Getting set up in Portland

So ... today's my birthday and (news flash), we're living in Portland. Thing are coming together here; we picked up our car last night from the car transporter. We just bought a very nice console (a kind of wide, low, bookcase) from 10,000 villages. It's made of a variety of woods, all very eco-friendly. The wood was reclaimed from buildings and from other furniture ... that's the reuse in Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Not that we got it to be super-PC-green ... it was available locally, it was the right price, and it's a stunning piece.

With that in place, I was able to get the wood tapestry up on the wall, and all the electronics are now hooked up. Let's see: cable modem, cable box, CD player, DVD player, XBox, TV, Receiver and wireless access point. Outside of a mass of cables stuffed under the furniture, it came together awesome. If we can just get the other 95% of the apartment as well put together, we'll be on to something.

Outside of that one, key corner, the apartment as a whole is still "decorated in early american cardboard" as Suzy keeps quoting me. The building is very nice, and there's a manageable amount of street noise. Most of the people we've met in the elevator have been in a situation much like ours ... relocating from other parts of the state or country to start fresh in Portland.

The neighborhood continues to rock; an excellent video store, more and more galleries. We haven't even checked out the many record stores or otherwise even scratched the surface of what's going on within spitting distance.

OK ... so back to my birthday. After all the craziness and confusion over the last month (or months), including two business trips since moving into the apartment less than two weeks ago ... well, it was pleasant to just take it a bit easy last night and catch up on unseen re-runs of Battlestar Galactica. Today has been pretty mellow, just more unpacking, a nice lunch, and a bunch of last minute chores. It sounds boring but for me its all good.

Starting next week is work, work, work. I need to send invoices to my current clients and start working on acquiring new ones. I have to really start producing for my Tucson client. And the unpacking must continue.

We think Suzy will have surgery to fix her finger next month, probably early in the month. We're looking forward to her healing up so that we can go skiing together (as together as we ever ski, but still). It's wierd being in Portland and knowing just about nobody, but people are friendly, and there's so much going on. There's even a lot of Java people using Tapestry here. I think a lot of good things are going to happen here.

Portland Week One

So we've been in Portland about a week now and it keeps getting better ... strangely, the weather has not been cooperating; it's been sunny, if a bit cold, every day. Where's the Portland rain? In fact, I've spent a total now of one month in Portland over the last five years, and I've seen only one or two days of rain.

Tomorrow the movers arrive with our stuff, and we can finally get into our apartment. We decided to stay in a hotel, rather than buy an air mattress or anything like that. Partly due to comfort issues, and partly so I could continue to do some work.

Of course, I have trips almost immediately. I fly down to San Francisco on the 13th and get back on the 17th, then fly down to Tucson on the 18th and back on the 21st.

We keep finding more stuff to like about our location; we're really hoping to use the car very minimally. Sure, there's a decent mall about 10 minutes away (we swung by last night to pick up a new set of cookware), but for a lot of ordinary items, including food, we can just walk.

Yesterday, we took the streetcar to the saturday market; it's clear to see that if we keep to that plan, we'll get a lot more exercise, just by walking more. This, too, was part of the plan in moving here. Boston makes it difficult to do anything without a car ... it's faster, easier and cheaper to drive into Boston than to take the T. Portland's excellent public transportation makes it just as easy, and much cheaper, to get around without a car.

And the funkiness of Portland is still wonderful. Yesterday, we stumbled across an all-tuba concert in courthouse squuare (dead center of downtown). Across the street, the salvation army was using volunteers dressed as Darth Vader and a squad of Imperial Stormtroopers (pictures to follow).

Meanwhile, the only fly in the ointment is Suzanne's finger. It turns out to not be just an unlucky fracture; she has a kind of bone cyst or tumour (benign, not cancerous) that has been weakening that bone. It would have broken eventually, and would have been worse later. In any case, she's seeing a surgeon, and will probably require surgery to clean it up and repair it using either artifical bone or a bone graft.

Happy birthday everybody, it's Nerd Birthday Week!

Yow! We're in Portland!

Yes, Boston did try to get its last licks in yesterday. We woke to a couple of inches of snow and treacherous driving on the way to the airport. Near the old Quincy shipyards, a car slid directly into our lane, prompting some severe and adrenaline-filled steering to avoid. The snow also delayed us in Boston, so that we nearly missed our connection in Newark (and Newark requires you to go through security screening when you switch concourses!) Then Suzy was stuck in the middle seat next to a really fat crying woman. You just have to love travel.

The biggest problem we've had so far is something unfortunate for Suzy: When checking in at Logan, Suzy managed to catch her finger on some luggage and ended up breaking here ring finger. We confirmed today that she does have a slight fracture, and will probably be in a splint for a week or two.

Today, at The Louisa, the apartment building we're to start living in, we did a quick check over the other units in the building. There were a couple that were a little nicer, but much, much pricier. I think we're going to do well in the townhouse we chose. We're already thrilled with the location ... a Whole Foods just across the street (or accessible underground by a shared parking garage), and just lots of everything: book stores, art galleries, restaurants; everything great about living in the city.

We're staying at The Inn at Northrup Station, a trendy hotel in northwest Portland, until our stuff arrives in the next week or so. Even since I was last here in August, more stores and restaurants have opened here. In fact, I'm sitting in a Starbucks right now typing this (need that internet access).

Meanwhile, I have two different trips coming up, almost back-to-back. A quick one down to San Francisco for shopping.com, and another one just after that for Vaisala (in Tucson). The timing could be better, but its nice to be bringing in some cash right now.

Moving Sale on Sat. Nov 5th

We're having a moving sale on Saturday, Nov. 5th, from 8am to 2pm.

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle was a lot of fun. It was the definition of a guilty, guilty pleasure. What I especially liked was that the Harold and Kumar are not stupid (stoned, yes, stupid, no). Sure, they're a bit geeky (Harold, especially, is struck dumb in the presense of an attractive neighbor he has a crush on), but in the end they managed to triumph over crazed rednecks, X-Treme assholes, lazy bosses, corrupt, racists cops and, it seems, the hand of fate keeping them from White Castle.

Some Movie Reviews

Suzy and I have caught a few flicks at the theaters and on video lately. MirrorMask was quite the visual spectacle ... Alice in Wonderland by way of Beetlejuice care of Neil Gaiman. Literally a teenage girls fantasy drawings come to life in a dream. Occasionally it slowed and stumbled, but made up for those short-comings with eye popping imagery.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is an early high point in the career of Miyazaki (later of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away). Lots of action, above average design and animation, a relatively meaningful plot, and best of all, a central character who is not passive in the least.

Primer is the ultimate, low budget science fiction thriller. It mixed some very real world cinema verite conversation with a plot something like Dilbert-meets-La Jetee. Because it embraces the pecular mechanics of time travel so thoroughly, it becomes effectively impossible to follow (the commentary reveals that certain strange events towards the end have no explanation because any explanation would rely on information that the protagonists simply don't have). Maybe not up to the level of indy flick hype it received, but not bad either.

And then, Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit which restored my faith in animation. Quick paced, well told, delightful to watch, and simply full of delight. I hope I don't have to wait another five years for the next story.

Illuminati: New World Order - Uncut Press Sheets

I've put up for auction my collection of signed, framed, uncut press sheets for Illuminati: New World Order ... they are big and somewhat fragile (for a cross-country move, anyway) and perhaps will make the right person happy. In which case, they better be prepared to pay.

We're also running an moving sale, 8am - noon on Saturday, Nov 5th.

Wheels grind into motion

Well, our backup buyers have become our primary buyers (the couple from Colorado have decided to move elsewhere) and we've agreed on price and terms. If all goes well (and when does that ever happen?) we'll be closing on December 1st and hopping onto a plane to Portland! Lots and lots of details to work out, as you might guess and, as my Mom can attest, nothing is final until the closing.

Movie Review: The Corpse Bride

Despite our recent pounding by another Tim Burton movie, we were hoping for another Nightmare before Christmas. What we got was even more of a trifle. The animation was excellent, but the story was amazingly thin. You have no back story for any of the characters, which makes the sudden love between Vincent and Victoria (the main characters, whose wedding is complicated by the titular Corpse Bride) hard to swallow. We can only speculate that Tim Burton started with the emergence of the Corpse Bride and worked out from there ... then lost interest in the story itself (which is one of his unfortunate trademarks).

The end result felt like highlights from a longer, better movie. And like many "musicals" these days, the musical portions could easily have been ommitted without affecting the movie. Worse, several of the musical numbers were so crowded and noisy that you couldn't make out what any of the characters were singing.

What's with all these passive protagonists? This is all too common in animation it seems ... characters who are along for the ride, too timid to affect anything until, perhaps, they show some backbone in the final reel.

This movie is most notable for technical achievements; it was shot onto digital SLRs and editted using Final Cut Pro. In addition, several scenes show animated characters playing piano (one piano is branded as a "Harryhausen") which was incredibly ambitous. But that doesn't make it a great movie, just a rental.

For Sale: Star Trek: The Next Generation Pinball

Goodbye, pinball machine. We'll miss you.

Animation woes

Suzy and I have seen several animated films lately, with very limited results. First, we rented Millennium Actress, which had some very good buzz. This had some interesting ideas and visuals, but like so much anime, just ran out of steam early on, and become rambling and chaotic.

So, next up was Howl's Moving Castle. Again, a good start that went nowhere. This film was dissapointing on many levels; the story line had nothing to do with the book upon which the film was based (by Dianna Wynne Jones, a favorite of Suzy's). In fact, it liberated a couple of names and a few strands of plot from the book, then immediately undercut them. The animation was decidely sub-par for Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. The characters were quite bland, the villains, politics, and entire world were arbitrary. But mostly, the plot made no sense. Why was Howl so scared of the Witch of the Waste (the movie recasts him from the book's shifty layabout into sometihng more like Neo in the Matrix); and once the Witch's power is broken, why do they take her in as a guest? Why does Sofi destroy the castle, just to rebuild a smaller version with Calcifer? Why does Suliman let them go at the end? Isn't having the scarecrow turn into a prince, and then announce "I'll go stop the war" in the last two minutes a bit arbitrary? Did we really need a translation of the lyrics of the syrupy J-Pop song over the credits?

But our animation misery was not quite over; last saturday night, we ventured out to the Coolige Corner theater to see their animation festival. This was a competition event ... but not the way I thought. You see, this was not like the animation festivals of the past; it did not contain Acadamy Award winners and hopefuls. It was a local competition, and an open one. These weren't finalists, they were ugly, pointless films by talentless, depressed, pretentious, angst-ridden, teenage artist-wannabees. There were one or two minor gems ("Crazy Eyes Dolphin vs. Mad Cow" was a charming visualization of a twisted story as told by three six year olds), but the majority of the short films were to be endured, not watched (and certainly not enjoyed).

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Avoid at all costs

No, really, this movie was excruciatingly bad. It was Tim Burton at his worst; imagery without story. Johnny Depp got Willie Wonka so completely wrong (and of course, Gene Wilder got him so right), but even that wasn't what sunk the movie. The music was terrible and unintelligible, plot lines from the original movie were dropped (and whether Slugworth was an invention of Mel Stuart or Roald Dahl, I don't know or care) taking with them all motivation for the characters, and all warmth and charm was surgically extracted from this film.

Don't be fooled by the first few minutes, which are playful and fun. Once we get to the factory itself, there's no movie, just a tedious wait for the end credits. Don't even rent this film.

Moving to Portland, OR

Well the cat is finally out of the bag: Suzy and I are officially moving to Portland, OR. We went through the very painful step of telling my parents, who were accepting that we just won't be satisified unless we try. This is an upsetting development for our friends as well, but I think ultimately much good will come of the move.

Our house is up for sale, and I suspect things will move quickly. We've spent the last many days cleaning up, organizing, and pulling out as much clutter as possible to a storage locker. The house looks great, as does the new lawn We had a broker show on tuesday, which was well received ... especially by brokers who had seen the house two years ago, before we purchased it. We'll see what happens on sunday, our first open house (1pm - 3pm).

In the meantime, we're pairing down our possesions before the move; including the Star Trek: The Next Generation Pinball Machine.

Wish us luck!

June 2005 - Quincy - New Yard

Just a few shots of our new back yard and patio.

Movie Review: Batman Begins

Whoa ... that didn't suck! Plays pretty close to the myth, with minor tweaks to make it work properly on the screen. It started, despite some action, as a bit too talkly but hit its stride by the end of the first reel. This Batman is not for laughs, and is neither invulnerable nor omniscient; in fact, he's quite vulnerable in a number of scenes. The screenplay finds some new nuances in Batman's rage/guilt/obsession.

Christian Bale makes a very good Bruce Wayne and a reasonable Batman (who can tell under all that costume?). Supporting actors do their job, with a few good lines to Micheal Caine. Suzy liked Katie Holmes more than I did; I felt she was pretty flat. Morgan Freeman is always Morgan Freeman. Gary Oldman was, as usual, unrecognizable as the lone, uncorruptable Gordon (long before being Commissioner Gordon).

I felt the action sequences were too jumpy, too hard to follow; we still seem to be living in the shadow of Gladiator (which I found laughable). You can do complex action without it turning into The Matrix, and I'd like to seem more effort there ... we're supposed to identify with Batman, and his whole shtick is being cool and controlled in a crisis.

This one is certainly up there with Spiderman and X-Men 2, and I honestly can't wait for a sequel.

April 2005 - Portland - Public Art

This is a short one; I had a quest to take pictures of every piece of public art I saw in Portland. That would be pointless ... there's just so much at every turn, even the half gig card would fill up almost instantly. It's great seeing people do a little extra. It's fun what can be done with one half of one percent.

April 2005 - Portland - Cannon Beach

This is a batch from Cannon Beach, which is about one and a half hours west of Portland, on the Oregon Coast. Haystack is the giant ("Godzilla-sized") rock on the beach, the core of a dead volcano.

April 2005 - Portland

This is a small batch of photos from our Oregon trip.

April 2005 - Portland - Columbia Gorge

This set of pictures is from a day trip to the Columbia Gorge. The road is specifically set up to bring you close to great waterfalls and scenic views. It used to be land owned by railroad robber barons, donated to the goverment for this purpose.

April 2005 - Portland - Japanese Garden

We took so many pictures while in Portland, Oregon that we have to release them in batches. This batch came from a mid-trip visit to the Japanese Garden overlooking downtown Portland.

The Phone

Have you answered The Phone?

Review: Sin City

Rob, Suzy and I caught an afternoon matinee of Sin City. The visual style was extremely powerful ... in fact, there wasn't much to the movie beyond that. It really was a transcription of the comic books to the screen ... but the over-the-top blood, violence, brutality and deviant fetishistic sex may not work so well on the big screen.

It did have quite a few good lines and wasn't exactly boring. I've only skimmed the comic books, but I got the feeling they crammed too much in. Too often, characters arrive, have a couple of lines of hackneyed conversation, and disappear (often in a splash of blood). I think I prefer a more controlled build up, where the potential of the combatants is established over the course of time, leading to a final confrontation ... Once Upon A Time In China did this quite well, for example, but in Sin City most of the characters are all but invincible (for example, shrugging off multiple gun shot wounds, or impacts from speeding cars) ... and that undermines any tension.

Suzy and my final take: Pretty entertaining for such a bad movie.

Calling All Nerds

Keeping track of everyone's email addresses has been getting harder and harder. I've created a Yahoo Group, callingallnerds, for this purpose.

Samuel Kijima Day 2

Some pictures of David and Aya's new son, Samuel. Sam is very vocal, and at 8 lbs 4 oz and climbing, quite strong. He loves (needs?) the sounds of Aya's and Dave's heartbeat.

January 2005 Snowstorm

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I finally got around to uploading some pictures from the big January snowstorm. The whole album is available on shutterfly.com.

[RELEASE] SamuelKijima version 1.0.0

Yamaguchi-Goldman International Services have announced the immediate product release of their new flagship baby product, SamuelKijima.

SamuelKijima, code-named, "Samuel", has been in final production stage for over nine months, and in product planning stages considerably earlier than that.

"Samuel" rolled off the Aya Yamaguchi-Goldman production line Friday March 25 2005 at approximately 12:10am (EST). The entire 26 hour production run went more or less smoothly, though, as production supervisor David Goldman reports, "the last 2 1/2 hours was a real labor." Product Manager Aya Yamaguchi-Goldman was in the break room and unavailable for comment.

The "Samuel" product is loaded with interesting features (please see seperate press release). Initial product specifications indicate a shipping weight of eight pounds, 4 ounces, and an overall length of 19 1/2 inches. Although this appears to be at the high end (size and weight-wise) for the production facilities, no production problems (except for the expected initial production run delays) were experienced.

"Samuel" will be presented to the public at an official product roll out in the near future.

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That's about as far as I can stretch that joke. Aya and Dave are doing fine. Everyone is healthy and happy and exhausted. Aya is expected to return from the hospital on Sunday, possibly earlier. Dave's parents flew in last night (Aya's have been staying with them for a few weeks). Dave still sounds like (an exhausted, ecstatic, in-shock) Dave. They want to avoid a crowd scene at the hospital and will send out an "all clear" for visits next week.

I'm not sure if it was really "26 hours" ... I had a little trouble following Dave's timeline. He felt they got to the hospital a bit earlier than they should have.