Author: geoff

For family and friends only

We were babysitting Tommy this afternoon, and just after we’d fed him he seemed to want to roll over to take a look at something. He’s only seven weeks, so rolling is not yet supposed to be in his repertoire…. After he’d being trying to roll for about five minutes, I decided to capture a video clip using my Treo. It’s over two minutes long*, and Tommy kept going for several minutes after I’d finished. It should play in QuickTime; sorry about the quality. Check out the leg action around a minute into the clip – a natural soccer player, I’d say…!

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* And 2.6MB in size – don’t try this over a dial-up connection!

Howl's Moving Castle

howlposter.jpg

Yesterday I met up with Kate, Hannah, and a friend to see Howl’s Moving Castle at the Landmark in Kendall Square in Cambridge. It was delightful: another wonderful creation by Miyazaki. Normally I prefer to watch foreign animated films in the original language with subtitles*, but this was the English language version, and it worked very well. The element of the film that really grabbed me was the way in which Miyazaki plays with the age of the heroine Sophie, after she’s been turned into a 90 year old woman; he shows us the girl in the woman and the woman in the girl, and how the way she sees herself affects the way others see her.

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* I don’t like animated films in which the actors providing the voices are so distinctive that you see them rather than the animated character. The exception here was Billy Crystal, who provided the voice of Calcifer, an irrepressible fire demon. Instantly recognizable, but not intrusively so.

It was 20 years ago today…

Today’s the 20th anniversary of my arrival* at Sun – July 29, 1985. What title to choose for this blog entry – the obvious Beatles quote, or the Grateful Dead’s “What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been”? Obviously both apply. Anyway, it’s been a wonderful roller-coaster ride – and just as important, I’m still having a hell of a lot of fun.

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* I’ve already blogged about the circumstances, so I don’t need to repeat myself.

Thank you, thank you, thank you

I’m flying back to Boston tomorrow afternoon. When I made the reservation, United decided not to allow me to select my seats, so before going to bed this evening I decided to log in to their web site and see what the computer had chosen for me. 27E, a middle seat towards the rear. Ugh!

“I wonder if there’s any way to get to a seat selection screen,” I mused. “Perhaps via EasyCheckin?” I navigated through United’s awful maze of menus, and chose checkin. “Would you like to purchase an Economy Plus upgrade for $34?” Probably (holding my breath) – what seats are available? 14A?! A window! The last unclaimed window seat in the plane. Be still my beating heart! (Yes I know it’s an emergency exit row: that doesn’t bother me.) Selected, paid, confirmed. Oh joy!

Work, work, anime, work, work

Not a lot to blog about this week…. I’m in Broomfield, Colorado, doing a ton of interesting but completely unblogworthy work; when I get a chance, I’m reading… work-related books; even the evenings have been working sessions….

However, while waiting for some colleagues to join me for dinner, I dived into a video store and picked up a delightful anime DVD, Makoto Shinkai’s “The Place Promised in Our Early Days”. I’d seen the trailer for it on the Anime Network a couple of weeks ago, and was impressed by the luminous colour – somewhere between “Spirited Away” and “Haibane Renmei”. Some critics are calling the director “the new Miyazaki”. I wouldn’t go that far – he loses the pacing a bit in the final third of the film – but it’s visually stunning and really draws you into his strange alternate history. Recommended. (See also this glowing review.)

Mentoring

Our mistress of mentoring, Katy Dickinson, has just posted a status report on the FY06 SEED mentoring program: “we have 35 of the 71 SEED Engineering Mentoring participants for 2005-2006 matched with mentors.” I’m really proud of the fact that I’m going to be mentoring two of those participants, both based outside the US. As a non-US citizen, based 2700 miles from the company headquarters for all of my 20 years at Sun, I’ve always been especially sensitive to the issues that arise when you’re a remote worker: when your preferred keyboard layout is not “U.S.”; when you have to be able to exert influence without hanging out in the cafeteria in Menlo Park or Santa Clara; when you have to remind people to use fully-qualified domain names in their URLs, because not everybody is in the “.sfbay.sun.com” domain. I hope I can be of use to the folks I’m mentoring this year; I’m also really looking forward to learning from them. For me, mentoring is a two-way street.

Technical difficulties

We’re experiencing some technical difficulties on grommit, the system that hosts geoffarnold.com. Steve and I are scratching our heads; he’s taken the drastic step of rebooting grommit once so far, but problems are recurring in classic Heisenbug style. Browsing should be OK, but comment posting is likely to be iffy….

(Of course it remains to be seen if this post will make it through… but then if it didn’t, how would you know?)

Between the lakes (I guess)

Travelling again. I just flew from Boston to Denver, then drove over to Broomfield where Sun has a major campus. (The flight was full but uneventful; it was nice to fly United again so that I could listen in to channel 9.) As I set out from the airport, it turned very stormy and windy: I found myself driving through huge dust clouds, dodging tumbleweeds and construction marker cones, and holding my speed down below 45 so that I could stay in lane. I’m now in the Omni Interlocken hotel: as soon as I had checked in, someone offered me a glass of champagne. My kind of place… though I’m not sure why this complex was called “Interlocken”. It doesn’t look like Switzerland, and Google Maps doesn’t show any prominent lakes in the vicinity.

Standing in for Chris

Tommy christeningOur grandson Tommy’s christening was yesterday, so we headed up to Lynn. The plan was for Mark’s sister and Kate’s brother to be the grandparents (nicely symmetrical), but Chris was 2500 miles away getting packed. (He and Celeste are relocating from Seattle to the Oakland/Berkeley area this week.) So I had to stand in for Chris, which I was happy to do*. (Perhaps I should Photoshop Chris’s face into this picture!) And of course Tommy took it all in his stride….

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* The deacon conducting the christening was one of those loud, enthusiastic types that shouts out the prayers and the responses, so I didn’t have to profess any beliefs that I didn’t have. On the other hand, the priest who conducted the regular mass (and who appears in this photo) was a fascinating character; we had a long discussion with him afterwards. At one point when he was talking about how he’d like to conduct services, I pointed out that he had nearly 1700 years of imperial pretension to get rid of; he agreed that the problems he was thinking about really started with Constantine. Let’s hope Benedict’s authoritarianism doesn’t squeeze all of his imaginative aspirations out of him.