Just a heads up to all you family and friends. We have moved to a new apartment and have changed our mobile phone numbers.

We are emailing everyone updates if we have your email address. Otherwise, give our old mobile phone a ring and the voicemail message will fill you in (for the next month at least). Hope to hear from you.

Now that I am not drinking soda three meals a day (Dr. Pepper be evil tasty), I have a new beverage treat to enjoy. A chai tea with the buttery spice of cinnamon, ginger and cardamom; Bengal Spice is yummy. Honorable mention goes to a new cane-sugar soda and the only coffee I actually like black.

We set a deadline in December — by Em’s birthday we would move into our own place. We have often selected deadlines like this, arbitrarily, knowing that we don’t really mean to hold them too rigorously. But as the search for our next home progressed to a plan and then a lease, we found ourselves officially unpacking on that very day.

I spent three days ferrying boxes from storage, belongings we had not seen for over a year. My father and new nephew helped move the furniture that had sat wrapped in plastic that whole time. Then Saturday came and we packed our clothes into suitcases, scrubbed and vacuumed, and made the short drive to our new apartment. So there we were, washing dust dishes and linens, breaking down boxes and bubble wrap when we realized it was Em’s birthday. Even she had forgotten.

The process of unpacking is a pain but it affords that transition in our minds of moving the notion of great significance called home. I have done it a few times now, and the move back to Oregon was the toughest. We both came knowing that we would be in transition, temporarily setting up camp but planning to move in a matter of weeks or months. It took seventeen. Let’s all exhale together now.

Our connection to The Cloud finally got setup today and I moved the office. I had been commuting back to our temporary home for the past two-weeks to get things done. But now I am sitting in the second bedroom, henceforth known as The Office. The move is finally done.

Of all the things in life that feature a big dash of utter lame-ness, moving definitely gets a large helping. Yes, it is balanced out by new sights, sounds and experiences, but today — having returned from a five day visit amongst the friendly faces in California — missing is more a part of moving than ever before.

Having always been more recluse than reveler, long stretches of solitude never seemed that bad. It made my freshman year at university much easier in a sense, but it also weakened ties that I really rather would have kept strong. With that in mind, a bit of trepidation had wormed its way into my mind about this particular visit.

How silly of me. Everyone put on their most authentic smiles, and extended hugs and firm handshakes. KMOB even made me lunch in the midst of his new kitchen with Dirtbike, his sweet dog, fretting over every last morsel. A certain Reagan Baby fed me scrambled eggs and cheese at Babette’s Feast and made me grin at the tales of his travels. Bre-bre made me feel well missed and the Monkey Pit finally demolished, may it rest in peace, seemed like home as much as ever in its new fresh faced layout.

The SCC reunion, while 99.9% faces I have never met, was fun as well. Though I must say, having risen at 4 AM, an after party that lasted until 2 AM featuring bad 90’s hip-hop, dancing and the strange sight of cash-monies floating in the air was not what my oh-so-sleepy self needed. Thankfully, our now one-year-old niece has mastered the art of letting old folks sleep in, so I managed to slowly recover on Sunday.

Another sweet revisit was the food. How it is I became so addicted to restaurants is beyond me. A Jerry’s Dog Smokey Joe Kielbasa was the perfect taste to start a four-hour chat with Gruber & Krammes. Revisiting the hilariously cranky barman Chris at Market Broiler and discovering he had been raised in Mapleton, Oregon was quite fun. And a hearty bowl of wedding soup along with pasta tombrello from Roman Cucina was a taste sorely missed. The special bonus that evening was a visit from the Champion. Perhaps in time for Christmas I will be able to promote her web store full of bitingly witty cards from this “paper twisted mindâ€?.

And that was it. A few swift days, then back on the plane. Happily greeted by the MAX and milder weather we returned to Cascadia. I still don’t feel quite settled here. A few friends even half as good as those left behind, with just the right mix of smiles and hugs, is what we need.

Did you read the ancient epic poem Beowulf in high school or college? Perhaps you read John C. Gardner’s retelling of the story from the monster’s perspective entitled Grendel. A new film by Robert Zemeckis is attempting to translate Beowulf to the silver screen [trailer].

I am ashamed to say that this trailer struck me as live-action until I saw Angelina’s face about two-thirds of the way through. Not recognizing the actor playing Beowolf, I just assumed the odd feel was a stylization of the photography that lends films like Sin City and 300 an odd feel.

But Jolie’s face, and movements, but particularly her face which I have been so exposed too by the main stream media over the years, made me stop in my tracks. I backed up the trailer a few frames to look at her again. Something just didn’t seem right.

As the trailer continued, the other famous personalities (Hopkins, Malkovich) confirmed for me that this was texture-mapping, 3D animation, not live-action. I am fairly obsessed with film, though not celebrity gossip nor paparazzi coverage. I suspect that to the more casual audiences, this trompe-l’oeil may actually work. But for those addicted to film or celebrity gossip, etc. this effect may fail.

At the end of the trailer, my immediate thought was, “Who owns the copyright on Jolie’s 3D likeness&dmash;her digital avatar?”

When the full-length Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within film was released, I remember having conversations about Sony’s opportunity to build an artificial celebrity out of Aki Ross (the avatar not the voice actor Ming-Na). The conversations tended to wander into the territory of how human actors could compete with professional avatars that never age, whose performances can be tweaked endlessly. The avatars’ accents and even language, being modular, could enable them to play in any film. Some of these ideas, including a computer generated voice, are explored in Andrew Niccol’s S1MONE.

I am curious if the actors in Beowulf own the rights to these professional avatars. How will these avatars age with the actors? If the studios own the avatar, will we be witness to the Jolie avatar in films as her young self for decades past her death? Will Paramount studios erect a theme park in the online world Second Life, where consumer avatars can interact with these celebrity avatars.

Imagine if you will, a group of famous actors near the end of an enormous production, say the entire cast of Ocean’s Eleven franchise, dies in a plane crash in the Nevada desert before wrapping up production on Ocean’s 14. Imagine the studio has obtained contingency rights to the actors avatars in the event of death. The studio completes production, drawing on a growing class of professional impersonators, who rather than parody, now engage in serious under-study so as to mimic the voice, movement and motivation that actors have employed. These impersonators play the voice and supply the motion capture to the deceased cast.

What a weird world these avatars, these artistic creations, might unfold.

The film itself, is not quite there in my opinion. The resolution of this virtual cast, the fine grained detail is not quite adequate for me to suspend belief—at least not in the trailer. I enjoyed the artificial world of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and will likely enjoy Beowulf, assuming the plot is reasonably adequate, but this trick of the eye will still be in the way. This method of spectacle will only become more refined over time, and it raises a set of interesting questions that I hope you will ponder when this film rolls into theaters.