Well, it's the last day of Spring Break, and there's now only twenty-five class days left in the semester. Course signup for next fall begins on Tuesday so I'd better start looking into what still needs taking. This week was pretty productive -- I completed five of the eight tasks I set out to do. When not working, I caught up on my list of unseen movies that people have recommended in the past. This included: Score, Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Reservoir Dogs, and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, the last of which was especially good.

I think that my string quartet is finished now. Feel free to give a listen and e-mail me your comments.

Outlooks I: The Cynics (MP3, 6:00, 5.6MB)
Outlooks II: The Optimist (MP3, 4:38, 4.4MB)
Outlooks III: The Freewheeler (MP3, 4:37, 4.4MB)

Here's a few links that have been building up on my News to-do list all week:

President continues to put foot in mouth
Gamespot: Melodies, Where Have You Gone? Part 2
The Fightin' Whites

It's interesting to see how much chronology is affected by surroundings. I lived in a single place all the way through high school, and for those years, I have a very clear chronology of world events, politics, and personal events. In college when I was moving around yearly, I have a recollection of events, but it becomes much harder to associate them with a particular calendar year. It's like the living place is the constant against which I can mark time. Events in my early life follow a stately progression, while the past seven years are more of a couscous of random happenings.

Yesterday, Booty got annoyed that I'm on the computer so much, so I let her create her own webpage. You can see it here (415KB).

I think it's interesting that no major news source has really devoted much space to Michael Jackson and the ancient art of pedophilia, ever since his sister stole the show with her mammary malfunction. Family conspiracy?

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Yesterday's notable search terms:

scrapbooking page ideas music and piano recital, popcorn microwave toxic fumes, sitcom clock secret passage, cattlebruiser maps, eaten by a lemur dog

Happy Saint Patrick's Day. This particular iteration of St. Patrick's Day (the 25th Edition) was relatively uneventful for me. We took the new cats and their poop to Pender Vet for a check-up and de-worming treatment, and then I came home, did some work involving submission statuses, threw a corned beef in the crock pot, and cleaned up the kitchen. The only real interesting facet of this entry is that I actually had to count up from 1979, because I couldn't remember how old I was.

St. Patrick's Day was usually hard for me in school, because my colour-blindness resulted in a paucity of green attire. Generally, I taped a dollar bill around my finger and called it a day. In honour of exciting St. Patrick's Days, here are some things I've done in the past:

• 1994: Went to the funeral of a high school crew coach who died from complications in a sledding accident at the Masonic Temple
• 1995: Took three tests: physics, vocabulary, and history. 11th grade vocabulary tests were always easy because they were multiple-choice and the teacher thought she was clever by spelling things like UNCOPYWRIGHTABLE and POUCHFITZGERALD with the answers. Apparently she couldn't think up any other recognizable words because she alternated with those two every couple weeks.
• 1996: Went to a Crew Open Boathouse and then had corned beef for dinner (It was a Sunday).
• 1997: No recollection.
• 1998: Played trumpet at Convocation at Tech, the first movement of my trumpet concerto, The Hero.
• 1999: Nothing notable.
• 2000: Home for spring break and spent all day working on an aborted IF game, Robin Caruso (see the Archive for details).
• 2001: Nothing notable.
• 2002: Finished composing a string quartet and went to a bar for some pool.
• 2003: Hung out with friends in Florida at a bar while Booty made a web page (see the Archive for details).
• 2004: Nothing notable.
• 2005: How will this holiday compare? Only time will tell.

Friday O'Fragments

with guest appearance by Molly O'Malley the Llama

List Day: What Your HMO Can Do For You

My health insurance at work is HMO-based, because the only time I ever go into a doctor's office is when I run out of lollipops. The driving principle behind HMO care is that if you make it difficult enough to get to the expensive doctor, no one will ever get that far, everyone will die, and the company makes millions of dollars. You have to get through the first line of defense, the hard-to-schedule general practitioner visit, and then get a referral to the specialist you need.

Recently, CIGNA added a zeroth line of defense: a toll-free Health Information Library number you can call to get encyclopedic information about whatever illness or disease you have. After dialing the number, you punch in a four digit code from the seven page directory they used your deductibles to print and mail. Here are some of the topics they have created automated recordings for:

3007 Constipation
3020 Hypothermia in Older Adults
3102 Allergy Proof Your Home
3316 Club Drugs
3325 Drugs in the Workplace
3335 Incest
3339 Masochism
3348 Pedophilia
3368 Voyeurism
3196 Ingrown Toenail
3180 Shoes: Proper Fit Prevents Problems
3244 Spondylolysis and Spondylolisthesis
3504 Brain Tumor (self-diagnosis may not be a good idea here...)
3700 Alcoholic Parent
3703 Attitude - Make it Positive!
3709 Burns in Children (burns ON children must be another code)
3716 Dating Concerns
3762 Rules: How to Live With Them
3783 Undescended Testicle
4008 Constipation (in case 3007 didn't answer your question)
4101 Aerobic Dance Injuries
4220 Something In Your Eyes (it's not just a song)
4307 Child Spacing (we recommend standard double-spacing)
4434 Touching in Renewing Sexuality
4437 Water: Essential for Good Health
4703 Dealing with Feelings About Food
4651 Bathroom Safety
4900 Animal and Human Bites

Museday Tuesday

Reptant: (adj.) Creeping or crawling.

The problem with the random word generator that I use is that if I ask it for an unsually uncommon adjective, it just spits out biology definitions. I think this one is related to reptiles. I started with the initial motive played by a bassoon, since it is the scaliest instrument outside of an All-District audition, and the rest just fell into place.

Green Media Day

Pictures from our recent trip from Puerto Rico, as well as older pictures from snOMG can now be found on the Photos page.

We did not get a picture of the ramshackle bar in Fajardo (a city which sounds unfortunately close to "hard on") which was named "DRINKERS Irish Pub" and adorned with a Spanish leprechaun, but it would have been appropriate for today's holiday.

One of these days, I'll get around to writing more about Puerto Rico, but this week is a little busy!

Review Day

There are no spoilers in these reviews.

Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen:
I reviewed the prequel to this book, Design Patterns in Ruby back in 2008, but still have not learned how to program in Ruby. I know enough to survive in a foreign Ruby country where I could decipher the signs to find the bathroom, but not enough to speak fluently to the natives. In spite of this lack of knowledge, I was able to understand and enjoy this follow-up book, even though it's a little more Ruby-centric. As I said in my Amazon review, "Russ has a knack for distilling concepts to their simplest, understandable form while maintaining a breezy, friendly writing style that invites readers to share in his excitement about Ruby." It's definitely worth a glance if you do any Ruby at all in your programming job.

Final Grade: A-

The Office, Season 2:
Emerging from the shadow of the awful first season, the second season of The Office does everything right, and is funny from start-to-finish without relying completely on uncomfortable situations. Even though Dilbert did it first, every episode seems to find a fresh aspect of the workplace to mock while maintaining mostly likable main characters.

Final Grade: A

Only two reviews this week? I really need to start buying some expensive stuff before I lose the right to call myself an American. This is also the case for playing World of Warcraft -- the money you blow on your subscription or transferring your characters to your friends' servers is easily made back because you stop spending money in every other arena of social entertainment.

Weekend Wrap-up

• Friday
  • Grilled Glazed Salmon for dinner with episodes of House of Lies.
  
  
• Saturday
  • Costco run for orange juice, Irish beer, and smoked gouda.
  
  
  • Car wash at home to remove four months of accumulated snow salt since the last car wash.
  
  
  • Anniversary dinner at Maggiano's with both sets of parents.
  
  
  • St. Patrick's Day party at Carolyn's, complete with fake moustaches.
  
  
• Sunday
  • Lounging around the house, reading, and playing Hearthstone with Rebecca.
  
  
  • Afternoon lost to a migraine.
  
  
• Today
  • A solid 8.5" of snow covers the town. Time to telecommute.
  
  

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Cat Day

I'm busy writing about all of the things we can put in the cloud today, so here is a picture of Cat #3 to tide you over until tomorrow.

Fallout from Metro's Emergency Safety Inspection

Yesterday, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority executed an unprecedented shutdown of the entire Metro system in hopes of inspecting a bevy of aging power cables before they exploded in someone's face. Thankfully, they did a great job of keeping disgruntled riders apprised through their Twitter feed.

Mar 16 2:25 AM

FOUND at Foggy Bottom Stn / Kennedy Center access: Punjab lasso and strange, white mask. Homeland Security notified in case of terrorism.

Mar 16 7:31 AM

FOUND east of Pentagon Stn: Secret entrance to CIA black ops division, APO. Still operational.

Mar 16 3:24 PM

FOUND at Archives Stn: Ancient shield with directions to find the cup that held the blood of Jesus Christ.

You might also enjoy these tweets from the opening of the Silver Line in July 2014.

Stuff in My Drawers Day

I drew this picture in April 1986 at the age of 6.

I was fresh from a trip to the Petersburg Battlefield, south of Richmond and the site of the longest battle in the Civil War. Having traveled to every battlefield in Virginia by the time I could do simple mathematics, I was oozing Civil War knowledge like a first grade know-it-all. Pictured here, is the use of sappers during trench warfare between the North and South. This strategy failed when the sappers dug too deep below their intended exit point and completely missed it. The tunnels then collapsed and everyone cried. Screw ups!

I'm not actually sure if Robert Lee himself was a sapper, but if he was a good leader, he would have taken a turn at the trowel.

How Toddlers Are Like a Denial-of-Service Attack

My brain is like a web server that accepts network connection requests from the world.

It has a pool of dormant connections, waiting for sounds. When a potential conversation begins, my brain has to spin up a new connection by identifying the speaker, confirming that an actual conversation is occurring (rather than distracting background sounds), and then dedicating the line to listening intently.

After the conversation concludes, my brain sends the signal for the connection to close. The connection gets freed up and returns to the pool to be reused for the next conversation that comes along.

Conversations with Maia are more challenging. Because she is still refining her speaking skills, a simple statement may require multiple repetitions to complete. Something like, "Do you think we should have olives for dinner?" will come out as, "Do, do, do, do you, do you, do, do, do you, do you think we should, we should, do you, do you, do, do, do, do you, do you think we should have olives for dinner?". (The last half of the sentence always pours out flawlessly -- there must be a scientific reason for this).

In trying to parse this information, my brain will quickly open up a new connection for each of Maia's attempts. This immediately uses up my pool of connections and overloads my brain.

Of course, my brain soon realizes that most of these hanging connections can be canceled and reclaimed. However, I am an introvert. I have a very small pool of connections to begin with and each one takes a long time to free up after use, sometimes as long as 24 hours.

The end result of conversations with Maia (amplified by pandemic quarantine conditions) is that I am constantly operating with a reduced capacity of pooled connections and they often don't get fully cleaned up or recharged before reuse. I may end up hearing things without actually understanding them or misassociating different social stories from different people in my memory because of the jumble.

This is one reason why learning a new game is less likely to be something I want to spend free time on -- the intensity of focus needed to learn a new ruleset is a waste to me if my brain is already filled to capacity processing basic conversations and remembering baseline logistical household needs, especially if I won't play the game again in the near future!

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Top Gun (PG):
Would you believe that neither Rebecca or I had never seen this movie before? We figured that we should probably watch this before watching the new one and were generally underwhelmed. The action scenes are uniformly unnecessary and hard to follow and all of the characters are fairly interchangeable. At least the director got his money's worth out of reusing the song, "Danger Zone", in four different scenes.

Final Grade: C-

Bruises by Dia:
I bought this album hoping for more light pop songs like Isabella, but this is a more introspective "blanket of sound" album that wasn't very memorable after my first few listens.

Final Grade: C-

Kirby and the Forgotten Land:
I bought this game to play with Maia so she could practice navigating a video game with a 3D camera perspective. She's getting there slowly but it's still frustrating enough that she eventually gives up and lets the game automatically teleport her character to mine. (Thankfully, she will never have to learn 3D controls with Mario 64 like us old-timers did). Game-wise, it's very shallow with far too many weapon options, collectibles, and side goals as distractions. Controls are very imprecise, yet the game is littered with time trials that require precision to unlock extras. We only play it now when Maia remembers it, but I'm fine moving on to the next game.

Final Grade: C+

Everything Everywhere All at Once (R):
This multiverse movie is ridiculous in a good way and doesn't take itself too seriously. That said, the fact that the wild part of the story is grounded in a very simple familial relationship story helps give something to care about. Fun, but not necessarily the best picture of the year.

Final Grade: B