Archive for January, 2006
January 30, 2006 at 11:35 am · Filed under Mundane
I booked my flight today - leave Vancouver on March 26th to arrive at Narita on the 27th. Wow I think this is a real itenerary in my hands.
But could I be hallucinating? Am I drunk? I swear I could have been wasted last night because I feel hungover today. No actually it was not from drinking…it was from that 90 minute bath. Yes folks, I have a bath hangover today. But it was a really amazing bath. I used the Ombra Chamomile Herbal Extract Foambath. I think it breaks the long tie between Rosemary and Lavender.
Me in the lab (just a few minutes ago): I kinda wish that I could do my thesis on the chemistry behind peanut butter addiction in females. I would call it my Reeses Thesis.
Yes, I am also sinking to the low level of quoting myself today. Of course I didn’t say exactly that but it was what I meant to say.
January 28, 2006 at 9:01 pm · Filed under Movies&Film
Yay for Shoppers Drugmart shopping spree - thanks Jemma : ) The best thing you can get a girl for her birthday…SD giftcards. I stocked up on bath products and this week I’m gonna be soo clean!
So after that and playing some Zelda, I went to the Elysian Room on W 5th and Burrard St and man…I had the damn best cappuccino. I would say it was the best ever. I almost ordered a second - will have to go back and indulge again. The cappuccino was prelude to seeing Woody Allen’s latest, Match Point, at the Fifth Ave Theatre.
I had heard that he strayed from his past habits with this one and that he did. Quite a bit. The changes:
- the movie is set in London, not Manhattan
- he kept his classic opening and closing credits style but the jazz music is replaced with opera (throughout the entire movie)
- there is an absence of witty or dry humour. A few moments are chuckle worthy and I think the whole audience laughed together maybe twice…but sometimes I think I was chuckling more at English mannerisms than I was at the script
- finally, there is no Woody Allen (he has not been starring lately), no Woody Allen replacement (like Jason Biggs or Will Ferrell), and no awkward sub-Woody Allen-esque characters. The only awkward one out of the bunch is maybe Emily Mortimer’s character, Chloe, but I think she’s supposed to be more sweet and slightly annoying at the right times than awkward
After getting used to the fact that this wouldn’t be like his other movies, I enjoyed more. I found the start a little slow and halfway through I wondered how good the movie would have been if the lead roles were not played by clinically beautiful people. Their faces were pushing the plot, not so much their character. This turned around midway as more and more darkness and motives began to surface. I left the movie knowing it was fairytale-like and uber-scripted but still getting a message about consequence and luck in life.
January 27, 2006 at 7:13 pm · Filed under Random Thoughts, Things Found Online
best headline of the week: Octopus attack on B.C. mini-sub
best desktop wallpaper for waffles ever:
(from Plan59 ads through BoingBoing)
January 26, 2006 at 7:40 am · Filed under Japan
Three things that freak me out about moving to Japan:
1. throwing up: every gaijin blogger makes some comment at some point about the drunk salarymen upchucking in the train stations. Some even post pictures. No…I’m not even going to link to that. The way I see it though, is that this is an opportunity to get over my fear…it’s a bit of a necessity if I happen to have a child in the future.
2. bugs: this fear applies pretty much anywhere new. I’m used to Canadian critters (sort of). Who knows what kind of surprises I’ll get.
3. having to eat a four-legged friend or risk offending someone (or starving): in the land of soy, people tell me it’s still extremely difficult to remain vegetarian. I’m hoping that my exception for seafood will help me out.
Three things that excite me about moving to Japan:
1. the food: the other night I was hearing tales of the incredible edibles - especially the sweetest strawberries and ginormous apples.
2. taking pictures: of everything different.
3. being foreign: even if it means I’m ignored.
Three things that are just awesome:
1. the end pieces on a block of cheese: the more they are imprinted by the plastic packaging the better.
2. the first time you use a new kind of soap in the shower: and you are not used to the smell yet.
3. listening to a new cd for the first time *tied with* taking the plastic covering off the screen of a new electronic device.
Hmm…the theme of that is new. Could it be that newness is one of the most pleasurable things in life?
January 23, 2006 at 10:59 pm · Filed under Site Specific
This is evil. I was all pumped to get up at 5 and hit the 6:30 am yoga class. Oh my rubber arm I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it anymore! So I roll over and open waffles to start browsing (waffles sleeps next to me).
Website stats > Search Query Report > horseback riding trot butt blog
That’s all one query. Google it…I come up first. Hehe.
I love checking up on my search queries. I laugh, I’m amazed, and then I feel bad because it’s likely that my site didn’t actually have the valuable information needed.
January 23, 2006 at 8:06 pm · Filed under Thinking, Work
We don’t totally get along. No, this isn’t about the election even though it’s election day. This is about general politics, particularly ones that get in the way of you doing your job. I don’t get them.
I am trying to get a demo of Echology up for Friday. It goes in this space in the center of the computer science building. The building also contains offices and labs. Echology makes sounds. Sounds during work do not make people happy. I understand that…but they are soft, quiet sounds and the demo will be 15 minutes at the most.
Still, there are issues, I understand that, and we need to develop a “protocol” for how demos like Echology will be held in the atrium so that we do not upset a soul. This could run smoothly or not. In the end it all depends on the politics surrounding the situation and that aggravates me somewhat. I feel discouraged which is why I am writing here and not actually working on the installation.
Speaking of politics, I watched I Heart Huckabees again this weekend. Love that movie. Ok so it’s not really about politics…but it is in a way because in an existential mindset can you really apply yourself to a single campaign? The fact is - you will always be left wanting, you will always find something wrong and at the same time you will always just be.
OK so I can’t apply that to the larger national scale politics because some ugly things can happen when we don’t get a choice in campaign…but at the smaller, day to day life scale it can work.
January 20, 2006 at 3:08 pm · Filed under I am feeling...
Today has to be the most painful day to be in the lab. I am in such a good mood. I want to go play outside. I was smiling at everyone in the streets this morning. They probably thought I was a freak. But they smiled back and that’s what counts.
I’m not really one for sunny days. I am, but I’m not. I tend to get really really happy but then crash a few hours later because no matter what I do I feel like I’m not doing enough. I’m wasting time. Saying that…I expect that the funk will come around 4:30pm….maybe. There was a difference to the sunny day today, a difference I love. When I stepped outside this morning, half the sky was bright and blue and the other half was covered in a dark charcoal coloured cloud. I love it when you can’t tell which way the weather will go. It makes possibilities seem endless. Of course I could check the weather network but then there would be no room for creative thinking.
Speaking of creativity - I have decided that I need to start drawing again. Like, really really drawing. At some point I stopped and I don’t know why. OK maybe I know why - it may have been because of the Internet. Being exposed to the wonderful creations people place on line made me feel mediocre if not less than that. Instead of being inspired I decided to shy away. Today that changed. I think I’ve been re-inspired by Tom Judd’s Everyday. He illustrated a page a day for one whole year.
This may mean that I need a new sketchbook…and markers…and some pencils those nubs won’t do…and inky pens……bwwaaahahaha.
Hmmm…this is what happens when the lab is empty on Fridays. I feel starved for attention.
January 19, 2006 at 8:20 pm · Filed under Dreams
…and what a better day than January 19th? Edgar Allen Poe’s birthday which, as you’ve probably read, is still honoured every year by the Poe Toaster who visits his grave in Baltimore with roses and a bottle of cognac. Today should be Halloween II.
Besides it being dreary outside which doesn’t say much for spooky in Vancouver, why is today so spooky? Well…I’ve been having the weirdest dreams. I had a nap in the late afternoon - quite a long one. In my sleep, a portion of my dream had me in the backyard of my home in Regina but the backyard being itself before the renovations. I went to the far edge of the yard to where a little shed used to sit. There were some crows and sparrows doing their bird things around me. When I turned around to go back to the house, I was completely surrounded by various birds. Large birds. I could identify the crows and sparrows, some ravens (I think…they looked like massive crows), and a few ivory-billed woodpeckers. They were all looking at me. They were giving me that “so…what are you going to do now?” look. I was frozen in that moment and while the distance between me and the back door seemed infinite, the hanging tree boughs, weighed down with the rows of fat birds, made the yard claustrophobically small. I remember taking one step forward, really the only step I could take without running into birds, and there was some ruffling of feathers as all birds shifted their glances slightly to continue watching me. I think I woke up from this one or I switched the dream channel cause it was way to spooky for me.
The dream makes sense given its certain influence. Before napping, I was reading the “Year in Science” issue of Discover magazine. They mentioned two breakthroughs of 2005 - the return of the ivory-billed woodpecker after 60 years of presumed extinction and the growing evidence that birds are much more intelligent then we thought.
The dream marks something else for me - the first time ever that I’ve thought of birds as spooky even though they’ve always graced Halloween decorations and various tales of macabre. The human-bird-weird thing goes way way way way back. I think I can finally understand. At the same time, my curiosity of our feathered friends has certainly been ignited.
January 18, 2006 at 11:26 pm · Filed under Dreams, Movies&Film
Tonight I went to a presentation of Belief’s Untitled:003-EMBRYO organized by the Vancouver ACM Siggraph group. The short film was presented with a talk by Mike Goedecke, writer and director of the film and founder of Belief, on the creative process.
I think I missed the creative process part. He talked for a while at the beginning and showed us some samples of Belief’s motion graphics work. I liked what he had to say but quite immediately I realized that I was at a gig for design folk. Not to say that designers are bad, or that I don’t secretly dream of one day working for a hip design firm, sitting at an ironically shaped desk wearing coordinated frames and scarf combos and talking about my process. But I’m not there right now so I couldn’t truly appreciate what he was saying. BTW I’m not trying to mock anything. Seriously…that’s how I imagine it.
We left after the screening (9pm gets a little late for me these days) but the film was okay. There were definitely some nice visuals and effects to be had. Still, again because I couldn’t appreciate Untitled 003 from a designer, or filmmaker, or graphics person point of view, I was left a little un-blownaway.
On the way home I was thinking about my disenchantment. I went there thinking the film would be very conceptual, very high level, using visuals and audio to express something but leaving a lot to the imagination. Instead, Untitled 003 had a storyline - a cool one too. Actually the way they did it is they had a “contest” of sorts where people could send the company their dreams and several dreams were chosen to be part of the film, the owners of the dreams not knowing anything about the final product.
The story was about this agoraphobic guy who finds a “dream-machine” contraption waiting at his door one day. The machine required that he place a helmet that captures dreams on the heads of 5 different people. The dreams were then fed to this gremlin-type monster living inside the machine. Each time he stole a vision, he would see it played back on the dream machine and this of course gave him a great sense of euphoria thus moving the film along quickly because he wanted more dreams.
My problem with the film was this: as soon as they introduced a story, I wanted to see see SEE everything that would make that story seem real. I want to really experience it. Show me what someone is dreaming I want to know! I want to feel like I’m watching my own dreams. But I didn’t. I felt like I was watching a commercial, or a music video. I felt very desensitized to the experience they were trying to give me. Why? Here are some of my thoughts:
1. The final dream sequences (I think there were 6) seemed to be driven by graphics tools or techniques rather than by an initial vision.
2. The story built itself up almost Disney style (seriously the beginning…Phantom Tollbooth) and, given the shorter length of the film, it felt really rushed. On top of that, the dreams take you away from the story, are really abstract, and while they give you some information on the characters to whom they belong, there’s no other time for you to develop an attachment to the character thus have a strong interest in what the dream tells you.
3. In his presentation Mike talked about how our perceptions are based on our belief systems. He gave the classic “which colour is darker?” example where they are both actually the same colour. Another was a sentence being read repeatedly with an increasing amount of distortion. By the end you can still hear the sentence. Do the process backwards and start with distortion, the sentence becomes audible around midway between distortion and clarity. This happens because in the first case, we are able to establish a frame of reference. So…
I figure that I had no frame of reference while watching these dream sequences. I couldn’t develop any interpretation because they seemed too abstract, too fake. My dreams can be pretty crazy, but they are always somewhat based on my reality and that’s what makes them weirder. It’s not the fact that I had to bathe in a community jacuzzi with a built in soap bucket and everyone stored their soap in there so it became one large mass of soaps and I couldn’t find mine so I ended up using someone else’s that was weird. It was that all the soaps in that bucket were from Lush. It astonished me that everyone who used the community jacuzzi used Lush soap!
Based on this last point (3), what would I do to make the film more likeable (by me)? In the dream sequence I would give the audience a frame of reference and then I would take that away. Make them think something is real, believable, and then blow their minds.
(holy crap this is long)
Of course I’m not saying that everything should go like this. I’m also probably totally missing the goal of making the film and where it sits in the design / art world and all the theory given to it by that. I was prepared to see it from that viewpoint, but he lost me as soon as it went into a fantasy-like story. So from the viewpoint of a spectator…
He did show a piece that I really did like - Manstray. Go to that page…click on “VIEW MOVIE”…it’s hilarious!!!
January 17, 2006 at 7:48 pm · Filed under Work
I’ll be putting Echology back up for some user testing next month. As a nice kick in my ass to get it working with some improvements, we have demos scheduled for the 27th of this month. That’s cool. What was not very cool was finding out that the atrium environment it was designed for has changed slightly. We wrote the max patches intending for sound to be spatialized with an 8-speaker system. There are now only 6 speakers mounted on the atrium’s overhead truss (see the picture in the link above…the truss is that large thing lowered down so that I have to bend over to work at the table).
Things were still possible though. I just had to look at the spatialization patches that Reynald was working on. I decided to do that today. Opening the main patch for editing, this is what I saw:
Reynald was right last year - this is absolute spaghetti code. But you know what?! I actually had determination today. I think it’s from all the crosswords I’ve been doing (thanks Tony ; ) ). I went to work using my deduction / colour coordinating skills to the extreme.
As a result, tonight I am going home a very very happy woman. I believe, and this was verified with a few trial runs using the new spatializer with my other patches, that the conversion to 6-speakers was successful. Woohoo!
OK seriously, now that the task is done, it seems so trivial. But this is a reminder to myself, and possibly inspiration to you, that often the mountains we see are mere molehills.
January 16, 2006 at 5:26 pm · Filed under In the News
I’m so productive lately. I feel like I can do anything. Except write. So I had a big essay on this article but I’m canning it all cause well…it’s just not working. Here’s the first part though…
BBC posted this short article on how diet changes in the past 50 years can be linked to mental health issues. The article is based on a report (pdf) filed by Sustain: the Alliance for Better Food and Farming and the Mental Health Foundation in the UK (it may have been only Sustain’s work, I am not sure about that one). I read the article and immediately wanted to send it to some close friends and family with a “see!!! it was the cookies!!! the cookies made me cry!” and “I think I’m going to drop everything and become a nutritionist“. Seconds later I decided not to send anything because a) I’m not going to drop out and b) I know that when you send people articles about what you should and shouldn’t eat it can seem less “oh in case you are interested because I found this interesting” and more “you eat crap that is killing you and this is an intervention”. So I’m posting the article here.
It is pissing rain today. Walking to the bus stop, a van drove by and splashed me. So tonight I am in hiding. Well…except for when I go out to get 1 quarter for laundry. I only 1 quarter…if there is a God that quarter will appear here right now!
January 15, 2006 at 1:57 am · Filed under In the News
This will be such a surreal diving experience. To create an artificial reef, the Artificial Reef Society of B.C. is sinking a Boeing 737 off the coast a little north of Victoria.
After going diving once, I’m hooked and I really want to get certified. This is totally motivation to do so.
January 13, 2006 at 9:49 pm · Filed under Reflection, Things Found Online
Watch that. Extraordinary.
I am exhausted tonight. It’s almost 10pm and I’m already in bed. This week has been great though, and I had a very good birthday yesterday. It was the cutest thing - Ali phoned me on Monday to find out if I had plans and if not, if I would want to maybe kind of go watch her boyfriend’s soccer game. Hehe…did she know that men playing soccer is like girl smut to me? So that was great and so were the phone calls, messages, texts, and emails from everyone. The day was not about me…for me it was a reflection of how lucky I am to have such lovely people in my life. I didn’t have any cake though. Hmm. I didn’t quite feel like cake, still being on a Christmas detox, but today my stomach’s cake-space was calling out in some loneliness. Maybe next week.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY (January 12). You approach this year full-throttle, determined to hit a goal by February. Tenacity breeds success. In March, your aggressive instincts lead you to quality clients or higher-paying work. A loved one’s success in June is a personal win for you, too. Travel in June and November is magical. In love, a Taurus and a Virgo are featured. Your lucky numbers are: 4, 5, 17, 14 and 38.
That’s my year ahead. On May 14th I’m going to meet a dashing 17-year-old Taurus on 4th Street but he’ll actually be involved with a 38-year-old Virgo so once again I will turn to my goals, my money, and my success.
January 11, 2006 at 9:14 pm · Filed under Experiences
…or I will try. I’ve been busy since getting back to Vancouver. No down time here but that’s a blessing. My highlight of the day is no longer checking bloglines.
Tonight I’m working on an ethics application for user studies in February. They are somewhat painful. I guess for good reasons, some research out there is a little out of hand, but the thoroughness…ick.
So speaking of ethics, an RCMP officer phoned me the other day, wondering if I knew of a couple of people I may or may not be related to. It was a little weird. I don’t know if I’ve ever talked to an officer outside the being pulled over in a car senario. I didn’t have much information for him. It’s highly likely that the person he was looking for is related to me somehow but it’s no one I really know.
This started some thinking. What if he was phoning about a closer relative? What if this relative was in trouble with the law and I was being questioned? What would be the right thing to do? I really don’t know. Follow the law or be loyal to your family?
In other news, I think that March 27th will be my date of departure. So much to do before then.
January 10, 2006 at 11:57 pm · Filed under Random Thoughts, Words
Yes! Something in the ol’ SK was boingboing’d. We are officially on the map and for LSD experiments conducted at the Weyburn Mental Hospital nonetheless.
In other news, I had the most amazing weekend and I want to write about it but I don’t think I could summarize it in words quite appropriately. Instead, here are some enjoyable words. Please use them this week! But avoid thinking about them too much. They’ll start to bug you.
Astonishing
Swimmingly
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