brainwagon

Eighteen long years ago was my first day at Pixar (before it was Pixar Animation Studios). Today, I’m celebrating by taking a bunch of my fellow Pixarians out for pizza and general good times. According to wikipedia, it was also the day that the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party agreed to give up its monopoly power, and the Soviet Union collapsed. Other events from that month: Nelson Mandela was released from Victor Verster Prison. Exxon was indicted on five criminal counts for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson. An agreement was reached to reunify Germany.

I was 25, about the same age as many of the kids I work with these days. I’ve spent nearly half of my life working here, and I must admit, through trials and tribulations, ups and downs, it remains a really, really terrific place to work, and I have been truly blessed with getting able to work with some of the most talented and nice people on projects that are truly amazing achievements in movie making.

To any ex-Pixarians I’ve worked with who have moved on, I salute you too.

Sometimes coming to work at Pixar surprises you with odd sights. Today, it was this Porsche Carrera in our atrium, which had been modified to be Sally, one of the characters from our upcoming summer movie release Cars. My suggestion that employees should be given one (sans modification if it would reduce the cost, I’m a considerate guy) is, in their words “undergoing all the review the suggestion deserves”.

[tags]Pixar,Cars,Porsche,Sally[/tags]

Addendum: Sorry for the small picture size, but that’s all the pixels my camera phone can really put out.

Well, those generous guys at Industrial Light and Magic decided to send us cookies to help us celebrate Pixar’s 20 year anniversary. They were all printed with images of Yoda. Cool! Thanks guys!

[tags]Pixar,ILM,Cookies[/tags]

Addendum: These guys apparently made the cookies.

It’s now 4:04AM on Monday, and I’m up, typing on my laptop.

Not by choice, mind you. Like most people, I have 40 hours to put in over the next week, and like most people I don’t get enough sleep as it is. But Scrappy is a handful during the night.

You see, he’s still really a feral cat. This means two things:

1. He’s active at night.
2. He wants to be outside. A lot.

I’m supposed to keep him quiet and not have any serious exercise, but I’m also supposed to keep him inside. These two goals are simply not compatible. I went to bed about midnight, and slept until about 1:30AM. Then, he started banging his head against my bedroom door. So, I placed him in the downstairs bathroom. Whereupon he urinated all over everything, tore stuff off the wall, and generally had every panic reaction you could imagine.

Now, it’s 4:08AM, and while I’m downstairs on the couch, he seems content (for the moment) to rest at the foot of the couch. I’m hoping it lasts for a couple of hours. Maybe I’ll try to learn something more about Asterisk, and pray for the sun to come up.

I’m supposed to take him to the vet at 9:00. They are supposed to remove his drains and then I can take him home, but frankly if I can’t let him go outside, I’m going to have to have him boarded for a couple of days, for his sanity and mine.

Okay, just for mine really. He’s now crying once every couple of minutes, and the funny thing is, I understand exactly. Neither of us is having the night that we want to. I hope he’s better soon.

Well, Scrappy did end up spending the night at the vets. They decided to anesthetize him, install a drain and then make him suffer the indignity of wearing a lampshade on his head for the next three days. On Monday, I’ll have to take him back to have the drain removed, and then in a week all the stitches will come out. Eeesh. Poor little guy. The things we do for our pets.

[tags]Scrappy,Cat[/tags]

Fifteen years ago today was my official hire date at Pixar Animation Studios. Because nobody works for a company for fifteen years anymore, I thought it would be nice to commemorate the occasion by asking some of the people that I have enjoyed working with over the years out to lunch at Hahn’s Hibachi, a Korean barbecue place in Jack London Square. I didn’t bring a camera, but Tom was nice enough to snap this picture of the aftermath.

I’m not the kind of person who spends a great deal of time looking toward the past, but I think it’s good to sit back and consider where you’ve been. I’ve been a part of something really terrific, working for the premier animation company in the world, with some of the best people in the world. To all who showed up, thanks for making the first fifteen years of work enjoyable, exciting, challenging and fun.

I was asked to think of what my greatest Pixar moment was, and it really is hard to pick, since there have been so many. Somewhat arbitrarilly, and yet totally worthy, I chose Jen’s invention of “Digital Dailies Bingo” during production for The Incredibles. This neatly solved the problem of preserving the sanity (what little we may have initially possessed) of the rendering team during a challenging production by allowing us to turn the adversity of having shots kicked back for fixes into a game. Inspired team-building brilliance!

Other big ones:

1. Everything related to Toy Story. The first time I ever wore a tuxedo. My first premiere. The first time I ever saw my name in the credits.
2. Watching h52, the “Hundred Mile Dash” sequence in The Incredibles for the first time in a theater, and listening to everyone cheer at how cool it looks. I think the motion blur did work out really well.
3. Having a $1400 dinner tab for four or five people in Washington D.C. on Motorola as part of the production of Cosmic Voyage. It’s a pity they didn’t spend more money on rendercheck: they managed to misspell both my name and Don’s.
4. Just the day-to-day work of working on Pixar’s RenderMan product, with some very talented software engineers.

To all who showed up to help me celebrate, thanks a bunch for fifteen terrific years.

[tags]Pixar[/tags]

Addendum: Flicker-ized for your enjoyment.

Yesterday afternoon, I got a phone call from my son who informed me that the virus scanner on his Windows box was disabled, and that it would no longer run. When I got home to check it out, I found that my laptop, which used the identical virus scanner (Computer Associates EZ Antivirus) had been similarly afflicted. I ended up uninstalling EZ Antivirus (why would you use antivirus software that got disabled by a virus) and installed Norton’s on my laptop and F-Secure on my son’s machine, scanned them, and all seems better.

My wife system which runs McAffee seemed to be unaffected. I have another machine which wasn’t powered on and was running Nortons, which similarly seems to be unaffected.

Thanks Microsoft. Thanks Computer Associates. Nice system you’ve got there.

Google Virus News

[tags]Microsoft,Computer Associates,Virus,Nyxem,Blackworm[/tags]

Well, I’d hoped to announce the results of some of my experimentation with Asterisk, but the weekend didn’t conspire with me very well. My mom ended up in the hospital (she’s back out, but it was worrisome) and I was nursing a borderline migraine most of the weekend. Yesterday I ate most of a pound of chocolate M&Ms (first time I’ve done that in two years, ever since I started Weight Watchers) and was generally not very pleasant to be around. Today, I feel like crap, but it’s back to the sugar mines of Pixar Disney…

I’m glad Mom’s out of the hospital and feeling better, but Mondays still suck.

Well, today I was off at the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference at the SF Marriot.  I’m mostly an interested bystander of the VOIP universe, but have done some experiments and are likely to be doing more in the near future, and I thought it was a good place to collect a book on Asterisk and generally learn a bit more about VOIP technology and cellular phones.   I was also trying to put my brain in the entrepaneur/venture capital space, and understand what that’s all about.  I’m not sure I succeeded, but I was having a pretty good time, when all of a sudden people started coming up to me and congratulating me.   Yep, Pixar bought Disney.  Or something like that.   This move had been rumored for quite some time, so it wasn’t unexpected, but it was kind of annoying that it came on a day I had taken off to go do something else.   I decided to bug out a bit early and sample the buzz back and work, and get the scoop, but I got back at around 6:00, so lots of people had left.  But my card key still works, so I guess they are going to keep me, and my Pixar stock is 2.3 shares of Disney stock.

I’m burned out for now, so if you want to find out about some of the goings on at eTel, try  Dan’s blog for now, and I’ll try to get up some of my own impressions later, or maybe tomorrow.

[tags]Pixar,Disney,eTel,Asterisk,Flutterby![/tags]

While i was home visiting my mom, we spent some time going through my mom’s collection of old photographs. We ran across this old Polaroid of myself (left) and my brother Kevin in Christmas of 1980. I was sixteen years old, and had saved for the better part of a year to get about three hundred dollars to buy this computer, and my mom kicked in the last of the money as a Christmas present. This little gem had 16K of memory, and I couldn’t afford any storage device (not even tape at the time), but I think I see the box for the Atari Basic cartridge in the foreground, so I must have sprung for that. I also see in the little shelf above my desk what appear to be prescription bottles, but are in fact small bottles of paints (I used to paint miniatures for Dungeons and Dragons). I also remember the Moosehead beer shirt that I am wearing: Kevin gave that to me, and I wore it alot, most of the way through my undergraduate years at college.

Just thought I’d share this blast from the past. Oh, and here’s a bigger scan showing more details.

There is an old joke about what men are good for: the punch line reads something like killing spiders, barbecue and oil changes.   I’d like to pretend that I’m a handy person, but when the truth comes right down to it, I pretty much consider myself a software guy, not a hardware guy.   Still, I think the software mentality teaches you to think about debugging in a more general sense, and occasionally it pays off.

Like today.  I mentioned briefly that my right windshield wiper had failed during my trip to Truckee over New Years.   While occasionally the wiper would twitch, it wouldn’t move very regularly, but would occasionally catch and flop all the way over to the left side, and then get in the way of the left wiper blade.   I was going to take it into a garage to have them charge me $50, but as I was waiting for my wife to get showered, I decided to give it a couple of minutes of my own attention.

I felt that it must be something minor, rather than a motor failure.  Had the motor failed, it would have been likely been catastrophic: the wiper blade wouldn’t twitch at all.  I felt it must have been in some part of the linkage that connects the wiper motor.  I had no idea what that linkage might be, having never really examined this stuff before, but it was a working hypothesis.

I marched out to the car, undid the rubber bands that Carmen had set up to keep the blades from flopping around during our trip home (while still moving I might add, a splendid McGyver moment for her) and stared at it for a moment.  I picked up the blade and tried to move it along its normal motion.  It moved easily, freely.   I then did the same to the one that worked.   It didn’t move at all.  Ahah!  I next popped the small plastic cap off at the base of the wiper arm, revealing a 5/8 inch nut.  It was finger loose.  Ahah!   Back to find a 5/8 socket.   A simple bit of tightening, and it worked.  For a minute.   Then it was loose again.   This time I really tightened it.  And voila!  It appears to function.

Saved myself a trip to the garage and some annoyingly large amount of money for a simple bolt tightening.

I feel useful today.

Whew. Back from my “vacation”.

I-80 was open earlier today leaving Truckee, but it took 2 hours to go 4 miles to the area where cars were screened for tire chains/4WD. My Expedition is of course the latter and had no trouble navigating the icy conditions through the Donner Pass, but was buffetted by the high winds which made the overall trip a little less than completely fun. As I finally began the long downhill slope to Sacramento, I breathed a bit of a sigh of relief, but then managed to get myself all worked up again as I neared Sacremento. When I crossed into Yolo county, the winds really picked up and there was significant flooding in the valley floor: in Fairfield on both sides of the highway you could see telephone poles sticking out of vast expanses of water where the river had jumped its banks. The weather was ugly (I’m beginning to use that word far too much lately) with blinding rain and heavy winds. Yuck. The ride which takes three hours in good weather took us nearly six and a half today. I also noted that my car’s right wiper has malfunctioned, so I need to look at that tomorrow. When I got home and collected my mail I found that there was no bills, and smiled a little, but then found a note stuck to my door by one of my neighbors about five housses down indicating that they had had a mudslide today, and that we should check our drainage to make sure that water was flowing properly. It was already after dark, but I hiked up the hill to check the two drainage culverts, both of which seemed to be be reasonably open and clear of debris, and water seemed to be flowing nicely. The piece of my fence that has blown down before blew down again though. I’ll have to trek up there and fix it in the next day or so.

All in all, virtually every time I got in a car in this vacation I ran into some brutal, inclement weather. The vacation was largely fun, but I’m exhausted. It will be good to get back to work and be able to relax.

Happy New Year everyone!

Addendum: Here’s a photo of I-80 the day before I drove on it. That would not have been fun at all.

It’s ugly!

I’m spending some time in Truckee, CA with some of my old college chums, and currently we are getting hammered by rain and wind gusting to 60mph. I-80 is reportedly going to be closed due to landslides for the next two days at least, and the furnace in the place we are staying is out because water from flooding has filled the crawlspace and the furnace is now in standing water.

Exciting!

We are running the gas fireplace full bore, and the temperature is holding a lovely 58 degrees, but the temperature is supposed to drop down to something like 23 tonight. Still, we aren’t going anywhere anytime fast, so I think hot coffee and the like will be the order of the day, as well as lots of sweaters.

Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble is apparently over in Paris, and decided to blog about the stuff he did in Paris, of which he only thought the Musee D’Orsay sufficiently interesting to mention, probably because their IT system apparently runs Windows XP.

Get some soul, man.

When Carmen and I went there for our anniversary back in 2003, we spent the entire day in the Musee D’Orsay, and at no time did we even think to ask what operating system their IT system runs. It just never came up.

Here is a by-no-means-comprehensive list of some of the things that this geek did while in Paris:

1. Day one: Got in fairly late, but decided to go out for a midnight supper. Did a big circle from our hotel near the Place de la Concorde, all the way down to the Louvre and back. Caught some nice views of the Eiffel Tower lit up. Back to bed.
2. Day two: Cafe au lait and pain au chocolat (forgive my spelling, it’s been a while since I took French, and my ability to type accents in HTML is minimal) for breakfast, er, petit dejuener. Some churches, the double decker buses, visited the Musee de la Marine, and then strolled to the Eiffel Tower via the Champs des Mars. Didn’t bother going up, but had a hot dog at the park underneath. Visited Napoleon’s tomb, and Les Invalides. Then, back to the hotel, where we thought we’d catch a quick nap before going out for dinner. We woke up around 10:00pm. Found out that the restaurant Au Pied de Cochon was still open, so took the Metro down to the station near Ste. Eustace, before wandering over to munch on a dinner of pigs feet (which seemed appropriate, given the restaurant), some real french onion soup, what was probably a laughable wine selection, and a terrific desert. When we got out, it was too late for the Metro, so we walked back to the Place de Concorde.

That was the first day and a half. We were there for a week. We saw the Louvre, including an exhibit on Michaelangelo and Da Vinci. We killed a day at the Musee D’Orsay, skipping their IT department, but did stop to have lunch in their “cafeteria”. We had dinner at Gourmard, the second most expensive restaurant I’ve ever been to, and worth every penny. We took an early morning train to Versaille, where we snapped some fun pics of us in the Hall of Mirrors. We fed birds that flocked to our table in Montmartre as we ate escargot, just because hell, we were in Paris. We went to the Paris airshow, walked around the Fete de la Musique, scaled the Eiffel Tower at sunset, took boatrides on the Seine, took pictures of Notre Dame, Sacre Couer, and other lesser known places. We visited Les Jardins de Luxembourg, and just basked in the late sun. We mastered the Paris Metro, and just all in all had a blast.

Didn’t really think much about blogging.

Sometimes, you just have to unplug, at least, until you get back and post all the pictures to make other people jealous.

That’s what this geek did in Paris. I’d love to go back.

I always seem to get sick around the holidays. Starting yesterday afternoon, my throat started getting sore, by the time I was home I had the chills, bodyaches and general lassitude (annoying, given that there is lots of cleaning and cooking to do). It’s now 5:11AM, and I’m up with a dry cough, slurping back a couple of liters of water, taking some ibuprofen, and hoping that I begin to feel good enough so that I don’t keep waking my poor wife up. I’m now working on paring back my holiday plans to levels that won’t kill me.

Two rooms to clean, I’ll let Roomba vacuum (that doesn’t suck), I need to mix up the turkey brine, and get the sweet potatoes cooked and peeled. Then, I will sleep. A lot.