories, monologues, and dialogs. Some parts are in a quasi-screenplay format. One is intended to look like an insurance report that was forwarded around over e-mail by office mates. Wallace is constantly switching the voice in his writings as he switches between settings and characters so that while much of the book is in the third person, it feels first person because the language changes so drastically to reflect the subject of the current passage.

I can't seriously claim any solid understanding of what the real point of it all is -- there have been more than a few scholarly papers on it, and you hear 'great American novel' bandied about a lot by some critics. Most of the characters in the book suffer from some kind of addiction or compulsion, so that's an obvious theme, but the book also touches on other topics ranging from incest to commercialism to American foreign policy.

'Too much' is the overarching theme I get from it. Throughout the book you see things taken literally to ridiculous extremes. ONAN is the formalization of how the US just imposes itself on the rest of the continent. As if air pollution wasn't enough, garbage is now actively lobbed into Canada. James Incandenza is an experimental filmmaker that critics often refer to as audience-hostile with his bizarre style, in one case making a film where a character looks into the camera the last third of the film spouting apologies. Regarded as mediocre, he finally makes a film that is so entertaining it's lethal. The children and teens attending the tennis academy are so totally immersed in their drive to achieve super-stardom in tennis they know little else. Characters are constantly going on drug binges or overdosing.

And ultimately, of course, the book itself. You can't help but look at the massive volume of this thing and its 388 end notes and not wonder if there's a statement to be made in the delivery as well.

Spoils

2006-10-18T15:29:00.000-07:00

Finally on my vacation. I've had my fill of umpteen-hour flights to the various corners of the globe/nation, so I've decided to go for the exact opposite of 'getting the most' out of my vacation time this time around, and will be spending my time visiting the fabulous San Francisco Bay Area. I'm planning on doing a few Wushu workouts, doing a few jogs up to Lake Temescal, taking a long drive around to places that will help clear out my head, and spend time in coffee shops on my new MacBook stealing some poor sap's Wi-Fi to make pithy blog entries, such as I am now. That is, I'm planning on doing absolutely fucking nothing.

The difficulty of this is not to be underestimated. The preoccupations of the last month or so has left unquenched my blood thirst for affordable East Bay real-estate. A flawed-yet-highly-desirable target has wandered into my sights and I'm trying to make some casual moves on it, which I'm finding is about as easy as running a 'casual' space shuttle launch. I never expected home-buying to be an easy process, but I'm still surprised with just how many variables there are. I've lived a long, happy life without pondering WTF a sewer lateral is, but now it's one thing I absolutely can't stop thinking about w/r/t this property, and the grave, archaic injustice of having to share one with two other residents. It's all likely moot anyway, for my shot at this particular property is slim at best.

Time is a rare ally here, though, and I need to learn to work with it. Though my sanity suffers, I can live at home slightly longer to wait for ideal targets and to better condition myself to go in for the kill when the time comes by straightening my finances out even more.

I need to talk about other things or else I'll be a total wreck. Which I will. Talk about other things, that is. I finally saw a respectable movie that I really enjoyed. I've finished reading Infinite Jest. The A's choked in the league playoffs. I'm fostering a dog through Milo. I'll talk about all that. Next time.

Labor Month

2006-10-01T23:38:00.000-07:00

FINAL-ly!

First real weekend I've had all month -- there must be something ironic about having worked every single day since Labor Day in September. Appropriately enough, though, most of the crew has been enjoying a real windfall in wages precisely because of our embattled labor union contract, rendering material the otherwise intangible physical and psychological tolls of miscalculated production schedules. I more than doubled my income for the month by working 70+ hour weeks, at least one of which was 80+. We even entered into what the wags refer to as 'golden time', where every single hour counted as overtime because we had crossed beyond the normal, sane limits of continuous work days.

It's sort of like this month has been that hell-of-ironic-punishments. So you like your job, eh? Just HOW much do you like it??? You like your co-workers, eh? Just HOW much you like 'em? You want to make more money, eh? Just HOW much do you want to make it? It all became a huge blur.

Anyway, insane as it was, I think we turned out some really great work. Do check it out if you live around the 200 or so theaters nationwide that will be capable of screening it.

Don't ask how. Just watch.

Next Mission:

Roll out! ... after my vacation

Needless to say, this is a highly coveted assignment, and I consider getting crewed onto it as some kind of payback, be it administrative or karmic. It'll be a real relief, too, since it'll be more of a standard show (i.e. not stereoscopic), that I'll be supporting along with another more experienced ATD I hope to learn a lot from.

It won't always be like this

2006-09-27T05:06:00.000-07:00

It's 5am, and I'm at work.

From the day before.

Now they pay me for it

2006-09-02T01:03:00.000-07:00

No excuses -- my life has been pretty dull of late. So when the announcement went out that we were cranking up to 60+ hour weeks for these last weeks on the show, I generally saw it as getting a huge pay bonus for not having a life. Long days + full Saturdays have been the rule for me the last three weeks, with about three more before we finish.

Including this one. Besides the huge bummer of losing the R&R of a 3-day weekend (we'll be in Saturday AND Monday), there's the added element for me of the Bay Bridge closure this weekend. I'd BART over, but I really don't want to rely on Muni over a holiday weekend when I get into SF. It's bad enough during weekdays. So I'll be doing the Bay/Golden Gate/RSR circuit at least twice this weekend. At least I'll have the opportunity to swing by the old Brew Co. and pick up some of that Blueberry stuff.

I haven't done this kind of schedule since the DR/RT days, and even then I don't think I ever did 60+ for longer than a week or two. And I don't think the stress I dealt with then even begins to approach what I'm dealing with these days.

It's pretty taxing, but I gotta say there's this urgency to it all that gives you a real sense of purpose. Military metaphors have long gotten trite in the work place, but we're happy to excuse them in such situations. You really do feel like you're on this mission, in it together with the show's crew trying to get it all done. Together. When it's like this it's remarkable how easy it is to push any judgments and opinions you develop about somebody far, far into the background so long as they can get the work done. And when they actually do get the work done, which happens the majority of the time, it's equally remarkable how insignificant and petty those judgments and opinions suddenly become.

The work really is looking spectacular. There's a sense that we might have gone a bit too conservative on the stereoscopy on our last project, so we're pushing it much more this time. I think you'll really like what you see.

Be vewwy vewwy quiet...

2006-08-14T00:14:00.000-07:00

... I'm huntin' houses.

What season is it anyway?

My recent emancipation from credit card debt has emboldened me to take some tentative steps into that lion's den of real estate, the Bay Area housing market. Without really meaning to, I'd find myself cruising around choice neighborhoods Sundays, 2-4pm looking for that cheery-yet-elegant 'Open House' sign and then making the (often abrupt) maneuvers to intercept.

It's house huntin' season!

By choice neighborhoods, I mean the edges of what I *think* I can afford. If trends hold up, that should be expanding in the next few months. Before my eyes, prices have dropped $10-20k on locations I've been looking at the last two weeks alone. I'm actually fighting a strong impulse I have right now to move on this condo by Berkeley's dog park. Besides the overall cool-down in the market, there's the seasonal winter cool-down a-comin' that I'm hoping will give me a fighting chance at something better when autumn rolls around.

Berkeley's at the top of the list. The town and I have history, and I'd like to build on that. I'd be perfectly snug as a bug in parts of Oak-town or E'ville, though, if circumstances dictate. The Watergate condos that so many of my cohorts have bought up, for example, are well within the price range. I find them a bit bleak (I like to call them 'people storage'), but I'd hardly be suffering there.

BART proximity's also a huge factor. Living in the East Bay means commuting, and so help me I will not be able to maintain sanity if I have to endure the Bay Bridge 5x a week.

Money-wise, all the on-line calculators and trackers have given me a pretty good idea of what I can afford. All these cheats like Interest-only and TIC just aren't options, as far as I'm concerned. I really wanna go for the real deal or bust. Some people swear by TIC, but even in the best case it sounds like a hell of a long-term gamble.

The big variable for me is the job. It's a volatile industry and I really need to factor that in somehow with my decision. What if I have to move in a few months? Who knows, I may find myself making lattes or something for a bit. Or I may find myself... living in a shotgun shack. Or I may find myself... in another part of the world. Or I may find myself... behind the wheel of a large automobile... Anyway, if any of this happens, I need to figure out stuff about moving and renting it out or potentially selling it before the 2-year minimum.

I suppose it's also possible that home ownership may simply not be in the cards for me right now. I haven't seriously talked to a professional just yet, and there's only so much all these web tools can consider.

Model citizen

2006-08-06T18:12:00.000-07:00

I was pretty excited to learn that they were starting up sculpting lessons here at the new digs with Richard, the lead maquette builder for our (now former & lovin' it) model shop. Many others shared the excitement as well, apparently, and I couldn't get into a session until the start of June. Just finished up last Monday and I had a terrific time and got a lot out of the class. Rich is a terrific teacher too, not afraid to poke fun at your work if you're doing something really off, and had lots of great little tricks and little pearls of wisdom to offer on the subject. It's great how people here are down to earth about things that are easy to become such an insufferable snob about.

We did two subjects with a four 3-hour sessions each. That's plenty for an experienced sculptor with the basic poses like the ones we used, but it's still fairly challenging. Most other workshops I've been to do at least six sessions. Lacking formal instruction, these have always been a real battle for me, and I finally started getting it together with my co-worker's class last year, but it was his first time teaching and we ran out of time to cover everything.

So getting a real class with an experienced instructor for free was a real godsend. We'd have a catered dinner too on top of it all, which was awesome. I kept forgetting to bring tupperware -- the food was good and there was always tons of leftovers that'd just sit there overnight and get tossed in the AM.

I guess generally I've got a good grasp of proportion, facial expressions, and attitude. I notice I tend to stick to heroic or athletic body types, though, regardless of what's in front of me (though the models were both very athletic -- not always the case). This is fine, but can get a tad monotonous. I liked how some of the more experienced people layered on flesh to to give muscles and fat a sense of sag. The flesh on my models tends to look taut and a bit tensed up.

Faces were one area I really developed a lot this time around, even throwing in this pissed off expression on the guy with the staff. Because there was a very Wushu-like feel to the pose, I embellished a bit by taking the stance wider and lower and giving it a bit of a lean. I guess this sort of gives us something that looks kind of like southern staff.

Given the level I see my colleagues are at, I know I've got a long way to go, but at least I feel like I'm progressing. I'm in a maquette class due to start in two weeks, where we're supposed to make up something to build. What, o what to build...

Feature film numbed the radio star

2006-07-31T00:47:00.000-07:00

What variety!

As much of a big NPR nerd that I am, it'll be a while before I understand what possessed them to make a movie of PHC. There are probably certain particular ways in which this film might have worked, but what we're given is this sort of bizarre melancholy mish-mash that would probably be a confusing downer to anybody that doesn't know the show, and kind of frustrating to folks like me who generally like the show.

I really like the voice actors on the radio show, but the movie pretty much sidelines them in bit roles and calls in mainstream talent to do their characters. Keillor, who literally makes the show what it is, is stuck playing himself in the film while Kline gets to have the fun as Guy Noir, and Dusty and Lefty are played by Harrelson and Reilly.

All the radio show's characters aren't real characters either, but performers or staff on the show. That is to say, Dusty and Lefty aren't out on the range, they're basically country music stars. Guy Noir isn't a detective, he's an ex-detective working as the show's manager. Gone are the creative little radio ads they do for the Ketchup Advisory Board, Rhubarb Pie, etc. No news from lake Wobegon.

The polished, name-brand cast also kind of muddles the radio show's folksy mid-western vibe as well. Instead of quirky stories about simple prairie folk getting themselves into unusual jams, we're watching divas and showbiz types hamming it up in a loose and meandering plot surrounding the last broadcast of a fictional version of the show. Tommy Lee Jones is some radio tycoon who's shutting the show down. Virginia Madsen shows up as some kind of angel. Lindsay Lohan is a gloomy teen whose mother and aunt are performing on the show. Some old performer guy passes away in his dressing room backstage.

How this is supposed to seem coherent to the uninitiated is beyond me. It isn't exactly a bad film, just sort of confused. If it's inaccessible for somebody who doesn't know the show, then who is it for? And if it is for the PHC-initiated, why play so fast an loose with canon?

I can't help but wonder now if NPR will be the next vein Hollywood will tap for movie ideas. Car Talk kind of got a cameo in Cars. What's next? Flora's indicated some interest in Wait! Wait!. This American Life, maybe? We can watch the mishaps that occur as Sarah Vowell visit historical sites while David Sedaris works through issues with his family. Ira Glass just sort of sits agape at the whole thing.

... and all that other stuff

2006-07-23T21:10:00.000-07:00

When the traditional summer pastime fails to captivate and inspire, a viable alternative for me has become the summer box office race. Thanks to sites like BOM and RT, watching the millions pile up (or not) weekend after weekend for various feature films takes on the drama of any sporting contest. There are statistics galore, records to smash, and punditry at all levels. I can't for the life of me see the real significance of p2 breaking the 10th day BO record relative to a just plain overall week 2 record, but the numbers are there, and I can't help but find myself impressed nonetheless.

For the rooting interest, there's definitely a skew towards affiliated projects, but generally I just go for the movie I like. Luckily that typicaly jibes well with the affiliations, particularly this year with p2. Catching screenings becomes something like cacthing ballgames. Besides plain old personal enjoyment, there are conversations to be had about how well the thing will perform down the line. There's even smack talking, or at least awkward concessions when your film underperforms somewhat.

I talked about p2 at length, but I've been watching other stuff that I've been meaning to write about.

Box scores from the summer BO Race...

Superman Returns: Classic beats New

"I'm back."

It seems that the popular consensus on the return of the Superman has settled down firmly somewhere around 'disappointment'. My expectations weren't very high for it anyway, but I was hoping that the six years of development hell the project wallowed in would've resulted in a minimally compelling re-imagining of the man o' steel to make him relevant today. It's quite a challenge, but I didn't see much point otherwise.

Their approach? Make some truly radical changes... to Lois Lane! Everything else in the movie, from the titles to the soundtrack to Lex and Super himself, stayed pretty much the same as the original movies. But Lois is now a jilted single career mom, which might have worked if she wasn't cast as somebody who looked like a fifteen-year-old. All this, and she still goes into rooms and locales alone (or with offspring in tow!) that b-grade horror movie bimbos from our parents' generation would've known to avoid. It's a competently-made film otherwise, but stuff just seemed to become less and less important and coherent as the movie went on.

Also have to remark on the 3D -- It's pretty crummy. It seems that they skimped on some features of stereoscopy and tried to compensate by overdoing it in other areas. The result was that everybody looked like they were on flat cards moving in and out of the screen at ludicrous speeds while lacking the motion blur to make that motion seem organic. There are lots of different ways to tackle stereoscopic 3D, so don't let this film chase you off from other 3D films.

The Devil Wears Prada: Style ties Substance

Miranda Priestly and the Fashion Factory

I'm still not entirely sure what a sleeper hit is, but I think this is it. While all eyes were on the MoS over the July 4 weekend, this became kind of a curiosity as it held its own amazingly well and has kept apace with Superman in the weeks since then. I wouldn't be surprised to see Super drop below it in the daily BO (obviously never the overall BO) in coming weeks. (looks like it did over this weekend)

I caught one of our screenings for this and did indeed find myself enjoying it way more than I'd care to admit and actually saw it a second time with the Moms because I knew she'd like it. It's your basic Cinderella story with Streep as some twisted merge of the fairy godmother and the wicked stepmother. Hathaway's cute enough as the protagonist. It isn't any more redeeming than, say, Johny Depp cavorting about on a sailboat, but in some ways it's as if the fashion industry was making some attempt to explain itself in this movie in a way that non-fashion types like myself can appreciate.

Okay, this entry's already pretty long. I'll hit some of the other stuff later this week.

The devil wears seafood

2006-07-09T23:46:00.000-07:00

Many a lobster dinner was expensed as 'reference' for this film.

So did you see it? Given the BO(1), chances are good you did. And given the exit polling, (92% of a very diverse audience rating it as very good or better) you pretty much liked it.

Besides haughty self-righteous indignation, one of the things I felt staring at that 52% on RT last week was a warm fuzzy recollection of days of yore, when I could rely on critics to slam summer movies I had terrific fun at. They're hard to find now, but I do remember reading some pretty nasty reviews for 'junk' movies turned classics like Ghostbusters and Back to the Future back in the day.

For a while there it seemed like the critics kind of got it and were right there with us in seeing silly summer fun for what it was, such as when they loved the original back in '03. So this time they saw that it was silly, saw that it was fun, and yet they slammed it seemingly with relish. Go figure.

Anyway, if you had talked to me after the preview we got about two weeks ago, I would have dropped some good money on an RT rating somewhere in the high 70s/low 80s. I guess it's good I didn't, but I really would've out of some passive-aggressive spite even if I knew then what I know now. In fact, dare I say it, I actually liked this one much more than the original, and many folks at the screening were equally surprised to find that they agreed.

I was actually pretty luke-warm about the original, kind of for many of the reasons the critics are slamming it now. It kind of moved slow for me. The plot seemed a bit obfuscated and somewhat inconsistent. I didn't quite connect with the characters.

So lynch me, I think Keira looks kinda hot like this.

This time I did. The sequel built nicely off a familiarity with the old characters and put them in interesting new situations with what I found to be campy-but-fun banter in the finest tradition of certain space epics from our collective youth. I really enjoyed the new characters, from Harris's crazy witch doctor to the evil trading company guy to Nighy's Davy Jones(2). Especially Davy Jones, actually.

The plot, frankly, made a lot more sense to me than the original, where I never quite could resolve everything about the cursed gold, who was cursed, and who needed to do what to fix it. It actually cleared up some of the questions and inconsistencies raised by the original in a very satisfying way.

Pace-wise, I really didn't feel the 150 minutes. Seriously. I had a smile on my face the whole time and always found something on screen to keep me interested. It ends on a terrific note and I am primed for part trois, particularly what creative things they find to do with one Mr. Chow Yun-Fat.

Those hills look familliar...

FULL DISCLOSURE: Yes, it could be said I have connections to this film. Apparently several scenic photos from my Brasil visit last winter came in handy for a few BGs we slapped together. So take this all with that grain of salt, but most of you who know me will know that I'm brutally honest about our projects.

FULL DISCLOSURE 2/CONFESSION: Yes, I did see the movie which the title of this entry spoofs, and will probably lose hetero points for saying I really liked that one as well. To be fair, I was taking my Mom for her birthday... After seeing a company screening for it at which I figured it'd be something she'd like, which she did. So yes, I've seen that film twice and pirates deux once.

(1) Box Office. What do you think it stands for?

(2) I have to stress that his face is NOT prosthetic, but totally CG, right down to the eyes. We (in the collective sense) did the mix of mo-cap and animation that you might recall for certain characters from certain other epics involving bad jewelry.

Lost me there

2006-07-09T21:57:00.000-07:00

Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

This guy was about the only reason I was rooting for France. After that I just sort of didn't care who won, and just wanted the damned thing over with.

That said, I sort of feel for the guy right now. Surely we've all screwed up before, and the consequences of just how stupid this move was is going to be drilled into him for the next few days (months/years/life), if it isn't already. The man's got a lot of talking to do.

Think of the children!

2006-07-04T15:44:00.000-07:00

Looks like there's a good chance the final could turn out to be that vision of soccer hell I was talking about earlier. A primer:

Euro 2004 Ad for the Guardian UK

The SF Chron had a nice piece lamenting the problems some teams have had staying erect, and how it may be influencing our next generation of players:

A thrilling World Cup is still one big flop -- CW Nevius, SF Chronicle

The 'I' is silent

2006-07-03T23:38:00.000-07:00

Ai meu deus!

After an 11 game run from the law of averages, the Brazilian National Soccer Team turned themselves in peacefully Saturday to French authorities in Germany. A few of many stories:

Brazilians come to terms with 'national shame' -- Calgary Sun

Brazil fans destroy Ronaldinho statue -- Radio New Zealand

Three Men Protest Brazil's Game Against Ghana In The Nude -- All Headline News

A rough google search

Yes, soccer is a team sport, but individuals can have a defining influence. On Saturday, France had Zidane. After watching this man and Henry work for about the first 20 minutes there wasn't much doubt in my mind who deserved the win.

Brasil naturally has a whole bunch of I's on their team, but in a more formal sense Parreira seemed to pin the team's fortunes on Ronaldo. Apparently a lot of the folks still really love the guy, and to a degree I do too, but I was perpetually aggravated by the missed passes and stumbling throughout the tournament. It's like the whole team kept trying to feed him the ball, but he was too often a step too far behind it or sluggish and lumbering on the movement afterwards. Can't take anything away from the goals he did score, but it felt like too much of the offensive focus was on him when it really didn't need to be.

One thing I began to notice was the sort of denial the ESPN sportscasters had about the whole thing. Going by their commentary, you would've seriously thought Brasil was dangerous throughout the match. But even with their frantic efforts in the last minutes, Brasil never seemed like it had much control of the game, and never looked like a real threat. (ONE -- count 'em -- ONE official shot on goal through the whole game.)

Anyway, Brasil's out, their national morale and stock exchanges will be in the toilet for a few days, but on the bright side I can let the World Cup fall slightly lower on my list of concerns. Apparently Ronaldinho can prioritize other interests as well.

In terms of rooting interest, I really did like what I saw from the French Saturday. This isn't some issue of pride -- I just really want to see Zidane and Henry play some more. You always hear about the legendary players like Beckam, Ronaldo, and Ronaldinho, but the one guy that really brought it this time appears to be Zidane.

This is also by the process of elimination. I positively hate the Italian team's flop-focused style of play. Portugal falls into kind of the same style, but actually nastier. Germany's style I can respect a little more, but they do seem a little thuggish as well. I'd prefer a Germany-France final for the game, and I'd watch the Italy-Portugal 3rd place match as a kind of window onto football hell, where two whiny, floppy, bullying teams make life miserable for each other, fans, and refs.

No comment

2006-07-01T00:07:00.000-07:00

From a Guardian Unlimited review:

After flirting with Looney Tunes comedy, Hollywood pastiche, Peter Jackson-style grandiosity, and seafront pantomime, it eventually becomes clear what course the Pirates franchise has really plotted: a packed universe of characters; epic action; strange lands; freakish monsters; a curiously sexless central couple. This isn't an updated swashbuckler, it's a backdated Star Wars! The comparisons are too plentiful to put down to coincidence. Not only does the narrative arc parallel that of the Empire Strikes Back, but virtually every character here has a Star Wars equivalent. Mackenzie Crook and Lee Arenberg are the substitutes for R2D2 and C3PO, commenting from the sidelines, while Naomie Harris's swamp-dwelling prophetess is a Yoda surrogate. One wonders what George Lucas's reaction will be when he watches the movie.

Unfortunately, the Star Wars connection applies to Orlando Bloom, too. He's a Mark Hamill in the making. He's simply too boyish to conjure any sort of heroic authority. Perhaps it would be better for everyone if Keira Knightley turned out to be his sister, and there are hints that Depp's Jack Sparrow has the potential to do a Han Solo.

Don't look at me man, I just work here. Saw it last week and think it's worth knocking out a review for. I'll try that over this (hot damn!) 4 day weekend.

Well, do you?

2006-06-28T00:26:00.000-07:00

Discrediting Americana has become something of a favorite theme in reality TV, or at least the supposedly highbrow ones like Antiques Roadshow. I haven't watched it much, but I understand the chief attraction is watching some middle-aged housewife get her cherished beliefs about the history of some well-guarded trinket dashed to pieces.

It's not that I don't enjoy this kind of thing (though I found I really didn't in that case), but that this kind of crap sat its fat ass on the timeslots once occupied by awesome specials where people flew helicopters over erupting volcanoes or showed all kinds of funky stuff through micro- or tele- scopes. In the end they're just different flavors of infotainment, but I really doubt the Roadshow has inspired many kids to become scientists and engineers.Those 'making of' specials about certain space fantasy epics were the very first place I learned about the very company I'm working for now. If appraisals of porcelain trinkets is the alternative to Yu-Gi-Oh these days, it's no wonder kids are getting less and less interested in educational entertainment or any of the things it inspires.

No, they're not Italian. And note the absence of red and green overalls.

Sci-Fi Channel's "100% Real"(1) Ghost Hunters series fits into all of this in that it mixes that crackpot-humiliation element with IR and false-color thermography footage of crap like I've absolutely never seen. blee turned me onto the show over a dinner conversation in which at least one pair of eyeballs rolled, but I sat rapt.

The reality show follows a pair of plumbers who, after (or often, instead of) fulfilling the obligations of work and family, run The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS), a paranormal investigations group. Taking calls from homeowners, innkeepers, and civil service officers in states ranging from bemused to concerned (rarely panicked), the pair spends one to two weekend nights free of charge at the site of said hauntings with some fairly sophisticated equipment and a team of wide-eyed cohorts.

At this point the show totally splits off from all of those ridiculous Halloween-time specials in which ambiguity is not so much considered as it is tapped and forcibly siphoned out of grainy footage and photography that would in all other cases prompt the reasonable person to consider better equipment rather than the influence of the supernatural. The pair, Jason and Grant, ask the things anybody should when they see some of this stuff and to their credit, in most of the shows they really do find zilch, or have to disappoint that wide-eyed cohort that got really excited over some lens flare or odd dust hit that they just found after sifting through several hours of footage.

The reveal of this utter lack of evidence to the homeowner or innkeeper very invested, sometimes financially, in their site's hauntings makes for that roadshow component. Particularly irritating are those old ladies that insist they or some family member has some sixth sense and throughout the investigation tries to spook people out by saying they feel like they're being watched or exclaiming "it's here!" or "what's that???" while gesturing off camera. Also the leaders of fraternal chapters to TAPS that by all appearances have taken time out from their busy action-figure collection circuits to freak out over some dust glint whose irregular shape they are convinced is the face and headdress of some Victorian-era bride tragically murdered on that site.

But, oh, that 20%. Provided they are indeed true to their word that they aren't and hate dicking around with evidence, you will quite likely be keeping a few more lights on around the house the evening after you watch an episode. True to their transparency, much of this footage they keep on their website and invite skepticism as Jason and Grant are themselves doggedly skeptical to the last in the majority of the cases.

Apparently they've built up enough of a following or encounter clients sufficiently invested in their would-be haunting that forgery comes up on occasion, and they do indeed catch it, as you'd discover in one of their deleted scenes. In one case a 'black shadow' literally looks like some guy zipping by in a dark cape, though there was enough skepticism of the skepticism that they felt it was worth presenting.

Ghosts and extreme, sudden changes in velocity are the two major fears of childhood I now crave. With ghosts I'm skeptical, but I like the idea of a universe with these kinds of things, even if in the distant future they turn out to be some quirk of quantum physics or what have you. Whatever it is, having some ambiguity and mystery in the universe keeps it interesting, and any show that deals with it without totally insulting my intelligence will sustain my attention. Finally having a non-seasonal show on the subject without some throaty voiceover intoning "... or is it???" at the end of each episode is very refreshing.

(1) The DVD packaging says as much.

RE: Brasil Futbol

2006-06-18T11:46:00.000-07:00

Feeling a little better, but still a little queasy.

It's the law

2006-06-17T23:02:00.000-07:00

This is my favorite ad ever for the World Cup. It's from 1998, when Brasil lost so badly in the final that conspiracy theories abound about some fix on the part of the team or Ronaldo or what have you.

That aside, though, I've been sort of lucky in that since the World Cup popped onto my radar in 1994(1) (as it did for much of the US, I imagine, since we hosted it), Brasil's been dominant, with the championship in '94, a second place in '98, and another championship in '02.

They've always been a threat, of course, but it's not like they win every single year, and I'm beginning to wonder if the law of averages has finally caught up to them this year. Brasil's first game last week was possibly the most horrifying thing I've ever seen from them. Maybe nostalgia has tainted my memory, but I'm not used to seeing them making that many bad passes and getting the ball stolen from them quite that much. Ronaldo's received a lot of grief about his weight gain, and given his performance Wednesday, it seems to be deserved. You really would've forgotten he was on the pitch.

One thing I learned this past visit to Brasil was that many folks there don't pay much attention to it until at least the qualifiers. So I don't feel like such a ridiculous poseur for not following club football there or here in the meantime. Some things I've learned:

It is indeed legitimately called 'soccer' in the English-speaking world. In England, where the modern version of the game was created complete with a common rule set conferred and drafted in 1848, 'soccer' is a contraction of 'assoc' football, itself a contraction of the full name, association football. They didn't just call it 'football' because there were two kinds -- association football and rugby football. Rugby football evolved into that thing we have a big annual bowl game for. I like to call soccer 'football' myself, but there's nothing wrong with calling it 'soccer' simply for clarity's sake.

The offside rule is the most frustrating thing about watching these games, sort of like the holding call in the NFL. It just seems to come up out of nowhere to negate spectacular plays and goals. Apparently the motivation for it back in the day was that people would just post guys back by the opponent's goal and do huge clearing kicks to them to knock into the goal. As to why that's a bad thing, I'd figure it's because the fun of soccer is watching folks move the ball up the field through a defense, not just punting the ball back and forth across the field.

It does kill scoring, though. Also, some teams have exploited it by sort of scooting away from their own goal at crucial moments (often corner kicks) to draw the offside call on their opponent. FIFA revamped the rules back in 2003 into something somewhat more obtuse in some attempt to deal with this. Basically as it is now, simply being offside isn't necessarily an offense. It's based on the ref's opinion on if the player is interfering with a defender or using it to gain some kind of advantage in play. Given the officiating we saw in today's USA-Italy game, that's really, really scary.

Anyway, that's all that comes to mind for now. Waking up in the AM for the Brasil-Australia game. Hopefully we'll see some improvement.

1) 1994 might seem like a ridiculously late date for a native to take interest in World Cup, but frankly the family wasn't that into it as I grew up here, so I never knew. It's just one more of those things about my country of origin that I didn't really explore until late in my teenage years.

Vent!

2006-05-31T00:56:00.000-07:00

I'm about a month into the new position. It's been a lot of fun, but I gotta admit it's really pushing me in some areas. I talked a bit before about the payroll and common titles(1): junior @rtist and assistant technic@l director, respectively. It's odd how the bureaucratese/payroll title sounds so much more organic. The common title is more in line with what was advertised and what I was expecting. Damned technocratic, though.

But I guess things never work out quite as expected, and I'm working a lot more these days in the 'junior @rtist' sense of my position, which is to say I'm working on shots. That's awesome, but the pressures remain for the technical stuff, and I feel like I'm dropping the ball on that end because the shot production stuff has been taking precedence, and frankly is a lot more fun.

I'm finding the tech stuff is remarkably like working at a supermarket. I generally know how stuff works, but I don't know where some obscure library or software update or patch is. They've got a nice system for all this, but in the end you still have to know what it's called, what version to get, who can answer questions on it, etc.. Software/command/library names perfectly sensible in some contexts can be impossible to intuit in slightly different ones. We've got a terrific alias for fellow @TDs, but I feel if I send more than about 10 messages to it per day I've begun to overstay my welcome, friendly and helpful as the other teammates continue to be.

An unexpected source of stress lately, though, has been people. Everyone else has been incredibly cool, but I feel like I might have been a little short with folks lately. Part of it is how people calling me or dropping by my desk totally interrupt my already clumsy juggling of different roles and duties. In my old position where stuff had gotten a little too easy, I'd welcome the interruption, but it's been a little aggravating in my current state where I'm still trying to get my bearings. I also think there's some inevitable arrogance that seeps in after any kind of promotion that I really, really should know better than to indulge. A rare luxury about the place I work is that I really do work with some sharp people, but I wonder if some of the things I've said these last weeks might give people the impression that I think otherwise.

Titanic on a boat!

2006-05-21T14:40:00.000-07:00

Terrific combination:

Read the title essay in David Foster Wallace's anthology "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again". (Settle in -- it's at least 60 dense, footnoted pages, if I recall correctly.)

Watch "Poseidon".

At the risk of spoiling it for Grumpy, I'm going to have to disclose that Fun Thing details Wallace's experiences as 'your correspondent' for Harper's on a subsidized 7 Night Luxury Cruise. Poseidon details the experiences of a group of off-the-shelf characters trying to escape the same, except in their case the boat's been capsized by a rogue wave and lies belly up on the ocean taking on water from what was its top.

One of the things I've been enjoying about Wallace's correspondent pieces is how they mix vivid description, insightful observation, and multi-layered analysis in such a way that I almost feel like I don't actually have to experience the subject event myself anymore -- it really feels like I've been there.

So when Poseidon cuts to shots of the service staff working in the galley after the terrific long, sweeping shot of Josh Lucas jogging around on the decks of an entirely CG cruise ship, I remained fully engaged. For one, I wondered if they toiled under the same service-industry oppression that turned Wallace's insistence on carrying his own duffel bag to his cabin into something of a federal case, prompting a personal visit and apology for the deck's baggage handler's incompetency from the manager. I pondered the feasibility of sneaking one's girlfriend onto a cruise like one of the galley staff's characters had done when, as Wallace found, every nook of one's cabin is mysteriously cleaned to perfection anytime one leaves it for longer than 30 minutes. When the curtain went up on the saucy Latin songstress during the ship's formal New Year's party, I wondered if her act was preceded by a passenger talent show and hypnotist/comedian much like the main act at the final night's formal on Wallace's cruise.

Taking stock...

As we meet the characters, I wonder about the statistical aberration of having an ex-NYC mayor, an ex-Navy professional gambler, and so many young, attractive, pre-retirement people on the same cruise boat. I wonder how many of the bridge officers are Greek, which would have been consistent with Wallace's findings that most cruise lines were operated out of Greece, tending to skew the composition of the officers towards the same.

Basically, whenever large volumes of rushing, flooding, pouring, bubbling, drowning water weren't on screen, I had plenty of things to keep me occupied. So that I found the 'character-driven' moments not entirely unbearable will have to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Accomplishing that, the story was able to maintain at least some minimal alignment between what it wanted me to care about and what I actually did care about as I watched the passengers get abused by those spectacular torrents of water.

It's coming!

And they truly are spectacular, orgasmic in much the way Wallace describes in another piece of his, "F/X porn". I had wondered what else was to be done for CG water after Perfect Storm besides maybe tweaking a few things on the simulators and maybe doing a better job on the color. I saw that there were indeed many more interesting things to be done, particularly the colors we see as the ship's festive lighting gets smothered by cascades of whitewater and various systems short and blow out during the impact sequence. Also worth mentioning are the rather graphic scenes of humans getting incinerated in flash fires, dropping onto ballroom ceilings, or getting themselves crushed or impaled on various shipboard implements made hazardous simply by being flipped upside down.

You'll endure this all together with the characters, and by extension, Wallace. And as the characters finally poke their heads out above water in the end, you'll find an amazing synergy between them, your proverbial correspondent, and yourself as together you sigh and are just happy to have survived the experience.

I am not a Cylon!

2006-05-10T23:45:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder why I say I grew up in this town but it seems nobody I 'knew' is around? Or that the few people who do are strangely connected either to Wushu (El 'Sickness') or military equipment (Jerry at the surplus?) Or how it seems most of my friends from college come from the same high school in, of ALL places, San Diego? Or my aesthetic affinity for machines and technology?

Stop wondering.

I had a childhood, dammit! See? I got pictures to prove it. I wasn't artificially created by machines in a plot to destroy humanity!

Just picked up a scanner, partly motivated by irrational exuberance,
partly by this mess of negatives I found while cleaning out the house a few weeks back. I don't know what happened, but most of the actual photos from my childhood have been missing pretty much since I started college. I figure it's a mix of bad organizational skills and moving two or three dozen times. Not everything is there, and some are my brother's forays into photography (not half bad, actually), but I guess at this point I'll take what I can get.

I picked up the Canon Canoscan LiDE 500F(1), mainly 'cause it could fit in one of my drawers, looked cool, and happened to get some nice reviews. Its film and negative scanning definitely is definitely intended for casual use, though -- scanning several slides takes a lot more mucking about than I'd like. I'll have to exercise much editorial license in what gets preserved and what will be lost to the ages.

That photo is unflattering, but so appropriate.

(1) I admit I mention this so precisely because I'm curious what ads would get put up for it.

Art School Space

2006-05-02T11:20:00.000-07:00

It doesn't take very much exposure to the arts for one to develop all kinds of wild notions of just what the hell it is that goes on in art school. Surely, most of us have had our sense of aesthetics and taste violated and molested by some piece of tripe flung limply at us from straight out of left, failing to go the distance and instead of landing solidly in our grasp, drops short, splatters, makes a huge mess, takes a bad hop, and beans us squarely on the temple.

Coming to and nursing our wounds, we can only wonder. Why? WHY???

And then... HOW?

Art School Confidential (the film) doesn't answer this, and in many ways, I don't think any of us expect it to. I was hoping simply for therapy of the sort 'Office Space' offered to white collar cube-dwellers everywhere. Office Space didn't just expose the evils of corporate platitudes and politeness, it gave us *coping* strategies. All other countermeasures exhausted, we could retreat into safety by putting the vapid, blithely ignorant boss into the Lumberg slot, the infuriatingly chipper co-worker either into the 'case-of-the-Mondays' woman or that tool with all the flare from Chotchkie's(1). We'd then chuckle a bit with the co-workers that understood and found it in ourselves to slog through the rest of the day.(2)

Confidential offers no such retreat. When(3) you again find yourself stuck in an overlong, plodding 'art' film or mediocre gallery exhibition, you won't have acquired any comic archetypes to cling to while you sip on your smuggled-in flask or overpriced glass of Merlot.

From an environment rich with eccentrics and inflated egos and what I'm told is brilliant source material, Confidential takes on the style of the conventional college coming-of-age comedy complete with dopey romance, slacker cohort/guru-figure, sublimely-perfect aryan villain figure, and occasional interjections by the world-weary faculty by equal parts accomplished and mediocre.

Much like Office Space, Confidential seems to split into two films. You'll really find the parallels striking. The First half sets up the satire. The second half switches gears and becomes something of a caper flick, methodically tying up all the loose ends and adding a lot of uncharacteristic action.

Given the spectacular disconnect that can occur between artist and audience in some projects, the satire is incredibly unsatisfying. There are freaks spouting pretentious, half-baked bullshit, of course, but not enough and not to the degree that we can believe that these are the same people that have inflicted such suffering upon us in theaters and galleries across the country.

Oddly enough, I'm left admiring somewhat the abrupt switch to the caper mode in the second half. While parts seem out of character for this kind of film, there's a cynicism underlying it that rings true and deserved deeper exploration for the kind of darkly comic take that the overall movie would've benefited from.

The cast does fine, but it really would've worked better as an ensemble presentation than focusing on a few central characters. Malkovich stands out, as well he should. The rest of the cast doesn't really offend either, and overall the film seems competently made. I'm just left stumped at how a movie could make art school students boring in comparison to office workers.

(1) Even writing this down now, I'm compelled to reach out and strangle a small rodent or something when I think of the guy.
(2) Comforting, but not necessarily a healthy thing. As many have observed, the irony of the sort that office humor sources like Dilbert and, alas, Office Space mine may indeed be the kind raw resource that the proverbial /Man/ needs to help keep us all placated enough not to affect actual change. Basically, if taping up a Dilbert strip about some grave corporate injustice that mirrors your own or quoting Office Space behind your manager's back satisfies your sense of insurgency, who's really benefiting? It's not entirely a rhetorical question.
(3) Not 'if'.

Armchair accounting

2006-04-22T15:18:00.000-07:00

Great. Looks like somebody was able to gain access to one of my credit cards. A charge showed up from someplace in the UK! It's easy to tell on this one because I never use it (or pretty much any card except for the mileage thing). Called my card company and they've been terrific. No charges, account's on temporary hold, etc.

It's a lucky thing I happened to be checking my account the day after the charge went through. Over the last few years checking my spending and debt has become something of a minor hobby.

I came out of college & immediate post-college with ridiculous debt, though I know now it's a common thing and that my case wasn't nearly as bad as some people's. Still, when I finally tallied it all up it was a pretty frightening figure. I finally got my ass in gear in 2002 and set up a system. It's not anything earth-shattering -- it's just an Excel spreadsheet coupled with electronic bill payment. If you're grappling with bad post-college debt, you may want to give it a shot.

On one sheet I started recording how much and *when* payments were due. You can get the general idea of how much and when a bill's due over about 2-3 months of tracking. This helped me schedule regular billing dates to make sure that, if something bad happened, I could be sure the next paycheck would more than cover the next round of bills. This is easy for me because I get paid weekly. Might be tougher on monthly or bi-weekly.

Electronic bill payment helps because it keeps you on the schedule. If you still mail stuff in, you're bound to forget or lag far behind sometime and you'll be stuck with a double-payment or a compacted payment schedule one month that can throw the system out of whack.

After a while I was able to figure out when to hold back on spending, when to relax a bit, when it was okay to splurge, etc. It also helped me start saving up a bit too. I could start setting targets for saving up, start to stow stuff away for vacations, etc.

On the other sheet, and this idea came to me later, I started tracking principal on my debts. Cars, credit cards, student loans, everything. I could see how much it had gone down month over month and do projections based on that.

It's all really motivating because it gives you a really concrete sense of your progress. It turns it all into a kind of game -- just punch in some numbers and see how stuff turns out. It also motivates you to scheme a bit on how you can do better. You can see the impacts of, say, switching insurance companies, consolidating debts, etc.

There are probably better things and nice pieces of software out there that let you do this, but this has been working out really well for me. I'd often come out of months where there's been some kind of shock to the system from some unexpected expense with *extra* cash in the coffers from the things I do to compensate.

Good sports

2006-04-10T01:03:00.000-07:00

I guess any day you dodge all the bullets is a good day. Of course, some would point out a good day would be best described without the use of firearm metaphors.

The Berkeley Tournament did seem a bit spottier than previous years, but it finished by 10:30, which I figure is on par with the usual. I wasn't there the whole time, though, so I'm still catching up on all the details. There's always some grumbling after CMAT, but it does sound a bit more serious this time around. Heard of a little incident with some China coach that seemed to be handled well. I was there to help close things out at the end of the day judging intermediates. I felt a little rusty frankly -- a few decisions I might rethink, but I'm generally comfortable with the scores I awarded.

I didn't spend the whole day at the tournament, for a change.(1) I was pretty clear beforehand that I'd be out that afternoon catching my first ball game of the year. I was all set to go rain or shine, but in what might be considered an act of divine intervention, we got partly cloudy skies with a few good breaks of sunshine as we watched the Giants roll over the Braves 12-6. Even got a bit of a sunburn watching it all. Possibly the most satisfying game I've attended in years. ery special thanks to the Flower (aka Lumber's better half) for the freebie!

The tournament after party was hot, crowded, and not broken up by cops, which again is something we had been worried about that didn't come to pass. It ran its course like all parties should -- with the front yard smelling like puke and folks trickling out slowly into the wee hours of the morning. Remembered chatting with some neighbors who had dropped by to see what the fuss was about and pick up a beer. Gotta love Berkeley.

(1) I was there by 8 am to help out with the judging, only to find myself milling about all morning. I think I'm just going to sleep in from now on and show up for the swing shift.

It's still whoring

2006-04-05T01:09:00.000-07:00

I was actually writing down my thoughts on Kieu at about the same time I wrote about Eve, but hadn't really sorted out what I really felt about the movie.

Oh it's crummy. Make no mistake. But to a degree I felt vaguely wrong slamming it because it felt something like criticizing the illustrative quality of a pre-schooler's finger painting. It's not so much mean as it is pointless.

As always, the movie doesn't feel so much like a narrative with an actual plot as it is a montage of establishing shots. Dialog runs not so much like an interaction between characters as they appear to be monologues of two or more characters spliced together through some daring and edgy editorial pizazz (they aren't, btw). Absolutely every shot, even those in broad daylight, look like they were shot overexposed under the fluorescent glow of a Safeway produce aisle. (Maybe this is to be praised for consistency -- critical, 'climactic' scenes feature characters picking produce and riding Muni buses.) Equipped yet again with merely two facial expressions (blank & upset) and speech lacking inflection and syncopation, the protagonists are left utterly uncharismatic. The effect is predictable -- you don't care very much about their angst and life history and wish they would go bother somebody else.

That all just had to be said. But again, pointless. Through the forces of democracy(1) and the market, Kieu as a film will likely see little circulation outside of SFIAAFF. Lacking the option to see this film, there is apparently not much point in me warning you not to.

This entry can salvage a few broader points, though:

1) As mentioned last entry I'm perpetually amazed at how Asian American film makers rail against the mainstream media's portrayals of Asians, go to film school, buy/rent expensive equipment, apply to and get some fabulous grants... and then turn around and make films that show pretty much the EXACT SAME THING. Kieu is another example of this -- if this film was made by a non-Asian, people would be horribly offended at the yet again exoticized, emasculated, emotionally-constipated portrayals of Asians.

2) If you think review whoring is an issue with major studio films, you have NO idea how bad it is on the ethno-indie film circuit. At the very least major-releases get enough exposure that dissenting opinions will emerge. (I'm reminded of the murmurs about Sideways being overrated that eventually surfaced back in 2005.) With the ethno-indies you have a cacophony of well-meaning, softballing professional reviewers, reviewers highly connected to the projects and festivals, reviewers having a political agenda, and reviewers that simply don't have the time to write about anything beyond their 'picks' for the fest. The end effect is that you'd only really hear one kind of view. For example:

Variety review
SF Chron festival picks

They mean well, but this is NOT what's going to help Asian Am cinema in the long run. People need to start making better films, not better-reviewed films.

(1) As someone who's been denied the facility to rate films at SFIAAFF twice now, I've got to wonder if disenfranchisement runs rampant at the fest. In one case we had fled the theater halfway through -- if that's not saying something that should go on record, I don't know what is. For this one we were so apprehensive that we essentially procrastinated about leaving for the film and got there too late to recieve the ballots. The snarky slacker demographic is being seriously under-counted.(*)

(*) Sorry about the footnote. Been reading some D.F. Wallace lately and I'm just pedantic enough to think this whole footnote thing might be a good idea.

Nobody does it better

2006-03-25T10:35:00.000-08:00

My threshold on the issue is apparently a little higher than many, but I can agree that there continues to be issues with the way Asian Americans are portrayed in Hollywood. In spite of some encouraging developments, we still see Hollywood portrayals of Asian Americans as exotic, emasculated, and emotionally constipated. THANK GOODNESS, therefore, for Asian Am film making, where Asians FINALLY get the opportunity to make their own films that portray Asian Ams as exotic, emasculated, and emotionally constipated.

We stopped into the SFIAAFF last Monday for a double-feature of our own making, catching screenings of "Eve and the Fire Horse" and "Kieu" separated by about one bottle of Sake. (Sorry we didn't catch up after Eve, rancho! We didn't stick around for the Q & A.)

Given some of the things we've seen at the fest, I've become so very very appreciative of a film that elegantly and competently tells a simple story illustrating coherent themes with interesting events and likable characters. Such is Eve. It may not find itself counted among the all-time classics of motion picture, but put it up against similar kid-focused fare from Disney, or even 'serious' kid entries like "In America" and you'll find it'll hold its own and possibly a little more.

Very much like "In America", it portrays the experiences of an immigrant family as seen by two young sisters (in "In America", the family is Irish). Naturally, the immigrant sob story has been done to death, but the kid angle is fresh enough that Eve brings some new things to the table. I'll spare you the plot summary (because I hate writing them, they're boring to read, and they're laden with spoilers), but it manages to squeeze in a surprising amount of edginess in dealing with issues of race and religion while maintaining a whimsical attitude that's true to the subject.

That said, it still suffers from a few minor things that irk me in these kinds of films. The kids are emotive and animated, but the adults in Eve have the emotional range of a light switch, flipping mainly between blank and upset. And as always, ample screen time is spent showing folks bowing before ancestral altars, lighting incense, doing things for good luck, lacing dialog with natural symoblism (sometimes sarcastic, thank goodness), etc. Given the strong religious themes, some of this is naturally necessary, but there's a rote feeling to these kinds of scenes in these films that I'd sooner do without. Yes, they're foreign and have different customs. WE KNOW. Just move the story along, please. The way some films show this stuff, you'd think people spent half the day doing this kind of thing.

This entry's long enough. I'll hit Kieu next time, and BOY, will I hit it.

Eugene 911!

2006-03-17T11:38:00.000-08:00

So it's been a week since the first 'part' and a good two weeks since the original event, but let's just wrap this up...

Miscalculated after-parties are becoming something of a tradition at Collegiates. Let us not speak of Stanford 2004, where at least one other guy and I got tossed out of a club. The Davis 2005 committee rented out a terrific space on campus only to be forced to host it DRY.

And now this year.

EPD gives more than 85 drinking citations this weekend -- Oregon Daily Emerald

Of course, making the news can be considered something of an accomplishment. Such things are not without fallout, though. If you were there or simply very sympathetic, do help.

At least until then, however, I'd say things were going swimmingly. It was kind of a slow start, probably because our very hospitable and unsuspecting hostess apparently had no idea what she had agreed to. When we got there, no alcohol was to be found and the residents by all appearances were ready to settle in for a mellow Saturday night of TV and Gamecube. Within what must have been minutes, the garage was a dance floor, tubs of punch were mixed, and the occupancy of the house went up by at least two orders of magnitude.

That all came to a screeching halt at around 11:30 when Eugene's "Party Patrol" unit hit. These guys wasted absolutely no time screening folks for age and alcohol and issuing 22 underage drinking citations. For those of us from the free republic of Berkeley, this was quite a shock.

Especially in our condition, there wasn't much that we could do, so we hopped the van back to the hotel. After lounging around at our hotel lobby for a bit, I turned in. At the very least I'd get a decent night's sleep for the drive home.

Back to School

2006-03-09T23:02:00.000-08:00

In spite of it all, I've found that it's pretty unusual for me to regret checking out a Wushu tournament. I was really wishy-washy about heading up to check out/help out with Collegiates last weekend, but even with all the brushes with icy death on the I-5, police oppression, and sleep deprivation, I came back satisfied that I'd made good use of my precious, precious weekend.

The event was tiny in comparison to previous years, which is naturally a bummer, but I must admit it's nice to run through these things without intense time pressure. I barely worked a third of the time I was there, which allowed me to contribute to posterity by taking lots and lots of pictures, applying in a really half-assed way the various things I've learned in my photography workshop.

I'm not sure if the Oregon guys fully appreciate this, but they've got a really nice looking gym. It gets plenty of natural light and I love the wood paneling and scaffolding.

In the afternoon, rays of sunlight would hit various parts of the rings which made for some interesting lighting opportunities.

This is Kunyu from the Stanford team. I got my hand at doing some ringleading this time, which helps me recall people's names. Stanford went on to win the coveted team title.

Here's Caren from the Cal team. No idea what the results are from all these, but you know where to get 'em .

Filip from the Stanford team. The shot sort of works even if the exposure is probably about a stop too dark.

The Cal 'Happy Bears' team group set stood out dramatically from the rest of the field. There was a general sense talking to folks afterward that this whole trend of including LENGTHY sparring sets in group sets has got to stop. I'm slightly looser on this in that I think some is okay if people can positively NAIL it -- i.e., if it really looks like a fight. That sort of thing takes real time and skill to pull off. If not, I'd highly recommend ditching it.

The Cal team did have a lengthy sparring section, but it was very well choreographed and very convincing. But in the end, I generally side with the view that group sets are about perfect timing and coordination. Maybe folks have forgotten, but you'd be shocked how awesome people look when they're perfectly together across a complicated series of moves.

A small tournament meant a relatively early stop (after a pretty forgettable and impromptu 'Mad Tricks' competition), which left plenty of time for...

They never seem to print out enough of these things.

To be continued...

Freedom!

2006-02-23T01:31:00.000-08:00

Happy Friday

2006-02-17T10:29:00.000-08:00

You will feel SO much better about pictures of yourself after this:

http://www.fluideffect.com/

Look in the portfolio, particularly the before/after sections.

Re-upped

2006-02-15T01:05:00.000-08:00

I renewed my KQED membership some weeks back, entitling me to a whole other year of snooty, self-righteous indignation for the low, low price of $11 a month. I waited for them to do the New Yorker DVD-ROM offer, which should contain everything that magazine has ever printed since its inception. New Yorker's been a tad spotty for me, but the beauty of a searchable DVD-ROM is that if any particular writer catches my attention off-line, I can look 'em up directly on that there disc. This was in addition to my choice of the standard gift, which ended up being that emergency crank radio again. I really don't need any more umbrellas or mugs, but I do find some appeal in having one of those crank radios on every single vehicle and at every location I spend my time in.

I also take it as an opportunity to bitch about KQED programming some more. There's isn't much to gripe about, actually. They've picked up two terrific shows right when I'm paying attention, during the 11pm-2am weekday slot. "Day to Day" targets the busy 20/30-somethings with slicker production and younger hosts. "News & Notes" brings the Black perspective to current events. (Yes, their show description says 'Black', not 'African-American'. Very refreshing.) It's pointed without coming off like some SNL skit spoofing cable-access 'Black Power' shows. While the uninitiated would mark the show as colloquial after hearing a few slang terms tossed around, the more astute would realize that similar terms are thrown around by your McLaughlins and Lehrers all the time. It's just that your 20/30-something years of experience with the American media have acclimated you to the latter and not the ones that perfectly intelligent people from different backgrounds use.

And then there's the third hour.

I had once tried setting an alarm on my radio to send me to bed at 1 am. But now simply keeping it tuned to KQED until that hour has the similar effect of making it the most loud and obnoxious thing in my room. That's when the breathy voice of pompous gasbag Christopher Lydon introduces us to "Open Source", a show which as a goal attempts to reproduce the level of discourse on Internet blogs. In many ways it meets its goal. Like most blogs, the show is inflated, recklessly opinionated, biased, and tragically uninformed, squandering the resources of a valuable medium through a crippling lack of craft.

I actually remember Lydon from a long drive back up the grapevine some years ago surfing Central Valley radio stations (furiousg was there). It was memorable for me because of some bit he was doing where he had some historian/actor on pretending to be (I kid you not) the ghost of Thomas Jefferson. Besides the hubris and sheer hokeyness of the concept, I just saw absolutely no need for it. It did nothing an informed interview on Jefferson wouldn't have accomplished, and only served to muddle things by speculating on issues that Jefferson couldn't have possibly imagined. This was apparently a different show that Lydon was doing, but as I heard a few weeks ago, he's brought the bit over to Open Source as well.

If you, like me, never really had any notion of the difference between good and bad interviewing and discussion moderation, you will after Open Source. Listen as Lydon astounds you with an impressive lack of understanding of both his guests and their arguments. He'll make spurious assumptions, ask disgracefully leading questions, interrupt guests, goad them into speculation, take quotations radically out of context, and phrase queries like pompous high school essay topics. At times I really wonder if he's actually listening to his guests all. Compare and contrast this tripe with the damned near symphonic orchestration of interviews, debates, and listener call-ins by the likes of 'local' talents like Michael Krasny (or even his many understudies), to say nothing of other NPR interview/call-ins like "Talk of the Nation".

The irony, of course, is that I'm writing this all in a blog entry as somebody who does not study media as a career. Which kind of is the point -- it's great that there's this resource for expression and talk-back, but unless proven otherwise, it's really no more than listener call-in. Shows like Open Source would have you thinking otherwise if you're not careful.

Turkey Free

2005-11-27T22:07:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts on turkey:

It's the form of meat that's closest to vegetable. So often it seems to serve as a kind of meat substitute, replacing beloved beef, chicken, or pork in recipes for chili, burgers, sausages, etc. Anecdotal evidence confirms that the bird itself lacks its own actual flavor, and like tofu, rice, or white bread, serves mainly as a base for items having actual flavor. In terms of sheer quantity after the fourth Thursday of November, it may as well be the staple of one's diet. Indeed, turkey becomes much more appetizing when one pictures two slices of it wrapped around steaming hot slices of pastrami and the sharpest of cheddars with crisp iceberg lettuce, tomato slices, and a dollop of mayo.
If people really loved it so much, it'd be all over the place. We'd have it every single day. You'd be having it animal-style in your double-double from In-n-out. You'd be ordering it rare from the Black Angus. It'd be done asada-style in your super burrito. I'm not sure what the resource requirements are to farm/ranch/whatever turkey in mass, but science would find a way to do it, IF THE DEMAND WAS THERE.
It's amazing the lengths people have gone to in recent years to make the bird more interesting to eat. Roasting no longer sufficient, people soak it in various briney concoctions for days before roasting it or plunge it into vats of hot oil at tremendous risk to life and property. All to make eating the damned thing that much more tolerable.

I got a bird this year, but decided to delay cooking it until after we come back from Brazil. Then, free from the trappings of holiday tradition, I'd like to try the deep fry in a ceremony that will be like something of a cross between an ICBM test launch and a holiday feast.

As for this Thanksgiving dinner, it was spent turkey-free with the family over at a cousin's place in the south bay. The cousin's wife had whipped up an odd cider of sorts from the tangerines in the backyard which went well with a shot of Johnny Walker Black.

There are many like it

2005-11-20T00:14:00.000-08:00

... but this one's mine.

Um... the arrow's missing 'cause Starbuck took it.

So I like figure sculpting and all, but it was getting frustrating because I really didn't know WTF I was doing. Earlier in the fall I finally signed on for an instructional course that a friend of mine from work was teaching. Approaches vary, as always. He tended to be pretty technical and went in-depth into muscle groups and how they layer on top of each other. Free sculpting classes will be starting back up at work and we'll have a guy from the model shop running those. He's much less technical, but by all accounts is terrific.

My friend's class was open to the public, which produced an odd mix. You'd have your art students on the one hand. On the other you'd have your retirees and desperate housewives. Watching my friend deal with this latter group was damned entertaining. Oh God, the WHINING. "Well I DID what you SAID!!!" usually barked with a nasal shrill, was often heard.

Anyway, I got a lot out of it. I didn't really produce anything worth mentioning from that class because we were building up and tearing down a lot. But I finally finished off another studio session with all that knowledge fresh in mind, and I think my product isn't entirely disgraceful.

People are often curious how these studio sessions run. Well, typically you meet 3 hours once a week for 6-8 weeks. The first one we all agree on a pose, and that's what the model does for the whole session. Once that's settled, you just do your thing. Some people do what's there. Some stylize it. Usually you exaggerate the pose a lot for drama. I ended up bulking the guy up a lot and giving a higher angle to his aim. I actually did some archery back in high school, so I made a lot of adjustments to form and hand positions.

Yes, the model is stark nekkid the whole time. And no, it isn't awkward. After a while you're cracking jokes like you would with a co-worker. Quite often we end up having dinner with them after the session.

It was a great pose in general, but I think I had more affinity for it since it is more martial than the typical poses we pick. I actually had to do this particular one across 4 sessions. Work was too busy to make the earlier parts of this session.

Just Browsing

2004-10-18T10:01:00.000-07:00

I'm just looking around checking out different blog sites. My current active site is at Rotten Tomatoes:

Kai's Blog