The second season of Boston Public starts on Monday. It's really a well-done show, even if the choir teacher can't conduct worth a damn. If you've never seen it, you should check out a couple episodes and see what all the fuss is about.

I'm still learning all the ins and outs of the SC-8500 that I got last week, and thought I'd post a couple new comparison MP3s. This is my Latin funk tune from 1999, One for Rosie, on a standard soundcard and on the SC-8850 . The files are pretty big, four and a half minutes each, but it's worth the wait if you've got the time. You can also find the MIDI file for this in Volume Two of the Music page, so you can see how it sounds on your own computer.

Professor: "Is there a place that students hang out these days?"
Student: "...the Chiefs hang out in the lounge, the 'players' hang out down by the lockers, the string players hang out on the fourth floor..."
Professor: "I see. So where do the weirdos hang out?"
Composer: "We hang out in the breezeway!"

I'm back online with all of my network problems fixed. The reformat was actually pretty painless for a Windows process. The only reason I didn't post yesterday was that I was too lazy to get my FTP software installed until this morning.

I've got a new Warcraft report over at BR.com . The last one earned a 9.0.

Saturday night was spent at a Halloween party out in Catlett with a live band and a speeding hayride. Yesterday, I began rewriting this site to take advantage of new server features. I'm trying to eliminate the dependency on <TABLE> tags in favour of CSS and strict XHTML, but it's hard to make the switch after writing HTML the same way for so many years.

Who was the ridiculous ad monkey who wrote the ABC promos for Halloween week? "It's A-B-SCREAM week!" Ignoring the fact that scream doesn't rhyme with c, how can anyone find that witty, clever, or even remotely relevant to ABC's poor comedy lineup? On a side note, it's a reflection on the quality of TV that Alias, the show that no one watches, commands the third highest advertisement rates of all the primetime TV shows for 18-49 year olds. At least we know it won't be cancelled this year.

I heard a horrible song on the radio yesterday -- one that forms a trifecta with Cher's "Do You Believe in Life After Love?" and Fatboy Slim's "Check it Out Now, the Funk Soul Brother". It's "I See You Baby Shaking That Ass" by Groove Armada, and it consists of that phrase repeated over and over, except for one spot where the record intentionally skips for about eight seconds. It's like an electroacoustical music experiment gone awry. Move over Steve Reich.

Yesterday while shopping for Halloween trinkets in a crafts store, the register came up with a $3.13 total. Without a moment's hesitation, I had my debit card out and ready to pay this monstrous third-world debt tab. It was then that I realized I had become one of those yuppy cashless consumers that you read about in the paper all the time. I made five separate stops yesterday during errands time and paid with debit every single time. Thankfully I'm not so bad that I charge everything yet -- my credit card only sees the outside of my wallet for online purchases and prostitutes. By the way, that $3.13 got me two outdoor tealight holders in the form of tiny jack o' lanterns which I can stake into my overgrown lawn so all the annoying eighth graders that are too cool for costumes but still expect candy know where the sidewalk is.

My lawn is quite overgrown at the moment, since I haven't mowed it in about three weeks and it's been raining for just as long. The newly seeded portions along the sidewalk are finally growing in, and has that cutesy baby grass look to it, but the rest of the lawn could easily be the set for the next sequel to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, one of those classic 80s movies that consists of a bunch of kids on an adventure where most of the script involves shouting and screaming (see also, Goonies). I used to watch the shrinking movie all the time as a kid (there was a Roger Rabbit short at the beginning of the tape as well) but that was definitely another movie that didn't deserve to be part of a trilogy. It was followed by the horribly-titled (and horrible) Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (which could have made for an incendiary premise had they not taken the tame route of enlarging the baby and setting him on Las Vegas), and then Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves which tactfully went straight to video.

Since it's already proven that Hollywood loves converting atrocious piles of fecal matter into big-screen bucks, they should create a movie starring all the big child stars of the 80s crammed together into a brand new adventure. At a minimum, the ragtag bunch of misfits who eventually bond together and save the day should include the Short Round kid, Corey Feldman, Drew Barrymore, the Truffle Shuffle kid, and Ralph Macchio from The Karate Kid. The villain should definitely be Glenn Close, since she's scary-looking even in her serious movies, and her sidekick would be the Pee Wee Herman guy. Doesn't this sound like a winning combination?

Yesterday's search terms:
calculate gallons of paint to ton of miscellaneous steel

Friday Fragments

Halloween Edition, now with 50% more bats

♣ Police are on the lookout for a criminal. Call the station if you've seen him.

♣ Never have I ever called a television hotline or tried to be the ninth caller in a radio contest for random prizes and fame. I have called radio stations twice for requests, and both times they had never heard of the song. Stupid radio stations playing only the songs everyone already knows.

♣ This three-part movie trilogy of Lake and Titan's last visit to my home has a recognizable and quite apropos song for its soundtrack: (#1, 2MB WMV), (#2, 1MB WMV), (#3, 3MB WMV)

♣ The Staples Copycat commercial makes me smile, and not just because the cat looks like a chubby long-haired version of Amber. Amber is far cuter.

♣ All kittens are cute, but adult cats really aren't that cute at all. However, you will always find your own cats to be cute regardless, because you watched them grow up from kittens and associate their former cuteness with the less cute animal they turned into. This applies to human kids too. Who would put up with them through adulthood if they didn't have big saucepan eyes and make funny sounds?

♣ If I go to bed late and want to sleep in, sometimes I will feed my cats a little midnight treat of food on the sly, which screws up their internal food counters and prevents them from waking me up at my usual early hours. I don't find this to be bad parenting in the least bit.

♣ I probably won't do this if I ever have kids, because I'd be afraid that they'd turn into Gremlins and I'd have to trick them into the microwave and turn it on to protect myself from being mauled.

♣ I have not bought any tempting treats for the neighbourhood kids because I barely get a soul on Halloween Night. Rather than buy a box of tasty candy for one-year-old kids who have no idea what's going on and fourteen-year-old kids who are too cool to have a costume, I'll just hide in the back of the house with the lights out and take all my candy to work.

♣ I don't even have a costume, but it's not a crisis since I don't plan on attending any costumy affairs. I did promise that this year's costume would somehow involve a ukelele, since the ukelele from last year's costume didn't arrive until after Halloween was over. Give me a table cloth and I could be a ukelele-wielding superhero.

♣ Everyone says that that Heroes show is great, but I have yet to watch it.

♣ This weekend, I'm going to become an expert on the Spring MVC Framework since it's a likely candidate for the next version of our applications at work. I never did finish the book on AJAX and never started the book on Ruby, but at least those books look impressive on my shelf. Besides that, I may go to Kathy and Chris' for poker one night as well.

♣ Have a superb end-of-October weekend! Keep guessing those Tunes from yesterday!

Media Day: Halloween Party

Winners of the costume costume and various other random games won sexy black T-shirts with this logo emblazoned across the front.	Anna's decorations included spider webs which were so thick that even a few kitties were caught.
Rebecca and Vu raid the candy bucket.	Jaood arrives as a pirate, surprised to find two other pirates already arring and avasting. He duels Ben's pirate (who also received Costume Contest votes as "Figure Skater") and wins.
The cast of Juno is one of several good pregnant-friendly costumes.	This year I came as Ugly Betty. Womens' shoes are highly uncomfortable.
Annie won "Most Creative" for her interpretation of the Leopard Operating System for Macs.	Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin were another pregnant-friendly costume pairing.
We also had appearances by two Sarah Palins, a John McCain, and an Avril Lavigne. John McCain may have been inappropriately cuddling a Sarah Palin in a dark corner.	A record-breaking 39 people showed up for this year's party, and a good time was had by all. I'll try to put up the rest of the pictures sometime this week -- they're already on Facebook if you can't wait!

List Day: 30 Things I Want to Do

I want to...

1. Learn to play the violin.
2. Resume my self-studies of jazz piano.
3. Add song info to 13 years worth of MP3s.
4. Compose a new band piece.
5. Learn how to use Photoshop CS4 in a structured, non-ad-hoc way.
6. Take some random interest online classes through the free, yet poorly implemented, Skillsoft program at work.
7. Learn to program with Google Web Toolkit.
8. Learn to program in Ruby.
9. Write more reviews on Yelp.
10. Review burgers with Rebecca.
11. Learn enough to pass as a Database Administrator.
12. Create maps for Half-Life 2.
13. Learn video editing.
14. Redo the cabinets and appliances in the kitchen.
15. Organize the closets.
16. Start an herb garden for cooking.
17. Eradicate the creepy olive-sized spiders in the shed.
18. Permanently mount my over-the-air HD antenna.
19. Hang out with more people in the vicinity who don't require a thirty minute drive to reach.
20. Host the sixth annual Month of Thanksgivings.
21. Create new photo albums for all the unsorted pre-digital pictures scattered about.
22. Volunteer for something.
23. Exercise at least three times a week.
24. Cook more.
25. Eat more disgusting foods, like fruits and vegetables.
26. Exercise Booty more.
27. Learn Spanish.
28. Relearn French.
29. Work on the Paravia Wiki.
30. Write more Interactive Fiction.

I will probably do...

At least 3 of the above.

Costume Day

Here's a swatch of pieces from my upcoming Halloween costume. Any guesses as to what I'll be?

Electable Me

As a highly patriotic member of my community, I plan on running for Sterling District Supervisor in the upcoming election. Please do your part by printing out my signs and posting them for maximum visibility. Suggested legal spots include: the side of your pet, the bulletin board in the lunch room where your coworker guilts everyone into buying Girl Scout Cookies, some place on the Twitter, or secretly printed on the back cover of the pamphlets from your local Jehovah's Witnesses.

The success of my campaign depends directly on Department of Justice approval of my proposal to collapse district 701 so it just encompasses my court, because it is much easier to buy the vote of a court than a neighborhood. However, I have full faith in the federal government to recognize a good idea when it sees one.

Move to Sterling and vote for me!

Lake Day

Sunset over Lake Quinault.

Regular updates to resume tomorrow.

Loudoun Election Cheat Sheet, Part I of III

It's often difficult to cut through the macrame potholder of misinformation that stretches across the loom of general elections. With district boundaries resembling modern day Nazca lines, it can be a chore just figuring out who's eligible for your vote and which voting station to report to (dropping in unannounced on a random elementary school is frowned upon in this day and age).

As a public service, the URI! Zone is offering side-by-side comparisons for every race. Currently, this data is limited to my direct voting area because I'm but a one-man political team with no revenue stream and my district is the only one that matters. If a comparable resource does not exist for your area, you should seriously consider moving to Sterling Park so we can hang out, vote on stuff, and grill things.

State Senator, District 33

House of Delegates, District 86

To be continued tomorrow...

Costume Day

I hope this doesn't affect my clearance.

Halloween Prep Day

Maia made her first jack o' lantern with minimal assistance. She especially likes that he has a very long stem.

We are going to be the Berenstain Bears again this year because yellow flannel shirts are expensive enough to warrant reuse. This year, though, we have a Brother Bear!

Maia's Fall Break goes from Friday to Tuesday so we're going to spend a couple nights at a lake house near Harpers Ferry. Maia is getting tired of the five-days-a-week grind (aren't we all?) and wants to sit around the lake house with no plans. No big Halloween Parties planned this year, although AirBnB presumed that we were trying to throw one when we went looking for rental houses.

What are your Halloween plans?

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Gadjistan Zizany by Gadjo:
We caught this little street band on our trip to Barcelona in 2008 and their first CD has been on during many dinners since then. This 2011 CD is more of the same, but a little too repetitive and less quirky.

Final Grade: C+

Black Bird:
This true crime show tries to channel Netflix's Mindhunter and every show ever made that takes place in a prison. A low-level criminal must go undercover in a maximum security prison and befriend a serial killer to gain critical evidence. The show is very by-the-numbers and doesn't show any real nuance until Episode 3. The setting lacks any real menace or danger and the whole thing sputters along until it quietly ends. Other than a creepy performance by Paul Walter Hauser, the show had little to keep me enthralled. On AppleTV+.

Final Grade: C

Jim Gaffigan: Dark Pale:
This special is random and all over the place, like a seventh grader trying to figure out his sense of humour. It lingers too long on unfunny diarrhea jokes, and concludes without any strong climactic punchline. There are a few good belly laughs, but otherwise this special is a miss. On Amazon Video.

Final Grade: C-

Righteous Gemstones, Season One:
I picked up this show after wanting more Walton Goggins in my life after the Justified reboot misfire. This show about a family of televangelists manages to be funny without sinking to the easy skewering of religion. John Goodman is great, as always, and Danny McBride is fine playing Danny McBride (as he does in every show).

Final Grade: B+