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I’ve been working on the final project for my OpenGL course since 9am today, and I have absolutely nothing new to show for it*.  Argh!

In happier news, on Friday night a burlesque troupe passed through Corvallis. Tim and I went out and caught the show, which was surprisingly good.  Maybe not in the same league as the Apocalypse in Coney Island show Twinkle and I saw at Bumbershoot (nowhere near the same theatrics), but better than anticipated.  Then I spent yesterday catching up with an old friend from Detroit who recently moved to Portland.  We went out to a bar near his place, then headed over to Rontom’s for Simone’s farewell party.  I’d brought my camera all the way for Corvallis, then forgot it in the trunk of my car when we left his apartment, so one photo from my phone is all I have from the night:

Phil (right) and his roommate Dom

[*: Except for a decreased tolerance for OpenGL in general, and increased respect for the people who use it well.]

Yesterday Randy invited me over to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with Twinkle’s family. I showed up early, expecting a chance to play some guitar with Randy before the cooking really began, but Ted and Judy had just arrived, so kitchen preparations were already in full swing. Judy showed me how to make a pie crust and mix up a pumpkin pie filling; while I’ve been cooking a lot lately, baking is still all new to me.  I pitched in where I could, then had a chance to chat with Ted a bit a watch the old animated version of The Lord of the Rings (which he’d seen when it was first introduced in theaters).

Dinner itself turned out wonderfully, with Okie pie (sp?), salad, mashed potatoes, stuffing, veggie gravy, and of course (for everyone else) ham and turkey.  That morning I’d cooked up a cauliflower and coconut milk stew as my own main dish, and a side dish for everyone else.  It seemed to go over pretty well, just spicy enough to have some flavor but not really overpowering.

After dinner we had apple and pumpkin pie while watching Kung Foo Panda (which I’d never seen, and was surprisingly good).  Before leaving, we took a couple of group photos that came out beautifully:

Twinkle's Family

Twinkle's Family Plus One

More photos from the day can be found in my photo gallery.

Today I finally screwed up the courage to go get my ears pierced.  I’ve had a terrifying fear of needles since 2nd grade, when I spent a day in a hospital having blood-work done to determine whether my short stature was the result of some medial problem, or just genetic.  I swear they took more blood out of me than I thought was inside of me to begin with, and ever since I’ve had a tendency to faint at sight of needles heading toward my flesh.  Not today, though!  The people at High Priestess were awesome and professional, and I hardly felt a thing.  Now I’m feeling like a bit of a tool for putting it off so long.  I went with simple little barbell jewelry with black stones for now; after they heal, we’ll see if I feel like something more adventurous.

Anyway, in the last month I’ve grown a scruffy beard, gotten a hair cut, gained glasses, and had barbells pushed through my ear lobes.  I think that deserves a photo.

New face!

Last week I went in for an eye exam, my first since I was probably 10 years old.  Shockingly, my eye sight has deteriorated a bit since then, so now I’m sporting a lovely pair of glasses.  I keep wanting to take them off every time I come in from outdoors, thinking they’re sunglasses and suddenly the room will be brighter, but no–the room just gets fuzzier, and then I feel stupid and put my glasses back on.  On the up-side, I can see textures again!  Like, the wall behind my computer?  It’s bumpy, and now I know.  And my couch?  It’s actually woven out of tiny threads, and not the singular red mass I’d previously thought it to be.  So that’s cool.  Also, driving at night is no longer an exercise of guessing where the lanes are or what road signs say.  All in all, definitely an improvement.  I’ve been getting headaches toward the end of the day, but a friend who also discovered the need for glasses later her life reassured me that such things are normal and will go away in time.

This morning I went in for my first consultation with a dentist in Corvallis.  Again, I haven’t been to one in a while (not so bad as with the eye doctor, I think it’s only been two years since I’ve had a teeth-cleaning), so this was very much needed.  The good news: only one cavity, and it’s not a bad one.  Less-good news: my wisdom teeth don’t *need* to come out, but eventually they will make it too hard to clean my molars, and that will be inviting all sorts of horrid pain on my future self.  I asked him, “How soon?” and he replied, “Don’t wait 10 years.”  Good advice.  My mom had previously mentioned that if they need to come out, do it while I’m back in Michigan for the holidays so that my family can bring me soft foods and fetch books and movies for me, but with the situation appearing less dire, I think I’ll wait a few months.  If Twinkle’s offer still stands to coddle me after the operation, I’ll take her up on it in spring.  I was also glad to hear that in his professional opinion, since I have a tiny, tiny mouth and an over-reactive gag reflex, I should really be put to sleep for the operation; trying to do it while I’m awake, no matter how heavily sedated, could lead to complications.  I know most insurance companies don’t cover a general for something like wisdom-tooth extraction, but if there’s a medical reason for it, I might be able to get them to pay for it.

I just won (does it count as “winning” if I have to pay for it?) a Roomba on eBay!  Hillarious cat-and-Roomba photos hopefully to follow…

[also, I can stop sweeping my flipping hardwood floors everyday.  Who knew carpets hid so much dust?!?!]

Today I finished working out the kinks in my new photo album workflow.  The result: all of my photo sets since I moved to Corvallis are now available on the site’s Photography section.  I’m keeping the Flickr site for my best photography, but I’ve had all of these images sitting in Lightroom that I suspect friends would love copies of, so now they’re available.

For the curious, I do all of my photo editing in Adobe Lightroom (and occasionally Photoshop).  Using a heavily-modified version of the TTG Shadowbox Gallery Template, I export each album and upload the static HTML and image files to my server.  Nothing terribly exciting there, but now it gets interesting.  I wanted to have an index page that automatically shows all of my galleries, displaying the most recent first.  TTG supplies an XML AutoIndex module that does nearly everything I want, so I integrated that as my index page and hacked the PHP scripts to include better date and description information.  Finally, I wanted to provide an RSS feed of my photo albums, so people won’t need to constantly visit my website if they’re looking for new photos.  A quick modification to the XML AutoIndex script did the trick, so now you can subscribe to an Atom feed of my photo albums!

Everything seems to be working fine for my on Firefox and Safari.  If anyone notices problems with the photo albums or feed, please let me know.

Last year I moved 2,500 miles away from everyone and everything I’d ever known.  It’s been a wild ride of making new friends, trying to find my place in grad school, gaining and losing a girlfriend, and anxiety about what comes next.  Both this year and last, the ramp up to Thanksgiving has been the hardest time to be away from home.  I can fly home a couple of weeks in December, but I can’t justify a second plane ticket just for the Thanksgiving weekend.

Last year Twinkle saved me from a lonely shut-in weekend and invited me to her family’s dinner, and kept inviting me back daily, the entire time her family was in town.  Simply spending evenings watching old movies with her dad and step-mom made me feel more welcome and loved than I can adequately describe; I’d made friends, but didn’t realize how hard it would hit me when they all left for the holiday and I stayed behind.  Having a place to go and people to visit during that time was the best balm for homesickness I could have asked for.

Even without Twink around this year, her brother repeated the invitation, and I’m really looking forward to it.  Her family is wonderful, and it’ll be great to spend the holiday with them.  He even asked me to drop by early with my guitar so that could jam a little bit–slightly intimidating, since I’ve heard him play and he’s amazing, but it should be good fun.  I have to admit, however, that this feels a little bittersweet; depending on where things go with our relationship (which even I can’t truthfully describe right now), I have the sense that this may be the last time I really feel like a part of her family.  I hope that’s not the case; I don’t want to have found such a loving family only to lose them so swiftly.

Anyway, in contrast to last year, Will and Katie hosted a friend-Thanksgiving this year.  They held it tonight, before people began to leave town, so we were all able to get together for a pot-luck (in the best sense of pot-luck, no mysterious goo here) dinner, drinks, games, and gossip.  A wonderful idea, and they pulled it off perfectly.  It feels great to know that in just a year, I’ve met such an amazing group of people.  I suspect for most of them, it’s mostly another chance to socialize and enjoy a Saturday night, but for the transplants in our group, it really helps to make the west coast feel a bit more like home.

Twinkle introduced me to the wonders of leeks last year, and I keep finding new ways to incorporate them into my cooking.  First (since this was all new to me), a leek is a vegetable related to the onion, but tends to be more prominent in a dish’s flavor than if the chef had used onions instead.  I also find the texture to be more satisfying, but that’s just personal preference.  You can easily chop them up into strips and saute them with some garlic in butter, but I’ve lately found that I like to just get them sizzling for a minute or two, then add some salt and pepper, drop the heat to a simmer, and sweat them until they’re slightly translucent.

Yesterday I added some leeks prepared as above to a bottled pasta sauce with fabulous results.  They add a nice texture to the pasta dish (penne, in this case), and provide some extra variety to the flavor of the sauce.  For a quick side dish, you can saute the leeks until they just begin to brown, then splash in a bit of white wine and stir in some other vegetables (peas or zucchini work well), boil off the wine, and serve!

Yesterday I was notified that my research group’s submission to IUI’09 was accepted!  This was the first research study and resulting publication that I led, and I’d honestly not been expecting it to be accepted on the first try.  So yay!  That’s two publications in a year and half–not a bad start, I suppose   The paper detailed a formative study of barriers end users encounter when attempting to “fix” [i.e. debug] machine-learned programs, like junk mail filters or hand-writing recognizers.  These sorts of machine-learned programs are becoming increasingly common in software, and since they need to tailor themselves to a particular user’s needs, that end user is the only person available to debug them if they misbehave.  It’s really a whole new research field that can build upon existing data about end-user programmers debugging in more traditional environments, like Microsoft Excel, but the machine-learned component is a significant change from such traditional models of source code.

Now we have three weeks to address the reviewers’ comments and get a camera-ready version to the conference organizers.  The conference itself is in Florida this February, so with a little luck, I might be able to afford to go and present the results in person

This morning I wandered down to the second-to-last Corvallis farmer’s market of the year.  My dad had discovered this wonderful market last August, but I didn’t see it for myself until Twinkle took me last spring.  In warmer weather it’s a wonderful, bustling area of fresh produce, live music, and all sorts of other interestingness.  Today you could tell that most of the vendors have packed up shop for the year, the crowd was sparse and the only musicians were a harpsichordist and a sad old man playing his violin.  I found some good-looking leeks, potatoes, and apples, but not much else.

Over the summer, Twinkle and I would get fresh lemonade, soysage, and eggs, and sit and people-watch while eating breakfast on a park bench, but those vendors are gone for the winter.  I tried to get coffee, but the Espresso machine broke.  The honey-stick lady we frequented was gone, as was the wonderful cheese vendor.  Next weekend the market officially closes.  At least when it re-opens in April, Twinkle will be back to enjoy it with.