Lately I've continued to focus on writing my thesis, but the tempting distractions on the horizon are looming larger and larger. When I first learned that my paper was accepted into a conference in Slovenia in early September, I only worried about how attending would impact finishing my thesis and starting at Apple. The more I learn about Slovenia, the more excited I become about traveling. Now it looks like Sarah will join me after the conference, and we'll enjoy a little second honeymoon spanning from the Alps to Dubrovnik on the coast of Croatia. I pushed back my start date with Apple until the last Monday in September, in part to accommodate the vacation. Meanwhile, we've started the ball rolling with Apple with regard to the relocation, which we're timing to coincide with the expiration of our lease at the end of July. We'll have the month of August to look for a place to live, while we enjoy corporate housing in San Francisco, before our September travels. So the future continues to take shape. I just need to get this thesis in shape before then.

I should probably get to campus more frequently. I've been working from home most days, as I struggle to make good progress on writing my thesis, but today I decided I'd get out of Sarah's hair and try to focus better on work. Besides, the university shuttles are running again, now that the summer session has started. I ended up running into and chatting with at least three friends, which made up for any pause in productivity by improving my morale. This experience, along with briefly seeing Sheena earlier in the week, made me realize that I need to get out of the house more. I have a ton of writing I want to accomplish before I leave town—in less than two months!—but I also need to pace myself better.

Other mid-year resolutions include seeing the inside of the gym again and remembering to check in on Facebook once in a while. Hmm, and here, too.

Sometimes I take my health for granted, but life picked an inopportune time to knock me out for a week with a vicious sinus infection, just when I should be building momentum on writing my thesis. I can't remember the last time I sustained a high fever for several days, or when even standing up or sitting down too quickly would send pulses of pain racing through my head, or when I seemed to begin each day already tired and worn down. I hope this week isn't an omen of how the thesis writing will go!

I wanted to write more about the two fun experience that immediately preceded getting sick, but at this point I doubt I will have the chance. Just very briefly: I attended my cousin's wedding last weekend. I've always been a sucker for weddings, and I'm glad to see that having planned one hasn't ruined them for me. I only spent a few moments imagining how much effort went into the planning or wondering at the coordination among the vendors.

I also saw Star Trek along with Sarah, Jenn, and Peter. The Alamo Drafthouse included in the preshow this video report from The Onion, Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable', which sums up my experiences. I think it may the best Star Trek film made yet. Not coincidentally, even people who haven't watched the show at all might enjoy it. Yes, even Star Trek movies should have good writing and acting. And despite the obvious departures from canon, the script included numerous references to the original show. On the whole, I think the movie is exactly what the franchise needed: a fresh start that obviously demonstrates both an awareness of the Star Trek legacy but also a willingness to move forward.

I beat a video game for the first time in years, but this belated progress on my game queue mostly taught me that I need to blow the queue up and start over. The game I finished is Shadow Hearts, released in 2001 for the PS2. The game's setting, early 20th-century Asia and Europe but infused with mystical elements, provided a nice change of pace from most RPGs, and the precise timing and rhythm required by the "judgement ring" mechanic added some tension to the combats. I found it quite enjoyable as console RPGs go.

But then Sarah started playing Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, a more modern RPG released for the PS2 last year. It has superior graphics, art direction, character design, voice acting, music, and writing compared to Shadowhearts. Hell, even the setting in a modern Japan high school is simultaneously more alien and more intuitive (consistent) than Shadowhearts's mashup of mysticism and foreign locales. But the key difference is that Persona 4's gameplay actually gives the player more interesting choices to make. In hindsight, the most important decisions in Shadow Hearts are what accessories to equip on each character to grant the most appropriate buffs, often in the absence of many hints about what the coming battles will be like. In Persona 4, the player must decide every day after school whether to spend time on extracurriculars that forge social bonds or whether to climb into the television set at the local megastore to confront shadowy monsters, using avatars whose powers depend in part on what social bonds have been formed. Oh yeah, this game also has a lot more style, too.

Alas, I'm not sure how much more time I'll have for gaming until after I finish my thesis. Once I do, I'm strongly considering weeding out all the last-generation games from my queue. Then again, I spent half this entry talking up a PS2 game, and I still haven't played FFXII....

We're enjoying the new ABC cop show The Unusuals so much, we're convinced it's doomed to cancellation. Ostensibly a drama, it also sports a quirky humor that will probably throw off most of its viewers. By establishing a world populated both by secrets, where no one is exactly what they seem, and also by absurdity, the show resists categorization. As I said, doomed.

Looking back, my television viewing habits have shifted quite a bit over the last several years. I once fixated on science fiction and fantasy, from Babylon 5 to Buffy. At some point we just stopped making time to keep up with shows like Heroes and Battlestar Galactica. Now the shows we anticipate each week are all procedurals, from Bones to NCIS. I'm still not entirely sure why. Heroes and BSG in particular suffered from lack of clear direction, so maybe I just got tired of unfulfilling long-term story arcs and uneven writing. In contrast, Bones and NCIS complete a story every episode while managing to weave character-based threads that develop over time. Hmm, I'll need to revisit this question later, at the risk of overanalyzing this shift in preferences.

A Choose-Your-Own-Anecdote by Nick Jong

You walk into the PetSmart grooming salon leading your trusting, loving canine companion. The awkward youth behind the counter asks you if you want the usual haircut along with the bath. Do you:

1. Say yes, since you do, in fact, want your dog's hair trimmed the same way you've had it trimmed the last several times you brought her here.
2. Say, “Please do not shave my dog. We had you shave her twice last summer, but we didn't really like how it looked, she's finally grown back all her hair, and besides, it's not even that warm yet. So yes, to be explicit, please give her the same haircut you've given her every time we've brought her in since last September.”

If you chose option (1), then congratulations, your dog has been shaved. If you chose option (2), then you are a less trusting but perhaps happier person than I.

THE END

I normally disdain movie adaptations that adhere too closely to the source material, their conservative translations failing to yield a movie that stands on its own. Watchmen manages to pull off an extraordinarily faithful adaptation, which remains true to the original while seeming accessible to those unfamiliar with Alan Moore's original work. The author reputedly deemed the story impossible to film, but I would be curious to hear his thoughts about this effort. I'm also curious to see the reactions of moviegoers who see the film expecting just another comic book movie, instead of one that is a deliberate reaction to an industry glamorizing vigilantes who dress up in fanciful costumes. It's more a cross of V for Vendetta's dark, subversive aesthetic with The Incredibles's sideways, humanizing perspective on superheroes. Anyway, like many, I worried that Hollywood would screw up this classic story, and I am happy to see this larger-than-life realization of one of the graphic novels (along with The Sandman) that evolved my relationship with comic books at a time when I was outgrowing my fascination with The X-Men. In development for over 20 years and almost three hours long, it was worth the wait.

I'm not sure how three years have passed since the last time I ran a half-marathon, but I'm in better enough shape now to trim my time by about 15 minutes to 2h 8m 35s, or 9m 49s per mile. The mild weather probably helped, with the temperature at 5:30am already warmer than the high on race day three years ago. On the other hand, the route is now a somewhat hilly loop, instead of a downhill course from north Austin to the river. I think the hilliness tweaked my knee near the ninth mile marker, and I wasn't even sure I would finish. I finally stopped to stretch my leg for a while, and after another mile or so the pain suddenly vanished. I sprinted most of the way up the steepest hill of the course, on Enfield near mile 11, and the remainder of the race seemed one long downhill glide.

The aftereffects of the half-marathon also seem less severe than three years ago. I'm again mildly entertaining the idea of running two half-marathons back-to-back... someday. For now, it just felt good to run this race one more time. I'm definitely glad Jenn reminded and encouraged me to participate! Despite the number of running partners I have, I still think of running as a solitary endeavor by default, but it was definitely good to have company for most of the race, and especially during the seemingly interminable wait for it to start.

The commercials that FOX ran for the new Joss Whedon show Dollhouse didn't appeal at all, but I decided to give the premiere a shot. It's Joss Whedon, right? Judging by this first episode, you wouldn't think so, except perhaps in the casting of Eliza Dushku (Faith from Buffy) and Amy Acker (Fred from Angel), with bonus geek cred in the form of Tahmoh Penikett (Helo from Battlestar Galactica). In fact, the show could have been written by the mirror-universe Joss. His trademark witty dialogue has suddenly degenerated into insipid prattle, shackled to the needs of exposition. A tradition of strong supporting casts has terminated with a team of bland ciphers. This shortcoming is particularly problematic when the very premise of the show dictates that the heroine has a vacant personality half the time. Finally, the show accentuates the distasteful side of Whedon's dual preoccupation with female empowerment and victimization. Dushku plays a human doll whom the powers that be literally dress up with the outfits and personalities of the week. Beforehand we wondered if FOX was just trying to market the show as being porny, but the first episode is already more crassly sexual than anything I can remember seeing with Whedon's name on it. For once we should have believed the advertising and not the show's pedigree.

I mostly got out of the meme game a couple years ago, but this weekend I am feeling munificent. I'll cross-post my response to a Facebook meme here, but I won't "tag" anybody else. They don't call me Base Case for nothing. ( 25 things about me )

I'm just now emerging from a haze of paper writing to take stock of my situation, before I dive back into job applications and wedding planning. With my ICML submission done, I'll next get the ball rolling on writing my thesis. And I just downloaded the six IJCAI papers I agreed last year to review.

Huh, it's 2009 now. Barack Obama is the president. It's also the year of the ox; I entirely missed the Chinese New Year celebrations that coincided with my paper deadline. Sigh.

On a more tangential note, I just learned that Neil Gaiman won this year's Newbery Medal, for The Graveyard Book. I adore Gaiman's work and I know he's written youth-friendly stuff like Coraline (which I especially adore) and Stardust (whose movie I enjoyed), but it's still weird to think that the preeminent award for children's books went to someone I know best for writing The Sandman for DC's "mature readers" imprint. Anyway, I looked back at the list of previous winners and found many of my favorite childhood stories represented. Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game is my overall favorite and still the best mystery novel I've ever read. The Grey King from Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence and The High King from Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles hooked me on the fantasy genre. To my surprise, I also found on the list Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, the only fantasy novel I've ever started and been unable to finish. (I think. I am fuzzy on whether I managed to slog through C. J. Cherryh's Fortress in the Eye of Time.) I don't even remember what I found so objectionable about it. I'm tempted to give it another try after all these years....

Is it wrong that I joined Facebook mostly so I could geek out over the Facebook app on my iPhone? The other reason I joined is even less rational: with a job search imminent, I'm finally about to do something with my LinkedIn account besides accept invitations, so I "might as well" deal with Facebook, too. This declaration of war against productivity reaped some other benefits as well: eye-opening looks at what happened to some people who hadn't entered my mind since I graduated from high school over a decade ago.

In a microcosm of my current console gaming mode of operation, I've been downloading iPhone games faster than I can actually play them. I haven't even loaded some of the iPhone games I've downloaded. Many of these are crap, but the iPhone's great potential as a gaming platform is obvious. In the first few months of operation, the App Store already contains some simply wonderful games—my most recent addictions have been the strategy games Galcon and Zombie Attack!—and some more sophisticated games are on the horizon. The biggest obstacle doesn't seem to be the technology; it's the established precedent in the market that games sell for a fraction of the price of DS and PSP games.

I'm almost always pescetarian for largely health and environmental reasons, so my dietary restrictions aren't as absolute as Sarah's. So for me, most meat is something like junk food that's also very costly to produce (although unfortunately much of the ecological cost is not reflected in the purchase price). I've justified seafood to myself in part by recognizing that most of the fish I eat lived natural lives in the wild before being caught. Alas, the story doesn't seem to end there. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the very species that first made seafood amenable to me, salmon and tuna, also happen to be the most heavily overfished. As a result, they're becoming the mostly likely to be raised on farms, making them perhaps as ecologically wasteful as land-based livestock. In his new article, “A Seafood Snob Ponders the Future of Fish”, Mark Bittman reveals that “a salmon farm with 200,000 fish releases nutrients and fecal matter roughly equivalent to as many as 600,000 people.” It boggles the mind. And the more I learn, the more our way of harvest fish seems stupid. Almost a third of all the fish we catch is fed to livestock, including the bigger fish that people favor. It takes three pounds of fish meal to produce one pound of salmon; for tuna, the ratio is 20 to 1!

It just makes me sad. I'm not happy with any of the following options: give up tuna and salmon; determine whether any seafood I eat is farmed (at least I can avoid the organic seafood, since certification supposedly requires control over the animal's feed); contribute to ecologically unsound practices. I'll probably start by heeding Bittman's advice to try other varieties of fish besides the most popular ones. (His advice is partly taste-motivated, since farm-raised fish is evidently more bland, although I probably couldn't tell.) I don't see myself abstaining completely from salmon and tuna, but I mostly gave up meat and haven't missed it. Perhaps I'll find the same for my favorite fish.

I just read an article reporting slumps in the tech industry, which had been resisting the slowdown in the overall economy. So it's true: I'm cursed. The dot-com bubble burst shortly before I graduated from Carnegie Mellon, and now most of our economy is screwed as I begin my next job search. If this job market forces me to take a postdoc or something, or if I try to earn another degree, my curse might wind up blasting our economy back into the stone age. Clearly I need to disclose this fact to potential employers. Hire me! The fate of the free world depends on it!

I love the title "Quantum of Solace". I haven't even seen the movie, but I feel the need to dissent from the criticism I've seen levied at this title since its announcement. I mean, its meaning seems perfectly clear to me. The review in the New York Times gives a translation, "measure of comfort," that doesn't quite do it justice. The term quantum suggests not just a unit of measurement but the smallest possible unit, one indivisible. Solace is not just comfort; it is respite from otherwise prevalent distress. The title immediately suggests conflict and hints at the limits of the human capacity for violence, action, the inhuman. It invites us to construe a larger-than-life action hero by what is missing or minimized in his life. What form does this minimal comfort take? Was it Vesper, Bond's love interest in the previous film, now lost to him forever? Or will they be the off-camera moments of carnality in the arms of future damsels? Whatever form this comfort takes, the title emphasizes an element of humanity mostly absent from previous Bond incarnations, while at the same time noting its diminishing measure. By the events of this latest film, perhaps even this last quantum is lost, leaving only the pretense of duty and discipline to disguise rage, much in the same way the intellectual vocabulary of the title belies another bout of action heroism. If anything, the problem with the title isn't that it's bad, it's just too good for a Bond movie, a mere moment of entertainment. Just saying.

When I read various Mets blogs, I wonder what it says about me that I don't see the outcome of the World Series as adding insult to injury. I don't begrudge the Phillies for outplaying the Mets during the regular season, and they certainly earned their championship. With the Mets out of the picture, I wasn't sure which team to support: the one whose city has gone without a sports championship for 25 years or the one that had finished in last or next-to-last place every previous season. Last night I cheered for the Rays only because I wanted the World Series to last longer. I just hope the Mets were watching. I hope they find motivation in that sequence of shots showing the reaction of each Phillies position player to the final strikeout.

Our whirlwind trip to visit my family exhausted us, but I'm glad we made the time for it. I saw some relatives for the first time in a long time, and Sarah met some of my family for the first time ever. This set includes my niece, Jessica, who celebrated her first birthday! I'm in love with my niece. Perhaps I'm simply projecting, but she already seems like a sweet kid. I can't wait to see her grow up.

The next day, we met my parents, grandmother, and Uncle Tom in Chinatown for dim sum. Sarah and I had wondered what we would eat, but then my mother mentioned the Vegetarian Dim Sum House two doors down from our usual restaurant on Pell Street. Dad and I were amazed that we been oblivious to it all this time, but I guess now I know where I got my inattention to detail (which I prefer to call my focus on the big picture and on underlying principles).

This past summer we briefly flirted with getting cable (television), but then we decided that we'd just as soon spend take the at least $600 that a year of cable would cost and instead spend it on a Mac mini to use as a media center, allowing us to watch iTunes, Hulu, and videos directly from assorted networks' web sites on our TV. We've just been waiting for Apple to rev the mini, so we're not paying for old technology. Apparently we at least made the right decision with regard to cable. Last night our local NBC affiliate dropped off of Time Warner Cable, after the two companies were unable to agree on a new contract. Despite NBC's incessant advertising the last couple of weeks, urging viewers to switch to satellite or other sources, I never thought their macho standoff would come to this.

This feud doesn't immediately affect us, even though our favorite TV drama (Heroes) and comedy (30 Rock) are both NBC shows. We've been pretty happy with the HD broadcast over the airwaves, and we could always watch these shows online. For this reason, I suspect that NBC might get the short end of the stick. How many people are really going to drop Time Warner because they dropped NBC? They can watch most NBC shows online, so the real loser figures to be the local affiliate: Austinites can always tune to one of the other local channels for news and weather. This likely outcome makes me sad, since it seems crazy to me that the cable companies have so much power in this market. Some day, the producers will distribute all television content directly over the internet, and the cable companies can go screw themselves. Well, unless they're still providing my internet connection.

For the second year in a row, the Mets' playoff chances died on the very last game of the regular season. It's a heart-wrenching way to commemorate the last baseball game ever played at Shea Stadium. Now I can look forward to another offseason of the blame game. It'll be interesting to see whether the Mets bring back Jerry Manuel, their new manager, who is either a genius for almost salvaging the season or a moron for letting it get away. Many people will point to the Mets' ineffective relief pitchers as the primary culprits, but I don't know that Manuel's strategy of using six relievers in every game, desperately trying to find the “hot hand,” did anything more destroy the entire bullpen's confidence. If he had applied the same strategy to the position players, he would have benched Delgado long before he rediscovered his form in the batter's box.

Ah, but you see how tempting it is to look back and wonder where it all went wrong. I'm going to force myself to let it go and just to enjoy the postseason. The Cubs will crush the other contenders for the National League pennant anyway. Besides, my fantasy football team is off to a 3-0 start....

Yesterday I ran the fifth session of the Dungeons & Dragons campaign I began, and I'm finally becoming more comfortable with it. I'm getting a better sense of how I need to prepare for each evening, which is particularly important for a game in which the players can do anything they can imagine. I've also gained confidence in introducing changes to the published adventure I've been using to get the ball rolling. For once, in the aftermath of gaming, I'm spending less time dwelling on what I could have done better and more time imagining what to spring on my players next week. The expression on their faces when they realize the quandary into which they've walked: this experience is more what I had in mind!

So far, the single aspect of the new 4th Edition rules that I like the most: I've simply stopped bringing the rule books to each session. I just don't use them at the table.