(Here's me being a mite heavy handed with the graphics compression software on the Mac. Next time, I'll be more generous with my disk space!)

May 29,2004

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They call Portland the Rose City and today we found out why.

Look- roses.

May23,2004

May 29,2004 May23,2004 May 22,2004 May 21.2004 May19,2004 May18,2004 May17,2004 May15,2004 May8,2004

Say one or two movies this month

Troy . What can I say? Well, it was big. And it had funeral pyres. When the plot got dull, they built another funeral pyre. And goodness me, they had to build a lot of them (strange to say, looking over landscape, not one tree in sight. So where do they get the woo- oh never mind). What else? It was total crap- except for the one-on-one fight scenes. And Brad Pitt got naked and sweaty which kept Helen happy. An Australian review said it best "I enjoyed the book better". At least it was better than Van Helsing (just say no) or Sinbad.

Troy was written by some guy called Homer.I looked him up on-line- quite famous really. Seems he's written 20 films including Oh Brother where art thou? . Hmm... must check out his other work.

Happily, other films were better:

• Triplets of Belleville (fantastic)
• Shrek2 (great)
• Scary Movie 3 (fun, forgettable),
• The Big Lebowski (Cohen Bros. on drugs- weird²; you don't watch it so much as smile as it passes by)
• Dummy (so good it could be Australian),
• the Cooler (interesting),
• Super size Me (I hope it changes the world)
• Queen of the Damned (sexy punk rock vampires).
• Weird Al's "Smells like nirvana" film clip. Punk rook kazoos. Great stuff.
• Calendar Girls (11 out of 10). Standard platform for Helen Mirren and Julia Waters to have some strong-woman monologues (Helen Mirren appearing before the National British Woman's Institute opens with the line "I hate plum jam"). But then it switched to this wonderful commentary on sincerity and America. Our heroine (Waters) deserts the nude photo shoot for the washing powder- reels away, demanding to find a shower to wash off the obscenity of American commercialism. She is chased by Mirren who wants her to come back and help her build an empire. Mirren and Waters stride round empty Hollywood sets, debating fame and how it effects the individual. And there are no simple answers- no trite conclusion, The camera leaves them there, with their the shadows bigger than themselves, surrounded by illusions. And I just thought "no one has ever done America that well for me before"

May 22,2004

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Lots of walking- laps of the oval across the way.

The new Mac is great. Loaded with music. Playing tunes all the time. Sort songs by "#times played" then playing them in increasing order. i.e. always hear stuff played less often. Wait, do you remember... cool! And there are TOYS. A decent apple menu look-alike (Fruitmenu). And cool screen savers!

So its not so much a Mac as an entertainment machine. When I get to WV, I can play DVDs on it, listen to music, etc etc. What a world.

May 21.2004

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Took a two hour walk down Salmon Creek.

May19,2004

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Car came back from the mechanics. $4000 worth of fixes! Insurance paid half but we were still up for $1600. The mechanics showed us the nearly-rusted-through brake drum they took off the old car. Shudder!

As soon as we said "we're from the east coast", they nodded sagely as if to say "we get a lot of refugees from the car eating acid they use out there when they salt the roads". Like the east coast is some alien land where poison rains from the sky.

Actually, driving away, we could not see or feel any difference in the car. Started wondering if that rusted brake drum is some standard part they show to every customer. Then our egos awoke and we decided that any mechanic that charges us thousands of dollars must be very good indeed. The alternative, that we'd just been FLEECED, was fiercely rejected and we drove on, poorer but prouder.

Speaking of proud, here's Helen at the end-of-year bash for the faculty of Arts.

May18,2004

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What a week. Bush's push for Mars woke up last Friday. They wanted proposals for 4 years, up to $15M. And they wanted 500 words on them by, er, this Friday. I love NASA, everything moves at two speeds- STOP or RUSH. There was not a spare phone line around NASA all week. Everyone ringing up everyone else. Much money madness. I lost count of how many grants I went in one. Four? Five? Which means that this week I wrote $60M to $75M of grants.

In the middle of all that, I walked into my head-of-school's office and said "how do i spend $5M". Cindy laughed- "That's the kind of question I like to hear!". Then we got puzzled0 how do you spend that much, given that hardware is so CHEAP? In the end, the only thing we could find worth that much was any building refurbishment. We've conquered silicon but civil engineering remains expensive.

Happily, just before that insanity started, I got the two NSF proposals in. Incredible feeling of success, frustration, and futility. The odds of success are low but I was so full of pride in having it together to get it together. Wrote one of the NSF grants with Jane Hayes- very professional researcher. And she knows how to work companies- make them sit up and beg and offer us data. Wow.

And in more important news, the Angel series finished this week:

• LAME ending. Just line up all the badest looking bad guys from the whole series and fight them. And the very end- overwhelming odds, our heroes covered in rain and blood, backs against the wall, draw their sword for their next fight. End ideas. Roll credits, fade to black. Exit, Tim screaming.
• Looking back on it, Angel's last words were cool- in character "Well," he says "for me, i want to slay that dragon". Course he went down fighting. What else could it be? Peace for angel? I don't think so. He can't love can't win, can only fight forever till and the only peace is the peace of a battle lost in a glorious fashion
• Course, it leaves often the question of sequels. Spike is still unambiguously alive. And he's a great character.
• Harmony's out-processing was quintessential angel. She worked out that he worked out that she would betray him. "How?" she demanded. "Loyalty", explained Angel, "not high on your list. Get out and stay out." "But can I have a reference?" she pleads. "Already on your desk" he says, ever struggling to help those beyond help.

May17,2004

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Been busy doing NSF proposals. Got a new religion: memoing. Seems to be the hook from the procedural to declarative. Handles forward chaining trivially. Etc. Cool stuff!

So happy too be doing a good proposal. Two months ago, this process sent me into an insane funk. Now I'm doing what good academics do and enjoying it. Why? What has changed? Maybe the sun is shining brighter. More likely I've adjusted to not being the center of the universe at SARP.

May15,2004

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Got an appointment letter today: associate professor at PSU. Variable FTE appointment which means I get paid if I get grants. Well, not quite. I get a little salary- enough to cover parking!

May8,2004

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Weekend spent in Eastern Washington at Moses Lake.

Tedious trip getting out there. Went to see Michelle in hospital and that left us... subdued. Her cancer is active again- new secondaries in her pancreas that resulted in her going bright orange. We saw her day 4 in a series of new tests. Each day, nil by mouth awaiting some procedure that they often called off. By Friday she was suffering more from her treatment that from her cancer. So hungry! I told bad jokes, she told me worse ones.

Anyway, leaving the hospital the automatic window went down and would not go up. So instead of leaving Portland at noon, like the original plan, we did not get away till around 5pm cause we had to find mechanics.

Long, tedious, drive followed playing Helen's iPod- which kept running out of power. In the end we opened up one of the lap tops and used it as a $2000 battery for our $200 iPod.

Moses Lake was a reconstruction project that was meant to create a farming paradise in dry Central Washington. I got the sense that it was only partially successful- that somewhere along the line the dream had turned a little sour.

We tried coming back through Hanford but it seems that the nuclear industry is closed on Saturdays. Best we could do was McDonalds near by.

On the way back, we complained about having to drive west at sunset through Columbia Gorge on I84. "Not again!", we moaned. Fortunately, spectacular defeats sophistication every time and we "oohed" and "aahed" for that last 90 minutes before hitting Portland.