Mishkin Berteig - Just Some Random Geek.

My full name is Mishkin Ben-Garry Vyordan Berteig. I have another home page. About Me

20031029: I just watched the Matrix Reloaded again. I got the DVD earlier this week, and I've been anticipating a "reload" of the thing. I liked it better this second time. The whole scene with the Architect was much easier to follow. And the ending is suitably cliffhangery to make me very excited about the Matrix Revolutions. Melanie and I plan to go to that together, and we've invited Chris and Jeanne to come along... should be fun :-)

Justice and I have been playing the game Morrowind together quite a bit. Justice sits on my lap while I play. I think it is like watching a movie for him except that he has some control. I've also spent some time doing some 3D modelling with him. Hopefully I will soon be able to teach him how to do it. After that, maybe I can get him to learn some 3D math (he has started learning multiplication so the concepts shouldn't be too hard - just got to get him to understand decimals). And then, maybe I can introduce him to programming. I'll probably use the Java 3D api's.

20031027: Wee hours again. Had a nice, but very brief, visit with my dad. He came out to Toronto for a Baha'i conference this weekend. I also had a really nice day with the kids: we played a whole bunch including a little rough play and some video games.

I've put a little more of my music online and added a PayPal donate button - please donate if you like the music :-) It's music I've created on the computer. Some old stuff from '95 and some new stuff from this year. Let me know what you think if you do download it!

20031025: Well, its the wee hours and I still have a bit of a headache from the caffeine three days ago! Earlier I went to see "Intolerable Cruelty". There were definitely some very funny bits, but the ending was really weak. I felt like the second half of the movie, and especially the resolution, was unmotivated by the events leading up to it. Ms. Zeta-Jones looked very nice, and Mr. Clooney was quite handsome. Both did a fairly nice job with their parts, but, I think due to the script, Mr. Clooney had a radical personality transplant half way through that just didn't come across very well.

In a few hours I start my flight back home.

Today I bought a black sketch book which I will begin to use as a personal journal. Sorry dear audience, but you don't get to read about the most personal parts of my life :-) I'll continue to use this for the stuff that is publically consumable, but as I was telling my friend Kaspar: there's lots that goes on in my life that I can't put here for various reasons. For example, there's lots about my work life that I can't mention for reasons of confidentiality.

Speaking of work, I've been getting more and more into the C#/.NET world. I don't like it much to be quite frank. I'm still hung up on some basic stuff about C# that just seems ridiculous (the "virtual" keyword for methods comes to mind). As well, as I get to use the various products that are part of the whole .NET framework and strategy, I can really see how everything is quite tightly coupled together. The one mitigating factor is the use of web services standards which seems to be quite good and really does allow for some excellent interoperability. And of course, like most humans, the people from Microsoft that I am working with are intelligent and very nice.

I just recently read that Microsoft has US$52 billion in cash reserves... good Lord!!! Pretending that they get a measly 5% return on that cash, that's 2.5 billion a year!!! Just on interest alone, they could do a lot towards ending hunger or educating humanity or providing adequate shelter for everyone or even just funding basic research towards medicine and ecology. It's too bad Microsoft is beholden to its shareholders, otherwise we might have a much nicer company. Bill Gates obviously has a substantial philanthropic bent which he exercises through the Gates Foundation (good for him!). Still, that huge amount of cash is only about $10 per person - doesn't sound like much when put that way...

20031023: Today I had the backlash from the caffeine I consumed on the airplane two days ago. Big headache (just barely held in check with Advil), and extreme fatigue and "spacy-ness".

I got a fair amount accomplished at work: finished a design diagram, got my workstation fixed and installed MS Visual Studio.net 2003. I also started researching some search API's I'm going to need for the project.

I had a really nice talk with Melanie on the phone. I sure miss her.

20031022: A full week gone by. I had a great visit with Kaspar last Friday. We sat in a bar in Berkeley called the Albatross for a couple hours and just generally got caught up. One thing that was really cool was being reminded of stuff from long ago. For example, there was another kid in our class named Rob Reid. Kaspar kept in touch with him for a little while via mail and would send him audio tapes. I remembered that one time Rob invited me over to his house to listen to one of these tapes. I vaguely remember thinking that it was a little boring :-)

Over the weekend we had a birthday party for Melanie's sister, Kristine. Melanie's dad is Danish and so we had a full Danish smorgasbord (sp?). Herring, anchovies, liver pate, pickled red cabbage and cucumbers, rye bread, odd sliced meat, breaded sole. Delicious!!! (But I wouldn't want to eat that every day!)

Golnar and I taught the third grade 10 Baha'i school class this year on Sunday. We did a really simple thing where we took a prayer ("In the name of God, the Victor of the Most Victorious...") and wrote/printed/drew it with different colored pencil crayons. The neat part was that we each wrote only one word and then passed the paper to our right. We ended up with these prayers written in many colors and styles, and every paper had been created by all of us. The prayer itself is about serving God and how God will help if you do serve Him, so we privately wrote on the back how we would like to serve, and how we would like God to help. Some of the class were obviously pretty bored, but some were cool with it. I think it was a neat experiment, but we'll see what we can come up with for next week.

I'm back in San Francisco. On Monday night, Tuesday morning, I didn't sleep. I was just too wound up. So I ended up getting about 4 hours sleep distributed through the cab ride the the airport, the first leg of the journey from Toronto to Chicago, and then the first part of the journey from Chicago to San Jose. That latter leg was fortunately delayed for an hour and a half on the ground so I got a lot of sleep then. The rest of the flight I spent working my butt off getting some design documentation ready for this project I'm working on. I was to mail it out to the design team yesterday afternoon, but my Schwab email is broken - arg!

P.S. to Kaspar - if you read this, can you please call me on my cell phone: (416) 721-8037. I can't access your emails right now and so we need to talk to arrange getting together... and I can't access my email while I'm at work so that won't work :-(

20031014: I'm in the SF bay area again. My friend from elementary school, Kaspar Mossman (hi!) reads this blog and sent me an email yesterday. He lives here so we're going to try get together for the first time in approximately 20 years! Should be interesting :-)

I think I'm going to go see "Kill Bill" again tonight. I'll try drag Jesse and Derek along with me.

My flight was pretty brutal - I had to get up at 3:30 am EST in order to catch my flight. I transferred in Chicago and arrived here at about 11:00 am PST. Anyway, I can honestly say that commuting to SF is not the greatest time. At least I have lots of friends here and interesting work to do.

Yesterday Melanie and I spent about 8 hours driving around southern Ontario looking at properties. We found two that we are interested in buying. One is an empty lot that is in a small but flourishing town (to remain nameless until we actually get it/don't get it). We would try to re-sell it as an investment property. The other is a lakefront propert that we might buy just because it is so beautiful. Maybe we will build on it in a few years :-)

20031013: Yesterday I did some inside wiring with Melanie's help. We got me up into the attic with a ladder borrowed from Chris and Jeanne. I had to do some searching, but I eventually found the two locations for my "drops". One is beside Melanie's computer in our bedroom, and the other is in the closet in my office. Melanie helped me pull the wire through with the fishline, helped me locate the right spots, and helped with various other things. It was really fun to do it with her. Anyway, the Cat5e cable is now successfully running data between Melanie's computer with a nice wall plate to my hub. I haven't installed the wall plate in my closet yet.

My avocado plant is doing really well. It has seven good sized leaves and is about 40cm tall. I'm very happy it has survived the trip from Jersey City back home. Along the way, its stem was bent right at the base - I'm surprised it's still living.

Oh and a hilarious <parody>website</parody>. Just in case you don't get it, check here.

20031012: Last night I went to see "Kill Bill" with Rob and Cal... it is absolutely amazing, genius, breathtaking, delightful, and gripping. It is a constant barrage of cliché, gore, and beauty. All the bad guys really really get their due , hardcore. There are no pulled punches. And I'm going to see it again as soon as I possibly can...

My friend Charlie in Jersey City has a blog from which I got this link.

20031010: Wow!!! I missed all of September! Suffice it to say, I've been super busy and not motivated enough to keep writing. Well, I finally started hearing from people that they actually read this. So I have my duty :-)

Also, I have big news: Melanie is pregnant!!! Aparently there is some sort of etiquette about announcing pregnancies which I am completely ignoring - we just found out yesterday morning. Melanie had been feeling a bit of nausea and some odd food cravings for the last week or so. And since we had been semi-deliberately careless with birth control, Melanie suspected... and was right. We'll do a home birth with a midwife again. The baby will be due sometime around the end of May, maybe early June.

I've started doing some work in San Francisco so I've got long commutes. I am trying to work at home more than half time. The project I'm working on involves both C#/.NET and Java. I have to admit that I'm not a big fan of C# - the "virtual" keyword is like a nightmare back into the dark ages of object oriented development.

Financially, we're starting to do okay, but the continuing strength of the Canadian dollar is really hard on us. We actually have positive net worth (although just barely, and still lots of debt).

I've started teaching the grade 10 class at the Brilliant Stars Baha'i Sunday school. The students are pretty normal in that they exhibit a fairly high degree of apathy and shyness. However, they are a very interesting lot with some sports types, some geek/nerd types, some "alternative" types and some trendy types. I'm working with another teacher. Her name is Golnar. So far our consultations about what to do with the class have been really good. I am starting an alternate-Sundays "movie study circle" where we will watch a move, study some related quotes from the Baha'i writings, and discuss. The first one will be this Sunday and we will be watching The Matrix.

Speaking of movies, I've pre-ordered the Indiana Jones box set (CA$) and The Matrix Reloaded (CA$) on Amazon - I'll hopefully get them sometime in early November. They are currently 35% off list price so it seems like a good deal.

Last week Melanie helped me remodel my office. We bought a whole bunch of beech shelving to go along with my desks. Melanie has helped me to understand that having color-coordinated furniture really looks good. I've got deep book shelves with file drawers at the bottom for my papers, and some smaller shallower shelves for books, CDs and DVDs, and for Lego display.

I bought three new books that are pretty good: Agile Software Development with Scrum, Agile Software Development Ecosystems, and The Pragmatic Programmer. The scrum book is really good in content, but the diagrams are super-poor quality, the editing isn't that great, and there is a lot of repetitive material. Nevertheless, I highly recommend it for its very insightful and revolutionary approach to management (including management of software projects). The Pragmatic Programmer is also excellent, but I think it is more aimed at junior and intermediate developers. There is a bit of stuff that was good for me to be reminded of (like to keep learning new languages), but in general I didn't get much out of it. It's presentation is of very high quality. I haven't yet started the Agile ... Ecosystems book yet. It's next.

Older entries: October 2002, November 2002, December 2002, January 2003, February 2003, March 2003, April 2003, May 2003, June 2003, July 2003, August 2003, missed Sept., home

Top Sci-fi and Fantasy:

1. Ship of Magic (Robin Hobb)

2. Songmaster (Orson Scott Card)

3. The Real Story (Stephen R. Donaldson)

Top Software Development Books:

1. Agile Software Development (Alistair Cockburn)

2. Software Craftsmanship (Pete McBreen)

3. The Inmates are Running the Asylum (Alan Cooper)

Top Movies:

1. Run Lola Run (CA$) (with Franke Potente)

2. Strictly Ballroom (CA$) (by Baz Luhrmann)

3. Groundhog Day (CA$) (with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell)