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.

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.

Sorry to both all of my loyal readers, but I’ve been off with the family enjoying a brief vacation stint at Disneyland. We took the opportunity to see the 50th anniversary celebrations there prior to this week’s SIGGRAPH conference. Both the wife and son are now back in the Bay Area, while I go off and enjoy the week’s conference.

I got in around noon today, and got checked into my hotel room and then trudged down Figueroa to the Convention Center to pick up my registration. Courtesy of their new barcoded acceptance letters, I merely had to wave a letter under a laser scanner, click OK and within 30 seconds, my badge was printed. Not bad, and beats the long lines of years past. I also picked up a Boston 2006 pin to clip onto my badge. Boston will be cool. SIGGRAPH was last in Boston in 1989, which was also my first SIGGRAPH conference. I think I’ll go. 🙂

It’s actually been about five years since I last went to SIGGRAPH. A combination of the dotcom bust, and various internal jugglings and departures made it seem un-fun to go for a number of years, so I just stopped going. It’s kind of nice to be back, although it doesn’t really seem to have changed much, except for the possibility that people are getting younger (or, more likely, I’m getting older in a field dominated by the young and enthusiastic).

I made a brief jaunt through the art show galleries. The coolest thing I saw was Sustainable: an installation art piece which consisted of a number of tanks of water, each with a gong suspended inside and a pair of hammers controlled by solenoids which bonked them in a periodic fashion. Each tank also contained a series of water level sensors, and they each can pump water from their own tank to the one on the right. Internally, they maintain some notion of how much water they “need”, and will vent or not depending on some calculation they internally perform. As the water level rises and falls, the pitch and falloff of each gong is modified. The ensemble of them creates an interesting, continuously varying cadence which I found pleasing. I would have snapped my own pictures of it, but I was immediately accosted by the resident security droid who informed me that photography wasn’t permitted, despite the presence of the artist himself, who assured me that he didn’t mind.

Anyway, check it out, it was pretty cool.

Tomorrow will be a busy day. I should be there for the first paper session, and have animation theater tickets for tomorrow night, so it should be a long day. Tonight, I trudged over toward the Wilshire Grand, and had a sweet sausage pizza at the California Pizza Kitchen. You can spot the SIGGRAPH attendees: they all look the same to me. More on that some other time.

Today’s T-shirt comes from a simpler time, a time when computers had only eight bits, and all colors were simple primaries. It is just beginning to dawn on me that things which are retro are actually the stuff from my teen years.