Checksum Arcanius

Despite a number of logistical setbacks leading up to TIFF, we managed to exchange a majority of our vouchers for tickets this morning with a very nice lady who put up with all of my inane anti-TIFF comments very well. We ended up seeing three movies today: at 10:00am we watched Persepolis, an animated movie about an Iranian girl growing up amid the Shah, the revolution, and the even more oppressive regime of the Imans. It was a little unexpected and a little sad, but quite good actually. Next we walked across the hallway to our second movie, My Kid Could Paint That, at 12:15. It was a documentary about a child abstract painter, Marla Olmstead, whose family became mired in accusations of helping with her paintings when they claimed to provide no aid. The documentary was deeply textured but overall quite damning on the topic of whether Marla actually painted “her” masterpieces herself. The director himself was there and answered a few questions afterwards; he came across as a very likeable character who almost hated himself for coming to the inevitable conclusion that Marla had some help. He leaves open the possibility that his implied accusation is false, but he couldn’t find any other way to interpret the mountain of evidence that was gathered while making his documentary. Finally, we hoofed our way to the Visa screening room where we watched an epic about Ghengis Kahn, Mongol. It was a great and epic way to end our first day at the festival — unfortunately, our day didn’t end there. Although making it into Toronto without any problems in the morning, traffic leaving the city was something truly incredibly awful: In about two hours we made it only about two miles and nearly ran out of gas. We finally made it to a gas station, where we decided to hang out for a while until traffic died down some. We finally made it back to our hotel about 9:00, when we had originally left at 6:00. It was a somewhat stress-ridden ride, to say the least. At any rate, here are my totally off-the-cuff ratings (:

Persepolis: 3.0/5.0
My Kid Could Paint That: 3.5/5.0
Mongol: 4.5/5.0

Represent!

Dan, Scott and I arrived in Toronto today. We stopped at Niagara Falls briefly right after passing customs into Canada, and while very impressive, the falls would be a lot better in a nature preserve instead of overly commercialized as they currently are. Nevertheless, I’m still glad we went — it was pretty cool.

At the moment, we have only 15 of the 40 tickets we asked for; the balance we have in the form of vouchers that we have to find movies for. Thats crap; never come to the Toronto International Film Festival because they RAR you: as it currently stands, we paid about $50 per ticket for movies the bottom half of the list of movies that we wanted to see. Awesome.

At any rate, its nice to be in another country again, even it it is “just” our neighbors to the north. And we’ll make the most of it. Scott and I went on a run tongiht, and tomorrow we have two movies. Should be fun!

It has been a long time since I was in an honest-to-goodness lightning storm. Today, on my way home from Bellevue where I enjoyed food and entertainment from the Morettis, I stopped a while to listen to the rain fall, watch the flashes and bolts, and hear the thunder roll. Majestic, enchanting, and awe-inspiring. I would like more.

Major recent events thats I would like not to forget:

• Presented a poster about my CREE project at the UW’s Summer REU poster session at Mary Gates Hall on Thursday, September 16, 2007
• My brother Ben and his wife Kaylee came to town last weekend. I got to play ultimate with Ben and eat dinner and watch Serenity with the whole family
• I’ve been spending about one day a week testing Cochlear implant users with the Rubinstein lab at the Bloedel Hearing Research Center at the UW Medical Center. A lot of their stories are truly incredible — cochlear implants have had huge positive impacts on most of their lives. Its great to talk to the subjects between tests and learn about their stories
• Today (Tuesday), was the final “required” CREE event, the third BRI lecture
• Also today, I got to run a major software package at work that I built. After a little debugging, it is working well, and it is an incredibly fulfilling feeling to have it working so well at this point

…is happening right now. Its spectacular!

I’ve had some time to think
So now I’ll put it in “ink”
Canon’s 40D
is the camera for me.