I hadn’t been all that psyched to see Cars. One of my friends from college had recommended it, and he knows what sort of things I like. Even still, something about the visuals, and the concept as a whole didn’t scream, “must see,” to me.

I was wrong – it’s awesome.

Not, say, Incredibles awesome, but probably my second or third favorite Pixar movie – in the running with Toy Story. Great stuff.

But man, those guys at Pixar must *love* a challenge. Making the cars relatable, sympathetic, interesting, complex characters… that’s not easy, and it takes some time before you really “buy into” the notion, and aren’t weirded out by it all the time. Sure, the characters are largely stereotypes, and you could say maybe that’s one of the things that Pixar uses to make them more accessible – but it’s so well done, I didn’t mind at all.

The “small town = better than the city life” story, I dunno – it’s easy to wax nostalgic about the simpler life, and ignore the things that came with the simpler life in the real world – but as utopia goes, this wasn’t a bad thing to aspire to.

Yeah, the visual style may not sit well with you at the start, and the whole thing’s just so utterly bizarre it takes some getting used to, but give it a shot – it’s definitely worth seeing.

…but you can drive by it.

When I was in sixth grade, we moved from our house on Harvard Rd. to our house on Magnolia Ave. It was a weird move, just across town. I have no idea why we moved specifically. Still, it quickly became home, after we got rid of the dank-ness, and had wallpapered the rooms and such.

Got our dog, Sonja, not long afterwards, if my memory serves.

Lots of memories of things that happened in that house. Visits from the grandparents, cousin, and other family members. Studying for finals with Steve & Joe, and throwing Joe’s books out my bedroom window into the driveway. Getting little seeds thrown at the front window in the middle of the night when a friend needed to talk to someone. Lots of fights with my parents. Lots of nights studying. Lots of mornings waiting for rides to the pool, sitting on the couch, looking out the large living room window.

Sonja, barking as the mailman dropped the mail into the slot. Fixing up a static spark generator with my dad in the garage. Having my foot run over by a guy dropping me off from band practice. The ride up Magnolia Ave. to the pool. The short walk to school. Piano lessons. Lots of piano lessons. Secretly hoping that my piano teacher would be stuck in traffic, or unable to make it. Looking back, and wishing he’d made it more often, and that I’d appreciated it more when he did. I do now.

The light, above my bed, which let me read in the darkness. Sonja, running in the morning down the hall from my parents’ room, to mine, the click, click, click of her nails on the hardwood, and the whoosh of her flying through the air and landing on the bed next to me. The shiny new saxophone in the closet, which my dad showed me after I’d gotten into a really nasty fight with my mom. Listening to my dad playing his one note on the violin, over and over again. Lots of meals. Eating, at 10pm, after a swim workout, with my mom sitting there, watching me eat. I always thought it was weird, but I get it, now.

The smell of opening up the credenza, and getting out the silverware, or the nicer plates, when company came over for dinner. Playing computer games – Terminator 2, I think, with Sean & Kyle one New Year’s Eve. The Commodore 64 on my desk. The one night I had an NES, before my dad made me bring it back to the store for a refund. One solid night of Rygar. My grandfather, talking to me, telling me I have a responsibility to the world to use whatever gifts I have to make it better in whatever way I chose to pursue, as the two of us sat side-by-side on the edge of my bed. Pulling my bike out of the garage, almost every day, and riding it somewhere or another. Mobius, running out the front door, having spent the day in the care of my mom.

The last moments of whatever day, walking down the walkway, and unlocking the door to come home.

On the 22nd, my parents hand over the keys to the house I’d consider my childhood home. Sad, sad they’re moving, but happy for the memories I have now, and will keep forever.

It’s been a while since I’ve actually picked up an album or two that I really, really like. Recently got Demon Days, by the Gorillaz, and Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, which I’d heard plenty of way back, totally, totally forgotten about, and was reminded of again while watching House (they use one of the songs off Mezzanine for the theme).

It’s also been a while since a song has really put me in a mood, but Teardrop never fails to elicit a sort of melancholy calm, which makes it perfect working music. Strangely, it’s also perfect running music, because the spare drumbeat happens to be exactly my 6.5mph pace. So, yes – running with a melancholy calm. Very odd, but it works.

Gorillaz has one song on the album, DARE, which Ei-Nyung pointed out, is pretty generic disco-y music, except for a guy shouting the lyrics in the background (doubling up a disco-y female vocal). It’s that small vocal flourish, and a slightly more modern beat that completely change the whole feel of the song. Great stuff. Feel Good, Inc. is my other favorite on the album, but there’s a pretty wide variety of entertaining listening to be had.

…

I write a lot. It’s not like it’s a new revelation to me, and I’m surprised by it, or anything. The weird thing is how satisfying it is. Take the blog – it’s not like I’m really saying anything that’s world-changing. I’m not offering commentary on anything of any particular importance. But it *feels* like communication. I know there’s a number of people out there who read this, and when I see them after not having seen them for a while, there’s no period of “so… what’ve you been up to?” – generally, they either know my story in some detail, or I know theirs. It’s quite odd, though, because in some sense, it’s replaced “real” conversation and communication with fake, pseudo-one-way communication.

So, it’s sort of like getting to talk all you want, and not having to read the room, and realize people are bored. If they’re bored, they just stop reading.

But it raises a really weird question for me – what about the future? When I grew up, we talked to people. I didn’t use the phone much, and any social contact I got was generally face-to-face. I felt some “urge” to communicate – to interact with another person, and so I did. I learned how to do so, and what various signs meant. You learn the whole vocabulary of interaction, and develop at least some meager skill for it.

But now, there’s blogging. There’s IMing, e-mail, whatever. Are children learning to socialize through IM? Text messaging? LiveJournal? What percentage of a developing child’s time is spent socializing face-to-face? What sort of longer-term ramifications does some pervasive change in the way people communicate have over the long term?

I suppose this is probably the same question people thought when everyone got a home telephone. Then the cell phone. I’m sure every generation asks themselves, “what of the generation that follows?” and for the most part, we’ve always been fine. But like Al Gore’s slide on relative CO2 concentrations, it’s almost like information has become so dense, and so … ubiquitous, that the whole paradigms of communication have changed.

It’s no longer about whether you can find stuff or not – you want information, it’ll get dumped on your in reams – it’s about sorting the validity and the *worth* of that information. For me, a lot of that comes from learning how to judge whether someone’s a worthy source of information or not. Grammar, communication skills, persoanl presentation, etc. With the pervasiveness of unfiltered data, and a degredation of the metrics that *I* use to judge the validity of a source, what kinds of adaptation will I need to understand the future generations’ communication?

*shrugs*

The comments have been un-forked. If you did post anything in the last few days, though, it’s gone forever. Sorry!

Don’t have anything to write about, really. Which is sort of an odd way to start, but I wanted to write, so I suppose there’s something in the head rattling about.

Work’s interesting – it’s not what I’d necessarily expected going in, and as a result, the first week, I was somewhat disappointed. I’m not sure I’m not still disappointed, but I’ve taken some active steps in turning it into what I want it to be. Which is sort of odd, because the project’s not lasting much longer, and there’ll be something completely different in a month’s time, come hell or high water, because the deadline for this project was fixed long before I ever showed up.

So, that’ll be interesting. The game’s shaping up as well as could be expected, I think.

The commute’s nicer, too – about 15 minutes, door-to-door – the biggest factor in time is the stoplights, and not the traffic. So that’s a good change of pace. Still don’t think I’ve found the optimal route, but that’ll come with time. Gotta try to ride the bicycle to work one of these days. So far, haven’t really mustered up the time to actually do the ride – I suspect it’ll be ~30 minutes or so the first time, ’cause I haven’t ridden my bike, sadly, in years.

I think that’s one thing that would actually change my life for the better, to be perfectly honest. For about eight or nine years, my bike was my primary mode of transportation (starting basically with freshman year in high school). And not just like, from here to the corner store. I’d bike to workouts in Berkeley on a regular basis, I’d bike later from Boston to Harvard to visit my then-girlfriend (which is more like going to the corner store). Everywhere I went, I went by bike. It’s sort of nice. You feel a bit more in touch with your surroundings than you do in a car. Probably because you’re a.) going a lot slower, and b.) have to watch your ass, lest you be killed. So, it’s sort of a time of heightened acuity, where you’re both concentrating on propulsion, and yet have to put aside that zen-like meditative quality you get from the repetition of motion to actively be aware of your surroundings.

Yeah, I miss that feeling. I miss mountain biking, as well – the rush of adrenaline and speed as you’re racing down some hill – your mind working at triple speed to process all the incoming hazards, and work out an optimal way to get from point a to point b, ten feet in front of you. It’s like playing chess while being attacked by ninjas. Fun stuff. The problem with that is that it does require a certain fearlessness that I most certainly no longer possess. I fear crippling injury. I fear death. I like my life. I love my wife, I love my family and friends, my dog – I like spending time with these people, and the risk-taking equation has changed since I was young, and stupider.

Still, I miss it. Riding on the street is sort of the idiot’s equivalent to mountain biking. Ha. Riding through downtown LA traffic in the summer of ’98 was sort of like trying to commit suicide every day and somehow failing, either not being able to get hit by a car, or not breathing in enough toxic fumes to have one’s lungs clog up outright. I mean, it takes a serious misunderstanding of physics and probability to ride around at 20 miles an hour in a crowd of things that weigh 15-30 times what you do, and believe that on the very likely chance one of the two of you screws up, your chances of avoiding serious injury are any good.

Sneh. I suppose I had my moments.

Which reminds me of my knee. It’s been stronger – in many cases feeling better, now that we’ve been working out on at least a somewhat regular basis. On the other hand, it’s feeling worse, as well. If I’m sitting, and I try to extend my leg out in front of me, it’s smooth for the first 40 degrees of motion, or so. Then the last 10 degres, it’s “pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop,” until my knee’s straight. It’s sore when I sleep, hurts when I squat, hurts to straighten out. It’s been more or less like this since the surgery, but I figured it’d eventually go away.

I’ve got a phyiscal scheduled with the doctor – one of those things one does when they’re 30, I suppose. I’ll ask her about it then. Finally settling into the “get a doctor you see more than once every 10 years,” mode. Hell, I’ve even got a dentist I’ve got an appointment with in six months. It’s bizarre.

Eh, so this didn’t really amount to anything interesting, other than one of those posts I’ll read a year from now and go, “Huh. That’s what was happening then.”

At what point do you say, maybe it’s not that everyone else is moving slowly, maybe it’s that I’m actually moving quite fast?

Maybe it’s time to stop waiting for the master to appear, and simply accept that it’s time to take matters into my own hands?

So, the parents took us to Chez Panisse tonight. The menu consisted of four courses:

* A shrimp and cucumber salad, flavored with some Vietnamese notes. Tasty, and full of interesting, subtle flavors, but not mindblowing like the Halibut we had last time.
* A carrot soup, and a fava bean soup, served in the same bowl. Their viscosity was high enough to keep them separate, and a swirl of tarragon cream crossed the two. The carrot soup was an excellent carrot soup, but nothing more, imo. The fava bean soup was suprisingly delicious, withe flavors I neither expected, nor recognize.
* Chicken – the leg deboned, stuffed with mushrooms, and sliced, along with slices of the breast meat. I’ve never, ever had chicken done this perfectly. The breast meat was just astonishing. Flavorful, perfectly seasoned, juicy, with crispy skin… man. Genius. The leg meat & mushrooms were also delicious, but I’m used to moist & delicious dark meat, so it was somewhat unsurprising. Came with spinach, and some asparagus, both done to perfection. This is hands-down the best chicken dish I’d ever had, and after finishing it, I literally felt guilty for not being that excited about it after reading the description.
* A strawberry tart, with some sort of cream & shaved almonds. Delicious, but almost exactly what you’d have expected.
* A small chocolate ganache thingamabob, which was good, and a piece of candied tangerine rind, which was awesome.
* An iced citron green tea.

Delicious! Not say, cheap, but *delicious*. I was a little worried, as the meal didn’t start out with the punch I’d have hoped, but the chicken dish made any doubts completely disappear.

One of the weirdest things about the new generation of consoles is that Nintendo has insisted that better graphics aren’t the wave of the future. As a result, while the X360 and PS3 are pretty substantial steps forward in terms of graphical fidelity, about the most the Wii will provide is what the xbox *currently* provides. Nintendo’s mantra has been “accessibility uber alles.”

Here’s why it won’t work:

When you take a 2-D game, your brain abstracts it into some representation of reality. Your brain has been trained since near infancy to interpret two-dimensional images, whether photorealistic, or completely iconic, as representations of some form of reality. You understand, fundamentally, how to interpret 2-D of various quality, resolution, etc.

However, CG “3D” is nowhere near photorealistic yet – even the most talented of artists cannot make faces that are indistinguishable from reality with the current hardware, because people are so trained to look at the detail of a human face, and understand all of its nuances. 3-D is *too much like reality*. Your brain does not easily abstract a dodecahedron into a sphere – it’s only by immersing yourself in that context that you understand how to translate those visual abstractions into reality. This is *not* a process that has been as deeply ingrained as a person’s ability to interpret drawings, or effectively, sprites.

The critical piece is this: 3-D technology is currently progressing *towards* shedding the technical limitations, and being artist-dependent, in terms of replicating visual fidelity. That’s important because essentially what it means is that learning how to interpret “bad 3-D” (low-poly models, low-boned animation skeletons, etc.) is a skill that people are going to lose in the near future, because it simply won’t be necessary anymore. And as a result, something like the Wii, which has settled for obviously “bad 3-D,” will literally look terrible to anyone who’s lost that skill, because they’ve grown accustomed to looking at less abstracted representations of reality.

Look at Virtua Fighter. Not the new ones, the original. How *terrible* does that look? That one would consider that a valid representation of a human in *today’s* context is a *joke*. Look at old Playstation games. They’re almost unplayably terrible looking. But look at SNES games. They still look remarkably good. Sure, they’re low-res, by and large, but Super Mario World is *still beautiful*. It’s because the skill of interpreting low-poly 3-D is transient. Once someone’s adapted to the better technology, and lost that skill, things simply look bad. You don’t tolerate texture warping, pop-in, pointy circles, etc.

So, what Nintendo’s banking on is that the visual difference between the xbox and the x360 isn’t substantial enough that a gamer would care about the difference. What they’re *also* banking on is that that’s not the factor in making games accessbile to everyone.

And in my opinion, that’s where they’ve completely, totally blown it.

Finished the first season of House, and finished my time spent unemployed. Back to the grind, as of tomorrow. It’s a little strange, to be perfectly honest. I’m not really *excited*, or nervous – in some sense, I’m a little scared, sure – change is scary. But I think one thing is that it’s maybe less intimidating? Maxis was a sort of legendary place – the kind of place I imagined was full of candy canes and magical spirits, or something, before I worked there. Now, I know it’s all just a job, and even the best places are f’ed up in all sorts of crazy ways.

It’ll be a chance to work in a smaller environment again – something I think I like much better than the larger, corporate craziness. I wonder what their work-life balance is like, whether it’ll drive me crazy or not. I wonder what sorts of things are possible, and what I’ll find impossible, there. How long before I feel like it’s limiting, instead of educating, how long it’ll be before I want more, or want less. I dunno. I think it’ll be fun.

Starts tomorrow. And I go back to wishing, every day, that I just had more *time*.

One day left, of freedom. Job starts Monday. It’s been a good month. Relaxing when it needed to be, full of productivity when it should have been. I could have done more. Probably could also have done less, and been happy, as well.

The thing the month has taught me are twofold:

The first is pretty simple. I’m good at filling up time. I have a lot of hobbies, and basically never enough time to pursue them all. Without a job, I *still* didn’t get a chance to paint this month, nor did I play much music. I did play the sax a bit during the weekdays, and I played some on the keyboard. Now that we’ve got the piano, I’m actually excited to re-learn how to play that, as well. I sketched up a painting of a flower, from a photo I’d taken in London, but haven’t yet applied paint to canvas. Cooked a lot, which was really fun, and did a bunch of random stuff around the house, which was remarkably satisfying. Lots to go, but baby steps count.

The second is a little weirder. It basically has to do with prioritization and allocation of time. I didn’t realize how much I prioritize, and think of everything in terms of opportunity cost. Should I watch a movie? That’s pretty much a whole evening after work. Meals are always a balance of prep and shopping time vs. money. Playing a game, surfing the internet sort of “kill” time while something else might come along. What I’ve done, in the past, was actually “kill” time instead of pursuing good opportunities, lest something *better* come along. When my time was “free,” I prioritized things differently. I’d go places and talk to people, friends, Ei-Nyung, whatever – hang out ’till late in the night. Take the dog to the beach almost any chance I got, because it was all “free.” But those experiences are *better* than the experiences I have when I’m doing the cost calculations, and hoping for something optimal.

So, by trying to optimize, using bad calculation of the odds, I’ve effectively been making very bad decisions. I like movies. I like hanging out. I don’t mind being tired, or losing some sleep, and instead of waiting to see if something better comes along, I should just *do* what comes up when it does, and figure out what the ramifications of that decision are as it happens, rather than waiting for some other circumstance that may or may not come. I enjoy doing things, and so the primary concern should be *doing* them.

And for the last question, I put this to a vote, of people who have been to our house. Prioritize the repair or remodel of the following:

* Proper repair of the roof is a given, and is not part of this list.

* Drywall in upstairs common areas and the stairs
* Complete strip & remodel of kitchen
* Complete strip & remodel of upstairs bathroom
* Resurface and paint front of house
* Finish detail work in downstairs (baseboard trim & window trim)
* Terrace walls & strip grass from backyard
* Front stairs & front yard retaining wall repair
* Repair walkway up side of house

Personally, after the roof repair, drywall, kitchen, and bathroom are the ones I’m thinking, in that order.

Just curious what others think.