iPhone!!!!

I'm writing this from my new iPhone! It's pretty cool, I really do feel like it is the real web on my phone. I should be paying attention to the presentation right now but I hope you can understand why I'm not.

In other news, I have something cool planned for tanya on her birthday but it is a secret. Then I go to visit friends in Colorado and then I'm off to panama! Exciting times.

K, press over, back to work ( I hope)

I'm going to Panama!

I just bought tickets to Panama! I'm super excited, and that brings me one step closer to fulfilling my new years goals. I'll be gone for 16 days, which is the longest amount of time of not working since my senior year in high school. Now I need to brush up on spanish, find a digital camera, and dream about beaches. Email me your address if you want a post card!

Russian Party

Last Memorial day I went to Tanya's Mom's birthday. It was really good, there was so much food. Every time I finished something, someone offered (or simply spooned onto my plate) something new I had never seen before. Caviar, soup made with gelatin so it's eaten like pie, stuffed fish, hand picked mushrooms, Russian salad, spiced chicken, duck liver, and so much more I can't even describe the ingredients but it was delicious.

After an hour of eating I was getting pretty full and I told Tanya it was about time I slowed down to save room for cake. She asked me, “What about the '0Hot meal'?” Yes, we had been eating for an hour and there was a whole 'nother meal coming. And then fruit. And then Desert. And then Cake. And all throughout, wine and vodka. There were 30+ people present who ate more than any Thanksgiving meal I've ever seen and yet there was still plate upon plate of leftovers. People sang, gave toasts, performed acrobatics and I understood none of it but enjoyed it none the less.

Russian's know how to party.

Quick update: I'm gearing up for WWDC, where I will be speaking! So if you're coming to the 'dub this year, come to session 415 "Mastering the Quartz Composer editor".

Other than that, life is great and there's not much to report. I'm looking at vacation options so if you have any ideas, let me know.

H-1B Visa Cap Reached in One Day

One of the cool things about living in the silicon valley is meeting all sorts of people. I have friends from foreign countries like Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, China, Iran, France, Poland, Philippines and Fort Collins. Most are citizens, but some rely on work visas to be here. At least two of my friends are affected by this:www.crn.com/it-channel/198800456.

My co-worker from France and one of my salsa friends from Poland have a 1:3 chance that they will not get a visa to stay, even though they have jobs and contribute to the economy of the United States. It's pretty sad what Sept. 11 did to this country, and that we may loose some real talent if they can't work here.

Best of luck to you, Kevin and Ania (and anyone else affected by this)

Standup

I've done a couple things in the last week and I think I'm pretty satisfied with my most difficult goal, perform something in public. I've made two presentations at work, one to a large group (about 50) and one to half a dozen of the most important people in software engineering at Apple. I was nerveous for both but pulled it off nicely. Then last night I went to the Standford comedy club and got to participate in an improv skit with comedian Jimmy Gun. My mind froze up and I couldn't remember how Sleeping Beauty started but I did get up, got some laughs and had a good time.

In other news, I went to a Cake concert last week and it was fun. As a band, they don't have a very good live show. However, if I ever have a chance to see Honeycut again live I will certainly do so. The music was good, but the way those guys dance just makes you want to get up and join (mostly because it's so bad you could never do worse)

Oh and I'm moving this weekend. :)

What's your favorite color?

That's a hard question. I like vibrant colors, like corn fields, good music and spicy food, but I also like muted colors like 5:00 am and half empty bottles of champagne (in this case, half empty _is_ the optimistic view). The one color that I don't like is any shade of boring, with apathy being just behind it. If I must pick a favorite, my favorite color is a sincere smile, it looks great when you wear it, and matches with anything.

New Years goals

When I grow up, I want to be a story teller. The kind of man that gathers a crowd at family gatherings or performs for crowds in parks. Whether that means classic stories, my own life events or maybe spontaneous fictions made up on the spot. Most of my goals this year relate to that dream, and here they are.

- Do something awesome: examples include building an interesting whatsit or finding the meaning of life.
- Do something stupid (in the pursuit of awesome): When I learned to ski in boyscouts, the scout master told me to fall down on the first run of the day, so that it's no longer a fear.
- Perform something in public: I haven't quite figured out how to make this happen, but this is the most frightening goal I have.
- Keep the plants on my deck alive: That means replacing the dead ones currently out there :)
- Plan and take a vacation: I've never been off this content. I've been cool places with my family but I really need to do something I can tell my kids about someday.

Happy new year to all!

Rotation

Here's a funny bug someone had:



They were wondering why the image on the billboard was being scaled in and out. The reason here is that the size of the image is actually increasing as it is rotated. The corners make the rectangle larger but the billboard stays the same size so there's an implicit scale operation to make it all fit.



The way to fix it, is to either vary the width of the billboard using the dimensions of the image or to rotate the billboard itself.

Clips

There was a question this week about code reuse in QC, and now I fell compelled to talk about that and modularity. The original question was "Now that I've created all these javascript patches, what do I do if I want to reuse them?" The answer is to make a clip, by saving a composition with just the patch(es) you wish to reuse and publish the important ports. You can save them in ~/Library/Application Support/Apple/Developer Tools/Quartz Composer/Clips and they will be available to you in the Clip Library. When you drag those clips to your workspace, they become macros which are fully editable if you double click on them.

*Insert convenient segue here* Speaking of macros, it's a good idea to organize your compositions inside macros in order to make them more readable. More importantly, name them too. It's a lot easier to figure out why your composition isn't drawing anything when you put all your background elements in one macro and realize that it's drawing above your animation :)

1 year anniversary

A lot can change in a year. I've graduated college, ended my internship at Qualcomm, lost my grandma, started a job at Apple, moved to California, survived WWDC and the relative lull following, made all new friends and kept in contact with the old ones; and during that entire time, I've been dating Jessie. We haven't even had a fight, despite being in different states longer during our relationship than together. It takes a special girl to make all that worth while, and I'm so happy to have found her.