|
|
 |
June 30, 1998
News
Information about Ty Davison straight from the horse's mouth.
News Archives
Years worth of mind-numbing details, ponderings, and events.
News Links
External URLs that have cropped up in the course of the News history.
June 26-30, 1998—Palmer & Anchorage, Alaska
The flight into Anchorage was amazing. I don't recall ever seeing more spectacular sights from an airplane. The snow-capped mountain ranges were truly breath-taking. And again, nothing but kudos to Alaska Airlines. The flight could not have been better.Despite the magnificence of the surroundings, I came to Alaska for the wedding of my good friend Suzanne and my chess nemesis Dave. As a bonus, this event afforded me the opportunity to renew friendships and to meet many terrific people. Sue's family in particular showed me uncommon hospitality, and I remain very grateful.
The wedding and reception on Saturday were both excellent. It's a powerful feeling when two people you believe are right for each other join their lives together, and this was certainly one of those happy occasions. I've known Sue for about 10 years and Dave for about 6 months, but it's obvious to me (and everyone else, I think) that they were meant for one another.
The normal post-wedding chaos prevented much more than a cursory look at the natural wonder that is Alaska. Words consistently fail me when I tried to describe the beauty of nature, so let me say simply that Alaska is worth the visit, and that I, for one, shall return.
June 25, 1998—Salem, Oregon
Enjoyed dinner and extended conversation with friends Mike and Joy and their 2-year old Skylar. (Lest I forget, I also met their new puppy "Wolfie.") I got a chance to configure and explain a couple items relating to their new PowerMac, Winnie Pooh, as well. Arrived home late in a tired but happy frame of mind.June 22, 1998—Salem, Oregon
Returned to Portland for dinner and good times with my friend Garr. As usual conversational topics ranged widely, though we notably avoided our on-going dispute about the value of Jerry Springer. (In short, Garr believes it's a show which allows viewers to see detrimental behaviors and begin to implement avoidance techniques, all of which should lead to a general improvement in the lowest common denominator of society. I simply think that Springer is crap.)June 21, 1998—Salem, Oregon
Watched a slew of World Cup games with the same gang from yesterday evening (minus Joe, who arrived in the afternoon). Details on the games in the Sports/Soccer section.Speaking of Joe, we headed out to the Apple "Store-within-a-Store" at the Janzen Beach CompUSA. Finding, as usual, a number of sub-$15 Macintosh games for sale, I grabbed the 3D-first person action game Damage Incorporated for $10. We played a couple times once we returned to the house, and it looks like a worthwhile purchase.
Headed to my parents' place in Salem that evening.
June 20, 1998—Salem, Oregon
Celebrated my grandma's 85th birthday with a nice Chinese dinner. Grandma, who's just moved into an excellent assisted living arrangement, is in the process of selling the Portland Gateway District house she's owned since 1954. Interestingly, my dad (who grew up there) and I (who lived there for a couple years after college) seem to have much more of a sentimental attitude about the place than Grandma does. I find this strange, and I'm not sure to whether to attribute it to a difference in personality, in experience, or in wisdom. Perhaps all three. Regardless, Grandma is definitely enjoying her new home.In the evening, I hung out with friends Matt, Dennis, Ybeth, Ginger and Joe. Held a BBQ and had a rockin' good time playing cards. Matt, unfortunately, was under the weather which prevented him from joining in much of the festivities, but the thought that future get togethers will surely take place was hopefully some consolation.
June 19, 1998—Salem, Oregon
Flew from San Jose to Portland on Alaska Airlines. No complaints whatsoever.Hurried off to watch a first-day economy hour showing of The X-Files: Fight the Future, the new X-Files movie. Pretty tame stuff so far as the X-Files story lines go, but worth seeing if you're a fan. Disappointingly, many of the lesser X-Files characters get little more than cameos, but some secrets are revealed, and that alone may be worth the price of admission. After the show, my brother Bret and I headed over to his place to catch a couple World Cup games that he'd taped.
June 17, 1998
Erin and I watched the Mel Gibson, Julie Roberts, and Patrick Stewart "thriller" Conspiracy Theory last night. Frankly, an episode of X-Files is more intriguing. The pacing, particularly at the beginning, was all wrong, and the Gibson's "I'm a crazy guy" schtick (like in Lethal Weapon) is tired. Roberts and Stewarts are better, but this whole thing just seems like it should've amounted to more given the star power involved. Erin found the movie tedious, and while it held my attention a little more, I can hardly recommend it. Give this one a pass.Discovered a neat site dealing with anagrams. I think it comes out sort of like haiku, but you can judge for yourself. Here's a few examples with my own added punctuation:
Ty Edward Davison=
A day did Ernst vow.
A navy wed dirt sod.
Dad tawdry, I've son.
Dad servant? I'd yow!
Dad tears down ivy.
Dad nary divest. Ow!
I've word Dad nasty.
No divest. Dad awry.
Tony saw Dad drive.
Daddy war vet. I son.Ty Davison=
Nasty void.
Sand to ivy.Erin Lilly-Davison=
Lad virile. Sin only.
Darn Illinois levy!
Alien lord is vinyl.
June 16, 1998
Got out and played some soccer today for the first time in quite a while. While I'm clearly not in any kind of playing shape, I was happy to see that I still had some touch on the ball. My exercise plan calls for soccer on Tuesdays and Thursdays throughout the summer, though I'd go more often if I could find a game.I've been reevaluating the feasibility of a December release of my album, and I'm sorry to say that it may not be possible technologically or financially. Although most of the necessary components of a home recording studio are in place, I still need the appropriate software (Mark of the Unicorn's Digital Performer 2.4), the studio-quality recording hardware (Mark of the Unicorn's 2408 audio card), and a CD burner. Assuming I'm fully proficient with the Roland XP-80 synth (which I'm not yet), that's still a lot of technically complex learning in a very short period of time.
The good news is that the actual writing of songs is going exceedingly well. I'm obviously in no position to judge how my musical work will be received by others, but I don't think I'll embarrass myself in this whole endeavor.
June 14, 1998
Erin was accepted into Santa Clara University's Masters of Theology program. She'll begin by taking two classes this summer and will continue taking classes in the summers to come (excepting summer of 1999 when we'll be in France). She plans to specialize in Pastoral Ministries.Thanks to a move on the part of friends Debbie and Maurice, we acquired a much-needed bookshelf and kitchen hutch (which means we can finally unpack our china). Erin's ability to pack a lot into a little bit of space is extraordinary, and as a result, these furniture additions actually give us more space in the house.
June 13, 1998
Went cherry picking out past Pleasanton, California with friends. Despite the El Niño this crop season, the cherries are delicious.Special thanks to my friend Sal for loaning me a tape of the Mexico-South Korea and Netherlands-Belgium games. Couldn't do sports commentary without it! =)
June 12, 1998
World Cup action is going fast-and-furious, and I'm already struggling to keep up. This morning's game started at 5:30 AM thanks to time zone differences. Needless to say, that's considerably earlier than this night owl prefers to wake up, and I'm afraid I was something of a zombie for the rest of the day. (Erin purports to not have noticed a difference.)I've more or less completed my initial testing of the Princeton EO90 monitor, and I'm happy to report that I am very pleased with the results. The controls are laid-out very logically and everything is menu-driven, making it very easy to use. Since it's a multisync monitor it changes resolutions on the fly (without rebooting), and the 1280 x 1024 mode is amazing. I've never seen so much screen real estate. Now a 19" monitor is not an inexpensive proposition, and if you don't need one for a specific task (like image editing, for example), the best price points are easily the 17" monitors. The best 17" monitor is probably the ViewSonic PPT775, and that costs almost exactly what I paid ($650) for the larger EO90.
I've joined a loosely-knit community of computer users in attempting to crack a 64-bit encryption algorithm. The project is a massive shared computing effort: Everybody downloads a bunch of encryption keys from a main server, runs a program on their computer which searches through those keys, and uploads the results to the server when down. Somewhere out there is the correct key (out of literally trillions of combinations). By sharing the computing load across hundreds of computers, we all contribute to the effort.
So why spend my spare computing cycles on this encryption cracking project? Well, money for starters. The person who finds the key gets $2000. But also it's an attempt to show that there's a need for stronger encryption than the standards proposed by the government in the on-going encryption software talks. If a bunch of Internet yahoos can break 64-bit encryption, then certainly we have reason to advocate stronger encryption standards for business and personal use.
For those interested, I'll post information next week on how to join the effort.
June 10, 1998
Continue to have a good experience with the EO90, now that I've got one that works. At the higher resolutions, it's possible to fit an amazing number of palettes and windows on screen at one time. This should be perfect for Digital Performer. I've now tried the monitor with Virtual PC as well, and Windows 95 seems to operate just fine. That might not sound like much, but since I use Windows 95 to run QuickBooks Pro (a window-intensive application), it's actually very helpful.We started bright and early with the World Cup action today. As I noted on June 7, Univision is broadcasting every game, and today's coverage was excellent. What with the Air France strike and all, I'm pretty pleased that Erin and I decided to push our France trip off until next year. I'm sure the "live" World Cup experience in France is great, but there's something to be said for instant replay and not being sardined into a country with thousands of other tourists.
June 9, 1998
Finally, at long last, my working Princeton EO90 and appropriate video adapter have been united with Zeke to form what I'll call a more perfect union. (Apologies to the Founding Fathers for appropriating their phrase.) At any rate, the monitor is—God be praised—working happily and heartily, and it'll be an all-skate safely and slowly in a clockwise direction until further notice.As I right this, I'm at a 1152 x 870 resolution at 75 Hz, and 12 point text is plenty sharp for my eyes. In case that won't do, there are a variety of higher and lower resolutions all of which, with limited testing, appear to display just fine. I don't notice any obvious problems with the monitor, though with only 2 megs of VRAM, I only get "thousands" or "256" color in most of the higher resolutions. VRAM being as inexpensive as it is, I may up the machine to 4 megs before too long. I could add a video card for even more speed and functionality, but since this set up is designed specifically for audio production, "as is" will probably suffice. (My video production pursuits will come later and probably require another machine anyway.)
Erin and I saw Adam Sandler's latest, The Wedding Singer, today at the Oaks. Nothing like mindless comedy for a happy afternoon. Reasonably inoffensive, an interesting '80s retro piece, worth the $1.50 we each paid to see it.
June 7, 1998
Received, via the San Jose Mercury News, the exciting information that I will be receive all World Cup games through the local Spanish TV station. Cancel my cable TV order, because who need ESPN now? The Spanish announcers are far more into the experience anyway. ("Goooooal!")Posted a review of the U.S. Team's World Cup squad in the Sports. Do we have a prayer of making second round in France? Find out what I think.
June 5, 1998
Added a new link in my Chess! section to the official web site of the Free Internet Chess Server. Here, you can download software which will let you play chess against opponents from around the world. For free. Enjoy!June 4, 1998
We saw our friend Fred in a local production of All in the Timing, a series of six-one act plays. Fred was spectacular and hysterical as a professor of a made-up universal language. (A sample of this language: "Good luck" would be "Goldilocks," and "welcome" would be "velcro.") It's hard enough for me to memorize things in English, and how he went through an entire piece using nonsense words--understandable nonsense words--is beyond my comprehension.I've added Fred's web site to Friends' Links in my Who I Am section.
June 3, 1998
Headed to the Mother Ship for re-fueling at this morning's Apple Update Tour in Cupertino. Details on the event in MacAdvocacy. (Portland friends note: The Apple Update Tour comes to Portland on June 12. You can register for the Apple Update Tour by calling 1-800-895-4853 extension 100. If you have a couple free hours, it's definitely an easy way to get all the latest on what Apple's up to!)My replacement Princeton EO90 19" monitor arrived this afternoon, but without the necessary Mac adapter. Looks like it will be a couple more days before I'm able to find out if it works or not.
June 2, 1998
The election returns are starting to trickle in, and clearly it's yet another in my on-going series of utterly loserville elections. Of the myriad of ballot measures and candidates, I'll bet only 3 or 4 went the way I voted. Ah, democracy! You're such a fickle mistress....[On the bright side, however, businessman and governor wanna-be Al Checchi got his $40 million head handed to him on a platter. Ever since his negative ads began littering the airwaves, I'd been hoping for his defeat, and tonight it looks like I get my wish.]
I'm happy to report that at least one Internet search engine comes up with the right web address (that means here, in case I've confused anyone) when you type "Davison Online" in the Search box. And the winner is: InfoSeek! Remember your web search 101 class and make sure you use quotes—otherwise you'll get all occurrences of each word instead of both words together.
Lycos gets an honorable mention for at least coming up with my old (now 404) Alink Davison On-line site. All the other search engines can take a flying leap, I guess. I registered with them all weeks ago, and this site should definitely be coming up by now.
I got the extra Mac keyboard I needed to start up both Henry and Zeke simultaneously and enable File Sharing between the two computers via my pokey little LocalTalk network. It's slow, but it works. I'm not sure if it really has any utility other than allowing both computers to use the same LaserJet printer, but it's just one more quick, fun Mac thing. I hear that my Princeton EO90 monitor should be coming through this week, so I'll be able to more thoroughly test File Sharing when it arrives; right now I have to type blind on one computer.
Another East Coast Swing dance class tonight with my friend Jennie. This one was pretty much a rehash of last week's, but that was useful too. There's something to be said for consolidating and refining one's knowledge and experience, after all.
June 1, 1998
Updated my Friends' Links section (in Who I Am—since I'm nothing without my friends) with the URL of Greg Becker's Thoughts.Org. Check it out.I've decided against posting an election guide for tomorrow's California state primary. For one thing, a lot of my readership (not that my readership really constitutes "a lot," but let's pretend) is mostly from outside California. Secondly, why risk further alienating people over a nonsense topic like politics? Most of the candidates I support will lose (and let's face it: My support of these people is lukewarm at best), and most of the ballot measure I dislike will pass. Even the incomparably bad Measure 227 which mandates English-only instruction in schools via a wholly untried and untested educational method will probably not be world-ending if it passes. There's just not a lot to get terribly excited about, I'm afraid. Of course, I encourage everyone to vote anyway.
In chess, I've been exploring the King's Indian Attack (as White) and the King's Indian Defense (as Black). Courtesy of my good friend Al Starfy, I've been able to play numerous games using these openings, and I've learned a lot. In fact, I'd be willing at this point to advocate both the KIA and the KID for players who don't want to have to memorize tons of different openings. Because there's virtually no way your opponent can stop you from setting these openings up, you can use them for almost every game you play. (I say almost because there's probably a couple exceptions to this rule; nonetheless, I've yet to find an example where I couldn't use the KIA or KID.) For what it's worth, early in his career Bobby Fischer played KID against virtually every queenside opening (1. d4, etc.).
