It will take more than that to knock off this Bay Area earthquake veteran. Just a tickle. But still, I'd rather not have to deal with any more of these in the near future. It's bad for property value.
I was in a meeting with Rob, Kristian, and Katie, and the building started shaking, and then it started really shaking, and we were under the table. After it stopped, everyone headed for the stairwell and the exits. Eventually they let us back in just to get our things and head home. In my office, the bookshelf and file cabinet had fallen over, and papers and things were scattered everywhere. My computer was still logged in though, and somehow Susannah had already sent me a message asking if I was okay. She sent that at 10:58AM, which is about when the earthquake occurred. She must have ESP.
I drove some Pike folks back to the office, and traffic was a nightmare so it took me a long time to get home.
Power was out at home, but no real damage. For a brief moment, I had visions of my bookshelf on top of my coffee table, books and glass everywhere, my home theater giving off smoke. The statue I bought in Africa, the one of the man holding his arms in the air in triumph, was still standing.
All day, I've gotten so many phone calls. News travels fast. I think the pictures they've been showing all around the
country, like the one of the car crushed by bricks outside Fenix Underground, exagerrate the severity of the situation.
Most of the city is intact. The damage is primarily cosmetic, and mostly confined to internal property damage. Costly,
but few injuries. WTO, Mardi Gras, and now the earthquake. Seattle's going to get a bad rep.
Family called, old friends, folks I haven't heard from in years. Turned out to be a good way to get back in touch with folks.
Our website's still running. Thankfully.
I ended up going for a bike ride around Mercer as the weather was so nice. Must have touched 60 today. Mother Nature giving off heat after her late morning workout. I rode pretty hard today, my heart was up at 150+ the whole time.
6.8 on the Richter scale. Big, but not earth-shattering. What if an earthquake did destroy civilization? Planet of the Apes.
When I was young, I found this old calculator my mom or dad must have used way back in the day. This must have been one of the first fancy calculators to hit the market. Inside the sleeve, there was a laminated cardboard card that discussed the idea of biorhythms, that our bodies have natural emotional, intellectual, and physical cycles. The calculator even contained special functions that would calculate your biorhythms based on your birthdate.
I note all of this just to note that I think I just recently passed a trough in my emotional biorhythm. Funny, this memory came back to me over the weekend, when I felt just completely burned out on work and life, and today I thought of looking up "biorhythm" in Google, and I found a gazillion links to sites that do this for you. Try charting your biorhythm. According to this, I'm actually about to enter an emotional and physical trough, but an intellectual upswing. That's depressing. I was planning on going to Whistler this weekend, too. I wonder if I should reconsider that plan. Maybe some unknown traps await me there.
Side note: If you use IE 5 or higher as your browser and are on Windows 95 or higher, add a Google toolbar to your browser! It's one of the few browser add-ons I've found useful. You'll never have to actually click over to a search engine again.
Sunday, N Sync guest starred on The Simpsons. That was one
of the funniest episodes I've seen in a long time. Bart, Milhaus, and the "ha ha" boy and some other kid form a boy band. In the age of irony, this is what we've come to. Success is not to be lampooned on Saturday Night Live, it's to lampoon yourself on The Simpsons. One must truly entered the bloodstream of pop culture to earn a guest starring spot on The Simpsons. Look at the list: Ernest Borgnine, Cypress Hill, Adam West, The Ramones, Mulder and Scully...
On a positive note, the third season of The Sopranos, the best show on television, kicks off Sunday with a special two hour premiere. Worth the price of an HBO subscription, trust me. Hotter than the smoking barrel of your daddy's gun.
Sunday I rode the Chilly Hilly, the first real organized bike ride of the season, one loop around Bainbridge Island. It lived up to its name--I froze my ass off at parts, and nearly died of exhaustion at others, usually near the top of some steep, long hills. I'm clearly not in prime cycling shape yet. I felt like I was about to just slow to a stop on a few hills, and people passed me on those left and right. It just ended up frustrating me more than anything. I rode with Rachael, Todd, Tim, and Jessie. In fact, Jessie ended up finishing third out of the hundreds of riders there! Lordy. I think I'll be his domestique on RAMROD.
Somehow, though, in my current "funk," let's call it, I enjoyed suffering out on those hills. They say pain is weakness leaving the body. Cycling is so simple. You're either faster than the next rider, or you're not. Who is stronger, and who is willing to suffer more. I may not be the strongest guy around, but I'm willing to suffer more than the next guy. Chilly Hilly
woke me up. Time to toughen up, suck it up, take my medicine.
Joannie doesn't think I can, but I can.
Struck today by a strong desire to move to New York and be a starving artist. Actually, given the cost of living in New York, I'd be starving regardless of what I did.
James is moving there in August though, so I'll have a place to stay.
Chatted with Howie for a while today. If he gets into business school, I'm going to try and convince him to take the summer off and head to South America with me.
I can't shoot a basketball anymore. It's ridiculous.
I chatted with Howie a while ago, and he told me he was shopping for a car. I asked him what kind he was going to buy, and he knew only one thing: it wouldn't be an Accord. He has driven an Accord all his life, since he learned to drive. Even girls he's dated have driven Accords.
Today, he told me he bought a car. Yep, he bought an Accord.
Read this in the NYT book review:
The universe as information. Fascinating idea. Idea is that science continually evolves paradigms for the universe based on the dominant machines of its era. First idea was universe as a clock, with Newtonian physics at its center. Force and energy were the key concepts, and both were conserved. Then came the steam engine, and thermodynamics. Energy is conserved, but entropy increases over time. Finally, we have the computer, and the idea of the universe as composed of information. The book, which sounds completely fascinating, is titled The Bit and the Pendulum, a reference to Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum.
People act surprised to discover that online advertising banners don't work. Duh. That was the crudest attempt at using the Internet for marketing. The next wave will be much more interesting, even more so than Napster.
My blood was racing today. I've been biting heads off all day. I need someone to talk me down. I can literally hear the blood rushing through my veins. I'm aggravated, frustrated, perturbed, amplified. It's a warning sign. I need a vacation. I can't redline like this.
I'm going to ride the Chilly Hilly bike ride Sunday. In my shape, something may burst.
Looks like you can buy playstation 2's at the playstation site. At least for
a short while. Should I order one? I think I'd be disappointed.
DVD-audio will disappoint everyone and take forever to penetrate the market.
Slow burn. Sloooooooooow burn. Why can't I just accept things the way they are?
X-files could end this season. That's the rumor. Feels right to me. I'm a big fan of the show, but it's time.
Computer crashed. Sat at my desk with nothing to do. Odd to think many business execs are still dictating e-mails to their secretaries. Think the Internet isn't so hot anymore? Ask people if they'd rather have you take away their computers of their TVs.
Flying again. Got to get up at 4AM. I hate that.
Feeling really beat up. Not enough sleep. Too much work.
Better hit IPing and set myself a wakeup call.
Today is another one of those holidays that some companies don't consider to be a holiday. I didn't get President's Day off in consulting, and I don't now. It just means I get a good parking spot in the morning, there's less traffic to fight, the mail doesn't show up, and the markets are closed. I can't remember the last holiday where I was in the holiday spirit.
Former Amazon employee Mike Daisey has a one man show spoofing his days with the company, and at his website he's posted a short film he shot in our headquarters after sneaking back in with his old badge. It's titled Rear Entry. Personally, I have no problem with folks poking fun at our company, but I've seen Mike Daisey perform in Seattle before, and this short film is far from his best work. It's not that funny at all.
The latest installment of the honorable J. William Gurley's column "Above the Crowd" names WIP as the next big thing. Do you agree? Whether you do or don't, read his column, subscribe to his newsletter. He was the first analyst to cover Amazon.com, back when he was at DMG, and he's still one of the sharpest technology analysts around.
Stanford's #1 in college hoops again, because North Carolina lost to Clemson. Hah hah. Had lots of fun rubbing it into Jason at work. I owe Rich, proud Clemson supporter, a beer.
Just got my anniversary issue of The New Yorker. Coincidentally, it looks like they're up on the web now, as well. Their website has some of the articles from the magazine as well as some exclusive online content. I don't mind having them on the web, though I'm not sure they gain much from being online either. I've always thought of The New Yorker as old school, as something you curl up with to read. I can't imagine trying to read those long articles online.
Feed magazine had a humorous feature called After the Fall. It imagines how a few of today's leading websites look in year 2004, after the Internet economy has imploded. One of the sites pilloried is our very own Amazon.com. Check it out. Reminded me of the Onion piece Who Wants to Eat a Meal.
Jumping back to The New Yorker, they have an online interview with Alice Munro, and here's an excerpt I liked:
"You have a splendid description of your way of reading the stories of others: entering them as if they were houses, not reading from start to finish but wandering around in them, from room to room.
That's right. And that's why I read stories I love over and over again. I just finished reading a Lorrie Moore story--you know, the one about the baby with cancer ["People Like That Are the Only People Here," The New Yorker, 1/27/97]--that I must have read twenty times. And it isn't, obviously, that I'm reading it to find out what happens. I just want to be there with her. Any story that I really love can make me feel like that."
And another excerpt, and more support for the idea that writing is a job, like any other:
"QUINN: You've spoken of how you had to struggle to find time to write--maybe working until one o'clock in the morning and then getting up at six and feeling, This is just terrible.
MUNRO: Oh, but I was much younger. I was in my late thirties, or around forty, when I was doing that. In those days, I would be thinking about the stories a lot, getting into them in my mind. Even if I just had half an hour when the kids were napping, that's what I would do. There were months when I'd be thinking. I didn't try to write--I just tried to get into something and get the feel of it. My life was so crowded with essential chores that use the opposite part of your mind, and that I wasn't very good at, that I had to work really hard to be a good mother and housewife, and to keep things in order. And, since that wasn't easy for me, I could have completely gotten into that way of using my mind, so that when I had a spare half hour I would only think of something else I had to do. That's why I think I knew, somehow instinctively, that I had to take a little bit of time to get into this other world. And it was very discouraging, really, because then, when I sat down to write, I often had thought too much about the story, and the way I was getting it down was terribly disappointing. And now I'm sort of used to that.
Now you have a dedicated schedule, don't you?
When I'm doing the first draft, I have a so-much-a-day schedule. But when I start putting it on the computer I can get carried away, and I try to go as far as I can every day, as if I were going to die in the night or something."
You know what? Just go read the whole interview. It's fabulous. Lots of great insights about writing, from a great writer. Hurry, though. This link looks like it will change everytime The New Yorker posts a new online only interview. Yet another thing The New Yorker needs to learn, how to post persistent links. Or maybe they intend for their stuff to be fleeting, which makes sense to me if they want to preserve
the value of their content. They should create a searchable archive you have to pay to access. I'd subscribe just to read some of the old fiction.
BTW, Alice Munro's latest short story, the featured Fiction piece in the anniversary issue, is also online.
A Quicktime clip on the upcoming new Baz film, Moulin Rouge.
Okay, I have to rant. Half of Seattle shuts down because a few inches of snow fell? Buses stop running? Very hard to work on tight deadlines when half the company stays home.
Get out a shovel and clear that driveway, people. A little exercise is good for you. Driving in the snow is difficult? Half these people will drive out to the mountains to ski tomorrow.
Sheesh.
It is snowing in Seattle tonight. This is the most I've ever seen it snow at once here. When it snows, everything seems so quiet.
Pics of the new Windows operating system, XP. This and those stories about new tastes and smells are from Ars Technica, by the way. A weblog for geeks. Cool stuff.
Valentine's Day. Humbug. Valentine's Day was great in elementary school, when you received Valentine's cards from all of your classmates. Maybe even a few of those tart pastel candies shaped like hearts and marked with Hallmark messages like "Will you be mine?" I remember carefully selecting more romantic messages to include with cards for cuter girls.
Super slammed at work. I wonder...am I drinking the Kool Aid? For some reason, everyone around me is using that phrase today. So I started wondering, and now I'm hesitating...probably just a phase.
Pitchers and catchers report today. Yeah!
Krispy Kreme donuts is valued at nearly $900 million dollars!
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is now the highest grossing foreign film in U.S. history, having passed the $60 million mark. Previous record holder was Miramax's Life is Beautiful. That, along with CTHD's 10 Oscar nominations (second to Gladiator)...who would have thought a Chinese wu xia film would achieve that?
A court in San Francisco ruled against Napster yesterday. RIAA lawyers and record label reps are all excited, but it's a hollow victory. The days of song swapping over the Internet are not over. Lawyers don't have that kind of power over the Internet, no matter how much they get paid.
Scientists may have discovered a tetrachromat, a person with four cone photopigments instead of three. The first mutants are among us, and their secret power is to have a richer visual experience than the rest of us. Unfortunately, tetrachromats seem to be only women.
Also in the Red Herring, supposedly they've discovered a fifth taste, called
umami, distinct from sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. It has its own receptors on the tongue. Supposedly if you block all the other taste receptors and eat MSG, you'll taste a strong umami flavor. Foods that have an element of umami include miso soup, green tea, dried shitake mushrooms, and Havarti cheeses.
Odd, this proliferation of the senses. I imagine myself talking to my grandkids one day, "Sonny, when I was growing up there were just five senses..."
Oscar nominations announced:
Made a quick swing up to Whistler this weekend. It's becoming such a familiar retreat to me that I'm starting to think of the eight hours of driving there and back as a short trip. Jumped over my first picnic table and did some nice face plants in the half pipe.
Saw Hannibal, and it was as I expected, a disappointment. Not surprising because the book itself was so dull. Still, Anthony Hopkins is genius. I'm adopting a Lecteresque persona at work from now on. He'd make a great program manager.
They reran Sportscentury's feature on Michael Jordan the other night, and I taped it. Finally watched it tonight. Man, I miss watching him play. I love the competitive fire, though. I want to compete with someone everytime I watch some retrospective on him.
Why am I in such a combative mood?
I'm going vegetarian for two weeks. Just because.
What's playing in my car's CD changer:
I wish I could always pull up the name of the CD(s) playing in the cars of friends and family around the country.
I was thinking...this whole digital vs. analog debate, CDs vs LPs. There is analog me, which is me as a continuous wave or signal. Then there's digital me. If you see me once a day, you're sampling me at the rate of 365 times a year. Or maybe you hear from me once a month because you live somewhere out of town. So you're sampling me 12 times a year. The more you see another person or come into contact with them, the closer you are to knowing their analog selves. The only person who can experience the analog of a person is that person himself. But a digital sample of a sufficient sampling rate is probably sufficient to really know most people. CDs are reasonable representations of music for most people, and you probably don't need to be with someone every second to feel like you know them fairly well. What is the right sampling rate for another person? It varies depending on how much you value their analog selves. You want to
own some albums as CDs, but others you're content to download as MP3s, and for a select few nothing but the LP will do.
Some people have such massive personalities that you meet them once and they haunt your memory forever. They are like waves of massive amplitude, they leave burns on the walls of your head. You may have heard the LP once, and you don't own it, and you'll spend the rest of your life flipping through the bins of old record stores looking for it.
Can you truly desire something you've never even experienced? What is it Sean Penn says in Thin Red Line?
"If I should never find you in this life, let me feel the lack."
Cisco missed its earnings estimates.
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are separating.
What is this world coming to?
Rach took me to the Seattle Symphony tonight for my birthday. We didn't actually have tickets, so we had to stand by the ticket office and see if we made it off the waiting list. The lady in the office gave Rach and I a sign that said "I Need 2" and we were supposed to hold it up as ticket holders walked in. We felt pretty silly, because all these other people had signs "I need 1" "I need 3" and so on and we looked pretty silly, eyeing each other suspiciously and maneuvering for best position. The ticket office had only one person serving the waiting list, so it was agonizingly slow once tickets did get released.
But luck was on our side. We got perhaps the two last tickets, and were the last ones to dash into the auditorium, ushers waving at us frantically at every turn.
Why the sellout? The Russian National Orchestra, led by conductor Vladimir Spivakov, was in town. No exagerration: half the audience was Russian. I didn't realize there were that many Russians in Seattle. Spivakov is the Russian Justin Timberlake.
The program:
Mikhail Pletnev was the piano soloist. I've never heard Tchaikovsky's 2nd piano concerto before. The second movement was very melodic. Overall, though, I liked the Cantus best. Never heard it before, and it simply consisted of all the strings playing the same descending A-minor melody in successively lower octaves and slower tempos. The 2nd violins played
one octave below the 1st violins, at half the tempo. And so on through the violas and then cellos. And one lone chime in the background, playing a single note. Simple, and beautiful.
So tired right now. Woke up at 5:30 to go play basketball at Sound. Got stuck at a railroad crossing by a freight train next to Safeco field, and sat there for something like 20 minutes. Jason fell on his chin while playing and had to go off for 10 stitches. I'm calling him Scarface. I finally felt my jump shot coming back at the end of the morning. I haven't felt it since I had knee surgery. How beautiful it would be if it returned.
He's feeling pretty puffed up right now, with his Heels #1, and NC in the lead for the Sears Cup, which Stanford's won every year except the first year, when Carolina won it. No problem, we'll pull it out after the swimming and tennis teams do their thing.
Was watching the Region 3 DVD of Crouching Tiger tonight just to make sure my Apex DVD player would process it properly, and it did. Neil's borrowing it for Movie Night at Amazon's AV room tomorrow. Watching a few scenes, I realized how much I love listening to Zhang Ziyi speak Mandarin. And how difficult it was listening to Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun Fat's Mandarin. My dad says Chang Chen's Mandarin was supposed to be deplorable because he plays a Mongolian barbarian in the film. But if I'm going to ding Kevin Costner for a bad Bostonian accent in Thirteen Days, I can't very well let Ang Lee off for allowing bad accents in his film either. Zhang Ziyi is a native Mandarin speaker, and I love listening to very accurate Mandarin. People who can speak it well can cast spells over me, it's like witchcraft.
I realized something while listening to the Cantus. I put myself on the edge all the time, all in the hopes that somewhere along there, I will find a moment of grace. Why tread along the edge of the abyss, where the risk of pain and failure is so acute? Anyone who has ever felt longing knows.
Nietzsche wrote in "Beyond Good and Evil":
"Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze into you."
I'm trying hard. To find that grace. To vanquish those monsters without becoming one. It's hard work.
Did two laps around Mercer on my bike Saturday and it nearly killed me, I was so slow. Last year I was doing reverse splits on laps around Mercer, but Saturday I did 36 and 40, which bugged me all weekend. That's so slow it's pathetic. I guess I need to be more patient, since I haven't ridden much this winter, but I think I'm just impatient by nature. These two guys passed me on their bikes, with their aero bars and triathlon framesets and wheelsets, and I couldn't keep up. Bugger.
Friday ended on a lousy note during our business trip to L.A., so I was already irked on the flight back. Then Stanford lost to UCLA, and Carolina moved above them into #1. Anyone but the Tar Heels. Jason will be blabbering about them to no end. Oh dear.
Macho Camacho's in town, looking for a place to stay. We went out and caught Shadow of the Vampire on Sunday. Amusing take on the filmmaking process, and once or twice during the film, especially when the vampire is looking into the film projector lens, I thought the film almost achieved a certain transcendence.
Duke Ellington: In a Sentimental Mood. Good stuff.
The prettiest thing I've seen recently. Oh!
Forgot silver, gold, platinum. Titanium is the metal of choice for gadget-freak jewelry.
Sunday I saw Chunyang, the first Korean film I've ever seen. Somehow I duped Laura into going to see it with me. I enjoyed it, though I don't think I could sit through an actual ponsori, which is the Korean musical form on which the film is based. Like a fable, or a long bedtime story with Confucian overtones. Vivid colors, like Ran.
Song in my head: Yumeji's Theme from Wong Kar Wai's latest film, In the Mood for Love. Beautiful cinematography. Great soundtrack. Mood is the perfect word to describe the film.
Everyone is commenting on how Asian cinema is hot, especially with how well Crouching Tiger is doing. They obviously don't have to view the usual dreck coming out of Hong Kong all year. Only the good stuff makes it stateside. But still, American
film is pretty stale right now. Iranian and Asian filmmakers are bringing some fresh storytelling to cinema. Thankfully.
Dan and I watched K2 tonight. I felt like rock climbing after watching that. Maybe I will have to join Toni at the climbing gym this month. I think I'm designed to operate in a high gear. I'm moody when I don't have a million things to do. I work best when I'm figuring out what not to do than when I have to figure out what to do.
A friend is one who is one beyond the point of personal cost. I heard that somewhere recently. But phrased more eloquently.
Rach and I are going to try to grab last minute cancellations for the Russian concert at Benaroya tomorrow. I heard Spivakov conduct the Russian national orchestra once, in New York. Spivakov played the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. Then, for the encore, he played this beautiful ballad, and I've never figured out what that piece was. I've been haunted by it for two years now. What was it?
There comes a time in every person's life when they must decide. Stay up all night so you don't risk oversleeping, or go to bed and set your alarm clock on high volume buzzer. I am there now. I think I may have to keep myself up through the night.
Sitting in a Seattle Kinko's, waiting for the world's slowest color laser printer to spit out 100 or so printouts of various design mockups for meetings in L.A. tomorrow. Kinko's late at night is the haven for bitter procrastinanors (primarily students) and business people under the gun (e.g. me).
It doesn't help that the employees here are incompetent. It took them about half an hour just to figure out the post-midnight password to log me on to a workstation. The guy helping me out made up all this mumbo jumbo about having to copy my files into a new folder and then converting them into PDFs because that's the only way they could get good color separation blah blah blah blah. Finally I realized he had no idea what he was talking about so I banished him to his little world behind the counter.
Did have to suffer through some printing problems. IE and Netscape Navigator don't print web pages the same, so I keep having to switching back and forth everytime a printout comes out badly. They also don't display web pages the same, which is no surprise to any web developer, but right now it doesn't make me feel any better.
Have to catch a flight in 4 hours, and I still have to go home and pack, eat dinner, and iron a dress shirt. I need an Alfred, like Batman.
Some company came out with a DVD that simulates watching a movie at the Drive-In. The soundtrack imitates the poor sound quality of drive-in speakers, and in the background you can hear doors shutting, young lovers giggling, crickets chirping. What a stupid idea. It would be like watching one of those Asian bootleg movies, where the bootlegger walks
into a theater with a camcorder and films the screen. People in the U.S. don't need to resort to bootleg copies to see films on a first run, so why would they pay extra for a drive-in theater simulation?
Yesterday night, had an Amazon hoops game. We field a team for a corporate league. We beat up on a team from RealNetworks. That was the only exercise I'd gotten since the Whistler trip last weekend, and it felt good to run around. We opened the game with a 14-0 run and never looked back. So now we're 3-3 after opening the season 1-3. Winning is so much more wonderful than losing. Character be damned.
C'mon silly printer! I can't think of anything to write!
Jason's happy. North Carolina nipped Duke at Cameron today. Stanford pulled out a close one at Maples against USC. If NC plays Stanford, Jason and I probably won't talk for the whole week leading up to the game.
Alan called again. After bouncing around a whole slew of family vacation options, I think we're back to Las Vegas the weekend after my sisters graduate. I will get my fill of the strip this year.
Alright, that's it. I'm going to stay up all night. Ah, this will be like my college days, calling up Howie to brew me a cafeteria mug full of Vanilla bean coffee laced with two heaping spoons of white sugar, alternating between engineering problem sets and that short story, both due in the morning, listening to Bob Dylan cranked up on my headphones.
Working in a video rental store produced Quentin Tarantino. I wonder what type of artistic geniuses Kinko's inspires.
The world's greatest copier. Can use all advanced functions on all models of copiers. You want two-sided, collated,
perfectly stapled copies? You've got it.
Printer's done. Finally!