A few video scenes

Well, tomorrow I fly to Seattle and then Hawaii to be reunited with my greatly missed little family! Can't wait. Also, get to visit with a triumphant Aidan fresh from trekking in Nepal. He said he'd teach me how to surf :-).

This weekend I was in Garmisch with Mat and Ari. We had a great time, hiking through the amazing Partnachklamm, a deep gorge with a trail on the side. The fresh snow on the rock made the dramatic landscape look like something from Halo. I took some small movies with my cheap digital camera, and combined them with some other movies from the Klettersteigs the weekend before to make: this. It is a 12 MB movie, might be best to download it first. Scenes of landscapes, Mat and Ari.

One of the coolest things we did was go swimming at the Zugspitze Bad. It was a great swimming pool, also had a hot tub the size of many ordinary swimming pools!

Here is what I'm working on

I came across this kind of impressive press release describing what we are doing now. It's pretty neat. I'm part of the Workgroup team mentioned in the full release.

Avid Signs Largest Deal in its History to Convert CBS News Operations in New York and London

IBC, Amsterdam - 9-Sep-2005 -

Avid Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: AVID) today announced the largest single deal in its history: a multimillion dollar broadcast deal with CBS to install Avid â end-to-end digital newsroom environments at the network’s New York City headquarters and London news bureau. The massive renovation, which will replace several tape-based news production systems, will be delivered in four stages. The first stage is currently underway and the entire project is expected to be complete by December 2006. Following the installation, Avid’s end-to-end digital news production solutions will be deployed at all three major network news operations in the US : ABC, NBC, and now CBS.

The rest of it here.

Kiddos and plump awfulness

Tonight I went to a meeting of the Munich Wanderers, an english-speaking group of hikers in the area. Seemed like most everyone was German though, and there to practice english? That was fine, it was an interesting group of people. I ordered the evening menu to eat and regretted it. It was two plump watery sausages that the knife could barely cut through, and then the insides came swimming out. I was appalled! I managed to eat most of the internals of one of them, but then I got completely grossed out. No offense to sausage lovers, normally I'm a big one. But I just never saw this kind of...thing...before.

Anyway, a neat lesson from an older guy named Erik, from Swabia. He said teaching children is setting an example for them. So, when his boy was little, he'd ride in the back seat and tell his dad if he was over the speed limit. Erik used to speed, and say "bullshit" to all that speed-limit nonsense. But with the "controller" in the back seat, he said "oh, okay" and slowed down right away. Erik thinks that this helped the boy learn good social manners. If he saw his dad breaking rules, then he'd feel entitled to do the same. He might obey rule X or Y, but would always be opportunistic in looking for a rule to break. "Children are like apes!" said Erik.

I also just loved the story Kris told me last night about the little fellas in their room at night. What a picture she painted! I can just see Rowan crawling jerkily towards the open door with it's sickle of light, half asleep, yet excited to be a part of the activity. He is just beaming but his eyes are puffy and closed against the light. He is so happy! And yet he falls asleep again, crumpling forward as if the batteries died.

And Elijah, sitting up in the dark somehow. Right when the door opens he is looking at you! Did he know you were coming? What was he thinking in there? What made him sit up? And he's learning the work banana, or at least working very hard at learning it. Kris said he studied her face intently each time she said it. Perhaps he was sitting in the dark, saying "na na", still working hard on it. That's my boy!

And how she'd lie down next to Rowan, who would be so overjoyed with happiness to have a visitor that he'd lie there smiling and looking at her and beaming. Unable to sleep he begins crawling in a circle to burn off happiness, always coming right back to be next to his mom. Smiling again. The cycle begins anew!

I like how Rowan bangs the keys with abandon, and Elijah always plays b-flat and occasionally the two adjoining black keys: never two notes at once! He'll look around for acknowledgement of his composition. How does he know there is an end, when he should look for applause?

Being away for awhile, these transmitted memories have the glimmer of trophies, and I don't want to forget them.

Hey, Petzold liked it too!

Ha, I say...Ha! So, I always liked this movie called Desk Set, an old Tracy-Hepburn film from the 1950s. It had a large computer, and interesting mid-century office protocols. Kris always wondered why I like that movie so much. Anyway Charles Petzold wrote an interesting speech here, and here is part of the section about Desk Set:

I recently re-watched what I believe to be the first Hollywood movie to deal with computers in a major way. This is the movie Desk Set. It’s 1957, and Katherine Hepburn supervises three other women in the research department of the Federal Broadcasting Company. Whenever somebody has a question requiring research, they call up on the phone, and Hepburn and her team get to work on the answer.

Enter Spencer Tracy, a self-described Methods Engineer and the inventor of an “electronic brain” called the Electro-Magnetic Memory and Research Arithmetical Calculator or EMERAC—“Emmy” for short.

Well, naturally, everybody in the research department assumes they’re going to be fired, just like what happened in payroll when an “electronic brain” was installed there. Although it’s expressed here as a nervous humor, this plot line reflected a real anxiety at the time. Of course, workers didn’t really think that an entire computer was necessary to do their job. No, people instead joked that they were going to be replaced by a single button....

Anyway, it's a good movie, go watch it!

Went hiking

I went hiking today in Austria. Here are the pics, I'll have a full story later. Right now, I'm going to sleep!
http://www.mountainwerks.org/cma/2005/rofan.htm

Our agent, John Sharp

I'd like to thank our real estate agent John Sharp. We've known each other for a few years through mountain climbing. I remember being amazed to learn a few years ago that he had climbed the Northeast Buttress of Johannesburg Mountain in the North Cascades National Park. I pressed him for details of the trip, and it went in my mind as something to strive to achieve. When my friend Theron and I finally climbed it we were forearmed with knowledge from John and another friend Robert Meshew. Also, John helped us more concretely close to the date, because he discovered an alternate descent from the mountain that he named "Dan's Direct," after a friend. We followed his advice and found our way down much easier that by going the standard way.

And it's like that that John helped us with our house: seeing us safely through a transaction fraught with worries, especially considering that we were leaving the country. I called him in mid-September and said "we want you to sell our house, and by the way, we might be seriously gone before you manage to do it." I then coolly lit a cigarette.

Okay maybe that was a little over-dramatized. John helped us work out a timeline, and helped us find a price that we were happy with and that would also ensure a fairly quick sale. His photographer spent a lot of time getting the best light and angles for the pictures. Here are a few of them:

We put the house on the market quickly, and got a buyer just 2 days later. Unfortunately it fell through because another family member didn't like the house a few days later. It took a few more days to get another buyer, and this person was really motivated (as we were, another thing to be thankful for). John was right on top of everything, and from here it went without a hitch. All in all, it went from "wacky idea" in mid-September to a closed house sale on October 31st.

I knew that if we ended up moving before the house was sold, John would be a good steward for our real estate business in Washington. He is solid and trustworthy. If we move back to Washington one day, we'll keep him busy looking for a place. We also hope he'll come out with his family for some hiking and climbing in the Eastern Alps wonderland.

John's contact information can be found here.

Here is the place...

The Musterstein is labelled in this picture from Google Earth (if it's too small to read, it is in the middle right. The picture doesn't do the massive cliffs justice, nor the beauty of the area, it is really something.

a few more stuffs

Wow, just now I went to the little supermarket. I got a big bag of cookies for 89 cents! Anyway, I was standing in line and the guy in front of me got into a big argument with the cashier. She started shouting "Sie sind krank! krank!" which of course means either:

"You are sick! sick!"

or

"They are sick! sick!"

depending on a context record that I didn't have. Either way, it sounded like this man was some kind of "local pariah" judging by the woman's outraged indignation at the stuff he was saying. Gosh, I wish I understood...

Work is really fun! The weather isn't very good this weekend so I'm not sure how far I'll stray from home. But I was thinking of going to work just to keep having fun with this project. I forgot how much I outlined before, but for this first project I am making a virtual table view on the object-oriented database (implemented in C++) we have. As I've plowed along, exposing more and more of the system through "tables," my eventual goal is to be able to join them in sql select statements. Also, an UPDATE statement would be really helpful. This tool will help product support to examine a database in a straightforward way (I mean, how do you "look" at an oo db?), and with the update statement might save someone's bacon sometime.

Today I programmed the WHERE clause to work for one table, building the expression grammar and associated tree to handle the boolean logic and decide if a particular "row" is good to print.

But I'll almost have to start over to handle multiple tables. You see, there is a lot of work under the covers when you write something like

select * from object_table ot, property_table pt where ot.ID = pt.ID

In the least optimized cast, you have length(ot) * length(pt) rows, and without ordering of table pt, you have to walk all of table pt length(ot) times! So without some intelligence gleaned from the where clause the performance would be awful. So, my work will be to think about query plans, coming up with a notion of Primary/Secondary keys, indexes, and following hints about which table should be primary (ot or pt). I never thought I'd be implementing SQL!

My boss showed me a parser generator program called ANTLR, and I'm using that to implement the SQL grammar. I have to say I really like this tool. You create a grammar file and it spits out C++ files. Here is the real benefit: the C++ files look exactly like you would write yourself if you were writing a recursive descent parser. This is much better than a YACC grammar where it is impossible to read or debug the generated code.

All in all, I'm very relieved at how fun and interesting the work is. I did my best beforehand to suss this kind of thing out, but I was steeled to accept either a precarious fire drill existence or mind-numbing beauracracy. Gott sei dank that I have had to put up with neither!

Last night we had a tabletop football tournament at work. I was terrible, but because my partner (Harald) was so good, we made it to the "semi-finals." I had a Subway sandwich which tasted just like back home (no "saurkraut sauce" or anything unpleasant :=)).

I can't wait to see the boyos and Kris. Skype really helps close the gap though, Kris and I can still have a "closing of the days business" talk, and it seems like she's right here. Of course she is starting the next day! Anyway, I can't wait for us to be in our apartment, it is so nice. And yesterday I went out to eat at Sitar, the Indian food restaurant just two blocks from our apartment. Super good. Living in a city is pretty neat.

I wasn't really ready to talk about it earlier, but I want to ask for positive thoughts for my friend Mat. He injured his knee Sunday while saving my life on a mountain called the Musterstein. He might have a torn ACL, at least there is a fair amount of swelling. He can walk fine, but certain ways of moving the knee aren't working right. Before I go into the details I want to say that this accident has forced me to realign myself completely in how I think about the mountains, what I'm going to do in them, and who I want to be for my family. I've confronted death in a way I wouldn't wish on anybody, but I think that ultimately it is a good thing for me. However, I can't ever really feel that way until I know that Mat's knee is going to be ok.

Mat, Ari and I were enjoying such an amazing weekend. We went shopping in the morning, then I loaned my iPod to Ari who liked it so much she stayed home and cleaned/redecorated the house with it. She ran the battery totally down, which is awesome. Mat and I first did a 6 pitch rock climb, then hiked up to a beautiful hut behind his house and had beer and cake in the best mountain scenery. For dinner, Ari made this great chicken dish with a spicy sauce and wine. We also spent a few hours speaking only German, which was great for me. They had a lot of patience, for sure!

Sunday Mat and I made the hike up to the Musterstein, starting from the little Austrian village of Lasching. We left the trail and scrambled for several hundred feet to the rope-up point. I took the first pitch, which I thought was really easy for a grade V (about 5.8 in the U.S. grading system). A few pitches later I volunteered to lead a grade VI pitch. I set out, and it schooled me really good. In fact, I stopped at a belay spot halfway up to let Mat finish it. Good thing too, because I couldn't even follow the second half cleanly. It climbed an overhanging wall protected by bolts with almost nothing for fingers. Above that pitch I set out again, climbing up to a steep corner and actually thinking about lowering down and giving this pitch to Mat too (he has practically boundless strength). I should have, because after a series of rapid events, I fell and ripped out a piton on the way down. I fell about 60 feet, and it was long enough for me to believe it was the end. I expected a short fall, but then I saw the piton fly out from the face above me and the rope flipped me over so that I was hurtling face-first towards the lower mountain. I thought of Kris and Elijah and Rowan, and how I wouldn't be there. I was simply, very sad.

After a impact I realized I hadn't received a killing blow, and that I was hanging upside down with my legs tangled in the rope. I heard Mat groaning above me and was just generally dazed for a few seconds. I was thrilled to realize I could move all my limbs and wasn't bleeding. I untangled myself while hanging in space, then pushed over to a bolt on the wall to clip myself in. Mat needed me to untie from the ropes, so I did. After awhile he rappelled down (wisely ignoring my bizarre comment "I think I can keep climbing, if you lead that pitch!"). Mat had a awful looking wound on his hand where the rope had burned away a strip of flesh on front and back. He had a similar wound on his neck, and he was initially afraid his leg was broken from the way the rope wrapped around it. "It's like being run over by a truck slowly," he said of the way my plummeting weight tightened the rope around his leg.

When a climber falls on a rope the impact on the belayer is usually low, because there is some protection in the rock above the belayer. But because the piton had pulled out and because I ran it out on easy ground above his belay (a no-no that people who become complacent or too casual regularly engage in - as I did), the impact on Mat was tremendous. Many belayers have lost control of the rope at this point, and it would whistle away so fast that it couldn't be touched without searing pain. Had that happened, I certainly wouldn't be here. Instead, Mat was slammed around, burnt, wounded and "run over by a truck" up at the belay to hold me.

We were able to rescue ourselves, making 5 200 foot rappels to get down from the middle of the cliff face. We reflected that I had been lucky, in a way, that the route was so hard. Although that was part of what led to the fall, the steepness of the rock saved me from hitting anything that would break bones or worse: I was like a cat in the air, said Mat. He barely dodged out of the way to avoid me. "I thought you were dead for sure," he said.

We hiked down, only slowed down a little by Mat's knee. My only injury is a big scrape on the hand, and huge purple bruises on my calves from the squeezing of the rope. Also on my right tricep, but I don't know why.

I've finally had the truism "climbing is dangerous" brought home to me in a visceral way. I also feel the responsibility of someone who, in hindsight had a lot of reasons why he shouldn't have climbed that particular pitch, and suppressed them all, for a variety reasons including laziness and ego. Mat is injured because of this accident, and there is nothing that can put a sober cast on the day more than the injury of a friend when you feel any measure at all of responsibility.

And I feel plenty.

All of this is changing me inside, and I understand how fragile and precious life is now. I owe it to these friends and family that I love to change any aspects of my thinking that need to be changed. I humbly submit that to do this right is what I want more than anything.

So...in Europe for a week and "the gods" have slapped me (and Mat) down hard. I feel bad reporting such grim news, I'm not very good at this kind of news. Anyway, I'm going to stay off the hard climbs, and think about what originally brought me to the mountains, what made them such a spirtually comforting and energizing force for me. I feel that by constantly "one-upping" myself and climbing things ever harder and harder, I turned away from what makes the mountains a life-sustaining place. Instead, I was getting an ego boost and gradually losing the ability to make prudent decisions (decisions that might make you lose face or appear weak -- a condition usually feared all out of proportion to the actual result). I still want to climb, and for my family to climb together. But I'm fencing myself off from certain desires, and I want to puzzle out why for some time the "darker, steeper, scarier" climb was by definition "better."

Okay enough of that. Please send your prayers and energy to Mat's knee. It lives with the rest of him in Garmisch, Germany right under the Zugspitze.

Target of the Kontrol

It's pretty odd, hardly anyone here ever sees the Kontrol, or police of the subway that occasionally check to see that your card is valid. But I was accosted last night and again today! Last night I stayed kind of late at work and was coming home, listening to my iPod on a nearly empty train, when a tap on the shoulder got me to turn and see a black-clad serious looking man holding some kind of ID badge. I fumbled around and found my card...no problem.

Today is a holiday ("All-Saints Day", or "All Souls Day"). I slept in, then went for a bike ride to visit our apartment in Lehel. I needed to be back by 2 pm because Neal was making some pizza and it would be ready then. The weather finally took the turn for the worse that everyone was expecting, but I didn't mind the gray skies as long as the rain held off. Traveling south, then east through Westpark, I was impressed by the hills, forest paths, golden leaves and green lawns of the park. There was a little pagoda by a still lake. A half mile away there was a bigger lake with a restaurant and some geese. Eventually I came out and travelled up Lindwurmstrasse which brought me to Sendlinger Tor, a tower that marks the southwest entrace to the inner city. I hoped a little stand would be open to buy sausages in the Viktualin Markt, but everything was closed, darn. I just had time to ride by our place on Bruderstrasse then I turned back, following my nose back to Lindwurmstrasse and Westpark.

I got back and Neal hadn't even started on the pizza, too wrapped up in an Internet chat (kids these days...). So we hung out a while, then ate. I took off again around 4:00 on the bike, oddly excited about seeing terrain south of the main city.

But it was raining harder so I thought I'd relax and just wander a bit. That became harder though because I rode aimlessly onto Fürstenriederstraße and pretty soon recognized that it headed due south. I went by a cemetary called Waldfriedhof, and there were many people going in and out. I could see little candles on many of the graves inside. All Souls Day is a time when people prepare the graves of loved ones for winter, with candles and flowers. The cemetary was large, and I rode by on the outside for well over a mile. Before long I was on a bike path with a sign: "Starnberg: 16 km". Well Starnberg has a lake called the Starnbergsee. That made me think of the mountains so I thought "I should go there." I stopped to reconfigure my gear, taking off the jacket and hat, putting the lights on the bike and getting the iPod ready for a long trip. The ride was simple and nice. First I passed a large forest with little dirt roads going in. Then the country opened up into farm and horse country, very pretty. I was really getting wet though. It had started to rain lightly, and the lower half of my jeans were already soaked through. As I wondered about the wisdom of going all the way out to Starnberg and back I was suddenly flying through the air when my bike hit some kind of wet leaf. "Ahhhhgh!" I said, landing heavily on my back. Already bruised from an accident in the mountains Sunday I just had to shake my head. "I need my wife," I thought.

I collected my iPod (happily undamaged) from the middle of the road, and waved on the concerned car that slowed down. Grimly I got back on and kept going, all you can do after a pratfall I guess!

Okay, once I was at Starnberg, I was so miserable and soaked, that I made right for the S-bahn station. Squealching inside, I puzzled out what tickets I'd need to buy to get me and my bike back near home. It was a bit complex, so I probably "overbought:" I had to have a ticket for my bike, and a ticket for myself, each with a different number of zones because I already have a zone 1-2 ticket for the week. Whew. That took at least 5 minutes, including a puzzling episode where the ticket machine wanted a 50-cent piece and wouldn't accept the one I kept giving it. Alas, I had to put in a 1 Euro piece, and get back: another 50-cent piece for my collection!

Shivering a little in my wet jeans, I was happy to see the train. I found a car which took bikes and got on. I had to lock my bike up in front of another one, so I had to keep an eye on the area in case that person needed to get off. Suddenly I was accosted by a middle-aged man in traditional Bavarian costume. "Hochheimer auf gehts i'habe?" he said, or something like that. I made a non-committal noise and went to sit down. A little while later he reappeared and I had to say I couldn't speak German. He started speaking in what might once have been English, but he was clearly really drunk. Then he held out his hat for some money. I gave him a Euro, probably a mistake. He wandered around the train asking for money and swaying gently.

After 10 minutes or so I saw that my stop was coming up so I went to unhook my bike and get off. But alas! Kontrolle! Kontrolle! The black-clad men with badges had found me again, and, seeing me move towards the bike, two stood in the way. I explained that my german wasn't good, and started pulling out cards. 1 for my bike, 1 for me, and another for me in the 2 inner zones. They kept talking and I couldn't understand but it seemed like I'd done something wrong because I was the life of their party. Finally one of them took some pity and explained in English that the 2 cards I bought at the station weren't valid because I hadn't stamped them. Darn! That is just kind of hard for me to understand, I guess I always think that when I buy the card it becomes "in use" from that moment. But...they let me go, looking kind of aggrieved and disappointed...perhaps I was too easy a target?

The train had stopped though, and knowing how quickly the S-bahn pulls away again, I had a frantic rush to unlock the bike, gather my various tickets, my wallet, etc. and throw it all off the train. In fact, the door had already closed and I had to press a little red button repeatedly to get it open again. It took me about 10 minutes to re-assemble my possesions once off the train. These are the kinds of things that happen to someone in a strange land. The most normal, routine actions take a lot of work!

Now I had to get back to my neighborhood, near Friedenheimerstrasse (I was at the Laim S-bahn station). It was raining hard now. Oh well, I'm already wet! It was probably a 2.5 mile bike ride in the dark cold rain. Neal and Pramilla were out. I went straight for a hot shower and some tea.

We sold our house! John Sharp did such a great job, and I hope the new owners are really happy with it.

Tomorrow's big thing is that I'll get a bank account, then Kris will try to wire money to it to pay for our apartment. I'd also like to go out and eat at a restaurant, I've been really frugal about food, and have been kind of beaten up lately. A beer and sausage or steak would be great.

I'm really glad Kris and I can talk via GoogleTalk or Skype. I can't wait to hug "The Boyos." It's been a week and half but it feels like forever.