If I can be forgiven for quoting an old flame, "Hold on to nothing / As fast as you can / Well, still, pretty good year."
The solar circumnavigation just complete was replete with all sorts of interesting things. Just a few highlights:
I was privileged with the opportunity to visit several new places: the Hoh Rainforest, Rialto Beach and Forks, WA; Cannon Beach, Oregon; and Las Vegas, NV.
I was reminded-painfully- that when preparing to jump over something, it is advisable to verify that the drop on the landing side is concomitant with the take-off on the departing side. Otherwise, the impact does unpleasant things to the bones in your feet.
I finally managed to figure out how to feel and talk about emotions, and have become a much better communicator.
I've had my taste in food shift fairly drastically. Between that and managing to exercise more, I'm now almost back to what I weighed during my hockey-playing days. As of this morning, I was down exactly forty pounds from my noted high of 207.5.
I started running, and ran my first 5k.
I've been honoured and blessed to have my eldest daughter back in my life. Катюша, я тебя люблю, и всегда, вне зависимости от ситуации или расстояние между нами.
I met someone new and fell very much in love. Not to be remiss in other relationships, I continue to fall more in love with my best-beloved of fifteen years every day. Love shared is really feeling more exponential than merely multiplied these days.

Highlight of the day: getting email from a Russian recruiter trying to fill a contract position in Seattle. I drafted a probably overly formal, but polite enough response in Russian noting that since the key thing they were looking is experience with a load-testing framework I haven't touched in five or six years and didn't particularly like then, I probably wasn't the best candidate for the role; and additionally that I'm reasonably satisfied doing the internationalization/localization work that I get to do now, which happens to let me do things like learn bits of languages and keep the ones I have at least somewhat functional.

Apparently I pass at both polite and somewhat functional, as I got a nice response back wishing me well and so on, and if I happened to trip across anyone who would fit their openings would I think kindly enough of them to pass the contact information along.

So, do any of my Seattle area software testing folk have experience with LoadRunner and interest in doing a contract gig involving scripting lots of load-testing automation? You don't need to respond to the recruiter in Russian- her English, as evidenced in the initial email, is exemplary.

Wow! On my annual performance review, in the Initiative and Drive for Results category, I got a 4.5 rating (of a possible 5- '5' ratings require approval of the Board of Directors, so this amounts to something like 'God-like'). Did pretty solidly almost everywhere else to boot.

And I'm still paid almost $14k a year less than I was at my previous job. Almost four years ago. On the positive side, at least this company has a solid future and my stock options should actually be worth something more than I'd pay for them when the company goes public (which is on the horizon).

Ever pick up the phone to call/text someone and have it ring or a message from that person arrive while you're in the act of doing so?
How often does this happen to you?
How regularly would it have to happen for you to find it strange and/or more than merely incidentally synchronistic?

I know, I know, weird question. Humour me, will you? I'll explain why in the near future after seeing how a number of you answer.

Ok, so it has been a while. Again. Deal. Or don't, but if that's the case, why are you still reading this?

Life is good. Unlike so many of the posts in this journal over the lifespan of its existence, for the most part I'm actively and assertively happy, emotionally and (mostly) physically healthy. Still love the place I work and for the most part, what I get to do, even if there are the little bits here and there which make me slightly crazier than usual. I have the slight suspicion that I'm managing to surround myself with people who are at least a little above my station, but find that they mirror the same perception about me- which probably just works out to being determined not to take others for granted, which is a decidedly good thing.

Goodbye, misskarin. Kick ass and take names in the Summerlands.

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Current Location: US, Washington, King, Seattle, 4th Ave NW, 9006
Ceòl : Garbage - #1 Crush

What an amazing- and entirely PG rated at worst- evening. Tomorrow, hockey. We'll see if I'm up to playing pickup on Sunday evening.

Where's the gorram wooden spoon?

Actually, the usually noisy neighbours have been quiet tonight. They must be out of town or something.

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Current Location: US, Washington, King, Seattle, NW 85th St, 523

Haven't shared much here lately, so I'll try to make up for it by sending you some pretties.

First, from October's Las Vegas trip:




Next, from Volunteer Park Conservatory:




And finally, from Woodland Park Zoo:



Even big kitties get nappish on chilly winter days!

I've now managed to do one more of those little fitness things I hadn't done before.

This morning, I ran the Seattle Marathon 5k road race. I've been running since the summer at varying distances, but hadn't done anything formal with it, so this was a new experience. The results right now show me at 109th among 310 male participants (I expect this to be revised up one spot, due to a double-entry, unless there were a pair of identical twins with the same name who ran exactly the same time) at a time of 26:28- or 8:22 behind the winner in my age range.

Seattle Marathon 5k course Seattle Marathon 5k course

I set a pace for the run with the RunKeeper app on my phone for a little slower than I've been averaging running on the treadmill at the gym (5:20, slightly off the 5:16 my last gym half hour was)- I figured real terrain and the temperature would have at least some impact on my performance, and it didn't seem right to expect to match treadmill pace on the roads of Seattle. Five minutes in, RunKeeper told me that I was almost fifty seconds ahead of that pace, which was just stunning. It also helped incite a little bout of cold-and-activity induced asthma, I think, as shortly after the end of the first mile, I was starting to have a little difficulty breathing, and slowed up a bit until I was able to get back to a normal breathing rate. Pushing on was a good decision, and I finished the course. RunTracker and the GPS in my phone show my total distance for the 26:41 it tracked was 5.52km- or an average pace of 4:50 per kilometer- which is faster than I've run any distance to date.

Today was a lovely day to go to the zoo. Some of the critters even decided to work at being photogenic.









The rest of the series is here.

In semi-related news, I'm within about $1800 of my goal to upgrade some of my camera equipment. If that could possibly be done in a self-supported way, it'd be ideal.

Here's the 'official' copy about our recruiting event tomorrow. Tableau is a good place to work, and for those of you looking, maybe we have a spot which matches your experience. Hope to see some of you tomorrow.

Tableau Software is hosting "Aloha Friday" this week!
8/26 from 1:30-4:30 p.m. in the Lake View Courtyard, 837 N 34th St., Seattle, WA

We are hosting a fun Recruiting event outside of the Fremont office, complete with a taste of the tropics! A team of Tableau employees will gathered to meet with candidates and passersby outside in our courtyard area, while enjoying tropical flavored shave ice and the sounds of a steel drum band. Attendees will be encouraged to bring resumes, a business card, or a referral in exchange for a shave ice! We hope to see you there! www.tableausoftware.com/jobs

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Current Location: US, Washington, King, Seattle, 6th Ave NW, 8463

Apple does a number of things very well. Particularly when it comes to user interface design, there is a design aesthetic seemingly inspired by Dieter Rams which simply just works while at the same time just working simply.But boy howdy, when the people in Cupertino mess up user experience interactions do they do it in spades (or possibly even no trump!). ( Read on, if you're so inclined. )

Wheee! Got the microSD card properly set up so that I can now elect to pop it in and boot my Nook Colour as an Android Honeycomb device. Nifty $50 out of pocket device (work got me a standard Nook with wifi and 3G as a prize for participating in our annual hackathon; B&N let me pay the difference and get the colour version) which is not only an e-reader, but now also an Android tablet. Haven't poked around at that part much yet, other than booting into it, but, um, go go Gadget geekery.

Up gruff and surly to go check out an iaido class which trains at a time which doesn't put it in direct conflict with any other familial commitments or obligations.

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Current Location: 47.690270, -122.363798

Wow, no one wants and is able to attend PNB's Contemporary 4 with us?

I feel like some sort of pariah now.

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Current Location: US, Washington, King, Seattle, NW 85th St, 547

Our very own Pacifc Northwest Ballet is presenting a mixed repetoire bill of four contemporary ballets- including a company premiere and a world premiere. inanna and I have an extra ticket to it. We're going to offer it to any one of our friends in the Seattle area, but rather than give it to the first responder, we're going to have a little contest. If you're available to attend the performance on Saturday, 26 March- starting at 7:30, but we usually make it a point to catch PNB Education Director Doug Fullington's pre-performance talks and hour before the performance- and would like the chance to be our guest (full disclosure: darkmuffin will also be with us, but he relates well with adults- I think he's usually better with them than with kids his own age), tell us why you'd like to come with us, spin us an interesting story, be the only person to respond, whatever. The winner will be selected by the end of the week.

More information about Contemporary 4.

Let's see if I can manage to successfully embed this visualization of the recent earthquakes near Honshu, Japan. If not, the view is available on Tableau Public (link opens in a new tab).

Seòl : industrious

Since moving as much as possible from 'conventional' Western footwear toward things like Vibram Five Fingers and tabi I've noticed a couple of things which are interesting at least to me. Foremost, the change in posture they engender- it's significantly forward from where it is in other shoes. Particularly for someone who tended to be a heel-strike walker, this is significant. Now, instead of my heels hitting the ground first, my weight gets initially distributed between the toes and ball of the foot.

Secondarily- and directly contingent to the first- this is why the ninja evolved the reputation for being so damned stealthy. It doesn't take any particular amount of grace- I can do it, and I think I've something less than the median- to move reasonably rapidly and fairly quietly when you change the physiological perspective in such a minor yet significant manner (minor, in that on my foot, we're talking a change of under 20cm; significant in that the change is from a significant heel-strike to plausibly no heel contact at all).

I feel as if most of the time I don't dream. At least, it is uncommon for me to have upon waking more than the most fragmentary recall of more than two or three a year.

Apparently, one of these has already taken place in 2011.

Sometime before waking this morning, I had a dream wherein I was interviewing for a photographic job. I'm not sure why, because it was clear that I didn't need a job and didn't particularly have time for one, but I was interviewing anyway.

I met with the guy around Pacific Science Centre, and pretty instantly had the feeling that I didn't want to work with/for him. He was pleasant enough, but seemed to ooze that stereotypical used-car salesman unctuousness which made him feel a little slimy and less than trustworthy.

He asked good questions, but somehow had gotten my old portfolio from when I was working in photography (rough timeline: early '90s), and was asking things about the work in it. [For reference, I worked in a few studios, did some freelance work, and occasionally handled the odd assignment for the newspaper for which I wrote.] Some of the questions were reasonable- "How did you light this shot?", "What did you use to get this effect?", "What filters were used here?" Then there were some odd, but technical questions- "What were the exposure and aperture values for this shot?", "What sort of film did you use for this?"

I can answer those. The first set were pretty easy- I can still draw lighting diagrammes with fair ease, and if I could recognize from the style or content where I was working for the particular shot, I remember fairly clearly what the lighting available was in each case, at least to the number of lights available if not the actual brands/models/specs. The effects and filtering questions aren't significantly more difficult, but they're largely technical knowledge.

The second set are a little more obscure, but not that much worse, and a reasonable test of technical merit. Things shot under studio lighting are usually exposed at the synch speed the camera allows- the default then was 1/60th of a second, and whether the camera in question was a Hasselblad 500 C/M, a Mamiya RB67, or one of a number of different 35mm bodies, the lens selection is pretty straightforward- on a 35mm, for instance, portraiture usually works well with lenses between about 90 and 135mm; on a medium format you'd look at 120-180 or so. Film type is reasonably comparable- high v. low speed, different types have slightly different characteristics. He seemed a little irritated at one point that I couldn't with any certainty say whether something was shot on 120 or 220 Kodak VPS (which was pretty much the benchmark in the day for portraiture, nominally an ISO 160 film, but conventionally over-exposed 2/3 stop at ISO 100), which seemed weird, because the difference is whether the film is all paper-backed (120) or just has paper leading and following (220)- which is all contingent on the film back in use. [For those of you who may not be up on it- which I suspect are almost all who haven't been scared off by the camera-geek talk by this point- 220 film allows twice as many shots per roll as 120 by not being fully paper backed, but lacking the paper, it can more easily be scratched by any debris which has gotten into the film back. There's no distinction between the film bases at all, they'd both go into the same sorts of cameras, so even from a negative, there's no way to tell whether it had a paper layer or not.]

The third tier of questions was really bizarre. He pointed at one of the bridal portraits in the book and asked what the bride's name was. He asked about one of the subjects in a modelling composite (which I don't think is actually in my ancient portfolio, although I remember the shot in question), "Was she really that hot?" and about another "Do you think she'd go out with me." In the photojournalistic section of my book, there are a handful of prints accompanied by the newspaper articles with which they ran. One of these is a shot of former Vice-President R. Danforth "Potatoe" Quayle, who had been in town to support the candidacy of John Ellis "Jeb" Bush (incidentally, the bright one of the Bush family- he's a very good speaker and conveys the impression of knowing what he talks about, not like his ex-President brother). "Who's this guy? Why the hell would you take a picture of him?" Dude, it ran A-1, above the fold in a regional newspaper. It's at worst a demonstration in latitude, as handheld photojournalism, candid portraiture- it belongs for a handful of reasons. There are a few hockey pictures, from covering Lightning games in Tampa Bay. He critiques these as being too grainy to use anywhere. Granted, I wouldn't print most of them 8x10 or larger for personal display, but in the context of appearing alongside the articles, they're there, and at that size because everything else is printed that size. They also look reasonably sharp in their reproduction in print, to the point that you can make out the puck in one of former Lightning centre Chris Gratton sneaking a game-winning wrist-shot over Patrick Roy's glove hand- not bad for a handheld shot with a 250mm lens at 1/250th (or so) of a second exposure (and from the opposite end of the rink). It ran, C-1, full bleed, and the article is right there with it.

The interview didn't touch on any of the digital stuff I've done in the last three years and which is what I'm comfortable with shooting now. For what it's worth, I think my photographic vision is better now than it was then, because I'm not concerned with shooting things which are likely salable images and because shooting digitally lets me take a quick look to determine if I captured what I wanted right away and if not I can take another. I'm also not working under the pressure of trying to eke out a living at it, so there's a lot more joy in the art than there used to be. And I'm not shooting weddings, which stressed me out to no small extent. I think there are some decent pieces which I've shot in the last few years which would print well and would belong in a portfolio if I ever wanted to re-enter the field; but I certainly don't want to work for a guy like the one with whom I interviewed in my dream.