Christmas Stockings

I have fond memories of Christmas Stockings from my childhood. I was raised as an only child -- I do have a much older sister, but my parents separated when I was young and we each went with a different parent. I didn't miss the sibling dynamic Christmas mornings (because I didn't know what I was missing) but I did enjoy getting the diversion of opening my stocking while I waited for my parents to wake up. There was always a book. I think they thought this might occupy me and let them sleep a little longer -- and it worked! Chocolate, puzzles, a large naval orange, and always also something unexpected. I kept up this tradition with my own kids into their adulthood, and later gifts included new toothbrushes and stationary supplies. My father is coming down from Kamloops this Christmas (I am driving him back and forth). We don't do presents anymore but I thought having stockings to open would be fun. I wondered where my old stocking ended up after the move and found it in my box of ties (I don't look in there often!). I decided to make one for Veronica, in similar style. Everything I needed was at Dressew (sewing store on Hastings downtown -- very fun place to look around).

New Bike Light

I bought a new front bicycle light. Up until now I have only needed a light to be visible to cars. Now, my route takes me along South West Marine Drive (the highway section) on the way back and forth to UBC. There is a stretch without street lights and the new light is bright enough to actually light the way (as long as I don't go too fast). My night vision has deteriorated as I have aged -- I have heard others say the same. It is a Lumina 1000 and at least in early goings I can recommend it. Powerful light, rechargeable (mini USB port), seems to be rainproof.

 

We had a fire in our building this Summer

It was a fairly impressive one that started on the terrace of an upper floor. Luckily it was not near our apartment and we were able to get back in to our place later that evening.

Of course we all evacuated from the building when the alarm went off. It is the second apartment fire I have experienced. The first was in 1993 when I was living in Toronto. There is something quite different from an alarm going off, and one going off when you can smell smoke stronger than something spilling on the stove. Back then, I ran out of the apartment in my pajamas and slippers and not much else. It was the middle of Winter so luckily they brought around a heated bus for us all to wait in. This time I thought to bring my keys and phone, but left without my wallet. Maybe next fire I will be better prepared as we leave (assuming there is any time to prepare). Luckily a friend of mine was coming over for dinner that night. Instead of me cooking for him, he took us out for dinner.  

We bought an apartment

Veronica and I bought an apartment in Kerrisdale. This was not our first choice of neighbourhood but it does have everything we wanted within walking distance: groceries, restaurants, and transit. There were quite a few things that attracted us to the place, including a den, a storage room in the apartment, open kitchen with a nice layout and gas stove, and hardwood floors. The real draw, however, was the very large terrace with a garden. I think this will suit us well.

     

Pottery Meets Mathematics II

I found a bug in my MATLAB code for the pottery shapes in the last post, so those computational examples are not correct (but the math is). I actually found the mistake by building a five sided shape out of paper and seeing that it did not match the computational results. In my professional life, I would call this experimental model validation (or invalidation in this case). Code is fixed and now simulation matches reality.

Pottery meets Mathematics

Two of the things I really like in life come together. A type of construction I have used in the past is to make N symmetric, identical slab pieces (with N being 3 or 4 so far) and form them into a bowl. A recent example is show below (with N=4) and I think it turned out rather well.

    

What I thought would be fun is to figure out what the resulting form shape would be from a given piece shape and the "N". It was a fun bit of math shown below. There is another way you can derive it using rotations of curve tangents but this derivation is more my style.

I implemented a simple approximation in MATLAB and plotted out a few examples. The first is with N=4 and f(s) = sqrt(1+s) - 1 with s going from 1 to 4: 

and the second with f(s) = sqrt(1+2*s) -1:

You can see that the second has a flatter bottom -- completely flat at the centre since the derivative of f at s=0 is 1 (matching the N=4 case of 45 degrees). Note that you don't need to start the piece at s=0. You can start with s>0 and add a flat bottom (or anything else you want to do there). 

I think I need better visualization of the resulting surfaces to be able to use this as a tool to help pick aesthetically pleasing shapes. If I got really involved, I could generate the shapes for (small scale) 3D printing as a way to explore designs. 

Clint's Game of Thrones

Warning: this post contains spoilers of the last season of the TV show, Game of Thrones.

Game of Thrones is an eight season fantasy-themed TV show based on the novels by George RR Martin. If you don't know that, I am not sure why you would know me or read my blog. The series of novels is unfinished, and unlikely to be finished before Martin's death. The novels are a bit variable in quality but overall very good. The TV series has also varied in quality, with a steady decline after the action passed what was in the written texts. The final season was abysmal. My two main criticisms: Daenerys (who I was hoping would claim the throne in the end) was steadily portrayed through the show as an empathetic ruler trying to do the right thing and then went psycho in the last two episodes; the Über boss (the Night King) was defeated like a chump in episode three of six, so the rest of the season was anticlimactic. The dialog in the end scenes of the last episode was amateurish (although the response to Sam's call for democracy was amusing).

Despite these criticisms I really enjoyed the last season because I was not watching Game of Thrones, I was watching Clint's Game of Thrones.  My friend Clint has had me and another friend over to watch the last few seasons. We have had a delayed start to each season, timed to be able to watch two episodes a week. He has a projector, so we watch on a big screen. There is alcohol and he orders food for us. Appropriate mockery is encouraged, and it was almost constant this last season. We amused ourselves with our growing outrage at the course of the plot. Clint was almost weeping in frustration  during the later episodes.

The right kind of bad show can be quite enjoyable when watched in a group. Two others I remember are Twin Peaks 90-91 that I watched with fellow graduate students in NYC, and V in the Summer of 1983 in a Carlton dorm where I was staying for a Summer job at the NRC lab in Ottawa. 

Pictures from 1969

I am still going through old pictures. At the pace I am going, it will be a while yet before I make it through the pile. These ones were from a trip to Hornby Island with my father when I was six years old. I actually remember this trip. We stayed at a cabin that one of his colleagues owned. It was a quiet getaway type of holiday and I remember enjoying it.

The next is from my first skiing experience on Grouse Mountain. I remember this also -- and my memory is of getting off the chair lift without knowing how to ski and having to navigate a corner on a narrow track with a bottomless chasm on one side. At least that is how it looked in my head. Somehow I survived that corner and the picture makes me look like I almost knew what I was doing.

Visiting my father

I have settled into a pattern of driving up to Kamloops every few months to visit my father. He is now 92, still mentally and physically sharp, driving, and living on his own. He lives in a large town house on one of the side hills of the city, in the Aberdeen neighbourhood. He knows he would be better off living in a retirement home, but there are some repairs to the foundation of the house that he wants to see through so that it can be sold and his wife's estate settled. Because of this, he is in a bit of a holding pattern.

Anyway, I come up and keep him company for a few days when I visit. I am not much use to him. He has a son in law that also visits periodically with every handy skill that there is. My big skill -- Mathematics -- has less practical use. We talk, I usually order in one meal (pizza this time) but for the rest he cooks for me. I am getting pancakes for breakfast today before I start the drive home. We go for his usual walk down by the River. He keeps a pretty fast pace. We have a drink at 5pm, then watch some TV together, a mix of sports (golf this time), news, and movies. I picked a movie for us this time (Ex Machina) that he didn't like much, nor the TV series that I tried to interest him in (Travellers).

There are stairs in the complex that lead up the hill to a short walking trail in a neighbourhood with fancy houses with great views. I took this picture up there, the view only slightly better than what my father has in his place.

Pottery 2000-2009 (pre-blog)

I have been shy to post recently. I have applied for an administrative job at UBC and thought that it might hurt my chances if they knew how many real life distractions I have. I also had a bad experience with a post about the divorce (since removed) that my ex-wife objected to, although she had never read my blog while we were married. This current topic seemed safe on both counts, so I thought I would pick up the habit of blogging again with it.

I am slowly digitizing the family pictures, so that my ex-wife and I can share them post-divorce. I recently found a stack with pictures of pottery I made in the early days. I don't think I have really improved since this time, in fact these designs seem more innovative than what I am working on now. Luckily, I have my day job to pay the bills.

Below is an assortment from 2000 including a tea set and a water fountain in the shape of a duck. The salt shaker on the far left of the upper row of pictures was still in use at house when I left.

  

From 2001 and 2002, some candle holders and some small bowls where you can see I am experimenting with feet. The first picture below is one of the very few wheel thrown pieces I have made. I sent this one to my father and his wife in Kamloops, but the lid broke in transport. 

2004 seems like a it was a productive year. I kept the two below for a number of years. The three after that got given away. The "Sergeant Theta" bowl was a wedding gift to Peter Berg, a former PDF in the fuel cell modelling group I led. I am not sure what happened to the others. 

I only found one picture from 2005. There were years when it was difficult to organize free nights around work and family activities for the class at Britannia where I did pottery. This must have been one of them. The triangular form was made of three slabs the same shape attached together. I am interested in this kind of design now, and realized I could use my computational math skills to simulate the shapes generated from different templates and then use the tool to get the shapes I want. Mathematics meets Pottery! 

More pieces came from 2006. The one on the left was a present for my ex-wife and came with flowers in it. My daughter worked as a teenager for a flower store on Commercial Drive called the FlowerBox (which I recommend). The owner still recognizes me and I have taken my own vases in many times to have arrangements made that suit them. I kept the bud vase and salt shaker on the right for many years. Below that you can see some accents with the commercial red glaze I bought for the Britannia studio. There is the very large bowl with three feet that I thought was almost brilliant but slipped into the grotesque. 

    

    

From 2007, more red glaze and you can see I started moving into my default of pinch bowls and cups. It is what I do now when I don't have a plan when I go to the studio.

 

From 2007 there are a few pictures of other hobbies: candle making (which did not work for me) and embroidery. That is my own embroidery design for iris flowers. 

  

From 2008 and 2009,  pieces include a few things I made using purchased clay, underglaze and clear glaze. I really like the covered bowl in the upper picture. I am not sure what happened to that. 

 

There is still a gap between these pictures and 2012, when I first blogged pottery pictures "live". I will put them in another post when I find them as I sort through the old pictures, if they are interesting enough or at least have some potential for interesting commentary. Well, interesting by the standards of my blog...