Archive for 2010

The cost of getting things done

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

I guess there wasn’t a lot of note that happened in February, seeing as I didn’t manage an update all month long. I’ve been busy, but not with any one thing in particular. I also haven’t been sleeping well. It’s a Sunday afternoon and I could easily go back to sleep now for another few hours except that I have places to be all too soon.

Work is good overall; progress is slow but definite. The other people on my team are busy putting out fires on other projects, so I don’t see or hear very much from them. I flew to San José for some meetings over a couple of days back in February, a routine I am getting used to, although I still dislike flying. I think I am doing some good stuff behind-the-scenes on this project that will be very appreciated when the spotlight is back on me and what I’ve been up to.

In the meantime, construction has continued on my condo and it’s been nice to see some progress being made. There is actual siding on one of the buildings now and I’ve had three of my windows replaced with new ones (the remaining should be done this coming week). It’s annoying because of all of the noise early in the morning, and I’ve had to remove all of my blinds and deal with construction workers coming inside from time to time, but that’s clearly the cost of getting things done. We have our annual homeowner’s association meeting coming up this week and while I usually dread it, it will be interesting to hear the state of the union as far as the construction project goes.

Next weekend should be interesting. It’s the Emerald City Comicon and as a result of affiliations between Theatresports friends of mine and the guy running the event, I will be performing there as a part of “NERDprov”: improv themed around nerdy subjects from TV, movies, comics and wherever else popular sub-culture takes us. I’m also doing a special Saturday Theatresports with two of the Internet-celebrities from The Guild (and before you ask, no, it’s not Felicia Day, it’s Zaboo and Vork, both of whom have excellent improv backgrounds and should be fun to play with). Today I am going to a “research party” of sorts with the rest of the cast where we will be boning up on our geekdom in preparation for the two events.

Also coming up in a couple of weeks is the wedding of two friends, for which Elizabeth and I will be flying out to North Carolina. While there we’re going to drop in on my parents who are vacationing in Hilton Head. It’s a long way to travel for just a few days, but you gotta take the opportunities you can get, I suppose.

We’ve been having some insanely nice spring weather, with sunny, bright skies and mild temperatures hovering around the fifties (that’s the tens for you Celsius folk). I don’t know if it’s global warming or just random spurts, but it’s been very welcome.

Dan.

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Unmistakably different animals

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

My team fell a few points short of the challengers this weekend, so our run was short-lived. It was still a fairly solid show on the whole… I don’t think I showcased my best work but I did a decent job and had a fun time doing it.

I had a moment of weakness a while ago and purchased a stick-on decal for my laptop. I’m not normally the kind of person who abides this kind of thing, but I simply couldn’t resist the idea of having Yoshi eating the apple in the middle of my Macbook Pro:

Yoshi Laptop

The construction continues on my condo; my building is now fully naked of its siding and wrapped in clear plastic. I was supposed to move my barbecue out of their way a while ago, but was unable to because I had lost the key to the cable I’ve used to secure it to the patio. They offered to cut the padlock for me and finally got around to doing so, and today I went to put the barbecue into my storage locker. I hadn’t been to my storage space in at least a year, and was shocked to discover that someone had apparently attempted to break into it. I don’t think they succeeded as the lock is still in place, but the metal hinge it’s on is all mangled from someone attempting to break it off. Unfortunately, their tampering deformed the hinge in such a way that I can no longer open the door, even after removing the lock. I tried using a couple of tools to bend it back close enough to its original shape that I might be able to open it again, but I think short of grabbing a hammer and bashing it clean off the door it’s beyond my abilities. I’ve notified the property manager, though, and I expect they’ll take responsibility for repairing it. In the meantime I’ve had to leave the barbecue in the hallway with an apologetic note for those it winds up obstructing. Oh well.

Moving to the States from Canada gives you a lot of perspective. As countries around the world go it is nearly identical to our own, but the differences are still so very striking… I think about how in the species of dogs you can have two labradors that are more alike to each other than to any of the terriers, poodles, beagles, etc. and still be completely and unmistakably different animals.

The subtler cultural and regional differences notwithstanding, I thought I had a firm grasp on the superficial differences when it came to brands and products. No Shreddies, Rowntree-brand chocolates, ketchup chips, Harveys/Swiss Chalet, Tim Hortons or President’s Choice to name just a few. Well after more than five years of living abroad in the States, I finally discovered another: frozen yogurt.

It’s not like I go out for frozen yogurt very often. The few times I’ve gone, though, I’ve been surprised that the places I’ve ended up only had soft-serve machines with pre-mixed flavours in them. The experience I’m used to and that I’ve had my entire lifetime before moving to the United States is far more robust: they have a machine that they drop a bar of plain frozen yogurt and a cup of fresh fruit into, which then proceeds to pulverize, grind and mix the two together so that what comes out is a made-to-order flavoured frozen yogurt. It’s an evolutionary leap forward in terms of quality, as not only can you have any flavour you choose instead of just picking from whatever few they already have prepared in the soft-serve machines, but the fresh fruit ground in there tastes immeasurably better than the pre-blended stuff.

At first I thought I was just having trouble finding the right chain, as they have quite a few out here. I furiously Googled, thinking that somewhere nearby must offer the genuine confection I was craving and not merely some pale shadow of it, but it turns out that in these parts, soft-serve is simply what frozen yogurt is understood to be. I even found an article about a Yogen Früz that had opened in San Francisco, and this innovative, futuristic technique they had for blending custom-flavoured frozen yogurts (which has, of course, been the status quo my entire life).

I am beside myself, apoplectic with disbelief and sadness. I mean, these cro-magnons are thumping around trying to figure out which end of the spear sticks into the animal, while everyone else is tilling soil, raising cattle and sleeping on beds instead of cave floors. There’s nothing to be done about it… but next time I go to Canada, I’m definitely paying a visit to Dutch Dreams.

Dan.

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Token male

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Last week was kind of hectic. I got to have lunch with a couple of friends, which was nice, and perform in a couple of shows, which was also nice. On Thursday I went to see the preview of Tacoma Musical Playhouse’s production of Rent, in part because it’s one of the few (and least expensive) opportunities I had to see it, but also because one of the leads (who was also the lead when I did Damn Yankees back there in 2007) was going to propose to his girlfriend (also a lead in the show) during the curtain call. There was a pretty respectable cross-section of people in the theatre community who came to see the event, and it was adorable to watch. I’m not personally close to either of them (I’ve only done one show with the guy and had never met his now-fiancée), but the theatre community is small and with at least half a dozen people on that stage whom I knew and far more in the audience, I think it felt like a family affair for everyone.

Friday’s SecondStory show was nothing remarkable, but Saturday was my first Theatresports performance since December and I was both anxious and excited to get back on that stage. I was on a team with one apprentice and two veterans, all three of whom were women (I was a bit disappointed we didn’t go with the team name “Token Male” one of them had proposed). It was a really fun combination of strong performers I don’t often get to play with, and when you are, in fact, the token male on the team it means you get to play just about every guy role that comes up. We ended the first half with a five-point deficit but managed to come back from it and win by three points, which means we’ll get to play again next weekend. We had a good audience and I felt like I had a pretty solid show overall, with the opportunity to do some respectable scenework, which is what usually concerns me the most when I’m in Theatresports, so that felt good.

I bit the bullet and finally joined Netflix over the weekend. Technically I started a month-long free trial but I know I lack the willpower to quit something like that once I start it, and at $9/month it doesn’t exactly break the bank. The catalyst was getting this fancy new Internet-enabled television that hooks directly up to your account and lets you stream movies and television shows directly over the Internet. You see, I know I’m not enough of a moviephile to ever make a traditional, mail-based Netflix account worth the money, and in fact am likely to find it more onerous than just renting DVDs from a retail shop because I will worry about whether I am watching them and sending them back soon and often enough in order to make it worth my investment.

The Internet streaming is something new and very cool, though. So far I’ve watched a few episodes of the first season of Weeds on it and am surprised by how good the quality is. You can tell it’s been compressed and every now and then it jumps a single frame or so (almost unnoticeable), but by and large it looks almost as good as an actual DVD and doesn’t stutter or stammer like I’d expected it would.

The downside is that while there are a lot of streamable titles on Netflix, only a small percentage of their total library is accessible through this feature. So I am still trapped with the DVD-by-mail conundrum, even more so as I now need to work to keep my DVD “queue” full, but many of the things I want to watch are available by streaming, so it takes a lot more browsing to find things to put in the mail queue.

Netflix apparently has a “friends” feature, so if you use Netflix you should befriend me and share your ideas for what I should watch!

Dan.

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A legitimate world of their own

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

My new TV arrived yesterday! It is a Vizio VF552XVT, and at 55 glorious inches it’s a considerable upgrade from my previous 37″ Vizio. In fact, it fills the space of my living room quite nicely:

New TV

I’ve notably invested in a wall mount from Monoprice. This was both scary and difficult to install, especially seeing as the poorly-written instructions from China caused me to break one of the lag bolts off in the stud (I soon found better advice from the people who had rated the item on the website). But at the end of the day I got it up there and it seems pretty sturdy, and it’s super-convenient and easy to pull the TV away from the wall when I need to mess with the cables, or tilt it in any direction I please. Plus it frees up the top of the cabinet that my previous TV called its home.

Some things that are neat about it:

  • It refreshes at 240 Hz. I don’t personally put much stock in the difference between 240 Hz and 120 Hz, but compared to my previous 60 Hz television there’s a definite difference in the fluidity of motion, to the point where it almost actually lowers the cinematic quality by making the people seem too real and alive… it’s a lot more like they’re actually there, which I suppose is the idea, but it suddenly makes them look like performers on a set instead of characters in a legitimate world of their own.
  • At 55″, you really notice the difference between 480 (standard def), 720 (high-def), and 1080 (super-high-def?) resolutions. In fact, most TVs smaller than 42″ or so that support 1080 signals actually downscale them to 720, because you typically can’t tell anyway at that size. I didn’t realize all cable “high-def” broadcasts were only at 720, which on this TV is visibly blurrier than the 1080 signal from, say, a Blu-ray disc.
  • This is an LED TV, which supposedly provides better black levels than traditional compact-florescent back-lighting (because they can dim the LEDs selectively when parts of the screen are darker). This isn’t the kind of thing I normally notice or complained about on any of my previous LCD televisions, so we’ll have to wait and see if it makes an actual difference to me.
  • I waited for this model to come out because (at the same price as the previous-generation model) it has Internet connectivity to it. In fact, the remote control has a slide-out keyboard (which is absolutely terrible) and is Bluetooth instead of IR (which is extremely nice since I don’t ever have to aim it at the TV). The Internet features are (unsurprisingly) poorly designed and implemented in terms of user interface, but the advantage of it being software is they can keep pushing updates to me as it improves.

My plan of attack continues to be to run an Ethernet networking cable under the condo crawl space and into the living room, so all of my devices can be hooked up to the Internet without the encumbrances of wireless. I’m also hoping to run an HDMI cable so that I can plug my computer directly into the television, so I can watch anything can be downloaded to the computer directly on the big screen. Hopefully when the cable guy comes in a couple of weeks to reroute the cable I can make my changes as well.

In other news, my grandmother has been doing much better. She’s no longer in the ICU and is in a private hospital room where they are attempting to ween her off oxygen and build up enough strength for her to be discharged. Don’t know how long that will take, but it appears she is out of the woods for the moment, which is a tremendous relief to everyone.

I’ve been doing more of the improv performances at SecondStory this round, and while they are smaller shows than Theatresports at Unexpected they’re also more intimate… plus I’ve had some good friends in attendance and it’s been a swell opportunity to keep in practice. This weekend I’ll be doing both of them respectively on Friday and Saturday; Saturday will be my first Theatresports performance of the new year and I’m looking forward to getting back to it.

Dan.

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Under the heat lamp

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Happy 2010, everyone!

The past few weeks have been filled with adventure and mayhem. I surprised my parents by visiting them on their vacation in Sanibel Island, Florida. Elizabeth came with, and we spent eight days in the sun, six of which were the coldest on record for that region in decades. Which is to say that we spent most of the vacation in 50-degree weather rather than the 80-degree we were expecting, barely any warmer than it was in Seattle.

That had me bummed out considerably as it was an expensive trip (I’d even dropped a little bit extra to rent a convertible that saw almost no top-down use), but it was still nice to get away and relax, as well as see my family. The first two days were quite nice and we still managed to get in a respectable amount of biking and swimming, and at least it was sunny so I could get my vitamin D from somewhere other than an oral supplement.

On the list of curiosities was the Captiva Crab Races, where a few dozen people gambled on their hermit crabs to see which would reach the outer edge of the table first:

Crab Races

I named mine Humphrey and I’m pretty sure he died under the heat lamp on the table before the first race even began.

I’ve had a week or so to adjust back to home life. The construction workers have finally reached my building, and they have demolished the siding with zeal and gusto, and made working from home a challenging prospect. I had prepared for the opportunity to run more cables outside once they removed the siding, but after speaking to the construction manager I now know how to enter the crawl space beneath my condo from the storage locker… it seems the cable company will be rewiring my existing DIY-job for me in the next couple of weeks, so if I tag along when the contractor comes through I should be able to figure out the best way to run both my Ethernet and HDMI cables under the condo from the den to the living room.

I’ve also gone ahead and purchased the new television I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of: the Vizio VF552XVT. I was originally going to wait and see if I could pick one up at Costco, but at the last minute I found out about a “VIP” program that Vizio was running where in exchange for 6 weeks of filling out brief surveys on their new Internet-TV features I was able to receive a significant discount, free shipping, and a free sound system and Blu-Ray player at the end of the 6 weeks. It should arrive in the next week or so… I managed to squeeze in the day before the program ended, so I feel I was somewhat fortunate in being able to jump on that opportunity.

In much sadder news, my remaining grandmother (on my father’s side) fell terribly ill this past weekend, and had to go into the intensive-care unit. The entire family is currently in hurry-up-and-wait mode, and I’m preparing to have to hop on a plane to Toronto at a moment’s notice if her condition declines any further. At the moment the antibiotics appear to be slowly kicking in and she is improving gradually, though, and may even leave the ICU in the next couple of days if she continues to improve, although it will take her weeks to recover.

It’s definitely had me on edge these past couple of days, and was compounded today when I checked my mail and found a birthday card she sent me, presumably back in December. (I was glad the post office was able to successfully deliver it at all; there were a number of little mistakes she’d made in the addressing of it.) I haven’t opened it yet… I’m not a superstitious person by any stretch of the imagination, but the timing of it makes me anxious. Everyone in the family is stressed, of course, and Izzy’s recent passing is still fresh in our memories. I really hope she gets through this.

Dan.

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