Friday, September 8, 2006
Five years ago today, having quit my job in Toronto and been accepted to UBC, I stepped onto a plane with a couple of bags full of CDs and clothes, and moved to Vancouver.
I know Vancouver isn’t perfect, and there are certainly things that annoy me, but I love it regardless. Of all the places I’ve lived, Vancouver is the only one that really feels like home to me. Which is kind of strange, since I didn’t even visit Vancouver until I was in my mid-twenties. I mostly grew up in Regina, and I lived in Toronto for years after that, but I didn’t feel I was living in the right place until I came here. Toronto always felt kind of vast and impersonal, even though I came to enjoy living there. And it was pretty clear since high school that Regina didn’t have much use for me. I may not be the world’s most ambitious geek, but my aspirations are higher than a job debugging COBOL code for a crown corporation.
Vancouver, on the other hand, is the baby bear’s porridge. Not too big, not too small, not at the center of things or too isolated, not too anonymous, not too in-your-face (I like my social boundaries.)
And really, Vancouver is amazingly beautiful. Saskatchewan is beautiful too (Regina not so much), but it’s a stark, alien beauty that continually reminds you that human beings weren’t meant to live there. A couple of decades living on a barren and inhospitable prairie hundreds of kilometers from any ocean, mountain or forest primed me to appreciate British Columbia’s landscapes and, above all, its temperate climate — even if that means 40 weeks of the year are rather on the grey and drizzly side.
- Link>> to some pictures of my adopted home.
Tuesday, September 5, 2006
Oh, sure, I’m a righteous, vintage-wearing cooler-than-thou coolster into Wes Anderson movies and Cat Power concerts, and sometimes pretty girls talk to me, but there’s more to the enigma called Eric than meets the eye.
The fact of the matter is that I’m proficient in several programming languages, regularly have lengthy discussions on the technical merits of various operating systems, and can (and will, if permitted) talk at length about why Babylon 5 was so much better than Star Trek — and why Buffy the Vampire Slayer was better than both.
Also, I was almost certainly using the web long before you were, back when a solid understanding of TELNET and Gopher was pretty much a requirement. (This is not bragging — if you think the interweb is lame now, you should have seen it in 1995.)
What, you doubt I’m a nerd? (Just kidding, I know you believe me.) Behold! I have just computed my own personal Geek Code.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS d-- s--:+> a C++$ U++$>+++ P++(--) L+>- E--- K++ M++$ PS++()
PE-(++)@ Y? PGP t- 5+(++) tv--() b+++ DI- G e+++>++++ h- r-->++ y?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
Of course, the geek code technology is ten years old and therefore, might as well be a hundred. No specification for describing my mad Python programming skills? No slot for my Lord of the Rings opinions? No Slashdot?? Clearly, this cannot keep up with the 21st century geek. Sadly, the only successor seems to be OmniCode, which gains points for having a retro name, but then throws them all away be being hideously complicated and boring.
Real geeks like elegant solutions.
Also filed in
|
|
The literal translation of curriculum vitae is “course of life”.
I finally updated and reposted my own course of life and list of publications this morning. Not that I’m applying for anything, but I figure it’s best to keep these things up-to-date.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been using a graphical CV to visualize some of the things I’ve done. I figure this was useful, since the course of my life is less the road to success and more the spastic dotted lines left behind by Billy from The Family Circus. My educational and professional life has taken a few twists and turns since high school, from filmmaker, to amateur writer, to corporate programmer, to high-society gigolo, to grad student, to AI researcher, to helping build art gallery installations and a Yaletown Web 2.0 start-up.
Just think how much more impressive it would be if I had ever done any of these things well.
(Note to future potential employers reading this: just kidding! I do all these things really, really well! Except the gigolo thing. I might have made that one up.)
Thursday, August 10, 2006
The main reason I’m working so hard this month is that I want to earn me some extra money to go travelling in Southeast Asia this winter. I don’t have a specific plan yet, but I’m thinking Thailand for sure, and possibly one or more of Vietnam, Cambodia or Japan.
I think the idea of going to Thailand entered my head after seeing the offbeat, but quite lovely Christopher Doyle-shot film Last Life in the Universe, by Pen-ek Ratanaruang.
Not that the film really comes across like an advertisement for the country, but it has such a dreamy, slow-paced beauty and strangeness, and hearing Christopher Doyle’s brilliant commentary track made me appreciate how much locations can influence films. I like that.
In that way, it reminds me a lot of Lost in Translation, which makes me want to go to Japan. But Thailand is a whole lot cheaper.
Plus, if all goes well, I would like to take an extended period of several months to travel after I finish my PhD in a couple of years. This will allow me to dip my toe into the water of more exotic travel and find out how I deal with being in a country where I don’t speak the language.
In addition to my new start-up job, I have quite a bit of work to do for a project I’m working on with the Vancouver Art Gallery. Which means that instead of playing in the sun like the rest of Vancouver this long weekend, I’m locked away with my PowerBook writing ActionScript code, a task that would be much less time-consuming if I knew ActionScript.
Still, as sorry for myself as I feel, I think the project will ultimately turn out pretty cool, and as criminally underpaid as I am for this (I get paid out of a grant that mostly goes to people who aren’t me), I will be getting enough money to take a trip this winter. I hear Thailand is lovely. So you can belay those tears of sympathy I’m sure are welling up. Plus, I just watched Shaun of the Dead and zombie movies make me happy.
Oh, and happy British Columbia Day. I have no idea if this commemorates anything other than the fact that our forty annual weeks of grey and rain compel us to make the most of the summer. I tried googling for more info, but when I searched for “BC day” I got distracted by this rather amusing bit of bear-vs-hoser news, and now it’s time for bed.
http://yookyoungyong.com/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url=http://yookyoungyong.com/brownteapot-12-of-15-3/ Bear lumbers into B.C. day care
VANCOUVER – The story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears leapt off the page for the children at a Port Moody, B.C., day-care centre when a young black bear ambled into their kitchen looking for some porridge.
…
The bear had earlier visited a home across the street, standing up on his hind legs to get at the hanging bird seed, destroying the feeder before nosing his way toward the ground-level sliding patio doors, said homeowner Judy Bartrim. “My nephew chased it away with a hockey stick,” she said.
link >>
Also filed in
|
|