(from 2004)

Mahlen Morris's weblog from 2004, in newer-items-at-the-top style. (All the links to places on the site are broken and just being kept for history.)

Diane's 1989 Camry has been donated to KQED. Lots of memories about that car; our first kiss was while leaning against the back bumper.

Diane and I spent Thanksgiving weekend in New Mexico visiting my brother Clark, his wife Jill, and their six year old son, Kyle. We had a great time getting away from home and our cats, and hanging out at their home with their cats. We saw movies, had some yummy food from Jill, went shopping in Old Town and Nob Hill, and Clark and I stayed up till 2AM playing Burnout 3 on his Xbox. Now that's living! On Monday, our last day there, it was actually snowing when we woke up, a major novelty for us San Franciscans.

Showing my brother Clark the camera on my hiptop...

Those drawings on the table are from a caricature artist.

Shopping.com had our IPO last week, so we're having a little party in the Spanish Suite of the Clift Hotel. Nice view!

Had a strange but interesting idea this morning; a way to make easy-to-read XML compatible with faster-parsing binary formats. If you made a method-compatible replacement for a standard XML library (say, Xerces, or Java's internal XML package), but the output were a more compact binary format, then replacing the library would speed up the data processing. So in development you use the normal XML library, so you can see what's happening, but in test and production you switch to the faster one. Not useful when unknown 3rd parties are reading the output, but in other circumstances, could be useful. Hmmm...

Five years ago today I had a dentist appointment. Three years ago we destroyed a window in our house on purpose. Two years ago I got the computer that is still my main home machine. I don't these things because I'm a date remembering freak (although I am one). I know this because mahlen.org has now been up for five solid years.

Five years ago I was working at search portal Excite@Home, living in a tiny rented apartment in the San Francisco boonies with wife Diane, and had just adopted a stray white cat we found on the street. Now I work with some of the same people at Shopping.com, live in a house we bought even further from downtown (though close to the ocean), and Wanfu sleeps in our bed every night.

The view at 8 AM from my office this morning. This is facing east, with the Brisbane Marina in the foreground.

Two black Scion xB's, in the parking lot at work; the left one is ours.

Shots of the ruins of the Sutro Baths, a few blocks from my house. On the last photo you can see the newly reconstructed Cliff House restaurant in the upper right corner.

The Ambient Orb, amidst the shrine of nerdly food offerings. The Orb is hooked up to the continuous build process I wrote for work. Normally it is green, to indicate that all is well, but when the build fails, this what it looks like, indicating that the code must be fixed. Do not anger the Orb!

Corner of Clement and 25th Ave., San Francisco.

Diane and I went a Chinese dessert-only place tonight called Golden Island at 20th and Noriega with Diane's boss (who is also our dentist). Diane had the Sago with Strawberry (the red dish), Cynthia had the Dun Dan with Almond flavor, and I couldn't resist a dish called Snow Frog Cream Stwed with Red Date and Lotus Seeds. It was sort of a sweet hot soup. Then I found out that in fact, the name of my dish was not some clever metaphor; it's actually made of fat from a frog commonly found in China. At that point, I decided that maybe I'd order something different next time.

My first (terrible, in the dark) photo and my first entry using my new Danger Hiptop II, replacing the black and white Hiptop I've had since Feb. 2003. It's exciting to have it finally! It's also nice to have a working camera on my phone again, and look how much bigger the new picture is compared to the old ones.

Last week I concluded playing Doom 3, which, because I'd been carefully pacing myself, took me six weeks to finish. I still feel the same way as I did at the beginning of playing it; Doom 3 is a work of art. The pacing is just right in every way, the visuals are really striking throughout, and the sound design is brilliant.
I've been playing te Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War demo, and while it's pretty interesting (a surprise, since RTS's are not my genre), I think I'm gonna lay off the gaming for a while. Unless, you know, Half-Life 2 came out.

I'm sitting in Muddy Waters (a cafe) on Church St., waiting to pick up Diane from an event. I used to hang out here quite often, but my life wit Diane took me far away. So it's probably been 10 years since I've been here. Just about everything in my life is different (although I do still have Pooky and Lucy from back then), but THE SAME CD is playing on the sound system here; Portishead's "Dummy".

Stunning art direction make this a ground-breaking action flick. Surprisingly, all of the fights are swordsplay; this is the first time that we've seen Jet Li do any sword work. But Li delivers some of his best work ever here. See in the theatre to get the full effect.

A follow-up to Bear's Darwin's Radio, telling the story of the next-gen children and the political chaos they have sparked in the U.S. Some pretty interesting ideas here, but the political thriller aspect went flat, and certainly not as crazily inventive as Darwin's Radio.

This weekend, after months of "hmmm"ing and thinking and just plain procrastination, Diane and I bought a new car to replace our 15 year-old Camry. So we got another black Toyota, a 2005 Scion xB. It's short (great for parking in S.F. and driving in the tight streets here), has lot of cargo room (good for moving furniture and those times when stuff has to be moved), and is cool looking (good for, ummm, looking cool). We pick it up tomorrow.

This book was a revelation for me; a novel that gets the details of the joys, pains, and culture of being a working computer programmer exactly right. Ullman not only knows software (she's a retired programmer herself), but she knows software people. Highly recommended, especially for those punk kids who want to know what the Valley was like before the 1990's boom.

Another novel from the idea fountain that is Cory Doctorow. While jammed full of interesting uses for future and current technologies and how societies could form and interact within the new communication media, as novel it's not so hot; the main character's conflicts never quite quite made sense to me. But then, i read the entire novel on a combination of my Hiptop and a web browser (the entire novel is under a Creative Commons license), so I do have to wonder if that affeted my comprehension of the text. But hey, it was free! Still, if you want a well-rendered vision of what daily life could be like in 30 years (or even now, for the daring), it's worth reading.

A WW2-era memoir of being a Jewish chemistry nerd in Fascist Italy, and how chemical mysteries played a part in every part of youth and coming of age (and saved him from a much worse fate). Both the hardships of WW2 and the small practical matters of doing chemistry are described matter-of-factly, doing what good narrative can do: transport the reader to someplace they've never been.

Got back this weekend from a 6 day vacation in Kaua'i, following a 4 day excursion to Portland, OR the previous week. So no updates for a while, but I've been told that some people actually do read this site, (apart from people who stumble upon it via searches), so more updates soon. But for now, I have to reacquaint myself with my job.

Despite my best efforts, it appears I turned 40 on Saturday. I knew Diane was planning some sort of surprise for me, but the details were unclear. So when my friend Craig invited me to his house to play the brilliant Unreal Tournament 2004 on Saturday afternoon and Diane had no objection, I decided to play along.

I was then directed to meet Diane at a Hunan/Szechuan restaurant on California called Eliza's, where, it turned out, ten of my friends (including Craig) were there with Diane waiting for me. We had a great meal, and then hiked back to our house for a heavenly Citizen Cake Chocolate Midnight cake, opening presents (surprise, lots of books!) and a nearly 7 minute long movie that my let's-be-glad-he's-not-evil genius brother made for us.

Best. Birthday. Ever. Thanks Diane! You're the best!

From Programming Ruby:

"This means that all objects have Object as an ancestor, and that Object's instance methods are available to every object in Ruby."

Instructions: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, and post its text along with these instructions. Point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads.

A silly game i read about on Tim Bray's ongoing.

Work has been super busy for my team the last few weeks; leaving after twelve hours feels like I'm cutting out early. Despite having worked in the Valley for almost 15 years, this is really my first experience with that.

But I am learning an awful lot of new things, including a language I never thought I would need to look at, Perl. I tried Perl back in 1995 (on a 486), and I thought, "Phew, that's crazy, I'll stick with AWK." But this time around, I'm grokking it a lot more; I still think that Ruby is cleaner and easier to remember, but I'm enjoying the Perl too.

This weekend, in the midst of (mostly Diane's) preperation work for doing taxes, we did sneak in a few hours at the San Francisco Garden Show, buying a few dahlia bulbs and looking at the fancy-pants show gardens in the middle of the Cow Palace.

I noticed a few days ago that the stereo speakers I bought from Whole Earth Access in Berkeley when i was in college (1988) are finally so trashed that they need replacing; the little flexible part around the woofer cones has completely disintegrated. Diane can hardly contain her excitement about finally having an excuse to get smaller speakers (even though what we currently have are considered "bookshelf" speakers these days).

Diane and I spent Valentine's Day/President's Day weekend in Mendocino at the lovely Blair House, best known as the apparent Maine home of the TV detective in "Murder, She Wrote". Norm, the housekeeper, was a fantastic host, setting up many special Valentine treats for the guests. Even though it rained pretty much the entire time we were there, we had a great time, spending several hours with an artist Diane had bought a piece from 25 years ago when Diane was coming to Mendo every weekend. Great to play hooky from the house, especially since it was full of boxes from the movers pulling our stuff back in after the renovation.

My brother Clark, the genius TV editor put together a great video about our dad. See it on the movie page.

I hadn't mentioned that Diane and I spent two weeks of January in a hotel down the street called the Seal Rock Inn, while our hardwood floors were being redone. We had intended to just sand and lighten the color of the floors, but when the dark color came off, we saw that there were long rows of nails in floor that just didn't look right at all. And since we had the furniture in storage and the cats in the garage (boy did they hate that) and a place to stay, we figured, might as well do it right, so we got new 3/4" wood with a mahogany strip around the side. And then, for all those reasons above, we decided, well, better get the living and dining room painted. So that happened. Oh, and during all this, Diane started a new part-time job working for our dentist, Cynthia Hom at 450 Sutter Street, here in San Francisco. All those decisions to make, and Diane busy as heck!

However, once the dust cleared (or was wiped off) and the furniture was back in place, I have to say, it does look awfully nice. Someday I'll put a picture up.

A record label with the middlemen taken out. You can buy albums on the record label for as little as five dollars, fully downloaded. They have Web-radio stations that broadcast their albums; i especially like the Ambient channel. Finally, a music company that is willing to experiment with business models other than "I ship you plastic disks."

A writer of great talent shows that the Pulitzer she won for her first book of short stories was no fluke with this equisitely wrought novel about the youth and maturation of a second-generation Bengali living on the East Coast. Really captivating writing that never reveals where its next turn is coming from.

My favorite daily comic strip is even better collected in this book. Far funnier than other strips, and a great mix of characters eternally at odds (the unrepentant progressive leftist, the wanna-be thug, and the grandfather who can hardly believe his grandsons are such fools. Excellent.

My dad would occasionally write up little essays, and I'm hoping to post them up here. To start, there's Robert at Ten, an essay on daily life on an isolated Indiana farm in 1936.

Bye, Dad.

A parody of the Obey Giant poster, featuring our president.