The Twilight Report

apec go home

2007-09-07T21:19:00

I am so ready for APEC to be over. Those world leaders can go jump in a lake as far as I am concerned and frankly the lake can take our rotten “leaders” too.

Dateline Canberra. Nothing happens here. Ever.

Sibs are good. I am educating Tristan on important things like Doctor Who and asking annoying questions like “what did you do in school today.” I know this is annoying because I did a whole speech for the speech contest on the subject in primary school. That must have been before I was mortally terrified of getting in front of people to talk. Or it might even be the reason for it, who knows.

My dad is a neo-luddite. I told him he was a technophobe and he admitted to being “conservative” about such things. What is so hard about programming a number into a phone or sending an SMS?

mario and sonic to usher in the apocalypse

2007-03-30T21:02:00

I was reading the other day about how they (the giant ants^[1]) were going to make a game featuring both Sonic and Mario. Not only that, but they were both going to be featured in the title of the game. Growing up with the Nintendo vs. Sega rivalry, this would have once seemed like the moral equivalent to having Darth Vader command the USS Enterprise-K in the Next Next Generation, or having Captain Kirk pilot an X-wing. Times they are a-changing I guess, and where there is a business case anything can happen. Just today I was reading that Dell was going to start selling PC desktop systems with Linux pre-installed, which further confused me: this can’t be the same reality that I’ve lived in for the last 30 years. All of this is way too early for April Fools, so they must be ice skating in hell for sure.

Speaking space opera, I always had this fantasy of quitting my job in corporate America/Australia by declaring “I am a programmer. Like my father before me.” (Tyler can correct me on the inaccuracy of that quote) All this with the Visigoths about to storm Rome in 410, and bring an end to the Empire^[2]. The trouble is, my dad is actually a chemist. A pretty damn good one, but although he knows Fortran I wouldn’t really describe him as a programmer. I hope that if it ever does come to that, fate will forgive the necessity of a nice dramatic statement in place of a factually correct one.

Damn you Tyler, I can’t use the word “they” or “them” without thinking about giant ants!
so my fantasies are historically schizophrenic

Dinner with the rels

2006-08-19T02:45:00

Tonight I had dinner with some long lost relatives. Actually not really; I hadn't seen them in about a year and a half. I see family on my dad's side (aside from Dad, his wife and the kids) so seldom that when I do see them it feels as though they are long and lost. I’ve never lived so close to so much family. It’s nice.

Also: my dad bought a new car. It was about time that old clunker was way too small for the size of the family. It’s so weird to think of my dad driving a car with those modern curves. I instinctively think of his car as being a boxlike refugee from the 1980s. Apparently Lara misses the old car. Reminded me of how heart broken I was when my mum sold the Tercel. That was years ago.

It was actually even pretty nice to talk to my step mother tonight. She treated me like shit when she first started dating my dad (that was years ago), but I’ve tried not to hold a grudge against her, as I think that would just hurt my dad, and solve nothing.

She is ethnically Chinese, so I got to ask her intelligent questions about which dialect of Chinese that her family spoke (she is herself essentially a native English speaker), and where her family originates from. Before I started studying Chinese input methods I was aware that there were many subtle regional differences in Chinese languages and culture, but totally ignorant about what they might be. I’m still pretty ignorant, but at least I am learning. I tried to get them to show me Tristan and Lara’s middle names, which are Chinese, and so have Chinese characters that correctly represent them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my laptop out of simplified Chinese mode, and my step mother only recognizes the traditional variants.

I’m pretty sure that “David”^[1] is a jerk. He came by tell me that I was working on the wrong thing today and that the resolution on my monitor reminded me of the cruddy old days when X Windows was all the rage. Hello, if you didn’t give me shit to work on then the shit that I work on wouldn’t look like shit. Blah, whatever. Either it will get better, or I’ll be gone soon. I don’t much care which.

guy at work who offered me the position that no longer exists

07

2006-08-03T06:30:00

These are the buildings my parents worked in when they were post docs at Yale. It's in New Haven, where I first lived when we moved to the states (incidentally the house that I lived, and the school that I went to have shrunk since those days!). These buildings are right near the Peabody Museum, where my Dad used to take me to see the dusty old dinosaur bones, and the rare book library where they have translucent granite walls. This was taken last year, when Mum, Don and I went to New Haven to look at the dusty old dinosaur bones at the Peabody, look at the Gutenberg bible at the rare book library, eat white clam pizza at A Modern Pizza, and of course to reminisce about old times.

Climbing trees in Canberra

2006-04-19T03:39:00

Today I climbed a tree in order to rescue Tristan's frisbee. It was a lot of fun, and felt like quite an accomplishment. It reminded me of two people I know who like to climb trees: Amber and Brad. It's fun to act young.

(more random thoughts that have collected over the easter weekend)

more pictures here

(and some more)

Things that I don't understand

2006-02-08T03:06:00

I asked my mum tonight how what she does is different from what my dad used to do. My mum uses a technique called small angle neutron scattering to determine the nature of the universe. My dad used to be a crystallographer and determined the structure of crystals^[1], before he got bored with it and started playing with DNA.

I am not sure if I am describing it wrong, but when ever I attempt to describe what my mum does people say "oh so it's like crystallography." Which confuses me because mum has always talked about what she does such that it makes me think that it is completely different.

Walking home tonight I talked to mum about it and I think I am now equipped to explain how what she does is different. I still don't understand it completely.

Then mother had Don explain to me how the guy who manages their money makes a living without charging them for his service. I understand money about as much as I understand crystallography or small angle neutron scattering.

[1] When I showed Dad Final Intensity, his comment was not "wow what a neat demo", it was "crystals don't have five fold symmetry" ... uh thanks

Paper Clips

2004-12-18T23:18:00

I'm thinking about cooking some pasta for dinner, which of course brings up the whole low carb thing. It's a serious inconvenience that pasta is now worse than slathering your blood red cow stake with the thickest bacon grease imaginable, because when cooking for people you have to think up something more complicated to make. So I send Tyler an IM asking: "are you on any of those funky low carb diets?" in hopes that if he comes out to visit me in New York I can make something simple like pasta. But he doesn't answer me right away.

I decided I really needed a paper clip. I riffled through my desk drawer, but come up with nothing. I decide to go buy some and tell Tyler: "i need to go get paper clips. i'll be back in a bit."

To which he responds: "no; they don't work. my dad actually wrote a book which describes why"

I was about to walk out of the room, but I stop with a feeling of dread in my heart. Suddenly I had been thrust into some strange universe where Mr. Spock has a goatee and for some reasons all paper clips have become non functional. I wonder what else is different about this parallel universe? And why did Tyler's father write an entire book on why paper clips don't work? I've been so wrapped up in the future and being an optimist and all that B.S. that I have made myself susceptible to believing it just may be true when somebody tells me something like "paper clips don't work."

"huh? what?" I type.

Then I remember the question before that. "oh. heh. cool. got confused there."

Tyler responds with: "the diets"

"i thought you were saying PAPER CLIPS didn't work."

Relieved that I wouldn't have to double check my Star Trek DVDs to insure that Spock didn't have any extra whiskers (except of course for that one episode that he did), I went off to get some paper clips.

On the way back I'm listening to a CD I burned with just music that I like to listen to and none of the extra chaff which is on those CDs that those musical corporations expect us to buy. It struck me recently that with the exception of the first ("reptile") and last song ("suicide notes") it is all "happy" music, and that I haven't been much interested in listening to the "unhappy" tracks. Guthrie used to imply that the fact that I used to listen to depressing music made me unhappy. I contend (as I did then) that I listened to depressing music because I was depressed, and now that I prefer to listen to "happy" music because I am optimistic.

For a second there it didn't even bother me that I still don't have plans for New Years Eve. It occurs to me that New Years Eve is really Old Years Night... and is so about the past, not The Future.

Shashars

2004-09-22T04:22:00

Streetlight outside my New York home. I might never have seen it?

Those of you, who know me best, may not know that I am in fact from the planet Shashars, where I was the emperor of an empire that I ruled with an Iron Fist^TM. I am actually here on Earth as part of the Emperor Exchange Program. It's a service of the Galactic Dictators of the Universe, an elite club that only the biggest and most ruthless belong. It is very very invitation-only, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I'm here on Earth for vacation, to get away from it all, as it were, as an anonymous computer programmer working at The Company (real name removed to protect Corporate America).

I've been telling people this story in various forms for decades now. Not bad considering I am only approaching my third decade on this planet. In the first grade I had nearly my entire class convinced that they were also from Shashars. I even had a Queen to rule by my side (back then, I was the King instead of the Emperor - at some point I decided Empire sounded better than Kingdom).

Back then I was living in New Haven Connecticut, where my folks were employed as post docs at Yale. Later my dad would move to Chicago and my mum and I were off to Los Alamos. I was just now in my kitchen trying to think of what I wanted to snack on (finally decided on a tall glass of Chocolate Milk) and I wondered out of nowhere, how my life would have been different had I stayed in New Haven.

This is a bit embarrassing or maybe just funny... but I was theoretically engaged to a girl back then. I really wish I could remember what prompted me to do it, but I remember whispering into my Queen's ear "Do you want to marry me?" She answered in the affirmative. Now here is the embarrassing part: it has been so long and my memories of the first grade are so corrupted that I don't actually remember this girl's name. I don't know a girl I was sort of engaged to once.

If I had stayed in New Haven, might we have been friends growing up, like some of my friends in New Mexico? Would we now be old friends who occasionally sent e-mails back and forth at odd intervals? It is just so hard to say. It is hard to imagine how entirely different my life would be now, except just to know that it would have been completely different. When I think of life changing events, I usually think of two: one was moving to America with my parents (when we moved to New Haven in 1980), the other was when I put a free quotations database onto the Internet in 1995, which eventually led to a job offer at The Company and lead me to where I now live in New York State. Now that I think about it though, Moving to New Mexico from New Haven may not have been as dramatic as leaving one country to live in another one, but probably at least as causal to my effect.

Australian Tour

2004-09-07T17:38:00

It is now official. I am definitely for sure maybe going to Australia next February. I say definitely for sure because I am definitely going, but I say maybe because the last time I said was definitely going to Australia I decided later not to. Mum has a meeting the week of 11 February 2005.

I can't wait for it to be next year, because I will be able to say "The Year Is 2005..."

Anyway, Mum has this meeting down under and she can probably get me frequent flier ticket, so the price is right. I noticed that the meeting is the week of my dad's birthday, so it seems like the perfect time to go visit Dad and that side of my family. I thought dad would be thrilled to hear that I would be coming out for his birthday, but he didn't seem to be so particularly. I'm going to be there in February when it is cold here, but warm there, so I will have to contend with this kind of weather:

I know, I know... it's a tough assignment, but I'm willing to make the sacrifice.

Hopefully I will get to see my friend Tyler, as LA (no... the other one, not Los Alamos) is on the way. It's been way too long since I saw him.