señor taco’s travels

I went with Andre last night and saw Whale Rider in Berkeley. What a great film. The story was amazing and the movie was so well shot that you didn’t really think about it being a movie. There were a few places where the story and direction seemed a little heavy handed, but other than that I have no issues with it.

All the actors did a great job with their performances. The girl (Keisha Castle-Hughes) did an absolutely fabulous job, especially showing the agony of having to deliver a speech about her grandfather and he wasn’t there to hear it. The blending of traditional Maori practices and the modern world was great to watch. Seeing the Maori celebration at the end of the movie was awesome and inspiring, and again, it was well shot.

(pictured is the marquee at the theater, we couldn’t decide if we should see Bad Whale or Boys Rider :)

KP was in town for a couple of days after going to SIGGRAPH in San Diego and hanging out with his brother in L.A. It was good to see him if only for lunch. He seemed rested and well sunned.

I miss that bastard so much (well, to be honest I miss most of the East Coast Friends Crew a hell of a lot).

Last night was the August meeting for the SFOBUG. We were fortunate enough to have Bram Cohen come and give a little talk about his groovy application, BitTorrent (if you don’t know about BitTorrent just know that it’s one hell of cool bandwidth sharing utility for downloads).

Bram didn’t have a formal talk, but instead just gave a little background on BitTorrent (BT) and how it’s being used. He then went into a Q&A session about it. It’s 100% written in python (which is hella cool), has very groovy logic for TCP pipelining, and also is amazingly architected to provide the bandwidth sharing on massive downloads.

There were notes taken and I’ll provide a link to them (or the notes themselves) once those are available.

So yesterday I got up early and met Mitch & Deb. We went over to San Anselmo for breakfast with Andre. After that we did a little hike in Ross (which was fun).

Later Mitch & Deb invited me along to see some houses with them (they’re house hunting, but this was more to check out neighborhoods). We saw (in order) an okay house that stunk in a not so great neighborhood, an amazing house in a fantastic neighborhood (it had a view of the Bay and Golden Gate as well as a smashing layout), a house that wobbled a bit from all the people marching through it, and a finally two houses with odd layouts that were not at all suited to living in (the last house had a party room with a bar and “dancing” area with wood floors, mirrors on the walls, and a pole).

It was fun and gave me an idea of the process for when I start looking for a place of my own.