Elf Tracks

2008 at the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra

2009-01-02T12:46:00.000-08:00

November 29, 2008
Orpheum Theatre, Vancouver, BC
Conductor: Carlos Miguel Prieto

Verdi I vespri siciliani: overture
Awesome piece. If you were def you could still feel the music's energy and passion by virtue of Carlos' conducting!

Corey Cerovsek plays Sibelius Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47
Played with amazing skill and passion! Corey took time to chat with the audience about growing up here in Vancouver and the history of the Orpheum Theatre. A woman sitting next to me mentioned that she'd watched Corey perform throughout his career and that his family had been very encouraging from the start.

Bartok Concerto for Orchestra
Strange piece. Lots of great melodies that get prematurely truncated to explore other ideas then it ends. Did Bartok have ADHD?

October 25th, 2008
Orpheum Theatre, Vancouver, BC
Conductor: Pinchas Zukerman

Alexina Louie Infinite Sky with Birds
Pinchas Zukerman plays Mozart, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 3 in G Major
Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 in E minor

October 4th, 6th, 2008
Orpheum Theatre, Vancouver, BC
Conductor: Bramwell Tovey

This was my first symphony experience and turned out to be a great introduction. Since this concert I've been a regular at the VSO.

Ryan The Linearity of Light
Modern, interesting, but not (currently) my cup of tea.

Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Major
Hilary Hahn played this amazingly. I enjoyed this so much I bought another ticket to see the Monday performance as well. This has since become my favorite piece and a great version can be found here.

Berlioz Symphonie fantastique
It really is fantastic!

Tennis Notes

2008-01-19T23:51:00.001-08:00

Notes from recent tennis lessons

Serve

Toss should be single fluid motion
Align the toss with your body (don't toss wide or body can't get behind the serve)
Upon tossing keep tossing arm up pointing at ball, eyes on ball, keeping your head up
Hit 'over' the ball to get it to drop
Pronate to get more speed
Tuck left arm in holding stomach to aid balance
Don't over rotate, should land on left foot

Forehand

One preparation (rotate body and ready racket once in a single motion)
Elbows up, moving to ball (get 'around' the ball, right foot behind the ball)
Stop
Follow ball in with left hand (can you tell what brand of ball it is?)
Swing. Left arm kicks back and catches racket
Shorter contact with ball (brush up the ball), fast racket head speed
Front foot moves heal to toe as you step into the swing

Backhand

One preparation again but pinching the racket with your left pulling the racket up to your shoulder, elbows raised, racket grip turns in right hand until knuckles line up with racket frame.
Move to ball (small adjustments)
Stop
Swing low to high: drop the leading shoulder, extend your arm through the swing making contact in front (don't hit too late)
As right arm swings, extend left arm backward
Leading foot pointed towards target (weight moves back to front)

T60 and Eclipse

2007-01-26T22:59:00.000-08:00

The Password Manager captures the Ctrl+Shit+G key sequence on the IBM T60. Unfortunately this key sequence is the default command sequence for locating References within Eclipse. To disable Password Manager from intercepting this key sequence do the following:

Open the Client Security Solution from the start menu. Press the Manage logon passwords button. (swipe your finger) Then you'll find yourself in the Password Manager. Here click on Advanced. (swipe finger again!) Select keyboard settings and disable the default (Ctrl+Shift+G) keyboard binding.

access to native programs

2007-01-03T12:15:00.000-08:00

To get access to platform programs and associated icons:

Program.findProgram(extension).getImageData()

Beautiful Banff and Lake Louise

2006-11-11T11:50:00.000-08:00

I attended the CSCW 2006 conference in Banff (Alberta) last week. The conference was excellent. I had a chance to present Mylar and got a lot of excellent feedback. I was able to take a quick trip up to Lake Louise and (of course) brought my camera along. The lake itself is a beautiful emerald colour and is nestled among some magnificent mountains!

Assignment 1

2006-10-22T21:32:00.000-07:00

time out
[1/125th @ f8 (25mm)]

This weekend I set out to complete the first assignment of my photography course. This assignment has three sections: Difficult Scenes, Low Light, and Details. Three images are to be submitted for each category.

The suggested 'Difficult Scenes' include scenes with lower or higher than average lighting, light object on dark scene, dark object on light scene, back lit object. I found this portion of the assignment tricky because I usually don't go -looking- for these sorts of scenes. The picture above will be in my submission for this section since it meets the criteria of being a bright scene and the subject is backlit.

The heart of this image is the pattern/contrast of the stairs leading up to and the woman whose gesture completes image. The lens flare effectively gives depth to the image leading the eye from the high contrast skyline back to the subject (making a 'Z' with the stairs). The middle ground may be a bit busy and detract from the overall story of this image, though I like the dome. What do you think?

You can see from the metadata that this image has been cropped. It looks more like it was shot at 50mm rather than 25mm. Also, f8 gave me far too much depth of field so a little Gaussian blur was applied to the middle/background to emphasise the foreground/subject. Since contrast in this image reveals luminance, I punctuated this by conversion to black and white. See the original image here.

Here are some other back lit images taken for this assignment that probably won't make the final cut (but are a close second):

high voltage

gnarly

2006-10-15T15:09:00.000-07:00

I took this shot while visiting family in Campbell River on Vancouver Island.
- Line/texture of the rocks
- Boat masts and their reflection in the water

> iso 400 1/60s f11

2006-08-20T21:39:00.000-07:00

This is my first document (and blog post) published using Google's new online word processor writely.

2006-08-01T21:41:00.000-07:00

Mr. Fowler explains the benefits of Customer Affinity - "the interest and closeness that the developers have in the business problem that the software is addressing, and in the people who live in that business world"

See also Pleasing The Customer

2006-07-29T10:24:00.000-07:00

Here are some good online resources for working with menus, actions, global actions, retargetable actions etc in Eclipse:

Eclipse FAQs related to Actions Commands and Activities

In particular: here and here

Related Eclipse Articles:

Creating an Eclipse View

Contributing Actions to the Eclipse Workbench

2006-05-04T22:11:00.000-07:00

Here is a great post about how negativity is contagious.

2006-04-01T13:55:00.000-08:00

If you are getting connection 404 errors when trying to listing to internet radio stations the problem may be that your player isn't set up to handle the title information being sent. Here is the solution (enable title streaming) for xmms on linux.

2006-02-16T17:07:00.000-08:00

Code to load files within a plugin folder (Eclipse)

private File getLocalFile(String pluginRelativePath) {
try {
URL installURL = MyPlugin.getDefault().getBundle().getEntry(pluginRelativePath);
URL localURL = FileLocator.toFileURL(installURL);
return new File(localURL.getFile());
} catch (IOException e) {
return null;
}
}

2006-02-04T10:05:00.000-08:00

Some lessons (re)learned this week on the job.

Clean as you Code (Hoover) - Extract strings as CONSTANTS (using Hungarian Notation), rename variable names if unclear, pull out functions in the interest of succinctness and eliminate duplicate code (duplicate code can lead to unexpected behaviour and debugging nightmares). Perform these and other 'house cleaning' activities continuously.

Safety First - If you can't test it, you're walking the high-wire without a safety net. Go to great lengths (and time) to make code testable.

Refactor incrementally - When refactoring, divide the code into manageable chunks split at borders of functionality. Test after each change is complete - remember, Safety First.

Change completely - As you make changes to the code, make the change thoroughly and completely. Leaving legacy/extraneous methods and comments behind just adds to later confusion when you or others must debug/understand the code - be a Hoover.

2006

2006-01-04T21:03:00.000-08:00

2006 is here. Unfortunately for some, like Francis here, the year may not hold much promise. Francis is a street person I came across the other night on Broadway. He was sitting up against a bright white neon sign for warmth. The sign contained the brand names of high fashion beauty products. I traded him a meal at Dairy Queen for his portrait.

As for myself, I've just started work as a Science Researcher at UBC, so 2006 has started well.

2005-10-26T10:40:00.000-07:00

"But like it or not, most of our understanding of most of
the world is comparatively very close to the level of a sixyear-
old’s knowledge of trees: intuitive, emotional, or
practical rather than rigorous and informed."

- Mike Johnston The Empirical Photographer

2005-10-14T09:47:00.000-07:00

Intelligent Reaction

Here Adam Bosworth (VP Engineering at Google) discusses “Intelligent Reaction” – Reacting to client demands rather than “Intelligent Design” where engineers tell the customers what they will want.

race to the finish

2005-10-02T08:11:00.000-07:00

The UBC Day of the Longboat is underway. Rachel participated and her team placed very well. Unfortunately they were disqualified because they didn't have enough females on their team. :(

apple cobblestone

2005-09-24T14:53:00.000-07:00

Posted a few of my favorite photos taken on our honeymoon. I love the cobblestone streets throughout Portugal. The country is very beautiful and I look forward to returning some day soon.

Meaning

2005-09-23T23:39:00.000-07:00

Meaning, Ontology, Semantics, Tags, Labels....Great work.,

2005-09-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

Wireless networking on Linux. Notes to self...

iwconfig is THE program to use

"/sbin/iwpriv ath0 mode 2" will drop the DWL-G520 card down to 802.11b
I put this in the startup portion of /etc/init.d/networking on my Ubuntu machine. If somebody knows where this SHOULD go pleas post a comment. Thanks.

2005-09-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

Rachel and I were married on July 30, 2005! The wedding was beautiful and went without incident. Some photos can be found online here. When I get a moment I will be posting the photos we took on our honeymoon in Portugal!

2005-03-22T18:36:00.000-08:00

Capacitance Electronic Discs - they DO exist!

Many times in discussions about video technology I've described a video system that we had when I was a kid. Whenever I'd describe the system people would always say, "That is an old laser disk technology." I was starting to doubt myself when today I had the same conversation with my roommate and I figured it was time to put this debate to rest. So HERE it is, exhibit 'A'. The technology - Capacitance Electronic Disc. Our family had an RCA VideoDisk system that played these record sized disks (which in this model were housed within a large cartridge). The short story is that the system basically worked like a record player...but could play audio and video.

So there you have it. It wasn't some childhood Star Trek induced fantasy, they really exist(ed).

2005-01-23T17:29:00.000-08:00

Frank Spillers, a usability consultant, explains Progressive Disclosure.

2005-01-20T00:09:00.000-08:00

My three year old niece Keely playing beautiful music. :)