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Je m'appelle Adrian Secord and I live in New York City with the kittens of doom Orange and GriGri.
Most of my time is spent coding or working and the rest with friends, the cats, learning cello, drawing or photography. I have an amazing family scattered around the Earth but mostly back home in Canada.
June 17, 2009
This weekend, I'm going to go do my first solo backpacking trip in the Catskill Mountains, very excited! Since it's my first time out by myself and I have some new equipment, I'm going to hike the Ashokan High Point trail. The hardest part was figuring out the best way to get out of New York City and travelling the 2 hours or so up to the mountains, especially on a low budget. As an experiment, I'm going to train it up to Poughkeepsie, NY, then rent a car with a weekend deal and head into the mountains. Here's a map showing the last bit:
View as larger map
Feb 12, 2009
Thanks to Alyssa, Mary, Brad, Elisa, Lisa and Aaron for fun dinner and drinks last night. The birthday "cake" and accompanied Happy Birthday rocked!
We're considering Char No. 4 for the Saturday Brunch—see the details in the schedule below.
Feb 11, 2009
What a great birthday it's been so far, and it's only 10:00 am! I got a birthday wake-up call from a sweet girl and opened her gifts to me: a couple of mixed CDs of new music. I'm listening to them now, and I already have two new bands that I'll be checking out soon. I also have 26 new birthday emails to enjoy, up from 11 last night! Thanks! You'll hear from me soon. :)
Feb 10, 2009
Tomorrow's my 32nd birthday! To celebrate, I'm having lots of fun events this weekend, see below for the schedule. If you'd like to come to anything, please get in touch! If you can't come to something that you'd really like to, let me know, too, because everything here is pretty flexible. We can probably move something to accomodate you.
I love the Brooklyn Inn. It's all dark wood and leadlights, supposedly imported from Germany in the 1870's, and also supposedly one of the oldest bars in Brooklyn. I don't know about that, but I love this place—it's now my definition of a neighborhood pub. It's tiny, it's warm, everyone's happy, there's a pretty good jukebox and a little pool table in the back. Yay!
Brunch! Who doesn't like brunch? Well, I'll tell you a secret: I used to hate brunch. It's okay, I got over it; now I understand that it's a perfect mix of coffee and carbs and fat and warmth and friends. Brunch will be held somewhere in Park Slope, mostly because there is a billion places to go there and also Brad and Elisa can help me choose a place. (Thanks, guys!)
If you'd like to come, please email me and I'll send you the final secret location.
Update: We have our collective eye on going to Char No. 4, which is apparently some kind of brunch/southern BBQ joint, depending on what meal we're talking about. I'm trusting Brad and Elisa on this: their apartment has twenty feet/paws in total, so I'm sure that's some kind of assurance of quality.
It's a $16 prix fixe and the bloody mary's are supposedly to die for if you're into that kind of thing. And 300 bourbons—I mean, yeah. Not that we need booze to have fun, but, woo... 300 bourbons. That could worry a man.
If you're thinking of coming, could you shoot me an email/text/phone call before, say, Friday evening? It looks like we'll have to make some reservations, so yeah. Woo. 300 bourbons?
If that won't work we'll choose something equally awesome in roughly the same neighborhood, so no worries.
Los Campesinos! is a deceptively-named band from from Wales that creates hyper, shouty brit-pop, and I'm currently in love with them. I saw them in Seattle this summer, and now they have a new album out and they're on tour. They're playing at The Bowery Ballroom Saturday night at 8:30 with Titus Andronicus.
Sadly, I only have a couple of tickets that I bought months ago, and I think the show might be sold out? I know, horrible. Why did I even bother telling you? It's a good question.
Photo walks are great—you get a chance to work on your photography skills with friends and you have lots of willing subjects for portraits. If you like photography or visual art at all, you should definitely come.
It sounds like the weather on Sunday will be okay, so I think a photo walk somewhere in Brooklyn would be a lot of fun. I'm not dead sure where to do this: Williamsburg? Prospect Park? If you have suggestions, let me know.
If you want to come, email me and I'll let you know where to meet us.
Coraline is an animated movie of Neil Gaiman's graphic novella of the same name. If you haven't heard of it, here's the description from IMDB:
Adapted from the Hugo Award-winning, internationally best-selling novel, Coraline is a spine-tingling tale about a curious girl who unlocks a mysterious door in her family's new home and enters into an adventure in a parallel reality. On the surface, this "Other World" eerily mimics her own life - though it is much more fantastical. In it, Coraline encounters different versions of her own life, including off-kilter neighbors and an Other Mother who attempts to keep her forever. Ultimately, Coraline must rely on her resourcefulness, determination and bravery to get back home.
I own Gaiman's graphic novella of the same name, and it's beautiful and creepy. I'm pretty excited to see this movie. It's been getting good reviews, too!
Meet me in the lobby of the Regal Union Square theatre at 2:15 so we can all get tickets, etc. I suggest you buy tickets in advance, since this theatre can sell out, though hopefully not on a Sunday afternoon? We're going to the 2:45 pm showing.
Kasedela is my current fav restaurant: good Japanese food, relatively cheap, and a fun selection of sake. This isn't (necessarily) sushi: most of the dishes are small several-bite-sized chunks of flavorful goodness. (Here's the menu.) You can get sushi if you want, of course. It's also easy to be a veggie there.
Let me know if you want to come so I can make reservations.
Jan 9, 2009
Do you code? Have you discovered Stack Overflow yet? No? You should check it out, it's very good at answering all sorts of sticky code-related questions. I'm becoming quite fond of it.
Jan 1, 2009
Happy New Year! Olivia and I celebrated our hey-we-seem-to-have-been-hanging-out-for-two-months anniversary last night by partying with the super-wonderful Guelph kids. I have no pictures of that Spandex-inspired debauchery, but there was dancing and dancing and dancing. I do have pictures from a portrait photo walk that we went on in New York earlier in December. These were the pictures on my camera, I'll try to get the ones on her camera to balance them out a bit...
Dec 6, 2008
Cooper the cat has a camera on his collar: check out his pictures.
Dec 5, 2008
Yotam, Ian, Andy, Denis and I went to the Blip Festival 2008, a music festival celebrating 8-bit music in all its forms. Essentially, people rocking out using music made on Gameboys. I took a scant few pictures. My favorite musician was Low-Gain—he makes really danceable, fun music but also he stays true to the 8-bit feeling.
Dec 4, 2008
I de-Facebooked, at least until the spring. I set my password to a random string of numbers and letters and logged out. It was fun!
I feel more free: it's one less thing to obsess over on the Interwebs, and I have more time for real-world things like girls and cellos and photographs (oh, and my PhD). Prof. Donald Knuth—the most well-respected computer scientist there ever was—quit email in 1990.
De-Facebook: it'll make you happier, make you devastingly attractive to your preferred sex, free your time and ease your mind.
Nov 27, 2008
I haven't really talked about Noah Hoffeld, my cello teacher, here previously. Noah's really amazing as a teacher of cello. In fact, Noah's work with me (one hour, once a week) is good enough that it leaks out into other parts of my life: I find myself thinking about what Noah has taught me when I deal with my supervisor or try to figure out my direction forward in life. (Plus, Noah reminds me of a much cuter version of Yoda and he occasionally feeds me cupcakes.)
Here's a "recommendation letter" I wrote for him at some point:
“Noah Hoffeld is one of the best teachers I have encountered in any context, including my 25-odd years of formal education and many years of dabbling in the visual arts. I don't have any training in classical music, though I can read music and used to play in bands with my friends over a decade ago. However, I have always admired the cello and wanted to try playing, so I somewhat impulsively decided to start about a year and a half ago. Luckily, I chose to work with Noah.
“Noah is patient and relaxed as a teacher. He takes time to explain what he wants from me, including playing extended passages on his cello, teaching me music theory at the piano, or adjusting my bow grip. He's not too focussed on technique and is just as concerned with getting me to relax and enjoy the music. However, when technique is holding me back or becoming a problem, he has no problem stopping and working on the problem until we have fixed it together. While we follow no fixed curriculum, I always have plenty to work on and my practice time is interesting and often fulfilling. I feel that Noah is teaching me the art of being a good musician, and I always look forward to our lessons together.”
If you're looking for a cello teacher in New York, talk to Noah.
June 11, 2008
I live with musicians, and we just figured out how to connect the electronic piano here in the house to our laptops via MIDI for lots of GarageBand fun. You can drive the virtual instruments on your laptop using a real instrument (the piano). So fun! Here is my spooky first MIDI test, including a single arhythmic tom-tom drum (hi, Joe!).
May 4, 2008
I've just arrived in Seattle for another internship at Adobe and another chance to enjoy an amazing Pacific northwest summer. I'm a little swamped with arrival minutia, but I'll be able to post some pictures soon. I have, however, sort-of found a cello to play for the summer...
Feb 12, 2008
I'm back in New York after a very successful International Friend Tour that took me to Guelph, Smiths Falls, Arnprior, and Ottawa in Ontario, then over to Montreal in Quebec, and finally back to Toronto before coming home.
Check out some of the photos above...
Copyright 2000-2008 © Adrian J. Secord, all rights reserved.
