Archive for category Moving to the USA
Sailing off into the sunset toward America
Posted by Angela Brett in Moving to the USA, video on July 27, 2025
As mentioned previously, I have an idea for a music video I’d like to make about my move to the US. But before I make that, I wanted to publish some of the video I took on the trip, in a fairly raw and unedited way, just to get it out there. I already published hours of 4K video from the ship leaving Hamburg, leaving Southampton, and arriving in New York City, recorded with my Sony ZV1 camera on a tripod.
Well, it was time to put together whatever random video I took with my iPhone. And I was just going to stick it all in a video with fades between clips, but there really wasn’t much going on in terms of sound — it needed music. And of course if there was going to be music, I’d better edit the footage a bit more to fit in with the music. So I ended up making something of an impromptu music video. Probably the coolest part (other than the music) is the sunset I recorded from the front of the ship one evening.
The song is ‘America’ by K’s Choice, as covered by my friend Joseph Camann when I requested it on his Patreon. Joseph is a multifaceted and multitalented individual who is also known as Chromatic Verse (mostly for visual art) CamannWordsmith (mostly for writing) and Joseph and the Bear Hat (for song covers.) It is unclear which parts the bear hat played in this cover.
I initially thought that the song ‘America’ would work better for the road trip across America than the trip across the pond, so I spent some time trying to find something else for this one… but come on, ‘America’ has a line about the sun rising and falling, and most of the video is a sunset. How could I not? Also there’s the double bonus of publicising both my friend Joseph and also one of my favourite bands, K’s Choice.
A day or so after we got to NYC, we visited MoMath, and I recently realised that while I’d put up video of Joey Marianer riding a square-wheeled tricycle there, I had forgotten to edit the other video I took of Joey at MoMath. Here’s Joey changing some benches from a triangle shape to a square and back, set to one of the free jingles that comes with Final Cut Pro:
That’s it for now. Stay tuned for a video of whatever I recorded on my phone during our ensuing road trip across the US, which I will inevitably spend more than the expected amount of effort on!
Circles (Soul Coughing parody lyrics)
Posted by Angela Brett in Moving to the USA on February 6, 2025
These lyrics are to be sung to the tune of ‘Circles’ by Soul Coughing. They refer to the proposition that we use tau (τ) defined as 2π, instead of pi (π), counterarguments to that, and neverending friendly rivalries about it.
When you were younger you were taught a circle formula
That its perimeter is πd, that is, 2πr
πd gets you all round the circle
All around the circle, all around the circle
All around it
πr’s just halfway round the circle
Halfway round the circle, halfway round the circle
Halfway round it
And now you’re older, there are folks attempting to convince
That 2π’s τ and you should use it for circumference
τr gets you all around the circle
All around the circle, all around the circle
All around it
πr’s just halfway round the circle
Halfway round the circle, halfway round the circle
Halfway round it
Pi-tau-pi-tau-pi
Am I coming or going?
Tau-pi-tau-pi-tau
Am I halving or doubling?
Pi-tau-pi-tau-pi
Am I coming or going?
Tau-pi-tau-pi-tau
Am I halving or doubling?
But I can’t find out what’s the area
It was πr-squared, and now, τr squared on two
τ is now twice, π can do everything
Change it to τr, and complicate the formula
πr-squared is all around the circle
All around the circle, all around the circle
All around it
τr-squared’s twice around the circle
Twice around the circle, twice around the circle
Twice around it.
This row*’s just going round in circles (*with ‘row’ rhyming with ‘cow’, meaning ‘fight’)
Going round in circles, going round in circles
Round and round them…
(repeat entire song indefinitely)
I was not familiar with the original song, but we saw Holy Bongwater perform Nurples at FuMPFest 2024, and when I found out it was a parody of a song about circles, I knew what I had to do. I was motivated to finally finish it by a deadline for a maths music feedback group with a group of people I know from MathsJam. There were a few suggestions, but nothing that stood out as being a definite improvement — it was π of one, half a τ of the other, really. So I’ll put the lyrics here, and you’re welcome to sing them or change them as you see fit. They’ll likely be sung at MathsJamJam this year, perhaps along with This Tiling Never Repeats, which wasn’t sung last year because not enough people were familiar with the tune (and it’s a little harder to get the hang of than this one.)
In other news, after watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, Joey and I watched all of Lower Decks, and have got several seasons through Deep Space Nine. I now know that the combadge I put on my Star-Trek-like dress (which most closely resembles Starfleet cadet uniforms and Deep Space Nine uniforms) is only used for the first two seasons of Deep Space Nine, so the person who told me I had the wrong combadge for the dress was probably thinking of later seasons of DS9.
Since my last post I finished Advent of Code 2024 (which it turns out does not necessarily get more difficult each day, but does continue to be fun and somewhat nerdsnipy), did some more LeetCode exercises, did the final round of interviews for the job that had recommended practising with LeetCode, and did not get the job. So, I’m still looking, but now I feel pretty well prepared for most kinds of interview that could come my way. Meanwhile, I’ve started making a new multiplatform (iOS/macOS) app that a friend of mine always wanted to exist. A very rough, but functional, version of it is on TestFlight already. If you are a big Reddit user, and especially if you are also blind or visually impaired, you might want to try it, but please be aware it is in the early stages and there are many things I already plan to improve.
I have also uploaded a video from when we arrived in New York on the Queen Mary 2. I’m currently doing some light editing on a video from when we left Southampton, which I had forgotten I filmed. As mentioned previously, I still have more videos of my move to edit. On the more practical side, I’ve finished unpacking all my boxes, and filled my shiny new bookcases with books, and my new CD/DVD racks with CDs, DVDs, and also books.
This is when the [poster] wall comes down
Posted by Angela Brett in Moving to the USA on November 11, 2024
Here’s a video in which I take down my posters in my apartment in Vienna, in order to pack them up to move to the USA. It includes improvised song parodies and silly jokes from Joey Marianer and myself.
I took this video partly to have a record of my poster wall (though I also have a photo of it which I sometimes use as a Zoom background) and partly because if I get permission to do so, I’ll make a music video of Sam Bettens’ song ‘Go’ documenting the entire move, and a sped-up version of this video will be used for the lyric ‘this is when the wall comes down’. For now I’ve just used that one clip of the song, since I suppose it’s short enough to be fair use. Other songs referenced in the video are:
- Guy Williams’ National Anthem of Libya from Taskmaster New Zealand
- Another Lobster, by Kornflake (which is a parody of Another Postcard, by Barenaked Ladies, but I realised when watching that yesterday that I hadn’t actually heard it before, and only knew of it via Another Lobster)
- Another Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd
- Want You Gone by Jonathan Coulton, as sung by Ellen McLain on the Portal 2 soundtrack (it just seemed appropriate to end with ‘gone’, since I was starting with ‘Go’)
My posters are still in a crate on a truck somewhere between Montréal and here, so my home office currently only has a map of the route we took on the Queen Mary 2, and a Dogcow print, which I had wanted for a while but wasn’t prepared to pay the shipping and import fees for while I was living in Austria.
Aside from the music video, I have several other videos about moving here that I still need to edit, including:
- several hours of 4K footage from the Queen Mary 2 as it left Hamburg
- several more hours of 4K footage from the Queen Mary 2 as it arrived in New York.
- at least one more clip from MoMath
- various clips taken on my phone during our road trip from New York to my new home in the Seattle area
So watch this space! (I’m adding links as I upload the videos mentioned) Or subscribe to my YouTube channel and watch that space instead.
I’ll also put more photos from the trip on Flickr, so that’s another space you can watch. For now I’ve only put up panoramas from our pre-move trip to Fügen, our view of New York from the Queen Mary 2, and our road trip from NYC to Seattle.
In other news, Joey and I once again went to the MathsJam Annual Gathering in the UK. We didn’t give any talks, participate in the bake-off, enter a competition in the competition competition, or write any new parody songs for the MathsJam Jam this time. I won one of the competition competition competitions by writing the joke ‘What do you get if a Platonic solid loses a duel with its dual’ for the pre-determined punchline ‘the phantom of the solid’, but even that was just based on a poem I wrote (and performed) previously. We did, however, participate in Taskmathster as one of the Saturday evening activities, then two days later in London, we did the Taskmaster Live Experience. Both were a lot of fun!
Also, I have just released a new Mac app! It’s the one I made to create charts of days Joey and I have spent together while living apart (as seen in my previous post about moving to the USA). I’ll post more about it later today, but I think it needs its own post.
I swam halfway across the Atlantic Ocean, and now I live in the USA
Posted by Angela Brett in Moving to the USA on September 19, 2024
I keep thinking I shouldn’t post here until I’ve processed more of my photos and videos, updated my apps so I’ll look better for potential future employers, etc, but if I did that, the post would be absurdly long and late. This situation is of course fractal — I keep thinking I shouldn’t release my apps until I’ve fixed all those bugs, got everything working in VoiceOver, etc., but if I did that (as I have, many times in the past) the apps would simply never get released.
So, today I’ll write a blog post, and tomorrow I’ll either put my new macOS app on TestFlight, or submit new versions of NastyWriter and NiceWriter (which don’t work very well in the latest iOS, and also will fail to show ads because I’m halfway through moving my ad accounts to a new country.) Bug me if I don’t, and let me know if you want to test the apps. I should decide which one to release already so that I can focus on one thing at a time, but right now I’m focussing on writing this blog post, not on deciding which apps I can realistically get ready. See what I did there?
First things third: I made it to my new home in the Seattle area! I’m busy se(a)ttling in, changing all my online accounts to the new country (I’ll write a separate post about which hoops have to be jumped through for which accounts), and casually looking for work.
My lovely husband Joey Marianer came to Vienna to help with the moving, and many of my friends helped by taking my furniture and other things I didn’t need to keep. Then Joey and I took a train to Hamburg, the Queen Mary 2 ocean liner to New York City, and a road trip to our home in the Seattle area. It was of course in a pool on the Queen Mary 2 that I swam while we were halfway across the ocean.
Here’s a chart of all the days Joey and I have known each other, with appropriate emojis for the days we were together in person, and black squares for the days we weren’t. It was made by the aforementioned new app, which I started writing in an airport lounge one time when Joey’s flight left several hours before mine. This chart ends on September 6, 2024, because that way it would make a nice 49×56 rectangle. It also shows our first 256 days together, which is a nice round number in binary.
I’d never been to New York City before, so (after the no-longer-obligatory trip to Ellis Island the day I immigrated) we stayed for a few days before continuing. High on our list was visiting MoMath, the National Museum of Mathematics. I have a few videos from that, but here’s the one I’ve uploaded, of Joey riding a square-wheeled tricycle on a circular track made of inverted catenary curves:
Also in New York, we visited Liberty Island, Central Park, the Oculus, a few Sabrett’s hot dog stands, an annex of the Transit Museum, and the Apple Store on 5th avenue. I tried a rainbow bagel, some poorly-configured hot dogs (a friend from New York had recommended a particular combination of toppings, which neither stand gave us), and an Apple Vision Pro — I’d tried a friend’s one before, but without corrective lenses.
On the way home we stopped to meet friends in Toledo, Chicago, and Minneapolis. We visited Tony Packo’s (which has a large collection of autographed hot dog buns), Portillo’s (which has trays with deep recesses for cups, making it much easier to carry drinks around), American Science and Surplus (which has amusing signs and muzak) and the Minnesota State Fair (which has food on a stick).
Here’s a playlist of videos and podcasts that Joey and I showed each other because of things we saw during the trip:
There’s obviously a lot more to say and show about all of this, but I have to go finish some apps, so here’s a picture of the Statue of Liberty that I took from the Queen Mary 2 (previously posted on X and mathstodon).
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