Title courtesy Guy Forsyth (Inspired lyrics btw). Probably broke page layout, but whatever. I’m planning on posting a barrage–was going to use a japanese word with that consonant-vowel structure, but self-censorship prevails–yes, a barrage of entries tomorrow. I’ve done a lot of stuff lately and have a lot of stuff coming up. My days of staying at the office until 2 AM are over and now I’m writing code during the workday (yes, I know, it’s a breakthrough), so I’ll have more time to post.
Half my readership can rightly claim the title refugee–transient, even–at this juncture, so I can only hope that the seven of you remaining keep posting insightful comments.

(Image courtesy http://icanhascheezburger.com/)

I really only went to erg on the rowing machines but an elderly man and woman were on them. Their split time? Eleven minutes. I decided to jog for a while and ran for roughly two miles on the treadmill before getting off and claiming one of the now-empty ergs. Discovering that–no matter how hard I tried–I could not for the life of me pull slower than 2:30, I decided to go for a short 2k and then get off. My split wasn’t terrific, but considering that I have done absolutely nothing for the past year, it’s still somewhat amazing. I went to a stationary bicycle for a few miles and then headed home to shower.

I think I’ll start going here everyday. It’s a half-mile jog to the gym and it will let me keep exercising in rain and cold and whatnot. The vehicle exhaust on the roads is also (ob)noxious, and the recent smoking laws mean that all the tobacco-addicted morons stand on the streets and smoke while you’re trying to jog (in clear defiance of the posted signs). The gym is a quick solution to this.

Technorati Tags: Exercise

Technorati Tags: Amazon.com

Before attending the performance, we ate dinner at purple café and wine bar across the street. I had the lamb with their suggested red, and was decently impressed with both the food and the wine (the service wasn’t shabby either: they divided the check ten ways for us as soon as we asked). The furnishings and architecture of the place were also notable: the chairs were wrought iron and each weighed roughly thirty pounds, and a spiral staircase wide enough for four people rose from the center of the dining area to the vaulted ceiling nearly twenty-five feet above, encircling hundreds of bottles of wine stored in a silo that doubled as the bar.

After we’d had our fill, we headed back across the street to the performance. I didn’t realize that the Dvořák wasn’t until the second half of the performance and was understandably confused by the klezmer music coming from the orchestra. It was fun, but a bit everywhere and disorderly, reminding me of Gershwin with ADD. The second piece was a concerto for organ and strings by Poulenc, which was somehow at once ponderous and playful, serious without sacrificing any of Poulenc’s trademark wit.

During intermission, one of the guys commented that the principal violinist was extremely attractive and young for a principal violinist in a symphony orchestra of this caliber. I laughed because I had had exact same thought while watching the concert (I believe my exactly thought was “I hope there’s a ‘Ladies of the Symphony’ calendar somewhere”), but then was blinded by her sparkling wedding ring. Funny to see guys being guys at a “cultured” event. Oh well.

The Dvořák itself was impressive and–apart from the brass getting out of hand at one point–close to perfect. I didn’t realize until the last movement rolled around that I had played a good deal of the work before, and so caught myself subconsciously fingering along with the violins.

The orchestra is headed by Gerard Schwarz, who–apart from being one of the two people in the world I know with a name like Gerard–is quite famous for having a penchant for American works (here, the klezmer piece). Anyways, the night was fun and the music was great. Shane and I have tickets to next week’s Mahler performance (second balcony!) that he found for sale on the Amazon for-sale mailing list (so we got them for a discount). Unfortunately there are no works playing when Rebecca is going to be in town, but I’ve been finding all sorts of fun things to do around here, so putting together classy dates shouldn’t be a problem .

Technorati Tags: Amazon.com, Music, Symphony, Seattle

You see, at the winners’ table, we play for drinks: if you go out to someone, then you now owe them a drink of your choice (providing it isn’t ridiculously expensive). However, there is nothing to prevent that person from just grabbing another thirty chips and starting play again, but this also means that people who survive round-to-round can establish quite a lead. This can then be turned into a tactical advantage in favor of the person with two to four times as many chips as everyone else: they can push bids very high with little risk for themselves.

By this strategy, I soon had three or four drinks coming my way. Fortunately, you don’t have to collect on all of them, though if someone actually pays for one, you had better drink it. And though I had three or four owed me, I still owed one to Vi, so I commuted one of my credits in order to remove this debt, and used yet another to buy a guy a drink that had been owed one by someone who had left with debt on his hands (considered extremely rude).

By the time all the financial debt-transferral business was over, I had whittled my credits down to one and got Jen to pick me up a Jägerbomb (tonic water and Jägermeister). I was a bit confused how to drink it–you actually drop a shot glass into a larger glass of tonic–and mentioned my unease to Jen:

“I’m not quite sure how to drink this; I guess I just drop the shot into the glass. I haven’t yet been 21 a year.”

She scrunched up her face and got very concerned, whispering across the table:

“What!?!? You’re not 21 yet? You just got me to buy a minor alcohol!”

Granted my syntactic prowess often leads to confusion, though in this case I can’t blame her: for some reason I decided to mangle up my statement as much as possible. I decided to clarify.

“Noonononono. When I said ‘I haven’t yet been 21 a year,’ what I meant was “I am not 22 yet, so I don’t have much experience drinking, being only 21.5.”

This seemed to put her at ease and at least reassured her that the “local constable wasn’t going to carry her off in shackles to the lorry,” as might say her evil fiancé who stole my 615 chips earlier in the night. Steve (her fiancé) got third in the original tournament, and Chris and Brad ended up finishing first and second, respectively. It was a fun night.

Technorati Tags: Amazon.com, Fadó, Poker

Views of my blog over the last 30 days. Come on guys, you can do better than this. Ok, so it probably hasn’t helped that I haven’t really posted anything in the past fourteen. I like that little hump about a week ago, it’s got a cool shape to it.

In a word, beautiful. I highly recommend Adorama to anyone looking to get long-lasting good prints. I got two 11x17s, about eight 8x12s, a few 8x10s, and some weird sizes (for instance, one 4×12). Because I never really got the softproofing software working on my computer, I was somewhat worried that my prints might come back really with sharp contrast and eye-hemmoraging saturation (because “normal” people think that they look “so much more colorful” that way). The 11x17s look amazing, and the exposure and overall tonal feel (hue, curve, etc.) are exactly as I had envisioned each photo.

I immediately picked a blank wall for my part of the exhibit and hung up the photos. I’ve already gotten a few compliments, and I think I might get a few more if I ever hang up my name next to them. Peter seemed interested in the lens I used on one of my favorite shots, which was odd (which lens I use is almost irrelevant to me, and in that case I had used the craptastic stock 18-55mm). I also divulged that three of the shots were (gasp!) taken on a point-and-shoot and dared Brad to try to guess which ones.

Sadly, the black-and-white photos I sent in aren’t quite as impressive as I had hoped, and Tina’s B&W exhibit blows any of my shots out of the water, so I am still debating hanging up any of them. If I do hang them up, I’ll be the only guy with both color and B&W work, which is odd in and of itself. Also of note: Tina has a great photo of Joshua Roman (the musician) on the front of Seattle Sound Magazine this month.

Strangely, Chiranjeeb has now decided to expand his part of the gallery (it was his idea to start it in the first place), possibly because he’s been counting how many photos others have put up and wants to put up a few more of his own to reach the de facto quota. I’m thinking it’s because Fio comes back from the Arctic this week and Chiranjeeb would like to take up some more wall space before we’re assaulted by more photos of penguins. Yes, I know they don’t live in the Arctic. It was a joke. Whatever. I’m happy because Chiranjeeb’s work is probably my favorite: I’ve gone from disliking the unrealistically saturated colors to realizing that, yes, I have seen colors like that in real life, I just haven’t been able to capture them on film.

I also joined the “photogs” mailing list at Amazon, and now my Inbox is assaulted each morning with the latest goings on of the photo enthusiasts at the world’s largest store. I am regularly astounded by some of the lenses they own–one guy’s list of glass he took with him to Australia totaled 35 lbs. and well over $8,000–though I have been having amazing conversations with many of them regarding best practices for backup, color correction, travel lenses, and other such important details of the best ways to manage shooting thousands of photos.

Anyways, it’s been a while since I’ve gone shooting, so I might go hit up the pride parade tomorrow for some interesting shots. I’ll keep you posted.

Technorati Tags: Amazon.com, Nikon, Photography, Seattle

Vitus
Switzerland, 2006
A sentimental comedy following the trials of the titular boy, a child prodigy in piano and just about everything else. The cast is strong, with the boy’s grandfather being played by last year’s Downfall‘s Hitler (Bruno Ganz), and the boy himself being played by a real child prodigy (though his acting is also superb).
The soundtrack is absolutely amazing, utilizing Liszt, Mozart, Schubert and others to their fullest, and the scene of the boy improvising rock-and-roll while his babysitter wears one of Vitus’s mother’s dresses and sings her heart out is memorable. The plot becomes thickens when our protagonist–faced with the responsibilities of either attending college or joining his father’s tech firm at the age of twelve–apparently attempts suicide and damages his brain. Will he ever get his talents and intellect back, or has he ever even lost them? Only his grandfather is let in on the secret, but until the rest of the world finds out, Vitus gets his wish and can act as a “normal” boy his age, dropping back to grade school.

A great family movie with both comic elements and a good message, Vitus drives home the point that many “gifted” may see being so different as a curse. The side plots are numerous, almost to the point of being distracting; however, in a world in which every schmuck watches 24 and Lost–each of which generally has at least four or five things going on at once–I don’t foresee that being a problem.

I also foresee this being popular with high school German classes. Though it is in Swiss-German and not High German, I could understand most of the entire movie with little trouble (and I haven’t spoken in four years).

Overall a very witty film whose only fault is that so much is going on at once that the viewer can’t tear their eyes from the screen.

Cthulhu
US, 2007, World Premiere

A psychological horror film with a bit of gay metaphor, Cthulhu is one of the many recent films with the–in my opinion–ambitious goal of trying to film something long regarded to be unfilmable: the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Though I had first assumed that the film was based on it’s namesake work “Call of Cthulhu”, it turns out that it is only very loosely based on another one of Lovecraft’s works, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.

The gay protagonist of the film, Russ, has returned to his hometown for his mother’s funeral, and is determined to get back to the real world as soon as possible. His father is a disturbed cult leader who has long been preaching of the imminent return of the “Ancient Ones”, and has a sterile, cold relationship with his son, whose gay lifestyle he renounces. As it turns out, he dislike of the homosexual lifestyle is anything but moral indignation: it is later revealed that Russ is the heir to the earth, and until Russ bears a child, the Ancients will stay in their slumber (presumably on the island of R’yleh).

Russ begins having increasingly lifelike nightmares, and soon feels that his father’s religion may not be complete hogwash. The island eventually dissolves into total chaos and we are left wondering if prophecy will be fulfilled, with a stark shot of Russ against a bleak seascape, preparing to don the robes of his father.

I feel that this film loses its drive somewhere in the middle and at times leaves the viewers scratching their heads. Parts that should be horrifying were often humorous, though the movie did have its tongue firmly in cheek during many sequences. That said, certain segments were horrifying and a good job was done preserving the feel of Lovecraft’s works. The stories are often of impending doom and an unbearable dread, and rely more on what is imagined than on what is seen to achieve these ends.

That said, the film had its good moments and was often just fun to watch. The cinematography wasn’t too bad and while some of the acting was a bit over the top, I can’t say I had too many complaints about most of the characters. However, two hours is a bit long for a short story I read on the bus to the theater. I’ll have to get Alan’s opinion on it when I get back to Austin (he’s a big H.P. fanboy).

Technorati Tags: Film, Seattle

I’d just like to take the time to say that any review online stating “Lightroom has great printing capabilities” is complete and utter hogwash. That a $290 program doesn’t have a proper usable workflow for color correction and soft-proofing is infuriating. The best hack I could find to view my photos the way they’d actually look coming off of the Noritsu printer at Adorama was writing a custom Applescript printer workflow to embed the ICC profile and open the resulting images in Preview.

I’m sure Lightroom has great printing abilities for printing on your own printer, but if you’re paying upwards of $30 for 8x10s, 11×17, and 8×12 prints, you don’t want to leave things up to chance. I finally gave in and downloaded Aperture for doing the proofing work even though it’s horridly slow on this machine. As much as I want to stick with Lightroom, Aperture just keeps getting more and more appealing every time I bump my head on some stupid feature the Adobe devs haven’t implemented.

And I’m not buying a $1500 bundle so I can do colorproofing in Photoshop. Sorry.

On the upside, I just discovered a firmware update for my D80 that adds some features. Nifty.

Technorati Tags: Computing, Lightroom, Nikon, Photography