News of the Howard

2004

May 15: Fulfilled a decades-old dream by singing in Beethoven's 9th symphony, with the Fort Collins Symphony and the Larimer Chorale.

2003

December 16: The Sacramento Bee uses my copyrighted material without permission or even attribution in an article about the closing of JenniCam. At least The Register was more polite.
November: Finished translating Gustavo Bécquer's Rimas.

2002

April: After a wonderful few months off, I started consulting work. While visiting the Boston area, I saw a Fairport Convention concert. My work on Wythoff's game is mentioned prominently on a Numericana web page.
February 16-25: I'm in Europe for the first time, visiting Germany for a conference on algorithmic combinatorial game theory at Schloss Dagstuhl.
January 22: I resigned my position with Vitesse after nearly three years.
January 5: Carol gave birth to the twins, Mira Hypatia Seger Landman and Aaron Lucian Seger Landman. Here are a few photos.

2001

November: The babies are doing fine. Last ultrasound had them at 2.7 lbs each, just about nominal. Looks like one boy and one girl. I've been having a marvelous time translating the Spanish poetry of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer - check my poetry page. Attended the Hackers Conference, hiked with Ted in Yosemite. Saw the Leonid meteor shower with Carol and Robert.
October 12-13: I was a guest VJ for part of Earthdance 2001 CO. This was the first major public performance for my G-Force configs.
September: Translated the second Duino Elegy. Swelling is mostly gone but some pinkness persists. G-Force 2.1 should be out any week now.
August: Translated the first Duino Elegy. Surgery scar is now pink and a bit swollen, supposedly it will fade over time.
July: Carol and I spent a week in British Columbia. Had the cancer removed via Mohs procedure, now have black stitches all over my cheek and look like Frankenstein's monster. Learned JPEG file format and wrote Perl scripts to parse JPEG files and show what's inside them. This allowed me to diagnose and mostly recover the corrupted pictures. (The crashed hard disk is still sitting on a shelf.)
June: Boy it's been a month of ups and downs. On the good news side, all charges were dismissed before I actually had to go to trial. The same day, we found out Carol is finally pregnant. The first ultrasound a bit later showed twins! On the bad news side, my mother isn't doing so well, we had a hard disk crash that may have lost 3 months of my digital photography plus another freak event that corrupted 150 other photos, and I have something on my face that may be a small (hopefully benign) skin cancer.
I've been playing with and studying fractals and chaos theory a lot for the last month or so. One of the results of that is that I've coded some interesting fractals as DeltaFields for the G-Force music visualization program. (If you own a recent Mac, you've probably seen it, since it's the default plug-in for iTunes.) Some of them may be included in the next release of G-Force (2.1, due out later this month), but if you can't wait, you can get them here.
April: OK, so I haven't updated things for a while. I have my reasons. The story in a nutshell is that, due to events at a party my daughter threw at my house in September 2000, I'm faced with some rather ugly and expensive legal difficulties which I really shouldn't talk about until the trial's over. Probably that will be by May.
March: Carol and I vacationed on St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands. I should have photos up one of these days.
New geek code v3.12: GCS/E/M/MU/S !d@ s+++: a49 C++ US++$ UL++ P+++$ L++(+++) E- W++ N-(++) !o K--(+++) w-- M+ V(--) PS++ Y+ PGP->++ t+ 5+ X R tv--- b++ DI++ D- G e+++ !h r++ y++++@

2000

August: Plan to spend some time at the U.S. Go Congress in Denver and the NFNC summer camp in Oregon.
July: Gave a paper on Wythoff's Game at the second Combinatorial Games Theory workshop at MSRI.
May: Vitesse acquires SiTera for $750M. I acquire "golden handcuffs".
March: Carol, Maya and I went to Belize and Guatemala and saw a lot of Mayan ruins. Trip photos from my new digital camera are here.
February: Read/performed Orpheus with Arella, Elizabeth & Lianna dancing/acting and Carol supporting backstage.
January: Published my translation of Rilke's "The Sonnets To Orpheus" in booklet form.

1999

October: We've moved in! Gelly flew out for a week and found a house to rent. Now to unpack before the rest of our stuff arrives from California...
September: I took the girls to the NanDesuKon anime convention in Denver. We hope to close on our unit before the end of the month. Getting ready to move.
August: The unit in cohousing is nearing completion; by the end of the month the kitchen cabinets and most of the lighting fixtures were installed. Got back into mountain climbing after nearly 20 years without: climbed a 12,000 footer with Carol. Then on the 28th, I climbed 14,148 ft. Mt. Democrat, my highest peak ever. You can read Greg Carr's trip report with photos if you like. All three kids moved to Colorado and started school; mornings are quite busy since they attend three different schools and start at three different times.
July: Gelly changed her mind. She's coming to Colorado after all.
June: Started performing again. Did an open mike at Woody's, a pizza place where the stage was a corner so narrow that I often had to dodge the backstroke of a pool cue while playing. And on the 21st, I read my poetry in public for the first time, at a "poetry slam" at the Starlight. One woman was so moved that she wrote a poem about it.
April: Gelly changed her mind; she's not coming to Colorado. On the 15th, my poetry was mentioned on the suck.com website.
March: Started work at SiTera. But right away took a vacation to Baja with Carol (planned to coincide with her spring-break, this was our first long trip together ever). Can finally reveal that the chip I was working on is the Emotion Engine in the Sony Playstation 2. Gelly decided to come to Colorado anyway so we could continue raising the kids together. Maya's team took 2nd place in their regional Odyssey Of The Mind competition and will be going to state!
February: Moved, as planned for over a year, to Colorado to be with Carol and Maya. Took most of the month off, my longest break in over 15 years.
January: Finished my job at Toshiba.

1998

December: Spent a week in Colorado working with the architect and developer for our new home (a unit in the Martinez Park Cohousing development). A few minutes before midnite on December 31st, Gelly and I decided to get divorced.
October-December: I went to Japan for 6 weeks to work on the second tapeout of the chip we taped out in August, and I took Arella! (pictures) She attended Hisamoto elementary school in Kanagawa for the duration, sitting in a classroom being taught in Japanese. I revised Orpheus on the Nambu line commuting between Kanagawa and Kawasaki, on those days when I was fortunate enough to actually get a seat. Arella developed a taste for beef domburi and tuna salad sushi, and received a lot of Sailor Moon books and toys from her classmates. I also got to attend a conference on Computers and Games in Tsukuba. There I ran into Prof. Avi Fraenkel, and started some research into the Sprague-Grundy function of Wythoff's Game.
October: Finally finished the first cut of the Sonnets to Orpheus.
September: Was a ranger at Burning Man 98. The highlight was being part of a team of maybe 50 people doing crowd control during the burn - with the "crowd" consisting of perhaps 14,000 people! My friend Chris Klingner took some pictures. Look for Carol and I after soaking in the mud.
August: Carol, Gelly and I were on a panel at the Loving More conference. Then Carol left for Colorado! We've got a rental house, and we'll all be moving out there over the next year. And at the end of the month, we finally taped out the chip I've been working on since I joined Toshiba.
July: Carol's getting ready to move to Colorado in mid-August! I decided that my summer project was going to be translating Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus" ... all 55 of them. Currently I've got 21 done, so I'm almost finished with Book I. I also wrote a new poem of my own during a retreat in Boulder Creek. You can see them all on my poetry page. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to tape this chip out. It's hard to do poetry when you're working long hours at something else! We invented a new culinary masterpiece: mango & hamachi sushi. No, really. This is the first food I've ever eaten that brought tears of joy to my eyes. I recommend laying down on your back the first time you try it, and having someone slowly feed it to you. That will minimize the chance of your falling over. P.S. The mango shouldn't be overly ripe. And nigiri style seems to work better than makizushi - you don't want too much nori taste in this.
June: Took training to be a Black Rock Ranger at this year's Burning Man.
May: Did some more Rilke translations. Had MRI for my neck problem. It showed that my C6-C7 disk is slipped by 12 mm (1/2 inch) on the left side, and almost no spinal fluid is cushioning the nerves at that point. For now I seem to have fully recovered, but eventually, there may have to be surgery. Jack Van Breen and I were the entertainment at Alt.Polycon III. In addition to our usual guitar-based solo and duet songs, I performed Leonard Cohen's "The Sisters of Mercy" a cappella for the first time. It still worked. :-) (Have you ever noticed how weird it is to use the phrase "a capella", which literally means "with choir", to refer to singing unaccompanied?)
March: The regional OM competition was 3/7. I judged "Marvelous Mentor". On 3/12 I gave a talk "Visualizing the Behavior of Logic Synthesis Algorithms" at the Synopsys Users Group. You can get a FrameMaker 5 MIF file of the paper here or PostScript here. Went to Japan near the end of the month; saw a bit of Nikko. Went "hanami" (cherry blossom viewing) in Yoyogi Park, where I also got to perform old Beatles and CSNY songs with a pair of cool Japanese guitarists named "Tom" and "Tiger". They couldn't speak much English, I couldn't speak much Japanese, but when the 3-part harmony kicked in, we communicated just fine. Ah, bliss ...
February: Not my best month. Something in my neck went out and my usually excellent chiropractor has not been able to help much. So I've been ranging from nearly-normal down to in-extreme-agony and can't-use-left-arm-at-all. Took judge's training for Odyssey of the Mind. Burning Man announced that this year's theme would be "Outer Space". Do you think that Solaria had anything to do with inspiring it?
January: Recovered from the ski-trip flu.

1997

December: Check out the outline for my upcoming talk at next year's Synopsys Users Group. Went cross-country skiing and came down with a 103 F fever. Integrated Systems Design magazine quoted me twice in an article on deep sub-micron design.
November: Visited Japan again. Carol came along! Would you like to see some photos of our visit to a traditional sukiyaki restaurant? Had Thanksgiving at Gelly's mom's house. Started a new song called "Words Fail".
August: Presented a scale model of the solar system covering an area 1 mile by 0.6 miles at Burning Man '97. We called it "Solaria". Attended the Loving More conference. Visited Japan again! Went to Kamakura on my day off, and wrote a couple of poems about it.
July: Spent a week at Hollyhock with Gelly, doing Cris & Tret's workshop again. Wrote several new songs including "What Do I Mean To You?".
May: Visited Japan again!
April: Carol took some pictures of my brain with MRI. (Image is a 1.4 MB tiff file.) This required sticking my head in a 1.5 Tesla magnetic field. The grayscale part is just the structure of my brain. The colored bits are regions of the brain that were more (red) or less (blue) active when my mind was doing a certain task, as measured by oxygen usage.
March: Did a one-day Cris Williamson workshop with Gelly.
February: Visited Japan for the first time. Was able to squeeze in a side trip to Hakone. Started translated some Rilke poems from German.

1996

November: Left HAL after 4 years and started working at TAEC on a high volume embedded processor for a consumer application.
The combinatorial games book with my Go theory paper as a chapter was finally published! (buy it!)
September: Went into the recording studio for the first time to cut demo tapes, then attended the Northern California Songwriter's Association conference at Foothill Junior College. Tried (unsuccessfully) to sell some of my songs.
July: Started the month with my longest solo vacation in 15 or 20 years. I spent July 1-13 at the Hollyhock Center on Cortes Island in British Columbia, doing a Songwriting And Performing workshop with Cris Williamson and Tret Fure, kayaking, hiking, getting massaged, and playing Go. Then at the end of the month I attended the Genetic Programming 96 conference at Stanford.
May: On the 4th Gelly, Carol, & I hiked the coast from 4 Mile Beach down to Wilder Ranch with our friend Jolane. It was really spectacular since most of the trail follows the top of the sea-cliffs. The beaches were very nice and unspoiled too. On the 6th I received the Vaughn Brothers Rocketry VB Extreme 38 rocket kit that I ordered. It looks very nicely designed; I hope to launch it with H and I engines later this year.
April: The whole family took a vacation down south from the 4th to the 9th. We hiked Butler Canyon again, visited the mud caves elsewhere in the Anza Borrego, and hung out in Julian. I won the C division A Altitude event at the April 21st LUNAR rocket competition. Since this event was not held in C division before, that meant I set a new NAR national record in the event. However, it was broken later the same year. Also started writing a new song called "Anyone Could Fall In Love Tonight". My great-uncle Dewey, who helped raise my mother after her mother was killed in an auto accident, died. He was a gentle, happy soul, and I'll miss him.
February: Bought a Leo Kottke songbook and started learning "Mona Ray".
January: Took a songwriting class. Sang at an NCSA Open Mike night. Launched my first "scratch built" rocket and first cluster-engine rockets.

1995

December: Finished the Go theory paper (after only 7 years of research and 1.5 years of writing!). Whew! Also qualified to buy H engines with a spectacular flight on an AeroTech G80-10T, which landed about 10 feet from the LCO (and less than 100 feet from point of launch) after hitting an estimated altitude of 3000 feet (1000 m). The LUNAR folks sure have a nice, well run launch site! Spent a leisurely week in southern California at Carol's parents' house, with side trips to San Diego (zoo, museum) and the Anza-Borrego.
November: Still revising the Go theory paper. Built some larger model rockets; the biggest is an AeroTech Mustang with which I hope to qualify up to G power level so I can buy H motors. Carol was gone for 2+ weeks.
October: The weekend of the 7th, Carol moved in with Gelly and me. I got another Hypatia reference entered. On the 20th my father died. Toward the end of the month, reviews of my paper "Eyespace Values In Go" were returned to me. There were lots of revisions needed.
September: Labor Day Weekend Carol and I attended the Burning Man Festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. We were part of the Weird Blinking Lights camp. I had a lot of fun building and launching a model rocket kit, especially after I met a wonderful pyromaniac named Nancy who just "happened" to have a couple of cans of black powder and some cannon fuse sitting around. On my last engine, we packed the rocket full of explosives and other goodies, turning it into a lovely piece of aerial fireworks.
Later in the month I spent 4 days at a Buddhist mindfulness retreat led by Thich Nhat Hanh. Just before it started, I finished the review draft of my Go theory paper (started 14 months earlier!). My hair is growing back, short, fuzzy, and a bit uneven. Oh, and HAL finally announced our workstation (after 5 years of development).
August: I didn't go to the U.S. Go Congress in Seattle this year. Instead, Gelly & Carol & I attended PepCon. It was an odd experience, in that it was our first time attending as an established triad. Meanwhile, my Go program Poka was having its best tournament ever; after beating the favorite Many Faces of Go due to a program crash, Poka came within 22 points of beating Go Explorer and sewing up 1st place! In the resulting 3-way playoff for 1st, Poka lost both games, but still ended up a respectable 3rd place in North America. My Hypatia pages attracted the notice of Dr. Mike Deakin, who emailed me the text of one of his own papers to include in them. A few hours before Jerry Garcia died, I shaved my head.
May 18: Wrote a song called Desert Varnish inspired by the April trip.
May: I came in 3rd out of 14 designers in the Synopsys User's Group meeting design competition. You can read all about it on the ESNUG mailing list run by John Cooley (jcooley@world.std.com), in Integrated Systems Design magazine, July 1995, pp.56-60, or on Chronologic's Web site, or in Integrated System Design magazine's web site.
April 12: I decided to figure out my geek code for the first time. It's GCS/E/M/MU/S !d@ H s+++: !g p1 au+ a43 w+ v++ C++ US++ P+++ L 3 N+@ E- K--(+++) W M+ V(--) po+(-) Y+ t+ S(-) jx R G(') tv->! b++ D- B(--) e+++ u+(*) h---- f triad n+@ y++++@
March 30th-April 2nd: Went hiking and wildflower-gazing in the Anza Borrego desert with Gelly and Carol. We saw a lot of yellow Brittlebrush, purple Sand Verbena, and flame-tipped Ocatillo; other flowers were more rare, though we did catch 2 kinds of the dangerous Datura, and a single specimen of Apricot Mallow. There was great climbing in the narrowest parts of Butler Canyon - walls 30 to 70 meters high sandwiching a 5-meter-wide sandy floor. I remember exclaiming "gymnasium of the gods!" at one point. Most of the rock was blocky but just rounded enough to afford comfortable handholds, and the dark "desert varnish" indicated that it had been stable for at least 10,000 years.
Late March: After successfully defending a challenge from Swiss Explorer, my Go program Poka was defeated by NeuroGo II on the 9x9 Computer Go Ladder.
March 11th: The team of 5th-graders that Gelly and I have been coaching competed in the regional Odyssey Of The Mind (OM). Carol and my friend Ted Kaehler participated as judges. Despite some serious problems (one of the five team members dropped out due to sudden illness, and another's mother yanked him off the team the morning of the competition!), the remaining three team members pulled together and were able to present the solution to their long-term problem. Even though Murphy's Law hit them hard (a rope got tangled in their vehicle's wheels, something that never happened in practice runs), they managed to successfully complete all the tasks. Although they didn't place in the top three, the judges were so impressed by their teamwork in the face of adversity (especially in the later "spontaneous" event) that they were awarded a "Special OMer" certificate (only 3 such awards were made in a field of over 100 teams). And to top off the day, the two teams from our school (Monroe Middle School) tied for first place in the Egg Drop contest (splitting the prize of 6 rubber eggs :-).
February: My Go rating was increased to 3.5 dan in the AGA Quarterly Rating Update. February 8th: I received my complimentary copy of the book "Prospects in Nanotechnology", Krummenacker & Lewis (eds.), John Wiley 1995. I wrote chapter 6, "Paths to Nanotechnology", based on my talk at the First General Conference on Nanotechnology in 1992.
January: I've been entering the text of a 275-year-old book for my study of Hypatia.

1994

November 4th-6th: The 10th Hacker's Conference. I won first prize in the Hot Glue Gun Contest for the "Ronco Recordamatic".
September 7th: Photos from the "Operation Gymnosperm" outing that Gelly and Carol went on are available.
August 9th: This week I bought and learned Passport's Encore v2.6 software for creating sheet music and MIDI files. The sheet music (melody & chords) to Beyond The Flesh, in PostScript is now available.
From July 11th to 22nd I attended a workshop on Combinatorial Game Theory at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley. I gave my talk on "Fractional Eyes in Go" on Wednesday July 13th.
May 2nd-18th: Wrote most of Way Beyond The Flesh.

1993

Summer: Poka ties for last place in the US Computer Go Championship with one win (over Bruce Wilcox's Nemesis) and 6 losses.

1992

Summer: Poka takes 5th place (out of 7) in the US Computer Go Championship with wins over Prototype and Fumiko.
April: I wrote a cute program to help you get a phone number which spells a word. It was picked up off the net and archived by the Surfpunk Technical Journal.

1989

Summer: Poka takes 6th place (out of 10) in the US Computer Go Championship with a 2-2 record. Never got to play Nemesis.

1988

October: Poka takes last place (out of 14) in the 9x9 tournament of the World Computer Go tournament in Taipei, with a 0-4 record. It's all uphill from here!
Summer: I write a Go-playing program called Poka. It's an exercise in "artificial stupidity" - doesn't read at all.
April: Start work at Sun Microsystems. Become one of the first users of the Synopsys synthesis tools (still pre-beta at that point!).

Howard A. Landman / howard@polyamory.org

Last updated 2004 September 12