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We showed up for part of Top of the Park again on Saturday, then stayed home Sunday. (Well, I did anyway--Sara actually went in to lab for a while.) Sara also made sandwiches (including the bread) and assorted lunch for the rest of the week.

After fiddling with the drupal themes for a while I found it was suddenly no longer inserting paragraph markers automatically, so all my blog entries are run together in one paragraph. I tried reading through the php code to figure out what was happening, but didn't get very far.

Monday night we showed up at ToP in time to see Nomo. It turned out that our former neighbor Ingrid plays trumpet in Nomo, and several people we knew were there. It was a big (8-9 people?) "afro-funk" band, with lots of percussion and horns, and Sara and I both liked it a lot.

We stayed to seem them inflate the movie screen and show "Big". Is there a term for these sort of mini-music-video segments in movies where there's no dialog, just a succession of short cuts with the music turned up? I'm not very fond of them. Every time one came up last night, I thought "if this were a musical, there could be singing and dancing here. What a waste."

The floor piano scene was cute, though, I guess. Usually when you see someone play an instrument in a movie, the sound and video are obviously unconnected, so it's nice to for once see a scene where they actually seem to be playing the "instrument" they claim to me. You could even hear the occasional note cluster when they landed on the edge of a key. (Though maybe there were stunt doubles and such--heads and feet weren't always visible in the same frame.)

After a frustrating couple of weeks at work, I started feeling like there was hope of making progress towards the end of this week. I was so geeked that I felt a bit like I was missing out from working when I went to the opening night of Top of the Park on friday night.

Top of the Park is now on top of something that you might actually think of as a park, as opposed to the usual parking structure. Well, actually the stage is on the steps of the Rackham building across the street, and most of the other stuff is in or around the street.

The new location seems OK, and the bands (Jeremy Kittel, followed by Bugs Beddow), were fine, but Sara and I were both a little tired, so we left before the end.

Monday I made an unpleasant discovery: the git repository that I keep most of my work in was partially corrupted, and I didn't have recent backups. So I spent most of the day trying to recover what I could.

In the end the only thing I haven't figured out how to recover is something that will be easy to reconstruct. But there's nothing like getting to the end of a work day and realizing that not only have you not accomplished anything that you set out to, but that you're actually in a worse position than you were when you started.

So, work on tuesday and wednesday were, necessarily, better. Maybe I didn't get much done, but at least it was progress of a sort.

After neglecting it for a while, I finally rode my bike Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. It's much, much faster but, unfortunately, my knees still don't seem to like it.

Thursday morning, with the help of a cab and two Southwest flights (with a change in St. Louis), I arrived in Houston's Hobby Airport. The hotel looked like it couldn't be much more than a mile away, and I didn't have a ton of luggage, so I walked. Which was fine, though the heat and humidity left me a little sweaty. Fortunately I had time to unpack and take a quick shower before Sara got back to the hotel room and I was wisked off to the bed and breakfast where the wedding was to take place the next day.

We sat around and chatted with relatives. There was some wedding rehearsal activity which we didn't have any involvement with, and then we all went to dinner at a nearby Mexican restaurant.

The next morning we had the hotel breakfast and then visited the Menil Collection, where I was reminded of Roberto Matta, and encountered Max Ernst's Pierrot Mon Ami. A google "feeling lucky" search for "Pierrot Mon Ami Ernst", as of that day, takes you to information about casting number eight of the series of eight (the museum had number four), which could be yours for a measly 192 thousand. Sara would hear none of it, but I think it'd be way more interesting than, say, any Ann Arbor house you could buy for that amount.

After that we had lunch at a nearby café, then visited the Rothko Chapel and the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum, both within a few blocks. I've got nothing against Rothko, I guess, and the building was nice enough, but I'm offended at the idea of kneeling before his paintings. Even if you think he's great, he's not *that* great.

The wedding and reception that night went well. Guests included Sara's family, the new English inlaws, and friends from the lab where the couple work. This was the best part of the trip, but I don't really have anything to say about it.

Saturday we did some more tourist stuff around Houston--saw some gardens, walked around downtown a little, then ended up with an outdoor concert, "Accordian Kings 2006", where we saw "Cedryl Ballou & the Zydeco Trendsetters", "Joel Guzman & Aztex featuring Sarah Fox", and C.J. Chenier. It took a while for me to warm up to it--maybe I just didn't like the first band much--but in the end I had a good time.

We had to get up before 6am in the next morning to make our flight home, which is a little early for us, but everything went fine.

My main impression of Houston was of car traffic. Our hotel was well out of town and just off a major (3-4 lanes each way plus a 2-lane access road on each side) freeway, which seemed to always be full of high-speed bumper-to-bumper traffic. The roar of the freeway was constant. Going anywhere required a long ride on it. I probably got a skewed view of the place staying where we did--maybe it's different if you stay downtown--but it didn't seem like the kind of place I could live happily.

Sara had warned me that since Southwest didn't have reserved seats, you had to stand in line a long time to get a good seat. But the seats were fine (legroom seemed better than average), and I think I could have boarded at the last minute without being unhappy.

I left work around 6:30 to get some dinner at Leopold's and then go to juggling, but when I came back out it was sprinkling a little and looking kind of threatening, so I just took the bus home.

Last night I went through the commentary track for Le Mepris, but it was pretty boring. I guess I just couldn't stop.

I've been reading up on CSS in my spare time; it's sort of fun.

It's hard to predict sometimes what I'll find boring and what I'll become completely obsessed by.

After yesterday, I had to get out of the apartment.

It was 90 degrees and the buses weren't running, so the walk downtown was a little hot, but I ended up having a pleasant enough day. I spent a few hours in Café Ambrosia staring at my laptop trying to figure out the kernel's rpc-over-tcp receive code, then moved to Leopold's and worked on a few small git documentation patches.

Leopold's seemed ideal--power, wifi, lots of space, food, drinks--until people started shouting at the TV's. (Some basketball game, I guess.)

But when they're not shouting at TV's I like just hanging around places with lots of strangers. I'm not sure why--I've got my own stuff to do and not much interest in interacting with anyone--it just seems nice to have people around.

Sara left for a conference (and a visit with her parents) on Wednesday. It's odd being at home on my own. My first impulse is to go to the public library and stock up on movies that Sara wouldn't want to sit through. So far I've watched:

• La collectionneuse: A good choice, in that it doesn't seem the sort of thing Sara would have like. A bad choice, in that I didn't like it either. I'm not quite sure how I made it to the end. What was the point?
• Le Mepris: Actually I only watched about the first half. I still like it, but having seen it a few times before I don't feel obligated to finish.
• L'amour en Fuite: Actually I think Sara liked this when we saw it together before, but probably not enough to want to watch it again. I love it, even if it doesn't really do anything new compared to the four Doinel movies that come before it.
• L'Auberge Espagnole: OK, so French movies are a common theme. I like to turn the subtitles off and see how much I can follow, something Sara definitely wouldn't put up with. (The answer: not much, but not so little that I can't enjoy it either.) Sara actually might like this, a mostly light-hearted story about seven foreign exchange students sharing a Barcelona apartment for a year. OK, more European than French, actually. The mixture of languages is fun.
• The Office: The boss in this BBC series has the excruciating ineptness of Basil Fawlty. The episodes are presented a bit like unnarrated documentaries, and the added realism really makes you cringe. I think some people would find it too painful to watch, but after an episode to adjust, I'm finding it hilarious.

Yesterday I went juggling and then had dinner with Ajit, Wendy, Noé, and Belen (sp??). It was nice to have the company; after the first day, the novelty of being on my own wears off and it just becomes depressing having only movie characters for company.

Unfortunately today I was too lazy to follow my plans to go out and to get some hacking done. So I ended up on my own in the apartment all day. Dinner was OK, though--microwaved acorn squash with butter and maple syrup, broccoli, and some bread. If I'm not careful I eat nothing but cheese sandwiches when I'm on my own.

Ann Arbor had its first real sunny day after a week of rain, and downtown was pretty busy. Asparagus was the almost the only vegetable (other than potatoes and onions) for sale at the farmer's market, so I picked some up on the way in, then spent some time revising git documentation in the public library before meeting some arborupdate people--people I've only known as email addresses.

They were at Franks, which I'd never been to before. Might be worth trying again sometime--I don't know if the food was good or not, but it seemed inexpensive and comfortable.

Then I stopped by the grad library to pick up a book for our science fiction group, and met for a couple hours' juggling on the diag. Dave, Noé and I discovered that the usual feeder-rotation trick works in a 9-club ultimates feed--the feeder does ultimates, and the feedees do 2-counts, either left-or-right handed. As with the usual feeder rotation, the feeder and the stationary feedee keep their 2-count pattern unchanged, and only their passes to the rotating person change. The only change that seemed required was to give some extra warning before moving, since the transition happens very quickly.

Noé, Dave, Sara, Ajit, the-spanish-woman-whose-name-I-won't-try-to-spell and I had some beer and food at Dominicks afterward, and Dave impressed us with his finger jokes.

The Ann Arbor juggling festival was the weekend after our ontario festival; reasonably fun this year, though I'm not juggling a lot these days.

I started hacking on the arborupdate website a bit recently, which is sort of fun. Textpattern, on which it's based, actually seems fairly simple (in a good way).

New toys!:

• Linksys NSLU2: a pocket-sized network-attached storage thing without its own storage--but plug in an ethernet cable and a USB drive, and you get a functional little network file server. Very cute.
• Nokia 770: another pocket-sized device, this with wifi and a sharp 800 by 460 screen. Also very cute, and nice for web browsing, but fairly useless otherwise, as far as I can tell. Maybe an external keyboard would help.

The interesting thing about both of these, though, is that both run Linux, and both have active development communities (nslu2-linux and maemo) that are doing cool things with them. So I look forward to tinkering. My first goal is to get a recent kernel with our NFSv4 client and server running on both.