Go forward in time to Apr 2001.
Lunch at my grandmother's, good as usual. Nice talk with my uncle about plugging a camera to a telescope and the whatnot.
Lukewarm concert at best; it is the first concert of the season for the OFUNAM. Chopin's 2nd piano concerto was disappointing, and Brahms's 1st symphony was equally uninspired. I blame the conductor, because the orchestra can do much better than that.
Que las ardillas no vistan de champiñones a las vacas...
Sigh. Evolution freeze deadline and I am fucked.
Cooked a spaghetti with a spicy sauce that would have made Ettore proud. It is my best spaghetti so far; gotta remember this improptu recipe.
For dessert, mamey and chicozapote. Tropical fruit is a wonderful thing.
Got a bit overwhelmed in the afternoon. Took a walk out in the park; sat down and did a pencil drawing of the church tower. Not bad.
Wow, it seems that people are still trying to play with Gnoghurt, our 1-week hack for Linux Expo two years ago. Got a forwarded mail from Owen about it.
I just realized that in my favorite recording of Bartók's piano concertos, both the soloist and the performer are dead now. This is freaky.
Uninterruptible power supply broke. Or seems to be broken. Had to go buy a power strip. This sucks.
Ethernet cable broke one of its little tiny wires. This really sucks. Had to borrow one from Luis Javier, who very kindly brought it home after he went to the movies.
My camera's exposure meter is not goddamn fixed yet. This totally blows my white hairy ass.
Federico Ibarra on the radio. Amazing.
It seems that classical radio stations in Mexico are much better than the ones in the U.S.; plenty of contemporary music is played here instead of all-day elevator Mozart.
On the happier side of things, the Zapatistas finally got to speak to the Congress. Things should get interesting.
I NEED MY FUCKING CAMERA. I NEED TO TAKE PICTURES OF ALL THAT IS HAPPENING.
Oralia made absolutely the best quesadillas de papa ever. This completely made my day.
Productive day. Lots of hacking; calendar search engine is looking good.
John Adams on the radio; need to get some CDs.
Nice Bonobo-related phone call with Miguel in the morning. It is good to talk to Miguee.
Took the first batch of books to the apartment. Deja-vu.
My cooking skills are definitely improving. Took the few pork chops that were left in the fridge and cooked them in an improptu mustard sauce that turned out to be pretty damn good.
It is not really a fridge. It is a Coleman cooler box thingy. We haven't purchased the stupid fridge yet because I'm waiting for travel reimbursement from Stockholm.
Money sucks.
Cooking to Ravel's piano concertos does not suck at all.
I want to have ESexp's children. It is almost too easy to get something working nicely with this thing.
Hacking in the morning. It is good to write code while you can actually see and hear the trees swaying outside.
Missed Verdi's Requiem, Sunday concert, because all the tickets had already been sold. Sigh. However, there was a flute/guitar duet outside the concert hall and they were playing the corresponding version of Bartók's Romanian songs. That made me happy.
Kick-ass seafood lunch in the marketplace, coffee afterwards.
Nice walk around the park with Luis Javier in the afternoon. Talked about life and similar perversions.
Oralia did the first cleaning pass. I did the second and third passes. Wow, this place now actually looks decent.
Quick lunch consisting of rotisserie chicken and ensalada de nopales. I love this neighborhood: walk a couple blocks to the marketplace, find food, walk back through the park which is full of interesting people, grab a coffee on the way back, enjoy the trees, the bustle. Civilization, not a dead ass-tight suburb.
Mopping the floor to Shostakovich's cello concerto is not bad therapy at all.
When I was finally exhausted I wrote a bunch of code. Laptops are a good thing. I need to move my desk in soon.
Finished the paperwork, got the keys to the apartment! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
More setting up of random stuff in the apartment. Cooked pork chops with olive oil, garlic, cumin powder, and some herb whose name in English I don't know. Oralia made red rice and mushroom soup. Yummi.
Most of the dust/grime from the construction is still present, so we have a heckuva lot of cleaning to do.
Little time for hacking, sigh.
Ettore asked me to work on the searching interface for the calendar and put off the stupid focusing stuff for later. Wow, it feels good to be hacking on fun stuff again. Sexps for search criteria are so pretty!
Sent off the Stockholm stuff for travel reimbursement.
According to the realty office, as soon as my mother arrives from New Jersey on Thursday we can get all the papers signed and we can finally get the keys to the apartment! Wooooo!
Went with Oralia to visit her father at the hospital, where he is getting a hip operation in a few days. Had to go across the whole city, got massively lost; eventually it took two hours to get there. Did not get lost on the way back: 30 minutes.
But as always, a lot of sleep, lots of subconscious activity, and good music do manage to cure everything.
Movies with Oralia, Luis Javier (who is back from Seattle), and Clara. Almost Famous is one of those movies I can watch again and again and again...
Rain. Good rain on a warm day. It is good to get rain-wet from time to time.
Cried.
Somehow it felt better afterwards.
Listened to Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin, just the ones in the minor keys.
St. Patrick's day. And sometimes people hurt you so much that you have no idea of what to say.
Finally I can see the light at the end of the stupid Bonobo focus tunnel.
My camera is not ready yet. The exposure meter is indeed damaged. Suck. On the other hand, the old lenses to be turned into AI-type ones are done and just fine.
Paid for the phone line. Wow, it is expensive. Went looking for bed mattresses, found a nice model that is not overly expensive.
More important, pleasant discussion.
Prokofiev's piano concerto RULES. The violin concerto is awesome, too. Some CD buying action must be planned.
More focus hacking. At last I seem to be making progress. And Sawfish did not change; I just got confused about which window should be getting which events.
Oralia and I went around price-shopping for furniture and stuff. Nothing purchased yet, just writing down prices and trying to make up our minds.
Lunch later, Japanese food. Discussed plenty of important things. Put way too much wasabi in my soy sauce. But the octopus sushi was good.
Went and got the kitchen stuff: pots and pans, dishware, silverware, random basic utensils, some kick-ass knives.
Man, setting up a whole apartment is expensive.
The Eazel layoffs are a terrible thing. I hope the affected people can find a job soon.
Lunch with Luis and Michelle, then went to their office. Wow, they do have a nice setup now. Took some prototype pictures for a project of theirs, had fun. Luis borrowed my digital camera; he'll be using it for this project.
Flame flame flame flame flame flame flame.
Flame flame flame.
Mailing lists are highly combustible these days.
Took the paperwork to the <blah blah office>... it should be done by Friday, and then we should finally get the keys to the apartment. Paperwork sucks.
More frustration.
Took my F2 for repairs. The exposure meter stopped working; apparently it may be corrosion on the resistors. Dang, I knew dropping it on the snow would cause something bad.
Got a nice desktop machine. Only had a halfway-complete Red Hat Linux 7.0 CD flying around, so that is what I installed. And stock, pre-updates 7.0 does bite. Sigh.
Sawfish seems to have changed again with respect to the way it handles the X input focus for embedded controls. This is a royal pain in the ass. Mailed John Harper for advice.
The university network is sucking large rocks these days. It seems I'll have to get hold of an ISP; I cannot work this way.
Frustration.
Upgraded the firmware on the Nikon 990.
More work on the Bonobo focus issues. La la la.
Learned that my camera *does* have shutter speeds longer than 1 second. Set it to T, press the silver button on top of the shutter speed dial to let it turn to the 2/4/6/8/10 second thingies on top of the normal time markings so that you can use the light meter for these durations, set the self-timer to the desired time, trip the shutter and the self-timer release at the same time. Wonderful; now I don't have to use bulb mode and a stopwatch. Amazing what one can find on the web.
Picked up the slides. That camera store has a display of old cameras; they had an old Canon with an amazing f/0.95 50mm lens. Zero point ninety-fucking-five. Supposedly it is the brightest lens ever made; it is a huge circle of glass almost as tall as the camera body itself.
Florencia, a friend of Oralia, invited us for lunch. She made red pozole, and it was delicious. Nice chat, too.
Went with Oralia to the airport to see if my luggage had arrived yet. No luck. Asked them to have it sent to my mother's office, where I would be certain there would be somebody to receive it.
I just love flying.
Then we went to Coyoacán. Had lunch in the marketplace, cheap and good. Took a few pictures of school children standing in line waiting to be walked into the theater; they seemed delighted to be photographed. Then we tried to catch the future landlord to sign paperwork, but he was not there. I'll call him tonight.
We watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. What a beautiful movie.
Re-merged by focus patches back into a local copy of Bonobo. I am now writing the focus-from-child-to-parent part of the whole deal. Pain pain pain.
Flight back to Mexico. Did not go on the 11:30 AM plane from Boston anyways; rather took the 2:15 PM one. Overly full flight, sucky. Had to run to the departure gate in Dallas. Another full flight, but not so sucky (newer plane, a bit more room). Made the trip much more pleasant by listening to Pink Floyd and looking at the completely dark ground below. You could not make out the difference between the ground and the black sky; the little towns and cities looked like galaxies in the middle of space.
As always, arriving to Mexico City at night when it is not cloudy or foggy is absolutely fantastic. You fall into an ocean of glittering points of light. You feel home.
But my luggage did not arrive to Mexico. It seems I'll have to wait. Sigh.
Mis-coordination with my mother; she intended to pick me up but we missed each other due to the change of flight times. Took a taxi home instead.
Mark Crichton came to Boston last night and apparently went to the movies with the rest of the hackers. Met him today at the office; we went for lunch, talked about life, and he accompanied me to the Music Espresso to look for piano scores. Got Granados's 6 Spanish Pieces; that rocks my world. He left early-ish because he had to catch a hockey game back in Amherst.
Went with Jeff to Microcenter so that he would get a digital camera. He got the Nikon 880. A beautifully light camera, and it seems to have most of the functions of the 990. Sigh...
Anyways, I got a set of rechargeable NiMH batteries for my own camera; non-rechargeable alkalines really do not last very long and they get expensive.
Up until late in the office, procrastinated packing my stuff there as much as possible.
The Kocsis Plays Bartók CD completely rocks my world.
Released gdk-pixbuf 0.10.0 "dance the ghost with me" last night. It feels good to put out a release again.
Went to the gym with JP. Not bad at all, but I wish they had a swimming pool.
Huge dinner with Ettore, Rachel, Jeff, JP, Michael, and Aaron at Ginza. Aaron and I shared a huuuuuge shabu-shabu, everyone else had to help us; Ettore and Rachel shared an enormous boat of sushi (and I took the octopus, delicious thing).
Yesterday we had drinking culture night at the Boston Beer Works. Lots of fun, even though people said it usually gets more crazy. Afterwards some of us to get some White Russians, the official drink at Ximian.
As JP and I were entering our front porch, we spotted a crushed box of K-Y jelly that had fallen from the trash. The neighbors must be having fun :)
Today, absolutely fantastic dinner at the Asmara restaurant in Central Sq. Ethiopian food does rule. Then, Ettore and I went to the Somerville Theater to watch Dancer in the Dark with Matt, Sarah, Kathryn, and Monica. Few movies hit you like that one. It made me sad.
Go backward in time to Feb 2001.
Federico Mena-Quintero <federico@gnome.org> Mon 2001/Jun/18 17:44:12 CDT