Month: September 2007

Instant messaging with Thom just now:

me: random: i wonder how one attends that TED conference… i keep seeing clips of really interesting talks from different years
Thom: Yeah, I know… it’s by invite only, but I would dearly love to go
me: do you have to be a mover and a shaker?
Thom: Neither of us are important enough
  Except to each other, of course 🙂 And to our mothers.
  And I’m not sure about the latter.
me: yes, i’m having our mothers write us letters of recommendation
  “please extend my son an invitation to the idea conference. he has ideas. though i’m not sure what they are. or if i would agree with them, if i knew what they were.”
Thom: ROFL!
me: 🙂

Anyway, here’s a TED talk I came across a while back that’s really cool: Blaise Aguera y Arcas with a demo of Photosynth, which forms spatial relationships among large numbers of photos to create a three-dimensional space. (It’s not supported for Mac, unfortunately.)

In about twenty-four hours, Thom and I will be on our Virgin America flight to L.A., where we will be seeing Rufus’ Judy Garland concert at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday night. Excitement! We’re staying at a fabulous Lucy and Desi-inspired bungalow in Hollywood, and over our three-day trip we hope to get to Santa Monica, West Hollywood, the Getty Center, Universal Studios, etc. It’s Thom’s first trip to la-la land!

To get us in the mood, here’s one of my favorite versions of “Hooray for Hollywood,” 1950s cha-cha style by Don Swan and His Orchestra. Get out the cocktail shaker!

Astro Boy and me

Yesterday we went to an art exhibit we’ve been meaning to see all summer (indeed, we went on its closing day): “Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga” at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, which covered Tezuka Osamu‘s work mostly from the 1940s to the 1970s. It was really neat! I even liked the design of the exhibit itself. I’ve never really tried getting into manga — mostly because I just didn’t know where to begin — but now I definitely want to start checking it out, beginning with Tezuka.

There I am in the photo, at the museum with Astro Boy. (As other Thom aptly comments, which one is me? Ha.)

By the way, the “manga lounge,” a room related to the exhibit, had some general manga and other anime toys on display, including a character I remember fondly from my childhood: Voltron!

Lately I’ve been watching As the World Turns to follow the storyline of Luke (Van Hansis), a gay character who came out last year. It’s gotten kind of interesting this summer. One of the recent major turning points was a kiss with Noah (Jake Silbermann), a fellow intern who seems conflicted about his sexuality and whose girlfriend (also Luke’s friend) has been in the dark so far and is demanding answers about the tension between the guys.

This is the show’s only storyline that I’ve been following, so I just TiVo-skip through the rest. And since Luke doesn’t show up in every episode, that’s a lot of skipping. Still, I do like catching up and watching my “stories.” In fact last week when I found out there wasn’t going to be an episode on Friday due to U.S. Open tennis coverage, I was like, noo! By the way, YouTube is a good place to find some compilations of recent scenes.

cheers!

Originally uploaded by thomwatson

Last night Thom and I met up after work for drinks and dinner at the Park Chalet. We’d been to the Beach Chalet once, but hadn’t ever been to its companion establishment downstairs, which faces Golden Gate Park and even has an outdoor seating area on the lawn with Adirondack chairs.

The Chalet offers a line of beers that they brew themselves, and I took advantage of this by ordering the “circle of ales” sampler, made up of seven different varieties. Yum! (There I am in the photo, about to take my first gulp.) Each comes in a mini-glass, but all together that’s still a lot of beer. Thom is not a beer fan, so I had them all to myself. The beers ranged from light to dark. I wasn’t quite so fond of the porter; I’m more used to the pale ales, which were tasty.

We decided to get a bunch of appetizers as our meal: truffle chicken and four-cheese macaroni, ahi tuna tartare, shrimp and bay scallop ceviche, garlic french fries, and fried French brie. Everything was really good; of these I especially liked the macaroni and the brie. I’m getting hungry again just thinking about it!

My only quibble about the Park Chalet is that it can get pretty loud, what with the glass and tile everywhere, especially when you have a boisterous group nearby, as we did.

It was a really nice time. We hope to meet up for after-work drinks like this more often, and the Chalet is nicely located on the Great Highway, halfway between Thom’s office and our house (i.e., my office).

I won’t let myself get too distracted with the new iPods, because I’m actually in the market for a different kind of gadget: a GPS device for my car. I have a 2000 Toyota Corolla. It belonged to my late dad, who kept it in very good condition; it had been my car de facto for a long while, and earlier this year my mom transferred the registration to me. Although it’s not the coolest car in the world, it runs just fine, and I can at least move it into the twentieth-first century with some added technology. (By the way, the stereo plays cassettes. Remember those?)

When I first started looking at GPS units, I thought I’d go for something simple and relatively inexpensive, but once I saw the ones with high-end features, I thought, why not? Now I’m especially looking for one with Bluetooth, so I can pair it with my cell phone to make hands-free calls in the car. After doing some research on various sites, my current top contender is the Garmin nüvi 660, and I’ve also looked at the TomTom GO 720, both of which can be found in the $500-$600 range.

If anyone has any advice, let me know!

You know the PSP commercial with the two guys on the plane? I’d only ever seen the “cluster bomb!” one on TV, so I had no idea until yesterday that there is a whole series of them.

The rest are available on the PlayStation website. Oh, and the guy with the PSP is kind of cute. Belt check, anyone?

When I attended the American Library Association midwinter conference in Seattle earlier this year, I picked up advance copies of several books, which publishers give out to promote their upcoming titles. It makes for pretty good swag. I’m finally getting around to reading them; I admit that my procrastination does defeat some of the value of an advance copy, since most of these books by now have already been published and released to the retail market.

One of these books I recently read is 40 Days and 40 Nights by Matthew Chapman, who happens to be the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. The book tells the story of the intelligent-design case in Pennsylvania, Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education. Obviously there’s a slant to the book, but it does provide an interesting look at all the people involved in the case. Here’s a quote, which basically sums up how I’m feeling about religion right now:

I would not be against any religion that had the humility to admit that it was just one of many equally valid “fairy tales of conscience” (to use philosopher George Santayana’s definition of religion) or, in other words, “just a theory.” But I fear all religions that claim sole ownership of absolute truth. With no evidence except that of ancient hearsay, they can only persuade through appeals to the most vulnerable aspects of the human mind, through menacing insistence on blind faith at the cost of reason, and ultimately through violence.

Tina, one of my former co-workers, was at the most recent ALA annual conference a few months ago in Washington, D.C., and picked up a book for me: Hero. She even had it signed for me by the author, Perry Moore, who was there promoting the book. Aimed at the young-adult market, Hero is about a gay teen superhero coming to terms with his sexuality, his family, his powers, and so forth. It’s a good story, though I have to admit, with so much of what I read lately being nonfiction, I think I’m out of practice reading and judging fiction. Anyway, it’s definitely refreshing to see gay themes treated this way; I wish there were more books like this when I was growing up!

There’s an article about Moore in yesterday’s New York Times: “A Novelist’s Superhero Is Out To Right Wrongs” (via Jeff).

By the way, advance reading copies are usually uncorrected proofs, which means they can contain several typos. I have to fight the urge to get out a red pencil and mark up my copy!