My blog is loosely connected to my camera. If I don't remember to take pictures then, for practical purposes, it didn't actually happen. My memory remains somewhat porous and photographs continue to be an excellent reminder.
I just returned from a business trip that lasted almost two weeks. I took the day today off of work to recuperate from the whole event, get caught up on things at home, and readjust from jet leg. I'm not entirely sure I ever got myself properly time shifted when I was in Europe. I woke up so many times during the night each evening that I think I was still psychologically here in Saint Louis.
I will get back to the topic of my business trip, but not before I get up to date with the sporadic photographs I found in my digital camera when I transferred them today.
According to the camera the last thing that happened to me is that I attended a Halloween party at our neighbor’s house. Diane and Lenny Brown threw a great costume party the weekend before Halloween. It was very well attended and there were a lot of great costumes. For some reason I didn't take many pictures, so the quite stunning mermaid did not make it into the bunch.
Terry made our costumes by hand. I was Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, she was Arwen, and Alex was Frodo Baggins (of the shire). It was a great evening but I struggled with a dilemma which has continued to plague me for some time. I have quit drinking alcohol for about four months now. In general is isn't something I even think about any more. I don't have any real desire to drink and that has been a great relief. My weight loss program continues and I am down about 30 pounds. I look thinner and feel better. I particularly appreciate the fact that I have a much clearer head and don't waste time, money, or brain cells drinking any more.
All that said, I have a serious problem with social situations; especially something like a party where my friends are enjoying a beer and having a good time. I am a lot more 'fun' at a party if I have had a few drinks. And, without any, I am quite boring and feel like I don't belong. At the Halloween party I struggled very hard with the notion that I was taking this whole 'not drinking' thing to an extreme. Why do I make such a big deal out of not drinking 'a drop' for these past few months? What difference would a few beers in a social context make? Why couldn't I have a glass of wine at dinner or while out of town on business? The answer is I could. Drinking a few beers in a social situation wouldn’t kill me. I could go back the next day to not drinking anything at all.
However, the problem is that I have played this game before. I would quickly find appropriate 'social situations' to drink every single weekend. Once I slip down this slope it would be a short time before a glass of wine in the evenings would be ok too. Next thing you know I would be back to where I started, and I really just don't want that to happen again. It seems ridiculous to make such a big deal out of drinking one beer in a social situation, but I honestly believe that just that 'one beer' would inevitably become cases and cases in a few short weeks.
So, I suppose I will just be boring at parties for a while. My wife says I should be able to be just as fun as I ever was in a social situation without alcohol since, theoretically, I am the same person. Well, in theory that sounds good. I am really only hung up on this specific issue of alcohol. I have no such problem with other forms of relaxing elixirs. However, I have yet to find something that works. My Kava Kava experiment was a huge disappointment.
Here is Cole dressed up as a Ninja
Terry, Alex, and I in our costumes.
Mike setting up the tunes.
Diane and Lenny in their costumes.
Diane and Lenny making sure that their interface is aligned properly.
The next few pictures are from my trip to Toronto. I previously commented on this trip in the Blog. Toronto was awesome, and I look forward to returning for a visit in the future.
Toronto is an interesting mix of the new with the old. Here is a massive old church in the heart of the downtown. The photograph does not do it justice. It is almost surreal to see these modern skyscrapers surrounding this old world architecture.
This is the CN tower; the tallest free standing structure in the world. It is very cool to stand directly underneath it and look straight up. When you are in the downtown area is certainly does 'look tall', however the must stunning visual is when you enter the city. You see these very tall skyscrapers which are literally dwarfed by the CN tower shooting up towards the clouds.
Stan Melax and one of his programmer friends from when he worked at Bioware.
Here is a photograph from our team dinner with the COLLADA working group.
On Thanksgiving we went down my sisters new home to celebrate. We took a number of photographs but, apparently, the camera lens was smudged and hardly any of them turned out. We ended up with only these two photographs from the day.
This is a great photograph of Doug and my new nephew Job sleeping together on Thanksgiving day.
My sister Patty's new son, and my new nephew, Job.
I have had a new project for the last two months that has been taking a lot of my time; I have been trying to get a home for my parents to live in. My Mom and Dad have been living on a small rural farm outside of Hermann. They have been living there for the past ten years and each winter has been more difficult. The house uses a wood burning stove in the basement. My mother has a very difficult time walking now and uses a wheelchair or a walker. My dad has health problems as well and operating the wood stove in the winter is very difficult. I really felt it was going to be impossible for them to make it through another winter there.
About six weeks ago I put a contract on a lovely house that my cousin Larry helped me find. Everything was going fine with that house until the appraisal came in. The owners had put so much money into the home it just couldn’t appraise high enough to reflect the investment. This created a problem since it happened just a week before closing; which was supposed to be the day before Thanksgiving. That Saturday Terry and I called a realtor who showed us a number of properties. We found a very nice home in a subdivision outside of Jefferson City. The house was right next to a large Methodist Church and, the key feature, was that it was handicapped accessible. I nice little ranch home with easy access. The bathroom was wheelchair accessible as well; just perfect for my parents. That day we put a contract on the house. Then I had an idea. What if we offered to rent the property until closing? So we made this offer to. The seller accepted both offers!
The day after Thanksgiving I rented a U-haul truck and moved my parents in; just two days after we were supposed to close on the original home! Our closing is this Wednesday and hopefully (fingers crossed) everything will go smoothly.
I am financing the home in an interesting way. The house is financed with only 10% down but you don’t need any PMI. What is really wild is it is an interest only loan and acts like a line of credit. Each month you only have to pay straight simple interest. If you pay more than that, then the following month your interest payment has dropped. The wild part is that whatever principle you pay on the loan can be used as a line of credit! I love that option in case of an emergency.
We plan to refinance our primary residence and, depending on what is appraises for, we might be able to completely pay off the new home. I feel really great about knowing my parents have a comfortable and warm place to spend the winter. With the current state of the US economy, what with outrageous deficit spending, I fully expect inflation to hit and interest rates to soar. By locking in real-estate at a lower fixed rate I feel that is the safest way to invest our money right now anyway. To pay for the new house I have decided to simply stop contributing to 401k, a process that has seemed completely abstract to me anyway and instead put the money towards something that has the important side effect of helping my family.
The following two pictures are my Mom sitting comfortably in the living room of her new home the day after Thanksgiving.
So, after getting my parents moved in I had to get things ready for my two week long business trip. The first part of my trip was in San Francisco for the GameTech conference.
Right after Thanksgiving weekend I began my business trip. On Monday morning I hopped on an airplane and flew to San Francisco. My good friend John Oberschelp picked me up. We had a nice lunch where I took the following photograph of John.
After lunch we went to pick up John's boys, Hans and Mason, from school. The kids were excited because I had brought them presents. I try to be the 'good uncle' for the boys, which more or less works for Hans, but Mason consistently forgets me between each visit since, apparently, the memory of a child is about as porous as the memory of a 45 year old man. Mason is a very snappy dresser, and quite picky as well, so I was nervous that he might not like the gift I had bought him. I spent some time reminding Mason that he was 'part Saint Louis Cardinal' since John's family hails from St. Louis. He accepted that notion and both boys where happy with their Saint Louis Cardinals World Series t-shirts.
Their next gift was airplanes. We dropped Hans off at his choir practice and took Mason to the park to slowly destroy his airplane as it regressed from barely flying stealth fighter to not flying at all wingless rocket. We picked up our trash and headed home.
I had packed a bunch of 16mm film in my luggage which, apparently, the TSA thought looked a lot like bomb making equipment and thoroughly inspected. We set up John's movie projector in the living room and I showed some Christmas cartoons for the kids before their bed time.
John Oberschelp.
Hans, Mason, and their friend with an interesting name I can't remember.
Mason, a sharp dresser giving his best lady-killer smile.
On Tuesday I attended the GameTech conference. This conference is very exclusive. It costs $2,300 to attend for just four days. It is designed specifically for lead programmers in the game industry. People who attended, and spoke, included Charles Bloom (Oddworld), Chris Butcher (Halo), and Jay Stelly (Half Life). Needless to say I felt a bit out of my leauge; especially since I'm not a lead game programmer any more. I spoke on the last day about my open source effort to create physics content authoring tools and the launch of my new website.
The first two days were highly technical and very advanced presentations. The last two days were more practical, dealing with the real-world problems of creating stable products with a high iteration cycle. I was skeptical about the conference at first, but a true believer by the end. I hope I will be able to attend next year, because it was really an incredible conference.
Since I tend to multi-task I did a lot of web browsing while I was sitting listening to lectures. I had a notebook computer and wireless internet connection in the hotel. One thing I wasted time on was using the image search feature of Google. First I tried typing in my own name and found I had several hits on the first couple of pages. Mostly covers of games I have worked on our books I have written for. I then started randomly typing in women's first names. It is a curious past time.
The next thing I tried was exploring where I would retire to. I have this romantic notion about living in paradise instead of just visiting it. About once a year many Americans will go down to the Caribbean and visit paradise for just a few days. The warm air, the sun, the surf, going out on the ocean for a day trip, it is the greatest few days of your entire year. Then you hop an airplane and fly back to something cold, wet, and dreary and wait another year to be completely at rest for a few days. So, the notion occurs to me, what if you could live in paradise all of the time. Would you get sick of paradise? Maybe it is only paradise some of the time, and what with hurricanes and other problems, you would end up bored, restless and dissatisfied. Maybe you would yearn for the changing seasons, a warm fire, and a gentle snowfall? Maybe you always want what you don't have?
Nevertheless I explored the thought experiment of where would you go if you wanted to live in paradise? It turns out that any part of the gulf coast on US soil, other than in Florida, is not very appealing. I went to mapquest and started mouse clicking along the entire gulf coast of Texas and Louisiana. I zoomed in until I could see the individual city streets and then would Google search for housing in the area. Perhaps I am wrong, but there doesn't seem to be anything like Cancun along that part of the coast.
Meanwhile, there is plenty of paradise in Florida. Apparently I'm not the first person to figure this out. The price of property is scandalous and there is no such thing as a little bungalow that would let you wake up in the morning and listen to the surf while you have your morning cup of coffee and watch the sunrise. That 'little bungalow' will cost you many millions of dollars.
And, oh yeah, due to global warming, you now live in a war zone. Hurricanes that look like they were spawned by a computer simulation straight from "The Day After Tomorrow" will attack and ravage your gentle paradise lodging. You cannot get insurance for your paradise getaway and you spend portions of your life in disaster recovery, fear, and panic. Hmmm.... paradise has some flaws.
So, then I explored further away. I started clicking on other portions of paradise until I found a place called Belize. An English speaking nation on the Yucatan peninsula that is happy to invite wealthy Americans to retire there and obtain dual citizenship.
I've decide now that I don't want to live in paradise, I just want to try to rent it. So, the next time I have money and time, I plan to rent a place in Belize and live there for a month. I will report back to you on how this experiment turns out.
I would suggest you play the paradise game. It was a lot of fun. One of the things I did was I started clicking around the planet. Off to the right of South Africa is this large country/island called Madagascar. How very mysterious. However, that was far too large to interest me. I went out into the ocean further and saw dots of little islands. I continued to click on my screen zooming in and further in like I was exploring the Mandelbrot set. I found the island of Mauritius. I kept zooming in until I found the towns and highway systems. Next I Googled on Mauritius Island only to find that I was not the first person to discover this piece of Paradise.
There is a lot of Paradise on the planet earth and I now fully believe everyone has already found it before I have. If I ever achieve some level of financial independence in the future, after my kids are happily off to college, I would like to go exploring without being limited to mouse clicks on a map. I would like to actually travel to these places and absorb the culture and lifestyle that you can find there. Maybe, eventually, I’ll get bored of that and end up back in Missouri; leading the simple country life I was born into. Only time will tell. I’ll let you know how that turns out.
I just returned from a business trip that lasted almost two weeks. I took the day today off of work to recuperate from the whole event, get caught up on things at home, and readjust from jet leg. I'm not entirely sure I ever got myself properly time shifted when I was in Europe. I woke up so many times during the night each evening that I think I was still psychologically here in Saint Louis.
I will get back to the topic of my business trip, but not before I get up to date with the sporadic photographs I found in my digital camera when I transferred them today.
According to the camera the last thing that happened to me is that I attended a Halloween party at our neighbor’s house. Diane and Lenny Brown threw a great costume party the weekend before Halloween. It was very well attended and there were a lot of great costumes. For some reason I didn't take many pictures, so the quite stunning mermaid did not make it into the bunch.
Terry made our costumes by hand. I was Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, she was Arwen, and Alex was Frodo Baggins (of the shire). It was a great evening but I struggled with a dilemma which has continued to plague me for some time. I have quit drinking alcohol for about four months now. In general is isn't something I even think about any more. I don't have any real desire to drink and that has been a great relief. My weight loss program continues and I am down about 30 pounds. I look thinner and feel better. I particularly appreciate the fact that I have a much clearer head and don't waste time, money, or brain cells drinking any more.
All that said, I have a serious problem with social situations; especially something like a party where my friends are enjoying a beer and having a good time. I am a lot more 'fun' at a party if I have had a few drinks. And, without any, I am quite boring and feel like I don't belong. At the Halloween party I struggled very hard with the notion that I was taking this whole 'not drinking' thing to an extreme. Why do I make such a big deal out of not drinking 'a drop' for these past few months? What difference would a few beers in a social context make? Why couldn't I have a glass of wine at dinner or while out of town on business? The answer is I could. Drinking a few beers in a social situation wouldn’t kill me. I could go back the next day to not drinking anything at all.
However, the problem is that I have played this game before. I would quickly find appropriate 'social situations' to drink every single weekend. Once I slip down this slope it would be a short time before a glass of wine in the evenings would be ok too. Next thing you know I would be back to where I started, and I really just don't want that to happen again. It seems ridiculous to make such a big deal out of drinking one beer in a social situation, but I honestly believe that just that 'one beer' would inevitably become cases and cases in a few short weeks.
So, I suppose I will just be boring at parties for a while. My wife says I should be able to be just as fun as I ever was in a social situation without alcohol since, theoretically, I am the same person. Well, in theory that sounds good. I am really only hung up on this specific issue of alcohol. I have no such problem with other forms of relaxing elixirs. However, I have yet to find something that works. My Kava Kava experiment was a huge disappointment.
Here is Cole dressed up as a Ninja
Terry, Alex, and I in our costumes.
Mike setting up the tunes.
Diane and Lenny in their costumes.
Diane and Lenny making sure that their interface is aligned properly.
The next few pictures are from my trip to Toronto. I previously commented on this trip in the Blog. Toronto was awesome, and I look forward to returning for a visit in the future.
Toronto is an interesting mix of the new with the old. Here is a massive old church in the heart of the downtown. The photograph does not do it justice. It is almost surreal to see these modern skyscrapers surrounding this old world architecture.
This is the CN tower; the tallest free standing structure in the world. It is very cool to stand directly underneath it and look straight up. When you are in the downtown area is certainly does 'look tall', however the must stunning visual is when you enter the city. You see these very tall skyscrapers which are literally dwarfed by the CN tower shooting up towards the clouds.
Stan Melax and one of his programmer friends from when he worked at Bioware.
Here is a photograph from our team dinner with the COLLADA working group.
On Thanksgiving we went down my sisters new home to celebrate. We took a number of photographs but, apparently, the camera lens was smudged and hardly any of them turned out. We ended up with only these two photographs from the day.
This is a great photograph of Doug and my new nephew Job sleeping together on Thanksgiving day.
My sister Patty's new son, and my new nephew, Job.
I have had a new project for the last two months that has been taking a lot of my time; I have been trying to get a home for my parents to live in. My Mom and Dad have been living on a small rural farm outside of Hermann. They have been living there for the past ten years and each winter has been more difficult. The house uses a wood burning stove in the basement. My mother has a very difficult time walking now and uses a wheelchair or a walker. My dad has health problems as well and operating the wood stove in the winter is very difficult. I really felt it was going to be impossible for them to make it through another winter there.
About six weeks ago I put a contract on a lovely house that my cousin Larry helped me find. Everything was going fine with that house until the appraisal came in. The owners had put so much money into the home it just couldn’t appraise high enough to reflect the investment. This created a problem since it happened just a week before closing; which was supposed to be the day before Thanksgiving. That Saturday Terry and I called a realtor who showed us a number of properties. We found a very nice home in a subdivision outside of Jefferson City. The house was right next to a large Methodist Church and, the key feature, was that it was handicapped accessible. I nice little ranch home with easy access. The bathroom was wheelchair accessible as well; just perfect for my parents. That day we put a contract on the house. Then I had an idea. What if we offered to rent the property until closing? So we made this offer to. The seller accepted both offers!
The day after Thanksgiving I rented a U-haul truck and moved my parents in; just two days after we were supposed to close on the original home! Our closing is this Wednesday and hopefully (fingers crossed) everything will go smoothly.
I am financing the home in an interesting way. The house is financed with only 10% down but you don’t need any PMI. What is really wild is it is an interest only loan and acts like a line of credit. Each month you only have to pay straight simple interest. If you pay more than that, then the following month your interest payment has dropped. The wild part is that whatever principle you pay on the loan can be used as a line of credit! I love that option in case of an emergency.
We plan to refinance our primary residence and, depending on what is appraises for, we might be able to completely pay off the new home. I feel really great about knowing my parents have a comfortable and warm place to spend the winter. With the current state of the US economy, what with outrageous deficit spending, I fully expect inflation to hit and interest rates to soar. By locking in real-estate at a lower fixed rate I feel that is the safest way to invest our money right now anyway. To pay for the new house I have decided to simply stop contributing to 401k, a process that has seemed completely abstract to me anyway and instead put the money towards something that has the important side effect of helping my family.
The following two pictures are my Mom sitting comfortably in the living room of her new home the day after Thanksgiving.
So, after getting my parents moved in I had to get things ready for my two week long business trip. The first part of my trip was in San Francisco for the GameTech conference.
Right after Thanksgiving weekend I began my business trip. On Monday morning I hopped on an airplane and flew to San Francisco. My good friend John Oberschelp picked me up. We had a nice lunch where I took the following photograph of John.
After lunch we went to pick up John's boys, Hans and Mason, from school. The kids were excited because I had brought them presents. I try to be the 'good uncle' for the boys, which more or less works for Hans, but Mason consistently forgets me between each visit since, apparently, the memory of a child is about as porous as the memory of a 45 year old man. Mason is a very snappy dresser, and quite picky as well, so I was nervous that he might not like the gift I had bought him. I spent some time reminding Mason that he was 'part Saint Louis Cardinal' since John's family hails from St. Louis. He accepted that notion and both boys where happy with their Saint Louis Cardinals World Series t-shirts.
Their next gift was airplanes. We dropped Hans off at his choir practice and took Mason to the park to slowly destroy his airplane as it regressed from barely flying stealth fighter to not flying at all wingless rocket. We picked up our trash and headed home.
I had packed a bunch of 16mm film in my luggage which, apparently, the TSA thought looked a lot like bomb making equipment and thoroughly inspected. We set up John's movie projector in the living room and I showed some Christmas cartoons for the kids before their bed time.
John Oberschelp.
Hans, Mason, and their friend with an interesting name I can't remember.
Mason, a sharp dresser giving his best lady-killer smile.
On Tuesday I attended the GameTech conference. This conference is very exclusive. It costs $2,300 to attend for just four days. It is designed specifically for lead programmers in the game industry. People who attended, and spoke, included Charles Bloom (Oddworld), Chris Butcher (Halo), and Jay Stelly (Half Life). Needless to say I felt a bit out of my leauge; especially since I'm not a lead game programmer any more. I spoke on the last day about my open source effort to create physics content authoring tools and the launch of my new website.
The first two days were highly technical and very advanced presentations. The last two days were more practical, dealing with the real-world problems of creating stable products with a high iteration cycle. I was skeptical about the conference at first, but a true believer by the end. I hope I will be able to attend next year, because it was really an incredible conference.
Since I tend to multi-task I did a lot of web browsing while I was sitting listening to lectures. I had a notebook computer and wireless internet connection in the hotel. One thing I wasted time on was using the image search feature of Google. First I tried typing in my own name and found I had several hits on the first couple of pages. Mostly covers of games I have worked on our books I have written for. I then started randomly typing in women's first names. It is a curious past time.
The next thing I tried was exploring where I would retire to. I have this romantic notion about living in paradise instead of just visiting it. About once a year many Americans will go down to the Caribbean and visit paradise for just a few days. The warm air, the sun, the surf, going out on the ocean for a day trip, it is the greatest few days of your entire year. Then you hop an airplane and fly back to something cold, wet, and dreary and wait another year to be completely at rest for a few days. So, the notion occurs to me, what if you could live in paradise all of the time. Would you get sick of paradise? Maybe it is only paradise some of the time, and what with hurricanes and other problems, you would end up bored, restless and dissatisfied. Maybe you would yearn for the changing seasons, a warm fire, and a gentle snowfall? Maybe you always want what you don't have?
Nevertheless I explored the thought experiment of where would you go if you wanted to live in paradise? It turns out that any part of the gulf coast on US soil, other than in Florida, is not very appealing. I went to mapquest and started mouse clicking along the entire gulf coast of Texas and Louisiana. I zoomed in until I could see the individual city streets and then would Google search for housing in the area. Perhaps I am wrong, but there doesn't seem to be anything like Cancun along that part of the coast.
Meanwhile, there is plenty of paradise in Florida. Apparently I'm not the first person to figure this out. The price of property is scandalous and there is no such thing as a little bungalow that would let you wake up in the morning and listen to the surf while you have your morning cup of coffee and watch the sunrise. That 'little bungalow' will cost you many millions of dollars.
And, oh yeah, due to global warming, you now live in a war zone. Hurricanes that look like they were spawned by a computer simulation straight from "The Day After Tomorrow" will attack and ravage your gentle paradise lodging. You cannot get insurance for your paradise getaway and you spend portions of your life in disaster recovery, fear, and panic. Hmmm.... paradise has some flaws.
So, then I explored further away. I started clicking on other portions of paradise until I found a place called Belize. An English speaking nation on the Yucatan peninsula that is happy to invite wealthy Americans to retire there and obtain dual citizenship.
I've decide now that I don't want to live in paradise, I just want to try to rent it. So, the next time I have money and time, I plan to rent a place in Belize and live there for a month. I will report back to you on how this experiment turns out.
I would suggest you play the paradise game. It was a lot of fun. One of the things I did was I started clicking around the planet. Off to the right of South Africa is this large country/island called Madagascar. How very mysterious. However, that was far too large to interest me. I went out into the ocean further and saw dots of little islands. I continued to click on my screen zooming in and further in like I was exploring the Mandelbrot set. I found the island of Mauritius. I kept zooming in until I found the towns and highway systems. Next I Googled on Mauritius Island only to find that I was not the first person to discover this piece of Paradise.
There is a lot of Paradise on the planet earth and I now fully believe everyone has already found it before I have. If I ever achieve some level of financial independence in the future, after my kids are happily off to college, I would like to go exploring without being limited to mouse clicks on a map. I would like to actually travel to these places and absorb the culture and lifestyle that you can find there. Maybe, eventually, I’ll get bored of that and end up back in Missouri; leading the simple country life I was born into. Only time will tell. I’ll let you know how that turns out.
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