After the tournament, Lyndsay (and her roommates) hosted the team (and other teams) at their house in Santa Cruz. As a sidenote, the house (the downstairs being all I had really seen of it) was great, with the grounds spectacular. They have a tightrope made of nylon strapping that was quite entertaining to watch people use.

In the car on the way over, Andy drove me, Steffi, Andy Fisher and Heather over to the house. We used the navigation system in my car, which means we didn't go the most efficient way to the fields. As a matter of fact, we ended up stopping at a slew of stoplights, driving down small streets, and meandering through the neighborhood in a most circuitous way.

At one of these particularly annoying stoplights, I turned to see a couple walking along the sidewalk beside the car. The couple were both heavyset, with glasses and a slouched appearance. They walked arm in arm and seemed quite happy together. Someone, it might have been me even, made the comment that people tend to attract those similar to themselves: ultimate players date ultimate players, Techers date Techers (okay, no one said that), sporty people date sporty people, that sort of thing, leading to the comment that slightly overweight people date slightly overweight people.

The couple, then turned the corner. As they did, I started to roll down my window. Everyone knew I was going to say something to the couple walking by, the timing was too close for anything else.

And so I did.

"PULL UP YOUR PANTS!"

The guy was walking along with his pants in the style of today's youth, with his pants' crotch in line with his knees. His steps were abbreviated. I find the look incredibly retarded, stupid, inefficient, ugly and dumb. Yes, I repeated myself with three synonyms - that's how annoying that look is. Worse, that look will be back around in 20-30 years. Argh.

After my call, the guy pulled his arm from around his girl friend and lifted up his hand. I, and everyone else in the car, expected the usual response, and the response I certainly would have given had I been in his place.

I expected the finger.

Instead, he reached down, and pulled up his pants.

We were dumbfounded.

The light turned green. Andy accelerated through the street intersection, and we all burst into laughter.

The guy had actually pulled up his pants. Unbelievable.

Today was the first day of Calstates 2008, held, once again, at UC Santa Cruz. I had asked the various junta members if they needed me to go, as the signup sheet indicated there were five women on the list to go. I figured with only five, I'd have plenty of playing time, especially in the easier games.

Except I didn't know about the tryout signups.

Turns out, we arrived, and had 11 women the first game. The number didn't vary lower than 11, but was sometimes over 11.

I really didn't need to be here today.

Worse, I didn't need to be here, and I spent the whole day not going in. Not because I couldn't go in, not because I wasn't encouraged to go in. No, I didn't go in because I was feeling sorry for myself. I had, once again, let my expectations run away, and was frustrated by reality. Even when I had the opportunity to take the field, I opted to "play the next game, when there would be fewer women" (there never were), or "play the next half, when people are tired" (they never were, with so many of us), or "play the next game, as this was a 'tryouts-specific' game" (they all were). I didn't play because I didn't play, not because the team wouldn't let me, not because there weren't opportunities, not because I couldn't.

To say I'm annoyed with myself is an understatement. Big. Fat. Understatement.

When Kris left the team, he did a clean break. I'm almost wishing I had done the same. How much easier would it be to just walk away, find something else to fill my time?

But what?

Seriously. How do you replace an activity that has dominated your life for fifteen years? Can you walk away from that? Kris has, and has filled it with World of Warcraft quite successfully. I can't do that. I just can't.

So, what is it about Emily that every time I see her, I smile?

Every time.

It's quite consistent. Doesn't matter what kind of a mood I'm in, I'll smile.

Just today, I was miffed at something or other at the tournament, when I was on the sideline. As I looked up and saw Emily, she was turning around to look at something else and caught my eye. We both just grinned the biggest grins, and nearly started laughing. It was then that I realized that happens every time I see her.

For some reason, I suspect she has the same effect on Kyle.

"Have you ever ninja'd a feature into a product you were working on?"

I looked at Kris blankly after he asked me this question at dinner tonight.

"Have you ever put in a feature into your code that wasn't in the spec[ification], but that you wanted in?" he reasked.

Ah.

I smiled, and immediately began thinking of the various features I had, indeed, put in various programs I've worked on, features that weren't in the specification, but, darn it, they should have been. After looking at him with a huge grin on my face for a show while, with his wondering exactly which feature I was going to reveal first, I finally said, "Sure! A D B create."

He laughed.

When I was working for PDI, now PDI/Dreamworks, I wrote a program called adb_create. The adb part stands for "Animation DataBase," and was PDI's proprietary format for specifying animation data. I worked as a Lighting Technical Director, which meant I was responsible for dealing with the technical issues of the lighting department. Well, I and the other TDs who worked with me.

As the Lead TD, I also worked with the surfacing department, who created texture (and other types of surfacing) maps for the models for various computer generated films (in particular: Antz and Shrek).

One of the incredibly (more so that it should be) difficult tasks in the surfacing department was generating correctly sized base image files that would be wrapped onto the models. The programs that were in place were old, unmaintained, difficult to use, and quite error prone. Since the task was so difficult, I set out to write a program that WOULD actually run correctly, generating accurate files for surfacing artists to start with for surfacing models.

Now, at this moment, I need to mention that PDI had an R & D department. This department had "real" programmers: the women and men who worked with vertices and deep files and ray tracers and motion interfaces and oh, the whole bunch of complicated software, written in C because of a particularly bad rewrite years before in C++ that made everyone in the department decide object-oriented programming was evil, when in reality, just the implementation was evil.

Beside the point. The point was that R & D had their CVS repository and their install directory that no one outside R & D was allowed to commit to or deploy in.

The rest of the programmers in the company were "light" programmers, using whatever tools we had handy, existing or written on the fly, to get the job done. We weren't interested in necessarily the best solution, but rather the one that worked now with least amount of effort, because the scene, shot, feature, effect was due, and we needed to get it done. Now. No, yesterday.

Well, adb_create actually fit into the R & D tools. It was named as those tools were (prefixed with adb_). It was written in C as those tools were. It used the libraries that those tools used (you know, the ones R & D wrote and supported).

So, I deployed adb_create into the R & D directory, before integrating it into the surfacing workflow.

And received all kinds of uproar in return.

The worst of it was from my roommate, Dan Wexler. Dan was the lead developer for the company's renderer. He was The Man in the department. If he fell off a cliff, well, they had key-man insurance on Dan.

Dan had heard about how crappy the various surfacing tools were. Actually, he had listened to complaints from the surfacers for years, on how bad the tools were for them. Modelling had its own R & D developer. Lighting had several R & D developers. Heck, so did the animation department. But not the surfacing department, and, boy were their tools sucky.

So, Dan came up with this wonderful (or so I was told) plan on how to fix the surfacing tools. It involved several rewrites of various libraries, integration with a few existing tools, and a whole lot of effort in the R & D department. So much effort, it turns out, that the plan was put on hold until these other, more important, features could be completed.

On hold.

For years.

Along I came, and, tasked with fixing lighting tools from the production point of view, I fixed the problem. I wrote the tool that surfacing needed. I gave them adb_create.

By doing so, however, surfacing stopped complaining.

And by stopping the complaining, I thwarted Dan in his desire to see his new plan implemented.

And we entered into a long, downward spiral of arguments.

He wanted to implement his plan, but he needed surfacing to complain loud enough for those who set R & D's priorities to schedule time for the plan to be implemented. With adb_create, they stopped complaining, and his great grand plan would never be implemented.

I countered with the fact that I needed these tools to get the job done with the current workflow. I don't care about the great, grand plan, I needed to get those models surfaced and in the lighting shots now, not next year. Without adb_create, the surfacers had to work ten times as hard (well, ten times as long, and I'm not exaggerating on that number) to finish their work. I didn't care about next year, I needed results now.

It wasn't until Richard Chang, one of PDI's cofounders, stepped into the arguments and said, yes, it should be deployed to the R & D sacred directory, that the arguments finally ended.

I left PDI soon after that fiasco. I don't know if Dan's grand plan was ever implemented. Last I heard, he had oved to Tahoe, worked part time, gotten married to high school (college?) sweet heart Emily, and eventually left PDI.

I also don't know how long adb_create was used at PDI.

It is, however, my greatest ninja'd feature.

Kris and I went to our favorite, local sushi place this evening. He was craving sushi, and fish is the only animal protein I eat these days, so I was interested in going for that infusion. What I wasn't interested in, however, was going at 7:10 on a Friday night. You know, dinner rush hour.

We arrived, squeezed in through the door behind two groups of three or more people, and let the hostess know we were a group of two, and very happy to sit in one of the three open seats at the bar. Aside from being able to watch the sushi being made, and faster service when sitting at the sushi bar, we like talking to one of the sushi chefs. I don't know if we go frequently enough to this particular sushi restaurant to be on a first name basis, but we do go frequently enough to regularly receive extra bonus chef's special dishes on the house.

So, when the hostess told us "no" to the empty seats, I was a little miffed. When two people walked in after us, and were seated at the sushi bar in the seats we had requested, I was more than a little miffed. I was completely convinced that the two arriving after us but seated before us received special attention because they were Asian, and Kris and I were not. In retrospect, that assumption was a very bad assumption, as one of the groups in front of us was also completely Asian, and they, too, were skipped in the seating line up. Kris went up to talk to the hostess and found out they had called ahead to put their names on the seating list, and so actually WERE at the top of the list. Not that I knew that at the time my annoyance flared.

I was ready to go to another restaurant. The problem was, however, that neither of us could come up with another restaurant, or even cuisine, that we wanted to eat. So, we stood there, waiting by the door, for a table or some bar seating to open up. When a table did, the hostess tried to give us the seating, offering it immediately to Kris. I pointed to the group of three standing a ways off, not paying attention, indicating they were in line before us. No way was I going to inflict line jumping on a group when I was so clearly angry at another group for jumping in front of us. Wasn't going to happen.

As soon as the three sat down at their table, four seats opened up at the bar, and we were able to sit quickly. I couldn't help but think, once again, how my wanting something, how my sometimes light-trigger annoyance at perceived unfairness, nearly spoiled the evening for the both of us. I spent most of the dinner worried that someone was going to spit into my food in retaliation for the stupid American behaviour I had displayed.

Kris seems very willing to accomodate me and my faults, which is part of his charm, but I can't help but wonder when he'll break. When will he just yell, "Stop it! Stop it! STOP IT! Enough already!" I hope I can change before that happens.