Goin' to Southern Utah

I'm going to go visit southern Utah. I'll be leaving early tomorrow (Friday) morning, and will be back sometime on Monday. We're going to Zion's national park, and will do some slot canyon hiking. The canyon looks something like this. The hike we'll be doing is down inside that canyon, not the walkway up above -- apparently it's on the easier end of the Zion's "technical" hikes, and you have to check the weather report before going in. I'll try to take some photos (but since it's kind of wet down there, that will involve digging my camera out of the dry bag at the necessary spots).

Speaking of cameras: I have a new camera, which hopefully will not get dropped off a cliff or drowned or something while I'm down there. Hopefully it will also take lots of gorgeous pictures.

Dabbling in politics

I find myself following politics a great deal more these days, mostly thanks to Mitt Romney and his drawing enormous amounts of publicity to our common religion. Anyway, rather than rant about all the candidates (on the left-wing side, I know precious little about them), or about Romney in particular (what, precisely, is there to say that hasn't been said a thousand times?), I thought I'd open it up to comments and see if anyone wanted to say who their current favorite was. If no one comments, I'll probably hammer on friends and family until some of you do.

If anything really interesting or provoking is said, I might even follow up with an additional post. I don't know. Still trying to figure out this whole blog thing.

Evolution vs. Creationism vs. Sanity

While I was teaching a church class a couple Sundays ago, the topic briefly sidetracked into the evolution vs. creationism debate. There were two people in the class who were pretty clearly worried by evolution, since it seemed like a threat to the Genesis creation account. There seemed to be an unspoken fear that if evolution were ever proven right, it would prove religion wrong. It's pretty easy to answer this one from an LDS perspective, and I did so in the class. I'll chuck in the Biblical references too, just in case some very lost Bible belter wanders past and wants to use them.

First, evolution is openly taught and espoused by the biology teachers at BYU. Since this position is widely disliked by a lot of the students, they hand out a sheet of quotes from church leaders just before the relevant lectures. The gist of the quotes is that mankind was created by divine means, and that mankind enjoys a special relationship with God. It is wrong to use evolution to claim that mankind is an animal unbound by moral law. That said, the actual means God used for creation is a reasonable question, and biological evolution in and of itself is not a problem theologically.

Some time after BYU, I found that there's actually a reasonable scriptural defense of biological evolution, which I will share here. We begin in the book of Genesis, which starts something like this (KJV):

(1) In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. (2) And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (3) And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

It goes on to describe six days of creation, with man and woman being created on the sixth day, and God resting on the seventh. Now we move on to chapter two, in which the Earth gets created. Yes, again:

(1) Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. (2) And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. (3) And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

(4) For these are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, (5) And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. (6) But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. (7) And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

So was that all clear? Basically, God created all the life on Earth before anything had actually grown on the Earth. Now, without immediate proof, I claim that chapter 1 is describing a spiritual creation. After this spiritual creation (chapter 1), God created physical forms for all of these spirits (chapter 2). This second bit is the physical creation. This secondary physical creation starts with rainfall, and procedes with forming life (mankind in verse 7, other critters in verse 19) from the dust of the ground, a different term than was used in Genesis 1.

I've stated the spiritual/physical dichotomy without proof, and if you need a good Bible-only proof, I think you're stuck. I'll let you ponder over verses 4-5, which pretty clearly claim the two creations are a sequence, but I don't think you can get much further. The explanation here was in fact derived from LDS scriptures. The double-creation is explained much more clearly in Moses 3, which runs parallel to Genesis 2:

(4) And now, behold, I say unto you, that these are the generations of the heaven and of the earth, when they were created, in the day that I, the Lord God, made the heaven and the earth, (5) And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew. For I, the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth. For I, the Lord God, had not caused it to rain upon the face of the earth. And I, the Lord God, had created all the children of men; and not yet a man to till the ground; for in heaven created I them; and there was not yet flesh upon the earth, neither in the water, neither in the air; (6) But I, the Lord God, spake, and there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. (7) And I, the Lord God, formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul . . .

In short, if evolution is correct, then it refers to the period of creation described in Genesis 2. All of the wringing of wrists and yanking of hair that's gone into trying to make Genesis 1 fit with evolution is a waste of time, because Genesis 1 does not describe the physical creation of the earth. It describes the spiritual creation, where all the spirits of things were formed.

Genesis 2 even has some echoes of our classic understanding of evolution--rain and dust is an appropriate description of life emerging from the primordial ooze. And why not? The Bible makes no bones about the humble nature of our origins. We are referred to as being "from the dust" no fewer than seven times Biblically (Gen 2:7; 3:19; 18:37; Ps 103:14; 104:29; Eccl 3:20; 12:7), and a host more times in other scripture. It's also pretty clear that this dust reference isn't exactly complimentary; it seems odd that we should be so deeply offended to think of very-great-grandpa as being simian when very-very-great-grandpa is dust.

Of course, the scriptures also makes it clear that at a certain point, a change occurred. Mankind was given his spirit, the breath of life, and that spirit makes human beings God's children. As such, we need to follow a higher law than selfish desire if we are to be happy. Let's focus on that struggle, and give the evolution thing a rest.

What to Put in a Blog?

So, I've had a couple ideas for posts float through my head but I haven't really gotten around to any of them. I'm still trying to figure out what to blog about--most of the things I have on my mind seem a little too big for individual posts. I guess much of this is just laziness. I liked the idea of sticking up a picture with each post, but that's a fair amount of work.

Some things I have in mind:

• Just news about what I'm doing. Frankly, the stuff I write for the family newsletter is about as much as there is.
• Lengthy philosophical rants about one thing or another. Politics, religion, philosophy, whatever.
• Technical stuff. Maybe talking about what I do, or interesting recent problems.

Friends of mine just run multiple blogs, one for each topic they want to talk about, and then post to whichever one seems relevant at the time. This would be a good idea, but I don't output enough writing to keep even this one going. Perhaps I'll get better at it again.

Wii Campout

Today's image is of the Wii campout just outside of Wal-Mart. You're looking at a line of tents filled with people hoping to pick up their own Wii console the next morning. Wal-Mart had twenty or so consoles to give out, so quite a few people hung around. The successful folks waited for about 2-3 days. A friend of mine was in the line so I paid them a visit a couple of times, but I didn't try camping out myself.

Getting a Wii is approximately half the fun of these campouts. The other half of the fun is running into people you know, converting people you don't know into people you know, and switching from "always-on" mode to "sitting around doing nothing" mode, if only for a few days. I think we ought to do that more often.

I caught a cold (or something sort of like a cold) and stayed home from work yesterday. I'm still sort of tired today (I plan on sleeping for a good 9-10 hours, again) but I'm feeling much better. At no point did I wish I was dead, so I think I'm all right.

Foodie-wise, I haven't made any progress on the pizza quest, though I did attempt to make apple crisp yesterday. It didn't go very well, but I think I know what I did wrong, so I will try again some other day. I shall be eating turkey with a massive number of side dishes in a few hours, though, so the various other foodie quests shall have to go on hold for a while. I am not bothered by this.

Geekin' Out

The pictured object is made of Legos. If you don't know what that is, then please turn in your geek license. For those of you who never earned your geek license in the first place, it's a character from the original Legend of Zelda game, soon to be up for sale again, thanks to the evil machinations of the Nintendo machine.

Next-gen console fervor is building to a fever pitch, with both the Wii and the PlayStation 3 coming out in the next couple of weeks. I'm unlikely to buy a PS3 because it's stupidly expensive, and unless it pulls off some miraculous coups in the marketing and distribution department, it's not going to have many good games either (that's a function of market share). There was recently a survey in GameDeveloper magazine where Sony was trolling for suggestions on how to deal with the (very) negative PS3 buzz, and my first thought was "How about going back in time and refusing to allow your Blu-ray team to saddle your console team with an unproven and excessively expensive technology?" Is a dual-sided 8-gig DVD just not enough space for you?

The Wii, on the other hand, has been doing a brilliant job of building buzz and interest. It's a great example of massive R&D investment paying off. I might buy one of those, mostly cause I want to show it off to people.

A recent project of mine is trying to find a decent pizza somewhere in Utah Valley. Since most people don't have quite the single-minded dedication or budget that I have, I figure that I can save you all a little time. Please note that for judgement purposes, I nearly always get the cheese pizza--if they can't make a cheese pizza delicious, I'm not particularly interested in slathering it in toppings to try and save it. How hard can it be to make really good crust, really good sauce, and use really good cheese? Very difficult, apparently. So here are some initial results:

The absolute best pizza, with a commanding lead, is Papa Murphy's Take-n-Bake. It's not even funny how big the difference is. It's not as good as, say, that really great stuff I had in Brooklyn, but it's close. The main downside is that you have to take it home and bake it.

Another really good place is "The Pie" in Salt Lake City. It's just next to the University of Utah, and they will cook it for you. Unfortunately, it's not in Utah Valley, and I still like Papa Murphy's better. Papa Murphy's isn't quite as greasy.

There are quite a few places that have respectably good pizza. Olive Garden is very tasty, and Sbarro's at University Mall does a very decent cheese pizza (nearly as good as the Pie's, I think) -- although you have to get it fresh. I neither hate nor love Brick Oven, though to be fair to them I need to try a cheese pizza there.

There are also a great many places that make merely decent pizza. Smoke House brags about their pizza, but they use a precooked crust for selling by the slice, and that kind of kills them. They also can't seem to make up their mind whether they want to make Chicago-style pizza or New York-style pizza, and they end up at kind of an odd compromise. California Pizza Kitchen has okay sauce and cheese, but the crust tasted like a prebaked pastry.

There are also a few places that just disappointed. There's a place called "The Wooden House" (I think) on State Street that does charcoal grilled pizza. They use good cheese, and the charcoal grilling really does make an amazing crust, but their sauce is terrible. It's actually sour, and reminded me of those heinous squares of pizzafood you'd get in elementary school. If they would switch to a decent sauce then they could be good (though cleaning the place up would help too). Papa John's talks big, but all three times I've had them recently the cheese was manky. It might be a different story if you eat in. The Napoli place (near Albertson's on the parkway) does well on thin-crust pizzas, but when I got a thick-crust pizza it actually came out raw in the middle. A raw crust is an instant failing mark. I did like the thin crust stuff, but I don't think I can bring myself to eat there again.

I'm still trying places out--I intend on trying Pier 49 soon, and I intend to give Smoke House a better shot by ordering a full pizza (and hopefully getting it made from scratch) one of these days. If anyone wants to help me eat a pizza, I could use the assistance. I also haven't really put too much consideration into Pizza Hut, Little Caesar's, or Domino's, but I hope I will be forgiven for ignoring them. I also can't pursue this too faithfully or I'm going to blow up like a big blubber-filled balloon.

The long and short of it is that I really wish somone would figure out how they make that pizza sauce in Brooklyn. I've found really good crusts here, and there's only so many ways to mess up on cheese, but nobody has figured out how to make the magic sauce yet. Until then, Papa Murphy's it is.

Behold, the results of the pumpkin carving contest! The pumpkin more or less in the center is my team's entry (the "team" being Corby and myself). I imagine that none of my blog's readers know Corby; suffice it to say that he's a fellow from my ward with a very dry sense of humor.

In the end, about half the pumpkins got labeled as "pretty dang good" and the rest wallowed in the mediocrity of "not quite as dang good." That was about as far as the judging went, as no one had bothered to actually organize any judging in the first place.

The pumpkin now occupies a seat of honor on my balcony, displaying its mischievious grin to passers-by. I have got a bunch of candles and I could probably make it glow, but have not yet bothered to do so. I might do that for Hallowe'en, just to get in the spirit of things.

Cavan finally managed to call me from Russia (woohoo!). He tried a few times but kept catching me away from the phone. He calls me from some kind of weird phone card number, which means I can't call him back if I miss the call, and he's disinclined to try twice. I gave the number its own magic ringtone, and that probably helps a little. Anyway, it was fun, and we talked about stuff. I mostly don't remember what, but it probably involved Russia, and it definitely involved Russian ravioli, which Cav was having for dinner that night.

Thinking of food (and back on my side of the pond), I have yet to find a garden vegetable soup that doesn't taste like sour tomatoes. It's possible that people just don't use ripe enough tomatoes, but overall I find this a great pity. I'm often on the lookout for healthier food, and garden vegetable soup ought to be a good candidate, but it's always sour. Maybe you can make a good soup without any tomato? Tomato is always what you use to give the broth flavor, though, so you'd have to find a different good vegetable. Beans work pretty well, but add a lot of calories. Maybe a variant on onion soup would work?

Just when you thought everything was dead

The three round spots you see in the middle are mushrooms, poking up through tree bark. The tree bark, in turn, is scattered all around the base of a tree found at approximately 200 west 150 north in Provo. I was walking home from a birthday lunch for one of our employees when I spotted this tree with attendant mushrooms.

The reason it's interesting is because the entire treebox is infested with these mushrooms. There were dozens of them, I think. We put bark down to keep weeds from growing around the base of the trees, but these mushrooms pushed right on through like they loved it.

My blog is like a mushroom, and my laziness like treebark. Despite my laziness, eventually you get ... mushrooms! I'm sure there's a moral here somewhere. Just don't look too hard, I don't want you to hurt yourself.

Back from Iraq

I actually have something related to current events to talk about today, so I may as well :-). The guys you see on the left are members of the National Guard, and got back from a 12-month tour of duty in Iraq recently. They're also identical twins. They signed on in the same unit and stayed together. One of them was a mechanic, the other guy was a machine-gunner on the back of a humvee.

Up till I met these guys, I hadn't personally run into anyone who'd actually been to Iraq. Oh, I've run into a dozen dozen people who have strong opinions on Iraq, and I even had a religion professor who was excited for Saddam's ousting because he wants to go to Iraq "once it's stabilized a bit" so that he can see some history. But these guys were the first I've met who'd been there.

So what was their opinion on Iraq? In short: far more positive than any I've heard elsewhere. They stuck a slideshow on their laptop, showed off their gear, and answered lots and lots of questions. They believe the media really isn't giving the big picture--it's focusing on every bad thing that happens, and ignoring what is mostly a positive transformation. They never talk about any of the humanitarian projects, but anytime there's an accident or a death, you're guaranteed a mention. Lots of close-ups of the worst things, but complete silence regarding what's going right.

They also talked a little about the difficult things. They lost one guy in their squad to an IED--two artillery shells and some other stuff completely blew out the truck in front of them. Two of the guys were wounded and survived, one guy was killed. It was upsetting. However, mostly the service was large amounts of very hot, very sweaty boredom punctuated by rare moments of intense excitement. They didn't get shot at very often, but there were a LOT of roadside bombs. They saw those all the time. Mostly they succeeded in avoiding them.

They did give one credit to Saddam's army: They were the first army in the entire world to ever take down an Abrams tank. It was a pretty clever hit, too--very poor visibility, and they managed to get in close and get a shell in through an exhaust vent. So the total worldwide fatality count on Abrams tanks is now: One.

As for the Iraqis? Well, they like Iraqis. "Most of the people we're fighting aren't Iraqis--they're foreigners." Their perception was the Arab Iraqis were largely in favor of them being there, even if they didn't like it much. The Kurds, on the other hand, treated the Americans like "rock stars." American soldiers in the Kurdish areas are far more relaxed, and can concentrate primarily on humanitarian work. There aren't really any combat ops in the Kurdish areas.

They'd been in just about all the areas of Iraq (at one point they were doing transportation work) and even served several months near Saddam's hometown. There were very wide differences in public opinion by region, although even in the worst areas it has been improving. They told a story about the election in Tikrit (Saddam's hometown) -- the voter turnout there was far below 1% in the initial election. At one station there was a conversation that went something like this:

"There's a guy coming to the polling station."
"Is he armed?"
"No, he looks clean."
"What's he doing?"
"I dunno ... just kind of walking toward the station."
"Huh."
"Yeah, now he's gone in."
"Anything happening?"
"No, pretty quiet ... yeah, just came back out."
"Nothing blown up?"
"Yeah, no one dead, looks like."
"Huh. Maybe he voted."
"Yeah? Weird."

That same region had a voter turnout well over 50% in the following election, which they felt was a huge marker of the way things were improving. Iraqis still have a higher voter turnout than Americans; whatever they dislike about the political system, they are willing to try voting.

Another story that impressed them: They met an Arabic man whose brother had been killed because he (apparently?) tried to run a roadblock, and the soldiers shot him. But this man said "it is still better now. Now, I can go wherever I want. Before, if I tried to leave my province, they would kill me because I would not have papers. It is better now." They felt this reflected the tenor of opinions--things may be bad, but perhaps they are better.

As for the WMD's? "If there was anything, it's been buried or destroyed by now." Yeah, so the WMD thing didn't pan out. Most of the people that we're actually fighting there, however, are not even Iraqis--they're terrorists from Iran, or even more from Syria. "So in the end, we really are fighting terrorists, because the terrorists are coming to us in Iraq."

That's a pretty tight summary from over an hour of chatting. The barbecue was also great.

What I actually do all day

A fairly common question I get is what I do for a living. This is a rather difficult question to answer, because what I actually do is create a specialized set of plugins for applications used by the computer-animation and computer-aided manufacturing industries. Got that? To be specific, I write software for calculating curved surfaces, which surfaces are second-derivative continuous, allow for mid-surface termination of their isoparms, and form a superset of both subdivision surfaces and NURBS surfaces.

Basically, unless you have a fairly decent background in engineering or 3D modeling, it's very difficult to explain what I do. I was digging through some old pictures wondering what might be a good idea to post on my blog, and I ran across a photograph I took of a whiteboard. The whiteboard is on the wall of the company I visited in Seattle a few months ago, and I wrote myself a lot of notes on how something worked. Since I was leaving Seattle in a day or so, I just took a bunch of photos of the whiteboard so that I could hang onto the notes. Clear? Anyway, the stuff I work with looks pretty much like what you see on the whiteboard. If it makes sense to you, perhaps you should contact me so that we can offer you a job.

Someone else has made a more coherent attempt at explaining what I do. Feel free to flip through that if you actually care. Most people don't, really.

My dad's in Chicago right now. Peter, who writes a far more interesting blog, also lives in Chicago, so I got him to call my dad and help him find the tourist traps. Dad's at a conference and hasn't got very much to do, so tourist traps are a welcome distraction.

It's late and I'm supposed to be asleep, but I'm not tired. I will make a half-hearted attempt in a few minutes anyway, so wish me luck.

I'm not sure how to spell the puppy's name

This week, we have a picture that was taken about a month ago. The extremely cute dog that you see presented here is probably named Payton. I say "probably" because I have never seen the name written down before, so I'm merely stabbing erratically at the spelling, like a blind serial language murderer with a blunt orthographic knife.

Anyway, this dog is my sister Shana's new pet, and he's very cute. He's still a puppy, though he won't get very much bigger -- he's about the size of a basketball, but not so fat, and you're not allowed to throw him or bounce him.

I have, at last, acquired a Bluetooth adapter for my computer. This means that I am writing this post from my desktop, rather than my old and dying laptop, and I was able to copy the photo straight from my phone to the computer. This ought to bode good things for the future of my blog posting updatefulness.

While I was out shopping, I also picked up Brain Age, which is sort of like a math test pretending to be a video game. The basic idea is that if you exercise your brain by doing memory, reading, and math problems for a few minutes every day, that you will keep your mind nimble and keep away degenerative brain diseases. Whether or not that's true, the game is mildly amusing, and I like to keep my mental arithmetic sharp because I use it a lot.

Actually, the main reason I'm fascinated by Brain Age is because it's a very interesting piece of Nintendo's strategy to expand the video game market beyond the fortress of males aged 9-35. Brain age is an attempt to go straight for the elderly -- the instruction manual's examples were all for a 55 year old woman. Nintendo's president recently spoke about the gradual fading of the mainstream video game market in Japan, and he feels that expanding the market is critical for the future growth of the industry. Brain Age is a piece of his answer, and the Wii is another one.

That's all I have to babble about today. Have a good one. Maybe I'll post again soon.

Benton Paul and Other Indie Goodness

Today's entry is about a friend of mine named Benton Paul. These days he's trying to make it as an indie singer. He's got a good voice and he's got a knack for both the guitar and the piano. He's got an album on iTunes, and if anyone who reads here is feeling particularly generous they can go and buy it. If you just want to hear a bunch of his music for free, you can do that too, or you can visit his own website.

Most of his music is about girls, as seen from the perspective of a single guy in the Utah dating scene. If this strikes you as relevant, you'll probably relate to a bunch of his songs. For the record, my favorite song is "Here's to the Boys."

So, off on my tangent: One of the things that's kind of cool about the Internet is its potential to act as a medium for creating popular culture. As little as twenty years ago, there were gatekeepers for public taste--if you wanted any kind of publicity outside of your hometown, you needed a soul-sucking contract with one of the media gatekeepers. Nowadays, all you need to do is, say, make a fool of yourself and post it online, and very occasionally you'll achieve nigh-celebrity status.

It seems that we are gradually achieving an alternative to content aggregation using social networks, but I don't really have any special insight into that, so I won't bore you. In the meantime, everyone go check out Jonathan Coulton and wonder if it'll all work out.

Indie Game Night

Every three months, at a little-known game studio in the basement of a chiropractor's office across the road from a 1960's era hamburger joint, something magical happens. Specifically, about two-dozen people all squeeze into the offices and show off the games they're developing. But these are not just any games; these are independent games. That is to say, they are games made on no budget, by guys who generally have day-jobs, and who are doing it because. . . well, I'm not sure any of us know why. Most of these games will never make any money. Frankly, most of these games will probably never be finished. They will never acquire more than a few hundred players. To describe it as a "niche market" is in fact inaccurate, because of the word "market."

The picture is from the gathering. This is a 3-year-old boy who has just discovered an arcade game from the 1980's stowed away in the break room. He's standing on two boxes of soda pop to reach the controls. If you thought that 3-year-olds couldn't be absorbed by something for more than five minutes at a time, then this would have been an education; he played a single game for well over an hour straight. This is his second arcade of the evening; about five minutes after this shot was taken, he was physically pried away and dragged home so that he would get some sleep. And yes, this gives me nostalgic flashbacks.

I was showing a game this time. It still has practically no art at all, so it's not really worth putting up a screenshot, but it was fun to play. The essence was that you run around inside a maze filled with huge swarms of flying creatures. You need to destroy the hives which are giving birth to the creatures, and as you do so, you get stronger. The hives also get stronger, though, and the level ends up as huge clouds of fireballs battling to hold at bay the ever-infringing hordes. I don't know that it was the most-loved game of the evening, but I spend too much time playing it already.

The remainder of the party largely consisted of soda pop, cookies, potato chips and pizza. There was also a lone fruit platter, looking decidedly out-of-place nestled among the greasy carbohydrates. In short, it was a fun evening, and I'll probably be showing up at the next one -- in July.

Lack of Updates and New Computers

I have a new computer now. While this new computer is spiffy and in every way superior to my dying laptop, it does lack one tiny little thing -- it has no bluetooth interface. This may seem a small thing, but it also means that I have no way of getting pictures off of my camera phone, which in turn means I can't stick up pictures for my blog posts without going through my laptop.

This is making it trickier to post. I'm working on it. Sorry.

Too tired to think

An observation: If you stay up too late once then it will be a little hard to get up in the morning, but otherwise you won't be too badly off. If you stay up too late twice in a row and still force yourself to get up, you'll be sleepy and grumpy the whole day. If you just keep on doing it, you end up completely unable to think or function, except in a kind of zombie-mode where you can't get very much done. You end up compensating by falling asleep in the middle of the day a lot, and generally you end up miserable.

One guess as to which mode I'm currently in.

Another April, another Anime season

It's that time of year again -- it happens about four times a year, actually. Yup, another Anime season is upon us. Not that I have ever actually mentioned this before, but I happened to be paying attention about when the first fansubs started to hit. The Japanese TV season resets about four times a year, and the shows come out in 12 or 13 episode blocks to match it. And because I haven't updated in a couple days, I thought I'd give a rundown of the current interesting-looking ones. These are approximately in order of coolness, according to me.

1. Utawarerumono, literally "that which is sung" or "he which is sung." This show reminds me strongly of Scrapped Princess, which is the main reason for the number one position on this list. Today's picture is a shot of Eruruu, the cute and vaguely furry female lead. She also has a tail, which makes for occasionally exploited and highly odd fan service. The actual story seems to involve some kind of trapped demon apparently waking up in a man's body with his memories missing. We're introduced to a few characters and given a tour of a peaceful village in the midst of a war-torn country. I give the village three episodes of survival, tops.

2. KIBA is a show about teenage kids growing up in a cyberpunk nightmare city. Zed, the lead character, is a delinquent kid who is forever getting into trouble for smashing doors down with a hammer. His best friend and student body president is endlessly bailing him out. Zed actually seems to have pseudo-magical super powers, blah blah blah. It's the same old storyline with some fun twists. It's well drawn, though, and great for those of you who like futuristic sci-fi-like stuff.

3. Disgaea is a quirky Anime based on a quirky game. It starts with an over-the-top cute angel girl who shows up to assassinate the king of demons, who died of choking on a dumpling before she could assassinate him, but it took her two years to figure this out... and so forth. And just when you think it's already pretty strange, who should show up but Flash Gordon. I'm not even kidding. The closing credits music is strangely addictive.

4. Air Gear looked okay. It's kind of a fantasy sports anime about powered roller blades that can go a million miles an hour. For some reason, this also allows you to fly, jump fifty feet vertically, survive jumps off of tall buildings, etc. Kids are going to try this at home and they are going to DIE. Animation quality is good, so it's kind of fun if you like sports anime about non-existent sports.

Oh, .hack//Roots is also out, but I haven't seen that yet. It might be awesome, it might not. It seems to be modeled after .hack//Sign, and if it's as good as that (but maybe with some fighting?) then it could rock. .hack//Sign is still the best music to come out of any anime anywhere; it's a pity the story took such a terribly long time to get anywhere.

Plays, surprise parties, and a braai

Today's picture is of my constant companions, the desk toys. These little guys are what my fingers do for most of the day. It turns out that programming is about 20% typing, 10% compiling, and 70% sitting around cogitating the mysteries of the eternities (with special focus on the mysteries of How To Fix This Bug). For the 10 and 70 percent portions, these desk toys are terribly handy. They're magnetic, and can be arranged in multiple interesting ways.

In other news, I've had a birthday. I feel slightly older. There are several funny stories associated with this, although none of them are very funny, so please keep your expectations low.

The first one starts on Wednesday, which is usually when we have DDR. My siblings had the wonderful idea of throwing me a surprise birthday party. This really was a wonderful idea, however the intial execution left something to be desired. To start with, they locked me out of my apartment. I don't know what they were thinking here. "Hey, it's his birthday, let's try and make him as furious as possible!" is a pretty near hit. Anyway, someone finally let me in, and I walked in to find Cavan and Clarissa sitting on the couches. After a few seconds, it registered that there were balloons on the floor. And dead silence. Now, I don't know about you guys, but at most surprise parties I've been to, the idea is to yell "surprise!" loudly. The purpose of this is to make the surprisee jump, burst out laughing, something. So while I figured out that I was being thrown a surprise party, it took a few seconds to sink in.

Other than that, it went well. They had lots of very good but diet-destroying candy strewn about, some fun decoration, and they actually got me something I wanted (!) as a gift. The latter is by far the most impressive. So kudos to the sibs on that one. That's also the first time anyone's actually thrown me a surprise birthday party, which also makes it fun.

Nextly, I kept getting treated to trips to the theater this past week. I went to the Three Musketeers at the Gaslight Theater in Tucson, which was hilarious. You get free popcorn, table service (pizza and burgers and things) and you get to boo the bad guys every few seconds. There's a saloon-style piano going much of the time, and the occasional sing-along. It was a ton of fun. On Thursday my little sister took me to see Arsenic and Old Lace at BYU. Other than getting a little antsy from having to actually sit still for a couple hours (I don't do "sitting still" very well unless there's a computer in front of me), it was beautifully well done and the jokes were excellently timed and performed. I was laughing through much of the production, even having heard it before. On Friday, I ran off to see a exclusive play at the Hale theater. The play was written by Ruth Hale, and was about her father. It was their first night and had a couple rough spots, but if the actors can iron those out it'll be a cute production. I took a date on that one, which was also fun.

The family did a braai for Sunday dinner, which was divine. I am a huge fan of our particular style of potato salad, and the boerewors was amazing. Hurray for South African grub! It's a pity the stuff is so bad for you (although the way we did the potato salad was actually pretty good, healthwise ... I think I'm going to try that again).

That's all I've got folks, and it's getting late.

Labels, autism, and Refrigerator Poetry

Today's attached image is of a bunch of refrigerator magnets. You've probably seen these before -- you get hundreds of little magnets with random words on them. If you arrange them properly, you can sometimes get something resembling meaning. This is quite difficult to do, which makes them fun to play with.

There is an unusually large collection of such magnets on the fridge where I'm staying -- perhaps two or three hundred words. There were entire swarms of little nonsense phrases. I made up my mind to try and make a rhyming poem with fridge magnets. This is no small task -- even if you can think of a rhyme, it won't work unless you can find it. It took a little over an hour, and what I managed is what you see in the picture. It isn't good poetry, and it's not particularly meaningful, but it rhymes and I'm proud of it.

Today, we visited a friend of a friend's house for lunch and a conference session. This involved lasagna and coconut cream pie, so it was a happy thing. The family has three little boys, who are cute and cuddly. One of them is now two days old, and is cute in a seven-inch-long kind of way. The oldest is a four-year-old who is fascinating to play with. He's autistic, which makes it tricky to talk to him. He clearly does know quite a few words, and he understands quite a lot, but he's reluctant to use the words he knows. He's cute and likes being tickled. He can also assemble a mean puzzle -- his mom dumped out a hundred piece puzzle for him (this kid is four), which sent him into intense concentration while he assembled the first fifty pieces, making very, very few mistakes. It's fascinating to see a kid of four picking up and immediately placing pieces in a puzzle that size without breaking stride. He did get bored and give up about halfway in, but it was a pretty big puzzle.

It got me thinking a bit about the words we use to label each other and ourselves, though. We tend to pick labels for ourselves and then live up to them. People label themselves as "autistic," "ADD," "depressive," "OCD," or "deaf." These are mostly negative labels. Their good side is that they make you more likely to get or accept help; on the bad side, I think they sometimes create a self-image of being flawed or incomplete, and I think that it's wrong to believe this. I think everyone has mental and physical weaknesses of all different types and difficulties. Some are visible, and some are not. Some of them are labeled, some are not. If you've acquired a label you don't like, escape it!

On the other hand, I think people use labels positively too. Like, when somebody decides that they want to take up a career in engineering; they make the label "soon-to-be-engineer" and then they live by it. Once they believe the label, it helps them get past the problems right in front of them without giving up. Things like super-tough calculus classes or difficult certification exams are eventually conquered just because you're sure you can do it eventually -- you are, after all, a "soon-to-be-engineer." I think you can apply similar principles to religion, racism, nationalism, marketing & branding, networking, and a host of other things. We live and die by the way we label things.

That's enough of a rant for now. It's already gotten too long. Good bye for today.

Behold, the wall of anime!

I'm visiting a friend in Arizona right now. This friend is the only person I know who surpasses my youngest sister in Anime-fu. Normally, getting married would tone a fellow down, but it happens that his wife is quite the fan as well ...

To be fair, He's actually a lot more moderate about his anime habits than my sister, but what he lacks in present fanaticism he makes up with raw experience. He's my age, and has been playing the anime game since he was in high school. He was watching anime back when most of it was still being passed around on worn out VHS tapes, with translations scrawled on the back of a dog-eared sheet of paper wrapped around the outside.

Today's photo is his wall of anime. It's actually a pretty slick dining room decoration. The picture shows perhaps half of it. Each of the pictures is from an anime they like, and they've all been carefully cropped and covered in glass.

I suppose my only news is that I arrived in Arizona safely. I had to go via Denver, and there was a lot of turbulence on the way there. I don't usually get motion sick on flights, but I was sort of border-line on that one. I had a burger for lunch in the Denver airport, which I cannot recommend for burgers (I'll go with McDonald's next time), and then went onward to Tucson.

The highlight of the day, other than meeting up with old friends, was that we went and had sushi for dinner. And it was good sushi. Halibut nigirizushi, An eel-and-avocado caterpillar roll, and a rather interesting vegetable roll with pickled bits in the middle made up the bulk of the evening's menu. We've spent much of the evening playing with computer stuff (hopefully the game will get somewhere!), which is also good fun.

On Crane Simulators and Game Creators

Attached here is the last of my Seattle pictures. I took this out of the car window while being driven to the airport and having a lengthy conversation about the incompetence of Seattle's administration. The woman who was driving had strong opinions about the general inability of the government to get anything done -- they always had to commission byzantine and expensive studies to convince themselves that it was a good idea before they could actually do anything.

The picture is of the docks, and was taken as we were driving along a raised highway. The huge bird-like orange contraptions are cranes; they're probably about 15 stories high, and are used for unloading the enormous containers used on cargo ships. This photo was taken the same day as the one below -- as you can tell, the weather got a lot worse.

Anyway, I was a little surprised to find myself chatting about cranes just a few days ago. I was at a housewarming party for my roommate's uncle, and several of the people there were game developers, ranging from professional to amateur. One of the guys developed crane simulators for his day job. Now, you might hear "crane simulator" and think of something like a flight simulator -- and you'd be close. The difference is that the crane simulator is huge. Think of a giant dome ten stories high, with an actual complete crane chassis sitting inside, complete with vibrators to simulate high winds and enormous projectors to cover the interior of the dome with a virtual harbor to practice on. I showed that guy the picture I took in Seattle, and he sort of smiled and said "yup, that's them."

Of course, most of what we talked about was making video games. There's an indie game developer night coming up sometime in April, and I'm trying to have something ready to show off for a change. Ammon has most of next week off, and we're going to stick our collective heads together and (hopefully) develop something fun. We'll see.

That is, if I can persuade him to tear himself away from dofus for a little while...