Afterhours

VIFF - Oct. 1, 2009

Saw three pretty good films at the Vancouver International Film Festival today.

Tales from the Golden Age. A very funny collection of stories from Ceausescu's Romania. The best of the three.

The Maid. Again, very funny, in a grim sort of way – a really good study of both character and class relations.

Jermal. More a study of characters than anything else, and well-done, if a bit slow in places.

The first two were "would see again"; the last, probably not – but then, I was a bit sleepy by the time I saw it, so ... .

Another one tomorrow, and 18 altogether in the next two weeks.

Vacation 2009

Well, I didn't blog my holiday on a day to day basis, but here are a few photos and some of the highlights.

First of all, food. I ate too much, of course, and now have some extra pounds on, in addition to the pounds I gained while writing the comps. Let's see: there was caribou sausage, seal sausage, fish tongues, fish cheeks and other varieties of cod, salt turbot, lobsters, seal flippers, moose(?), crab, mussels and a bunch of other delicious stuff I've forgotten. And blueberries: my sister Sharon and her husband Paul picked lots. Here are the results of one of several trips, and the baking that ensued.

Another haul has been slated for blueberry wine. The early and plentiful blueberries and dogberries (mountain ash to the rest of the world) are supposed to be a sign of a hard winter, as are the large buds on some of the trees.

Next, the kids, my great-niece and -nephews.

Jacob (five and a half) learned to his delight that pigeons will eat from you hand if you hold it steady. (The seed was actually meant for the park ducks, but the pigeons know a good opportunity when they see one.) Note the cool yellow-dyed bangs from his "ready-for-school" haircut. Jacob started French-immersion kindergarten last week, and, by all accounts, loves it.

Laurel (three and a half), his sister, is bright and articulate, and will probably give him a run for his money in a few years.

And Jack, their cousin (three and a half), is "all boy", and heavily into dinosaurs at the moment, and the Ninja Turtles. He goes to "ninja school" (a.k.a. kiddie tae kwon do).

They're all great kids, and lots of fun to talk to and play with at that age.

The rest of the family (well, a few of them, anyway). My mom is shortly moving into a great assisted living facility, and is looking forward to the change. They help out with the physical needs of seniors like her (she's 85); her mind is still as sharp as ever (she wiped out my brother in poker while I was there). Here she is with her three children.

My sister and her husband have put a huge extension onto their house, and will finish the inside over the next winter or so. Paul likes to build things, and was working on the new deck while I was there - notice the classy rails.

The main living area is about double in size - great for family visiting and bunking - and there's a basement now, too. Yet it still has a comfortable cottage/cabin feel to it, despite the mod cons - lots of nature around, trees, lake and so on.

What I did while I was there (beside eating): goof off, mostly, and just relax. Barge cruising and swimming in the pond (Newfoundlanders call a lake a pond).

Having fun with family. Making pipe cleaner insects and paper bats with glowing eyes to hang along a trial in the woods after dark for the kids to find with flashlights (my sister's idea - the kids loved it).

And just sitting around the fire outside late into the night telling jokes, and other stuff.

All in all, a great holiday.

Holidays and new beginnings

Well, the comps are over - a few weeks over, in fact. I've been spending the last few weeks getting caught up on stuff; mostly household stuff that got neglected over the past year. Early tomorrow, I'm on a plane eastward for three weeks of non-thinking and otherwise relaxing with family.

I'm looking forward to September already – the academic in me still looks at September as a time for new directions and rethinking and changing old directions. This next year, I'm planning to do some more directed reading on certain topics in cognition and building Flash widgets to illustrate some ideas I have. And somehow come up with a research proposal for my dissertation, I suppose, though I'm not in any hurry for that.

I'll probably picture-blog a bit of my holiday, if only for my own records/memories.

The latest Star Trek movie

I saw it this evening. I hadn't planned to, but I was in the mall on errands, and I only had to wait 20 min., so ... .

God, it was boring!! Flimsy to non-existent plot, cardboard characters only pale reflections of their original TV series counterparts; little but non-stop action and explosions from start to finish. What a come-down from the original TV show! While its story-lines were often silly and its special effects laughable by today's standards, the TV Star Trek managed to maintain audience interest with a relatively low level of action, and that action furthered the plot and developed the characters instead of replacing plot and character – ditto for the earlier Star Trek movies. The Trouble with Tribbles had much more substance than tonight's excuse for a story.

The replacement of plot and character by action and explosions seems to be the accepted method of generating box-office receipts nowadays; the Harry Potter series has also gone in this direction. Constant action appears to appeal to the current generation of kids who seem to need it to remain interested at all – I'm probably just too old to appreciate movies like this one. Give me and other old fogies like me a film like Cherry Blossoms any day.

In Memoriam

They cut down my third-favourite tree today. On my walk to the Skytrain, I noticed an unexpected piece of sky where there wasn't one before, and discovered a carnage of logs and branches just about to be carted away in a truck. I was told that the tree had been a danger to passers-by, old and leaning over the fence as it did, and was removed for safety's sake.

The tree was one of the first harbingers of spring around here. Long before other trees produced any sign of new life, its net of fine branches showed a subtle thickening from masses of barely incipient buds. The cloud of pink blossoms that followed a few weeks later snowed wispy drifts of petals beneath the tree.

A shame, really. Humans who get old and bent over are supplied with walking canes and other supports for their old age – trees just get lopped down. Every spring, I'm going to miss this one.

The tree in March 2005.

A White Christmas

It's Christmas Eve here, and snowing again. More snow than I've seen since I moved to the Vancouver area about a decade ago. Transit's a mess, and no-one here appears to be responsible for clearing sidewalks – I had a great workout yesterday lugging home Christmas groceries – my legs were aching from all the sliding around. Taxis were overwhelmed and impossible even to call – it seems that everyone, including me, decided to do last-minute shopping yesterday rather than wait for the next dump of snow coming down today. It looks lovely now; big, soft flakes just floating down outside my window. But unfortunately, this city just doesn't know how to deal with snow, or rather doesn't really believe it needs to, since the snow will get rained away in a week or so.

A Merry Christmas to everyone reading this, and a few photos for the record, from my balcony.

Comprehensives: glimmers of light midst the clouds of confusion.

An update on where I am in my PhD program.

After completing all my required courses the previous year, I spent most of last year doing a huge amount of reading about various aspects of cognition, education, perception, design and other topics. I've actually been collecting papers and books on these topics since several years before I actually started my program and now have a thumb drive with over 3000 papers on it (many of which I've printed out), photocopies of relevant book chapters (from books from the SFU library and elsewhere), and a collection of purchased books that were too good not to own, despite my limited resources.

The point of all of this? I'm trying to get some sort of cognitive or other theoretical basis for developing a theory of onscreen mathematics design. There's very little out there even generally related to that topic, despite its relevance to education and mathematical publishing. There appears to be very little around on the nuts and bolts of actually designing interaction with onscreen content. (I don't mean screen navigation here – there's tons of stuff on that – but interaction with the actual mathematical content. For example, does dragging a circle or number tile around a screen affect the dragger's understanding of the math involved? and if so, how, exactly?) One result of all this reading is that I'm starting to see glimmers of how things all fit together, but that's a ways off yet, and still very nebulous.

Meanwhile, a deadline looms: I'm committed to completing my comprehensive exams next term. The first step in the process is to produce an annotated bibliography of about a hundred papers or equivalent relevant to what I propose to research. (Tricky, since I don't really have definite research topic yet, though that's also getting clearer.) Here's what I started with (12 file boxes of papers) and, in the shoe boxes out front, the results of the first cull.

Here's where I am now (about 20 file folders of papers and a dozen or more books).

Probably still too much, but I'm getting there! (Yet I keep discovering more books and papers that really should be included ... arrrghhh! ) I'm planning to write a short introductory essay explaining just how I think the materials I've chosen for the bibliography are relevant for what I intend to do. After the bibliography I have to answer both oral and written questions on the material. The bibliography itself may turn out more like a lit review than most annotated bibliographies – we'll see how that works out.

The upside to all of this, of course, is that, instead of swimming happily around in a large cloud of intriguing but uncertainly connected ideas, I'm being forced to think more carefully and explicitly about what I want to do for a research topic and to synthesize some of those disparate and confusing ideas into a coherent whole. I came across a nice quotation a bit back which seems to sum up the whole process and provide some motivation for it all: "Until you become confused about what you already know, what you know will never become wider, bigger, or deeper." (Milton Erikson). I hope he's right – I believe it, anyway.

The sunshine tree

This is a tree in the back yard outside my balcony. When I first moved in here (Nov. 2001) it was only a quarter of its present size. Now it's large enough that, for a brief few fall days, it serves as a "surrogate sun": its leaves turn a bright yellow – so bright, in fact, that I'm often momentarily deluded into thinking it's turned sunny outside, when in fact, I'm seeing only the light reflected from the tree. And on days when it really is sunny out, the wall of my living room opposite the balcony window positively glows yellow.
Alas, both leaves and sun will soon be gone.

VIFF, October 9, 2008

Two excellent films today:

3 Women Engrossing story with intelligent, reflective characters (reflective in the context of the plot, not as a philosophical overlay or something similar glued on to the plot). A clear plot, made so by several visual and verbal bits that clarified/focussed the viewer's attention (unlike many films where so much is going on that it's very easy to miss a detail essential to understanding what's happening). A well integrated and satisfying film.

I am Good A very funny and well-done film about a con to retrieve money conned away by the bad guys. Great characters.

That's it for this year. There were several others that, in retrospect, I wish I'd seen, but it's so hard to determine how good a film is from the guide the VIFF puts out – it reads mostly like advertising copy.

And a final note of appreciation to whoever writes the funny VIFF "trailers", not just this year, but in earlier years as well – I wish the festival would make them available online.

Addendum: I just did a quick search and found the trailers, at least those from this year.

VIFF, October 5, 2008

Two duds, more or less

Adhen Potentially interesting plot, but spoiled by a "realistic" style (all the ums and ers and conversation scraps irrelevant to the plot) and flat affect. No plot resolution.

The Equation of Love and Death Felt like an episode of a CSI show, with more violence (which bores me no end). One of those plots where you can't figure out what's going on until well into the film, by which time I didn't really care.

I wouldn't bother seeing either again. Waste of a Sunday evening.