Facebook has a weird time wasting quality that is hard to identify, but I think I figured it out.

The problem with writing your own animation software is that you have to maintain it.

The software I’m currently using is actually my second generation of animation software. The first generation was written in college for The Emperor’s New Clothes, which was done on a student research grant (let this be a lesson for you kids – you can get money for your films if you call it research!). On that project I was the writer, director, producer, and lead software engineer, so thank god Marshall did the hard animation or the whole thing would have been trash. The quality of code was pretty good for a college student (read: pretty terrible overall), but I learned some good lessons:

1. Debugging on set sucks
2. C++ is like concrete in that the code seems completely malleable when you first write it and slowly settles until the mere idea of refactoring base classes is exhausting.
3. With C++ you spend 10% of your time designing your GUI and 90% finding out why clicking a button is de-referencing a bad memory pointer.
4. If you put too much of your business logic in the GUI you will never be able to reuse it.

Felicia Day wrote a comment on the Movie Monkey’s ELE Application!

Oh yes, and watch “The Guild”.

I’m going to put down my feud with Google to help promote voting:

For the latest news of nephew, go here.

Tux! In Cake Form!

Heather Grimsley made a delicious Tux cake for some of my co-workers today. She really nailed the likeness! If you also take Sean’s companion cube cake into account, you can see a pattern of geekery at corporate HQ.

I told myself I would not be (a) political on my blog or (b) an uncle who posts all things about his nephew, but this was too cute to pass up. From my brother-in-law Josh:

Joe Biden holding Jacob Joshua Kollars

Here is my two week old nephew all decked out in his corporate garb. Admit it: seeing him in it makes you wish you had a baby blanket of your own.

My Abuelita’s birthday was on Saturday, August 30th. This was what Myrna’s family and my family had come down for. It was a big day; a Photographer came to take pictures for the local newspaper, there was a mass at Church for my Grandmother, and then there was a party at the Yacht Club. For the party my Aunts had ordered candies from candy makers from around Ecuador. All of my Aunts had dresses made from the same fabric (though my Mom made hers by herself).

Up until the day of the party there were certain surprises. During the trip my cousin Toty called me to say that all of the cousins were making contributions for la Hora Loca, a special surprise for the party. I asked Ivan Jose to explain to me what the Hora Loca was and got a perfectly succinct explanation that I didn’t understand as my spanish wasn’t very good. They were only looking for $15, so Chris and I made our contributions and figured we would be surprised. Then about three days before the party my Aunt Nena informed me casually that I was going to have to give a reading at the Church, but it was okay because they would give me a paper to read. I had to explain to her my site-reading Spanish skills are on par with a three year old, and I’d need in writing what I had to say in advance. This was pretty typical for the trip: crucial pieces of information would be given to us almost past the point where they could be useful. Sometimes I was amazed anything ran smoothly in the country.

All of my Aunts (and my Grandmother) had to go to the salon to have their hair and nails done. My Dad and Walter had a nice game of chess that Walter won.

While we were waiting we got a call from my sister, who had given birth to a baby boy! Jacob Kollars shares his birthday with his great grandmothers. It was quite the talk of the party. At one point I joked with my Mom “Wow, Grandma looks 80 and you look like a grandmother!”

Like all things in Ecuador things fell behind schedule. We all left around 4:55 for a five o’clock Mass but it was okay because Priest was late too (people ask me what time zone I was in, and I have to explain that the clocks were on Central time but everything else was in Ecuadorian time). While they had told me I had to do a reading, they neither told me when my reading was or that I was going to go first. That’s my family for you.

The party began at nine o’clock, so of course we got there at nine to set up. We put out the candy and the cake, and each table got a bottle of whiskey. People began to show up around nine forty five. The master of ceremonies was a relation of Judy’s who kept things moving smoothly. At one point all of my Aunts and Uncles came out with their children, and I video taped as my parents came out without me. Thankfully I jumped in line and the MC covered it up without missing a beat.

It was a gala affair, with Mariachis serenading my Abuelita one moment and my cousin Rosemary doing a Flamenco dance for her the next.  The highlight was the Hora Loca. It kicked off with these circus dressed kids running onto the dance floor with flags and baloons and pulling everybody onto the dance floor with them. They handed everyone baloons and masks and beads and basically encouraged chaos for the next hour.

The party ended around four in the morning. The next day I woke up around ten to find my ninety year old Abuelita making breakfast for us. I’m betting I’ll be down for her one hundredth birthday in ten years.

One morning my uncle Paco took my Dad and I for a walk on the beach at 5:30 in the morning.  Even though it was dark, there were about one hundred people walking along  Murciélago beach that morning. As people would pass by they would say hello to my uncle, see how he was doing, and wish him well as he passed by. It was as if he was the Godfather, or El Rey (the king).

Paco was a big guy and he had a big personality; he eats big, he drinks Johnny Walker Red, and he lives big. Most of my family wondered why he would go on these morning walks when he never seemed to lose weight, and he would reply “I can’t help it if there is always good food to eat!”.

He could also be a big goofball. The Tuesday before the party my Aunt Myrna and her family flew in from Los Angeles. It was also Paco and Judy’s Thirty First wedding anniversary, which of course in Ecuador means “party”. (Few things don’t mean “party” in Ecuador. It’s a fun country). Judy cooked up a storm and there was plenty of drinking and dancing, but the night belonged to Paco.