Sam's L33t Journal

Last weekend, went to Xavid's "chair-warming party". Their new(-ish) place is pretty cool. I'd visited before, but it was the first time for Erica and Julie.

Valentine's Day was this week. Julie sent Valentine's cards with Erica. Julie cooked a nice dinner on Valentine's Day, and we went out for a dinner date Saturday night.

Today, we took Erica to the theater, saw the Lego Movie. Erica got a bit impatient and sleepy by the end, but enjoyed it overall. I definitely liked the movie, it was a lot of fun! I still haven't mastered kid movie logistics, though. For one thing, I have to make sure she has the right shoes, since her new usual ones have lights on them. :-/

Work's been very busy and I've been very tired. Have not been sleeping very well. It's a long weekend, so hopefully that will help. I've been reasonably productive at work, it's just there's so much to do.

I want to play another video game at some point, or do more reading. I did finish Mr. Robot. Very good show. The cinematography is exceptional.

I keep failing to find the energy to write. Life has been pretty exhausting.

The headphone port on my phone broke, which really disrupted my routine, especially since I had to attempt fixes like "factory reset the phone" before they'd offer a repair under warranty. In the interim, I've switched back to my old phone, which is working fine after a round of updates.

Our condo complex had some drain trouble which required some high-powered plumbing equipment to fix. That was on Superbowl Sunday, so about the least convenient timing. Fortunately, it got resolved same-day, or that would have been even more of a headache.

What else... Julie took two day-trips for business, leaving in the early morning. That went fine. We went to some friends' birthday parties. We did get out to see a movie (the new Star Wars) for the first time in a long time, that was fun.

Work is busy. Overall it's going okay. A few of my older colleagues retired in the past few weeks, early employees at ITA Software. Always a bittersweet farewell; things are changing.

I keep meaning to write about politics, too, but if I can't keep up with my own life, how could I possibly manage to stay on top of the news? It's Gish Gallop: The Presidency. President Trump is the sort of guy where allegations that he cheated on his pregnant wife, then paid his mistress hush money during the campaign (with campaign funds?) is barely a scandal, not because it's widely disbelieved but because nobody's particularly surprised. Meanwhile, the GOP seems to be on their usual plan of "blow up the budget and economy, then somehow blame it on the Democrats". Not going to get into the latest round of the Nunes / Muller / whatever stuff except to say that this really is "stupid Watergate". I wouldn't be surprised if the result of that investigation is more bizarre than I could possibly speculate.

The Winter Olympics have started in Korea, and the presence of a joint Korean delegation at the games actually seems pretty significant, given historical context. At the last Olympics in Korea, North Korea tried to prevent the event with a campaign of terrorism and held a counter-exhibition so lavish that it drove the government to financial ruin just before the fall of the Soviet Union brought an end to food subsidies and the subsequent famine killed 2-3 million North Koreans.

I was saddened by the news of the death of John Perry Barlow earlier this week. He's the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among other things, so I've been very much influenced by his work. Though a document like the A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace really seem quite different during the administration of the first internet troll President than when I first read it.

I'm back in Cleveland for the start of Passover with Julie and Eris to visit my parents and siblings. It's been a while since I last celebrated Passover with my immediate family, not since I left for college in 2004. Introducing the kid to a lot of new people. She seems to be having a good time.

It's been a terribly tiring week, especially since the baby's sleep cycle seems to have been a bit disrupted by the unfamiliar environment and all the excitement.

Last weekend, Julie and I managed to see April and the Extraordinary World with some friends. It's a French animated feature by the same studio that did the adaptation of Persepolis, with a fascinating steampunk-played-straight setting and a more typical mad-science-and-zany-action steampunk plot. (Though it would be kind of interesting to see a story that played that setting all the way serious.) Overall, I recommend it, was a lot of fun.

Developmental milestones for the kid: Trying to roll over (but not quite succeeding), lifting self onto forearms. She's working on those mobility upgrades.

Housing acquired! Picking up keys tomorrow, move scheduled for mid-November.

It took an extra week due to circumstances beyond our control (some finicky details about an international deed transfer not done correctly the first time by the seller). But now it's done for real.

Stress is still wearing on me. Still, there are quite a few things I'm really looking forward to: Spending time with cousins this weekend, my mom is visiting town next weekend, there's an Ingress event in Boston next Saturday, and the weekends after that include some last-minute trips home.

I led a tech talk on interviewing at Google at Olin last week, and I'll be at Olin again for the career fair and a tech interviews panel discussion this week. I really enjoy helping out with that aspect of recruiting!

I saw The Martian on a work movie outing on Friday. The book is great, and the movie is a great adaptation. For the most part, it sticks closely to the book's plot with some judicious trimming for time. Though it does manage to make the book's over-the-top ending even more implausible, and there are a few moments where the cuts cause some of the funny bits to make less sense, or where the movie goes a little bit too far with putting viewer-friendly interfaces on everything. If you at all think you might like a story about an astronaut trying to survive being stranded on Mars, I recommend you see the movie and watch the book, in either order.

Media I've consumed lately:

Existence by David Brin - Brin writes far future sci-fi with a lot of references to the present and a strong ideological bent (if you're familiar with his nonfiction or his blog, large parts of this book seem like an author tract). That said, this sprawling story about humanity's encounter with an alien message in a bottle is an enjoyable read. If you like Brin's earlier work (especially Earth) or sprawling multi-threaded sci-fi tomes like Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, give this one a try.

Ex Machina - A programmer is summoned to the remote estate of an eccentric software billionaire genius. He soon is told that his purpose is to play the questioner in thought experiment where the subject is an experimental AI. It's hard to go into more detail without spoilers, except to say that if that premise sounds good to you, you'll probably enjoy the movie. I thought it was pretty good.

Time of Eve: Another Act by Kei Mizuichi - This one is a novelization of the anime of the same name (trailer here). The adaptation sticks pretty close, but I think the movie is better, so I'll recommend that first. The story is Asimov by way of Japan, and if you like Asimovian robot stories at all, you shouldn't miss this one. It's brilliant.

Avengers: Age of Ultron: It's very entertaining!

I've been having a relaxing time in Lubbock with family and family friends. Julie's parents are wonderful hosts, as always. All her siblings made it into town, and Julie's uncle even drove down from Canada (!) to visit. Christmas dinner was delicious, and people got me and Julie really nice and thoughtful gifts.

I finished reading The Feminine Mystique. That was an influential book for a reason, and it's a very interesting look into late 1950s feminism. That plus The Two Income Trap (which I also read recently) make a very interesting pair of book-ends for the latter half of the 20th century.

Also read How Children Learn. Wonderful book, really interesting and optimistic stuff. I really wish John Holt had succeeded in more of his education reform goals, but I really need to read more by him and his cohort.

Julie and I saw two movies on the trip, Mockingjay - Part 1 (very well put-together, though I still think they could have made the book into a single movie) and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (I enjoyed it; while I don't think this trilogy is as good as Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, it certainly stands up as an entertaining big-budget cinema spectacle). Saw the latter film at Alamo Drafthouse, which really deserves its reputation as the best big theater chain. Wish there was one in the Boston area.

On Sunday, I got a terrible stomach bug (the only bad bit of my trip) and spent the day drinking tea and watching Psycho-Pass (a cyberpunk dystopian police procedural, in a somewhat similar vein to Ghost in the Shell; worth watching if you like the genre, the first season is up on Netflix).

We were going to return to Boston today, but our flight was canceled on account of some ice. We're now scheduled to get in tomorrow, will see how that turns out.

This weekend, continued the trend of seeing lots of movies. Saw Guardians of the Galaxy (fun) and saw The Congress with Film Club (I loved it, but many in the group didn't like it at all).

Feeling a little stressed about performance reviews at work, where both the upside and the downside is that I'm not going up for promotion again yet. I feel like I understand what I need to do at work better than before, though, and this week got off to a good start.

Fun things from this week:

Saw Snowpiercer at the Brattle. "Hunger Games"-on-a-train by way of the cinematographic conventions of Korean action movies. Good stuff if you're willing to take your sci-fi more than a bit absurdist.

Julie took me to Giulia for my birthday, an amazing meal.

I went to the Union Square Farmers Market this weekend and did a bit of cooking. Steamed carrots, long red Florence onions, and baby kohlrabi with fresh sage. Sauteed rainbow chard and various other exotic greens with lemon. Made a salad with cucumber and red sorrel. Bought a loaf of pain d'epi (a pretty baguette variation I hadn't seen before) and served it with Fiore de Nonno burrata. All very good.

I got in a bit of biking yesterday, and today I took Hubway everywhere and biked about 14 miles.

At work a big project is being slow to warm up, but I've been putting in a lot of effort to make documentation improvements that I didn't have enough time to get to this past quarter. Feels good to finally get to that.

Returned from Christmas vacation on last Thursday, but not going back to work until next Thursday. Since getting home, I've been getting back to cooking and exercising and wrapping up some chores.

Christmas vacation was fun and relaxing. The best part was getting to spend time with my niece, Emilia, who's much less of a newborn now. She's such a friendly baby. Not quite walking yet, but getting there any day now, she has the strength but not quite the balance and coordination.

I saw a few movies: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire during the break (good adaptation of the books, I thought; the theme of the previews seemed to be "now with more CGI", including this one), Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters on the plane there (actually pretty entertaining, makes me want to go back and watch The Lightning Thief), and Paranoia (the 2013 one) on the way back (not very good, but sure captures the cultural zeitgeist with regard to tech companies).

A brief movie review, left out from my last post:

I saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey with Film Club last weekend and enjoyed it. Not sure if the higher frame-rate adds anything, though the stereoscopic 3D is striking (if oddly flat in the middle distance; though I'm not sure I see stereoscopic 3D the same as other people, my depth perception is pretty weak). I can see why the movie gets such mixed reviews, though. It's clearly done with a great deal of love for the source material (he even includes the songs!). Making that book into a trilogy of three-hour movies is a bit absurd, but the reason for that is obvious (for the studios, a trilogy is almost guaranteed to make more money; for Jackson, he's presumably still sad about all the material that had to be cut to squeeze The Lord of the Rings into ~9 hours). The action sequences are pretty over-the-top in kind of a cartoonish way, much of the humor is (aptly) pretty children's-book-y. But the setting is beautiful and evocative, and the dramatic scenes (especially Bilbo's encounter with Gollum) are very well done. Martin Freeman does a great job in the starring role, and Ian McKellan and Andy Serkis reprise great performances.