Today was my birthday, but I didn't do much to celebrate, because it's difficult to schedule things around the film festival. I'll do something to celebrate later.

My main activity for the day was to attend a SIFF panel discussion, Composing for and against Expectation, at the SIFF Lounge in the Pan Pacific Hotel. (Much thanks to Vulcan for ( Read more... )

SIFF's capsule summary: "A panel discussion on when to score a scene to empower the action or emotional undercurrents, and when to score against that expectation. Panelists will include composers working in film, transmedia, advertising, and video games.
Panelists: Guy Whitmore, Ron Jones, Sammy Applegate, and Susan Maughlin
Moderator: Brad ( Read more... )

This afternoon, a film "J" and I wanted to see played at Lincoln Square in Bellevue: Black Code. As kind of an establishing shot to illustrate the physical infrastructure of the Internet, the film started with a visit to a server farm in a huge underground bunker in Sweden, but most of the film was an assortment of cases where governments have ( Read more... )

Today I spent some more time working on video editing. It's taking time partly because I had to learn more about the software, and partly because there is a lot to do. The first phase was to get the raw video from the camera, the raw audio from my phone, convert the audio from the phone's format to .WAV, and synchronize the audio and video. That's ( Read more... )

This afternoon "J" and I went to Bellevue to pick up my father. From there we went to the same building where J and I used to work for a dress rehearsal of her presentation. She had to trim it somewhat, because we were squeezing an hour-and-a-quarter presentation down to a one-hour lunch, but it went pretty well. About five people showed up for the ( Read more... )

Today "J" and I and "T" went to an Indian restaurant with our friend "N", who had a coupon for it. The food was good, and the company was pleasant.
Later in the day, we tried to buy new batteries for our old uninterruptible power supply (UPS) at a battery store. They opened it up and looked at the old batteries - sealed lead-acid batteries I had ( Read more... )

This afternoon, "J" and I went to our usual alternate-Mondays meeting. After that, we went to get a pollution test for the car; it passed.
I went shopping for tile, first at one store, then at another because the first one didn't have enough of one of the types of tile we wanted and the second one did.
fame!

We also went to Costco, and I ( Read more... )

landscaping

This morning, we woke to the sound of yard-work power tools. Last week "J" had made arrangements with a landscape company to remove a massive blackberry bramble from a space behind our house. A crew of four arrived as scheduled to get the work done.
I didn't get to see the finished work until this evening. We took some time to ( Read more... )

I got an early morning knock at the door by a guy who seems to like talking to me. He seemed nice on first impression, and I hardly know anyone here so I welcomed the conversation. But after talking to him a few more times he seems weird - knocking on the door early in the morning, for example. His conversation seems to be a mix of common sense ( ( Read more... )

Yesterday I got a surprise in the mail: two boxes of checks from Costco check printing. The surprise wasn't the checks themselves, but the promptness of the shipment. I ordered on the 19th, and the site said 10 to 14 business days, and they were here on the 28th. Looking at a calendar, I count six weekdays - the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th, 25th, and ( Read more... )