State Fair and a Mondrian Exhibit

Posted on 28 October, 2002 by steevithak

Wow, October is almost gone and I haven’t posted any news yet. October is the month of the Texas State Fair and we spent a day there this year as usual. Rather than brave the crowds on the weekend, we took a day off from work and went on a Wednesday. Otherwise, last year’s account pretty much sums it up. We also took some time out to go to the Modrian exhibit at the Kimbell. The only other stop for this exhibit will be in Paris but it’s well worth going out of your way for if you get the chance.

Work on the GCC Linux to MCORE cross-compiler is coming along ever so slowly. I’ve been blowing too much time playing with my new DMOZ editor privileges, perhaps. Work on the mod_virgule codebase merge is behind too but I hope to start working on that again in November. Posting Robot news and working on the DPRG site have been taking up a lot of my time too. And on top of all that there’s the usual paying work that eats up most of my time.

But I’m still here, still alive, and still hacking.

Buying Camera Gear From eBay vs Camera Shows

Posted on 4 May, 2002 by steevithak

Busy day. Spent the morning mowing and edging the yard. We had lunch in Grapevine on the way out to a camera show sponsored by one of our clients. There was some interesting stuff to see at the camera show including non-photography items like two light sabers and an old Star Trek type one phaser. For buying and selling lenses, though, I think I’ll stick with eBay. Better prices are part of it but another part is the trust-metric-like feedback system on eBay. I’d much rather buy a lens from someone with hundreds of positive feedback certs on eBay than from a total stranger at a camera show.

From the camera show we drove by the office briefly to look for an Ovenbird that made an appearance friday. No sign of it today, of course, since I had a camera with me. Then we drove over to the Cottonwood Arts Festival in Richardson. Lots of amazing art and craft items (and a few not so amazing things). There are a dozen or so “art” festivals in the DFW area each year but most of them have very little that one could really call art. The Cottonwood Art Festival is the one to go to if you want art. The Deep Ellum Arts Festival has a few interesting things and a lot of music. Most of the others can be skipped.

After a we got tired of wandering around looking at the art, we stopped to get some barbeque and consider further plans for the evening. We had Dallas Symphony tickets but, upon closer inspection, tonights performance turned out to be another blasted piano concerto (have I mentioned that I am not fond of piano concerti?). We decided to skip the symphony this week.

Henry Moore Exhibit at the DMA

Posted on 27 May, 2001 by steevithak

The Henry Moore exhibit has been at the Dallas Museum of Art for a while. Saturday Susan and I finally had time to check it out. I was quite impressed. I can’t really say I was a fan of Moore prior to the exhibit (it took a bit of urging from Susan to get me to go in fact) but I found it very fascinating. The range of materials he used was in itself pretty amazing. One sculpture was made from a huge stalactite. The exhibit included more than 100 works ranging from tiny maquettes to several of his trademark huge works.

Afterwards we went to yet another local arts festival. This time it was the Dallas ARTFEST at Fair Park in Dallas. While not particularly interesting this year, it was too nice just having a day or two off to complain.

Wildflower Arts & Music Festival 2001

Posted on 20 May, 2001 by steevithak

Friday, Susan and I spent the evening at the Wildflower Arts & Music Festival. It was mostly music. And the music was mostly 80’s bands like the Go-Gos, Flock of Seagulls, The Romantics, and a bunch of others. Overall, it wasn’t a bad deal for 10 bucks. The Go-Go’s did a nice cover of I wanna be sedated “for Joey!”.

Saturday, I was on-site all day with one of our clients who was migrating their internal DNS to a new server.

Tonight, I’ll be watching the season finale of X-Files.

Deep Ellum Arts Festival 2001

Posted on 9 April, 2001 by steevithak

Last week was another busy week. Lots of Perl and a smaller amount of C programming. More progress on robots.net. The robomenu is now working. The robomenu is a database of robots with photos and descriptions. I’ve only managed to get about half the records into the database (they were originally static pages) but it is online and seems to be holding up okay so far. I’m using PostgreSQL as the database and a Perl DBI program to generate a set of static pages every night. I’m still working on the interface that will allow users to submit new robots but that should online within a week or so.

On Saturday Susan and I got to see Dmitry Sitkovetsky as guest conductor of the Dallas Symphony. He conducted the DSO in four pieces of Chamber music by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Shostakovich. The Shostakovich piece was a transcription for Chamber Orchestra of the String Quartet No. 8, Op. 110 and was particularly good. We tried unsuccessfully to find a CD of the piece Sunday. We’ll probably have to order it on Amazon or catch a used one on eBay sometime.

We spent a while at the Deep Ellum Arts Festival on Sunday. Lots of live music including a group from Central America playing some sort of traditional folk music with lots of curious instruments. There were some Celtic bands, some Jazz groups, and quite a selection of local rock groups – like Baby Jane Hudson and Eden Automatic. The weather was great for a day outside and most of the people had brought their dogs. I think we saw at least one of every possible kind of dog while we were there. It was an Art festival so there was quite a bit to see in the Arts and Crafts department as well, though the weirdest aspect of the whole thing was a collection of Art Cars from all over. There was a Van covered in bright orange stucko, a car decked out to look like the yellow submarine, and several cars that I guess you’d call debris cars. One was covered with plastic toys like Godzillas, Boba Fetts, and Mr T dolls. Another was completely covered by sea shells with a variety of rubber octopi and other sea creatures attached. One had a back seat uplostered in one and five dollar bills and an outside covered with quarters, nickels, dimes, and an assortment of jewlery. Weird stuff.

Renoir to Picasso at the Kimbell

Posted on 6 February, 2001 by steevithak

On Sunday, Susan and I went to the Renoir to Picasso exhibit at the Kimbell in Ft. Worth. The 81 paintings are on a worldwide tour while their home, the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, undergoes major renovations. The Kimbell is the only US stop on the tour. The collection includes works by Renoir, Cézanne, Derain, Matisse, Picasso, Rousseau, Modigliani, and a few others. All were by French artists of the late 19th/early 20th century.

Monday, after work, we went to our first day of Tai Chi class. Neither of us have ever taken any martial arts classes before so it will be interesting to see how this works out. We’re learning (er, well, we hope to learn – no promises!) the 108 movement Yang Long form of Tai Chi at the Martial Arts Center of Plano which also teaches the Soo Hwa Kung Fu system.