Greg and Kat's blog

Day one of the eating-real-food resolution went well. I had salad from the salad bar at the convenience store in Cornerstone for lunch. I could see making a habit out of that. I got some vegetables at the grocery store to save a little money on it.

I made scalloped potatoes (from my mother’s recipe) and spinach for dinner. Scalloped potatoes take far longer than I was comfortable with: there might have been some non-real-food snacking before they cooked. Cooking takes a long time. That’s clearly going to be the limiting factor in this plan.

Eat (real) food: check. Not too much: I miss potatoes, and may have moved into “too much” territory. Mostly plants: check. I feel good about that.

And, while at Save-On-Foods (a necessity, having no “real” food in the house), I’m about 95% sure I saw Fred Ewanuick (Hank from Corner Gas). He had a beard, so I wasn’t entirely sure, but passed him several times in the aisle and got a good look. Apparently he grew up in Port Moody, so it’s not too far-fetched. He bumps Andy Dick out of the top spot in the “celebrities I have seen out in the world” ranking.

I’m still holding out hope for running into fellow Vancouverite Sarah Chalke. Mmm… Sarah Chalke.

I just read Unhappy Meals from the NY Times. It was actually really interesting, and if you’ve got some time on your hands, I’d recommend it. The first line strikes me as something that’s far too simple and obvious to ever catch on:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I have really been eating crap for the last little while. I should definitely get some more real “food” into me.

Clearly I could stand to eat a little less. (Or several of my shirts have spontaneously shrunk.)

On the subject of “mostly plants”, I have been there for a while. But, at the end of the article, I was introduced to a new word: “Flexitarianism“. There’s a word that describes the thing I am! I feel like I should subscribe to a newsletter or something.

So, I’m going to try to get back into the habit of cooking. A late New Year’s resolution.

As most of you know, I take the bus to work every day. I really have no general problem with it, and enjoy the 20 minutes of reading/music every morning and afternoon. But, let’s face it: there are some annoyances.

As such, I present Greg’s (incomplete) Bus Rules:

1. If you’re standing: Look towards the back of the bus. Is there empty space there? Look towards the front of the bus. Is there a clump of people crowded together that can’t get by you? Congratulations, you’re retarded! Move!
2. Don’t wait until the bus comes to a complete stop to start making your way to the door. If you do, don’t be surprised, yell, or bitch when the driver takes off when you’re just about to get to the door after 15 seconds. Exception: You’re old/frail/crippled/have an inner-ear infection, so standing up on a moving bus is a significant danger.
3. Gentlemen: Close the gates. I’m sure you have a large, manly sack. Air it out on your own time, and keep yourself on your seat.
4. If you fail to observe the above rule (or otherwise can’t keep yourself confined to one seat), don’t be surprised if you find me snuggled up to you. Especially if it’s cold. Also don’t be surprised if I shuffle imperceptibly in your direction every time you adjust or shuffle in the slightest.
5. Mothers: Yes, I guess you can flip up those front two seats and park your SUV-style stroller. Don’t then take your bastard offspring out of the stroller and plop them on the seat beside you. You just paid one fare and took four seats. Leave the kid in the stroller. Or put them on your lap. Or walk there. Or find a local crack dealer to babysit the kid. Pick any one, doesn’t bother me.
6. Put your shit on the luggage racks. This seems to be overlooked particularly in the 5-wide bench at the back: there’s a whole big space back there.
7. Okay, this one is pretty minor, but annoying. If you’re standing and two people are trying to have a conversation across the aisle, don’t stand directly between them unless the bus is so crowded you have no choice. Take a half-step.
8. If somebody at the front of the bus gives their seat up to an old person and the old person then gets off, the original occupant has dibs on the seat. No swooping in.

Proposed additions welcome.

I decided I should make better use of my camera. Perhaps it was a New Year’s resolution.

Anyway, I have gone out the last two Saturdays looking for stuff to put in front of my camera. I took a few pictures around, but I’m going to concentrate on the panoramas because I think they’re neat.

Last Saturday was close to home. I started by going up to SFU. I did a full 360° panorama in the AQ (drag around the panoramas to scroll).

Then, I went down to Burnaby Mountain Park. I set up the tripod again and did another 360° among the totem poles.

They day was pretty overcast, so there aren’t exactly any spectacular colours in those, but they aren’t bad.

This week, it was overcast again, so I went downtown to a camera shop. On the way back, I put on my sunglasses. Then I though “hey, sunglasses mean sun!” Sun means light and light means colour.

So, I cranked onto the highway and went to the most obvious place in the city to take a panorama: the Cypress lookout. I got a nice panorama from the lookout, and it even managed to stitch together without much lens flare, which was nice since I wasn’t carrying my lens hood.

I think the last panorama was my favourite. I drive around the north side of Capitol Hill, took the road as far as it goes, parked, and set off on-foot into some kind of mini-port that’s there for the Chevron refinery.

I found a good place and took a panorama facing north towards the Burrard Inlet. It’s a neat viewpoint: the light is good and the water/mountains/sky effect is good. And there’s this weird overgrown houseboat lookin’ thing sitting there.

I showed the picture to Kat who remembered a floating McDonalds at Expo 86 that looked a lot like that. Sure enough, that boat is the remains of the McBarge (!). I found some more McBarge info out there too.

It’s snowing again in Vancouver. I learned several things today on my way to campus.

First, one shouldn’t leave one’s umbrella in one’s office and think “it probably won’t be that bad tomorrow anyway”.

Second, don’t walk out to the bus stop on a snowy day and forget your wallet, especially if you left your umbrella in your office the night before. You’re just going to have to trudge back and get it.

Third, don’t sit in the back of an articulated bus when the roads are slippery. You have too much information back there. For example, you notice things like “I seem to be moving sideways” even though you know full-well that the back wheels don’t steer, so the only way that could be happening is if you’re starting to fishtail.

Kudos, to the bus driver: he did seem to know what he was doing. Still, I don’t think I have ever considered kissing the ground when I got safely off a bus before.

So I’m here. We’ll see if I learn “if it’s snowing, fuck it, stay home” when I try to get off the mountain. Here’s a pic out of my office window, taken with my phone:

Update 5:00: Home safe.

As many of you know, most of my pictures come from a Canon Digital Rebel XT. I’m very happy with the 18–50mm f2.8 lens from Sigma that I’m using with it.

As someone who (1) likes taking pictures and (2) is a geek, I’m always on the lookout for novel things to do with my camera. Over the last few days, I have been collecting links. I thought I should share them.

Pinhole cameras

Pinhole cameras are about as simple as you can get: film with a small hole allowing light in. But why limit yourself to little boxes and film when you have a perfectly good instant-gratification digital sensor lying around?

As it turns out, you can make a quite nice pinhole camera with a camera’s body cap. Throw in a toilet paper tube or two, and you can have a zoom pinhole as well.

Bellows

I’m sure most of you can picture olde-timey cameras with the lens on a set of bellows. Well, they make new ones too: they are view cameras and are just the thing if you want full-control over the image you’re taking, and want to record on a large chunk of film for high detail. This may be a good time to note that a set of bellows will do at least as much as tilt-shift lenses, including the fake miniatures fetured on Boing Boing.

Once again, why piss around with film if you don’t have to? I’m pretty sure my local London Drugs won’t process a 4×5″ negative anyway. You can buy a set of bellows for a regular SLR that does the same job. For US$2500. Then buy an expensive medium-format lens.

In the lower end of the scale, one can buy a Lensbaby for US$150 or $270 (depending on the model). Or, the right kind of person can make a set of bellows out of a toilet plunger.

Panoramas

I have experimented with making panoramic images before. The idea is to take a series of pictures from one location and stitch them together with software like Hugin to stitch them together. The results can be quite impressive.

Shooting panoramas of landscapes is easy, but when you get up-close, parallax becomes an issue: you have to hold the camera still (over just the right point) while you turn it. A special tripod head is required to do this right. Panoramic heads typically run US$400 and up and are probably worth it if you need to do that kind of thing professionally. A KingPANO can be had for US$150 and looks like it might be fun to play with.

Others

I have also run across AquaPacs for underwater photography. On the other side of panoramas are object panoramas. You can buy an object turntable or make one with Legos to assist with this.

I also ran across a couple of general camera-hack sites: DigiHack and DIYPhotography.

So…

I don’t own any of these things (nor have I made any). I have been thinking about getting a KingPANO for a while, so I might order one of those some time.

Another trend here is using the camera’s body cap to attach crazy stuff as a “lens”. I might stop by a camera shop and see if they have spare caps (from dead cameras or something).

Anybody else got cool stuff to add?

We have been busy since Kat has been home. It’s a combination of holiday festivities and people wanting to see Kat while she’s back. To give you an idea, these have been the engagements for seven of the last nine days:

• CMPT Xmas party
• Moderne Burger with Kelly and Paul
• wine tasting with some CMPT people
• Eunice’s defence dinner
• sushi and too much wine with Anne
• Thai with Pam and they boy (after buffet lunch at the DAC with the CMPT staff)
• Italian with the CSSS exec and hangers-on

I think I might be missing a dinner with Oli and Tina in there too. Tomorrow is Kat’s Ama’s birthday, so there’s another big dinner for that. Then Festivus (no celebration planned), Xmas eve (at Kat’s family), and Xmas day (at Kelly and Paul’s). Maybe there will be a break in the Xmas-New Year’s gap, but I suspect stuff will come up.

Last night during the exec dinner, something tweaked in my brain. I finally realized what it was this morning: I’m tired of food.

It’s not that I feel like I have been overeating (although I probably have), or that I’m feeling especially fat (but I wouldn’t mind losing a few). I just really can’t get excited about eating anything. Maybe it’s just my brain warning me that I’m headed down the road to becoming a bloated man-ball.

Anyway, can’t write more now. I have to get some work done before another buffet lunch at the DAC with Kat’s lab.

It has been a long semester. I’m teaching two courses and trying to figure out how to be undergrad chair. Really, it made Kat being away less of an issue: I wouldn’t have had much time to do anything anyway. I’m guessing I averaged around 60 hours per week this semester.

I just finished marking the 470 projects. They were bimodal, as the class has been all semester. Apparently, my 120 exams are marked and I’ll get them tomorrow morning. With some luck, all the final grades will be done tomorrow. Realistically, Wednesday morning.

The CS Xmas party is tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully it will go well: as the chair of the Social committee, I had a hand in it. It pretty much followed Greg’s event organizing pattern: phone a restaurant and tell them about 100 people are coming, ask grad students to organize entertainment, done.

Update 12/12: I just approved my first final grades (one of the duties of the undergrad chair). That was exciting.

Last week, I was talking to a faculty member on exchange from China. He drove home something I knew, but had never really thought too much about: “Chinese” isn’t a very precise description of anything. That is, there are a lot of cultural differences between parts of the country.

So that got me thinking, which didn’t do any good, because I don’t really know anything about the subject at hand. That got me reading Wikipedia.

In my travels, I came across the Wikipedia article on Chinese Cuisine. In particular, the blue bar down the right of the page that lists types of Chinese cuisine caught my eye. There are apparently “eight great traditions” of chinese cuisine. I know something about some of them, but there are definitely some gaps.

So, I propose a quest: The quest to find and consume representative samples of each of the eight great traditions. This seems like a good city to do it: there are decent numbers from at least some of the regions. I should be able to find some restaurants, right?

Who’s with me? Anybody have good leads on restaurants? (Opinions not accepted from people who speak English with a Canadian accent—go ask your grandmother.)

Kat’s family is Fujian. Cantonese should be easy enough. There are plenty of Szechuan restaurants, so I’m sure I can find somebody with an informed opinion around somewhere. Our partner school in the DDP program is in Zhejiang, so hopefully I can find somebody with some insight. That’s four.

I don’t watch the news very often. I find that mostly, the world can get on just fine without me paying too much attention. I watched the CBC news tonight. There was a bunch of stuff about the Liberal leadership race. I noticed a trend…

Michael Ignatieff is the front runner. Ignatieff is a hardcore public academic, having worked at UBC, Oxford, LSE, and Toronto.

Stéphane Dion is the son of an academic and has had faculty positions at the Universities of Moncton and Montreal. A less impressive CV, but nothing to turn one’s nose up at.

Bob Rae is the least academic of the bunch. He was merely a Rhodes Scholar. Rae and Ignatieff both studied under Isaiah Berlin—seems like there might be some kind of conspiracy in there.

But, they were all in political science or public policy. As a computer scientist, I’d probably have to settle for being a lousy Premier or something.

Even our “populist” leader, Stephen Harper, has an MA in Economics.