Rachel's web site is finally up Rachel Diaz-Bastin, Nature Illustration and she has a few choice
illustrations up. Definitely some good stuff. She is currently taking some Scientific Illustration classes at UCSC which should be good. Though I
hear they swapped out one of the fancy instructors of the fulltime program for someone else who has been through the class but isn't that great of a
teacher, definitely a bummer. Anyway if you need some illustrations you know where to go now. :)
Rachel's web site is finally up Rachel Diaz-Bastin, Nature Illustration and she has a few choice
illustrations up. Definitely some good stuff. She is currently taking some Scientific Illustration classes at UCSC which should be good. Though I
hear they swapped out one of the fancy instructors of the fulltime program for someone else who has been through the class but isn't that great of a
teacher, definitely a bummer. Anyway if you need some illustrations you know where to go now. :)
Sequoia National Forest - California Academy of Science Beetle Collecting
Over Memorial Day weekend I went camping down in Sequial National Forest with Rachel and two of her co-workers, our goal was to find 4 different types of beetles
that haven't been collected in 30+ years. Now, to be honest I was expecting some fairly typical car camping - lots of relaxing by the fire and taking naps and wondering around looking at nature. This was a bit different. First, we were in the national forest and not the national park. The national park is world renowned all the big nature lovers tend to go the park, while the national forest is where all the locals go to live it up in the woods. I realize this is a massive generalization, but in our case the reality lived up to the myth. We were camped next to a large number of young redneck 'dudes' in the late teenager and up age range. Playing music, burning things and generally carrying on. The only decent thing about it was the campgrounds were fairly far apart and in this case there was a small ridge so we didn't actually have to see any of them. However the first night we were there they were carrying on late into the night. Car alarm going off for 10+ minutes at 1am, varoius random hoots and hollers, etc. Luckily they seemed to have burned themselves out that night and were pretty quite the next night. We eventually found out that as part of the revelry they had chopped down several trees and carved up the picnic table with an axe. Lovely people, oye!
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So today we bought a house! Well, given the nature of real estate that might be claiming a little much, but we did accept a counter offer to our offer and in theory 45 days from now on July 1rst we will be able to move in. The location is lovely, fairly close to downtown fairfax, very quiet, nice view, peaceful. The house was built in the 60s and is about 1300 sf on a 9200sf downslope lot at the end of road, down a private drive that is shared with the immediate neighbors. The place seems to be in great shape and has been modernized at some point with double pane windows and insulation and a lovely wood staircase with nice hardwood floors. It was sold a few years ago and passed all the inspections then so it seems unlikely that there is really much that could go wrong at this point. Very exciting!
[update 2009-05-27] The seller basically wants to back out of the contract. Short version is she is on disability and thinks she can get her bank to modify her loan to let her keep the house (which she supposedly can't afford otherwise.) Technically we could take her to court and force her to sell but litigation is expensive and stressfull and the court might side against us purely because we would be litigating against a cancer patient (even though the house has been for sale for 200+ days and she got a great price.) Not worth doing that and not very nice to try and take someones house who doesn't want to sell. Thus we will rescind the contract but keep the right of first refusal if she can't work out a deal with her bank and has to sell anyway. Given all the hoops we've jumped through one would hope we get a better price if that happens, but not knowing the woman it's hard to say if she would be as nice to us as we have been to her. Anyway back to looking.
[update 2009-06-06] Ok the crazy real estate process continues to astound and amaze. The sellers of the fairfax place that backed out before are now wanting to sell, we haven't found anything we like enough to buy since so we are back on for the purchase. Home inspections are scheduled and the escrow place has the first 1% or so. Pretty exciting, though I'm going to try to hold off being too excited until we actually get the keys. Not sure if the loan adjustment falling through or the divorce is behind them selling but either way probably not a good situation for them. Good for us, and maybe they can take a tiny bit of solice in knowing they are selling to nice people who were trying to help them out with the rescinded contract. Of course our being nice has resulted in interest rates going up 3/4s of a point which is pretty lame, but maybe we can lock in on a low day and it won't be quite the tens of thousands of dollars difference in total cost over the life of the loan. Regardless interesting times, hopefully we will move moving mid July.
Rachel and I saw a couple movies over the weekend. First "I Love you Man" on Saturday over at Larkspur Landing and I can't imagine how it got such good ratings. It was chuckle worthy a number of times, but mostly it had a lot of awkward humor that didn't seem very plausible and the plot was super predictable. Sunday night we decided we needed a movie after spending the day looking at houses, so we tested the Roku box's new ability to rent a movie from Amazon.com (which worked really well.) Continuing the comedy theme we rented "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" which was actually quite funny the whole way through, if not very 'tasteful', and even has some bonus material after the credits.
I went to a ceramics workshop this past weekend that focused entirely on handbuilding with slabs of clay.
The class was taught by Lynn Wood who is also a teacher at Sharon Art Studio where I take ceramics (though not my teacher.) Anyway she is a professional ceramics person, sells her wares, and is almost exclusively a handbuilder. I on the other hand never handbuild anything, so I thought it would be a good chance to expand my horizons. The workshop was good, it had various projects designed to teach different aspects of slab based handbuilding. Since Lynn was teaching it, there was also a focus on textures which was also nice. The projects were good in that there was plenty of room for diversity and creative changes to whatever we were working on. For example the second day we were making three pieces with using a small rectangular template to make a cylinder with 1, 2, and 3+ darts in it. (A dart being a triangle cut out of an edge, with the two new edges that results in being pulled together and joined.) The variety of differences between the three pieces each person made was quite something, the differences between the students was quite impressive. Someone snapped a picture of them all next to each other, and if it surfaces I'll add it to the post. I ended up making 12 pieces over the course of the 2 days. Three dishes, two conical mugs (think paper coffee cup) a pitcher, two drop mugs, two little teacups, and a tiny little 'teapot' though more likely used as a soy sauce dispenser. The workshop was fairly exhausting, and there were several sick folk there so I'm hoping I don't end up sick. I currently feel fairly terrible but it wasn't a great weekend for on time eating and it's allergy season so I'm hoping it's just that. It will be exciting to get the pieces back and glaze them when the next session of ceramics starts up again.
The Tour of California Stage 2 started in Sausalito, went over the Golden Gate bridge, then started for real and went to Santa Cruz. Since the start was a few blocks away I got up and wondered down the street to check it out. Fairly exciting, much larger crowd than I would expect for such an early hour on a holiday in crappy rainy weather. I saw Lance Armstrong which was cool, hopefully his comeback works out well for him. All the riders are in such stupendous shape it's pretty crazy to even think about. Though this time, with the weather, I was happy to go back home. :)
Honeymoon photos are up! - Belize!
I finally managed to get around to putting up the honeymoon photos. I had sorted through them a few months ago, but never quite finished the online process. Anyway here they are, carefully winnowed down from thousands to under a hundred for each of our three Belize destinations!
2008-10-25 Chan Chich2008-11-01 San Ignacio
2008-11-05 San Pedro
I love that Postgres support partitions, even if they aren't the cleanest to set up and maintain. However I have run into some issues with regards to the query planner and partitioned tables. The gist of it is that if the tables are partitioned the query planner can get quite confused and take an endless amount of time to run what should a 'simple' query. Which isn't in and of itself a problem, query planners notoriously pick less than great query plans. The problem is that for most cases you can explicitly tell the planner to things 'the right way' (well, your way, anyway) and with partitioned tables you really can't.
I have a key value table organized by group and I have it partitioned by id in order to be able to limit the total number of rows in a particular table (see Postgres Partitioning and hibernate for one way to do that) and my goal is to denormalize this table to use as the basis for a set of datawarehouse tables. In order to denormalize the key/value table I have to do various subselects against keys that I'm interested in for the datawarehouse. However the table is partitioned by group_id (a group that the keys belong too, maybe 10 keys per group on average) and the denormalized table will use group_id so searching by key results in large table scans for each subselect of all the child tables. Ideally there would be a single scan gathering up the data one cares about (ala GROUP SETS) or in my case if there is a UNION of the results of my query on each child table that would work too.
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Rachel got a new car! A 2009 Honda Fit Base Automatic - a distinct upgrade from the 1988 Toyota Corolla FX. The safety improvement is incredible, let along all the other modern features! The biggest problem was me forgetting my checkbook when we went to pick it up. The economy is definitely having issues though as we got this for a hundred bucks under invoice, which is fairly amazing for a Honda. Of course even the famed honda reliability has limits, my 95 accord had the front rotors warp fairly badly so I just had to get those replaced which was annoyingly expensive as they are press fit rotors which require extra effort. Anyway super happy with the fit, it's fun to drive, exceptionally roomy (which is amazing given it is only an inch longer than the FX it replaces.) and generally awesome!
[update 2009-02-15]
After 1200 miles of mixed driving Rachel's car has averaged 34 MPG which is pretty amazing!
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