This Day In History: 03/28

Thursday, March 28, 2002

After a couple months of starting and stopping, I finally finished The Muse that Sings over Spring Break. The book itself isn't so long; I just wanted to read it slowly to absorb everything. The book is a collection of interviews rewritten in prose form, from a wide assortment of living composers on their creative process and thoughts about composition. From its forty dollar price tag, you can tell that it's a niche market affair, and non-composers probably will not appreciate it as much as composers.

I found the book to be very interesting, if not informative. Most of the process ideas presented are so personal that it would be worthless to attempt to mimic them, but it's inspiring to see how other people approach the composition process. Ultimately, most of the book's value lies in its use as a catalyst for composition -- after reading a chapter at random, I am more likely to sit down and compose. If you are a composer who sometimes struggles to begin a composing session, or a non-composer with a high tolerance for people who talk too much about themselves, this would be a great book to read.

The Movie Night selection this week was Snatch, but really could have been called Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels Part II. It was a good movie, but essentially reprised the plot of the older movie with more well-known actors (they were even written by the same fellow). The accents were much more unintelligible in this one as well.

Former New Zealand chief claims Quayle threatened him
Aborigine demands right to spear officer

tagged as music, reviews | permalink | 0 comments

Friday, March 28, 2003

I was so caught up in my project work that I nearly forgot to do an update today. I'm hoping to get this MFIT project wrapped up in the next two weeks -- a task that's made easier by the fact that I'll probably have to scrap half of it and just write a design document for the part that's not technologically feasible yet. But enough about me. How's your weekend going?

Men are from Mars
Why it's a bad idea to make up your own games

New Booty pics up.

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Tuesday, March 28, 2006

I had to work onsite at Bailey's Crossroads yesterday so I took the opportunity to stop by my old high school and visit with my former Crew coach (who's also an eleventh grade English teacher). It was the first visit I'd made to the school since 2002 when I offloaded several hundred pounds of "Drum Major Teaching Materials" on the desk of the latest revolving-door band director, who may have been named Josquin, but perhaps it was Palestrina.

T.C. Williams High School from the west looks exactly the same as it did when I went there, right down to the list of State Championships won (which makes the not-so-subtle point that the school hasn't won one in over fourteen years), but the west side is being devoured by a fungal monstrosity that's already taken over the senior parking lot and promises to be the new, bigger-and-better replacement school for next year (if another welding fire doesn't set fire to the entire roof again). My coach's classroom looked the same as well, right down to the "Which College Should I Go To?" student reports hanging on the walls and the plethora of vocabulary words on the chalkboard. It was just like old times, except that I was dressed in my sexy "I'm interacting with people outside of the company" clothes and did not get mistaken for a lost student even once!

My coach plans to retire at the end of the school year -- he and his wife are selling their Burke house of 24 years and moving to a cozy Bay house with a pier near Yorktown. He expressed his relief that he was finally getting out of the school-biz, because (in his words), "the kids are getting stupider every year. It must be something in the water". He also mentioned that Alexandria's "Laptops for Every Kid" effort was a total bust because all the kids did was check their email and play games through class. He banned them from his classroom with impunity since he's a fossil and on his way out, but said that all other teachers in the school system had to do at least two lessons per quarter (4.4% of the year!) revolving around the laptops, so the school board could say they were being used. In another highly intelligent move only possible through the quick wit of a school board: all students take the Reading Comprehension Standards of Learning (SOL) test on their computer, using a split screen program that shows the text on top and the questions they answer on the bottom. The Writing SOL? They still take that by hand. For some interesting thoughts on NCLB laws, go read Kim's post. For photographs of Mike looking forward to being attacked go read his blog .

After trading war stories about school drama and Crew drama, I said my goodbyes and drove down to Skyline Center where I paid $9 to park for three hours. Parking fees are such a rip-off. I am paying someone for the privilege of storing my car on a slab of concrete where it might get stolen or broken into without liability. At the least, they should wash it for me, or feed it and take it for a walk. This is why God invented company expense reports and gas reimbursement plans.

Spending spring break in Walmart
Girl deters kidnapper with hammer to the groin
Catch a disease and get on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

tagged as memories | permalink | 4 comments

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Memory Day: Parties

What with the pool table, home theatre, and private champagne room, my house has always been a prime location for playing the part of the host. However, this "I'd rather stay home and invite everyone else over" behaviour isn't new -- I was hosting extravagant parties as far back as junior high school.

It started simple, with the obligatory birthday party, but soon expanded into a June "End of the Year Party!", a December "Other End of the Year Party!", and a random holiday-themed party thrown in for good measure. By the time I left for college, there had been at least twenty-five parties hosted in the home of my worn parents (my dad would occasionally retaliate with tricks like taking everyone's shoes, tying them up in a garbage bag, and throwing it on the roof).

True to BU-form (characterized by an obsession for planning, and too much free time), every party was tightly orchestrated down to the tiniest detail, so it would appear flawlessly facile when it came time to execute. The guests were first informed a few weeks in advance with a multipage invitation typeset with only the highest of Print Shop Pro skills on the dot matrix printer (invitations to friends in Arlington and Fake Alexandria had theirs mailed a day early so everyone would get it on the same day!)

Each party had its own impossibly long acronym, like the FAEOTYP (Fifteenth Annual End of the Year Party!), and of course the word Party! always had an exclamation point on it. The invitations were chock full of inside jokes and fun facts stolen directly from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, and the first invite would always have a choice of three different dates (so I could pick the one the most people were available for). After a round of phone call surveys to select a date (generally just a lame excuse to call the High School Crush of the Moment), a second lavish invitation would go out a week before the big day.

The first thing guests would encounter at the front door was a complex set of knocking instructions, filled with silly jokes and topical gossip from the schoolyard (a surprisingly large number of guests would actually read the entire thing). Neophyte guests who didn't understand the system sometimes went to the side door, where my dad would tell them "The party's next week!" and slam the door.

Once everyone had arrived, it was tradition to kick things off with a Trezur Hunt. Guests were divided into teams, given a map made with DeluxePaint, and a first clue which (when decoded) would lead them to the next location in the house (below is an actual clue from a 1996 Trezur Hunt). The first team to get through all ten clues got the prize, which was usually a giant box of Twix bars or something equally as fun. The Trezur Hunt was always a great success, except for the year where I had one team end up with a padlocked duffle bag while the other team had the key (a sociological experiment as it were). It turns out that a padlock is no barrier, because you can still open the zipper by pulling width-wise on the loose fabric, and I had to quell a mini-riot from the team with the key.

After the Trezur Hunt, we'd play badminton, volleyball, or have a water balloon fight while waiting for the Pizza Hut Pan Pizzas to arrive (This was a carefree age when no one cared that they were consuming five pounds of grease for every one pound of pizza). From here, all the girls would end up watching a movie and all the guys would end up in front of the computer to see whatever latest and greatest new game I had.

Once it was sufficiently dark out, the party would move outside -- the perfect excuse to terrorize the neighbourhood playing Bloody Murder, or to trespass on the last remaining Castle Playground in the city (located conveniently up the block at the elementary school). Despite the hoodlumry, all of my parties were entirely PG -- not because of the strict eye of the party chaperones (they were the least meddlesome party parents ever), but simply because it was a more innocent time when people weren't as concerned with smoking, drinking, and sexing up wenches, as long as they were all having a good time doing something.

In fact, the only party we ever played Spin the Bottle at was in the basement of the strictest parents in town, where we had to keep the door cracked at all times, and one or the other would come downstairs every five minutes looking for the pot. We used a mirror and a lookout system expertly devised by yours truly, but that is a story for another day.

What were your parties like growing up?

Dog performes Heimlich maneuver
A dating site for the hot
Love in the air for one lucky couple

tagged as memories | permalink | 8 comments

Friday, March 28, 2008

Friday Fragments

pissing around before a fortnight one off

♠ A major installation we were supposed to be doing at work got delayed by paperwork, so instead of spending Friday in a deep, dank lab typing rm -rf /, I decided to take the remainder of the week off to supersize my two and a half week vacation. It worked for NBC primetime in 2001, it can work for me.

♠ It's almost sad to realize that after deducting all this leave from my leave pool, there's still over 80 hours of leave remaining. I could take another two weeks off to do something meaningful, like leveling one of every Warcraft class to 70, but that wouldn't be nice to the people at work. I guess I'll just save it up for a trip to Petropavlovsk in December because I hear the weather there is quite nice in the winter. I could mosey up to the local McDonald's and get a nice, warm McRussian to go with my Soviet Shake (it's been renamed but the cups are pre-1991).

♠ Speaking of McDonald's, they apparently own a market share of Google. Doing a search on Reston restaurants last week brought up a very interesting search results page. Every restaurant in the area must have become a McDonald's overnight. I'll definitely go to the one with 2 reviews though.

♠ This weekend, we'll be dropping Booty and Amber off at my parents' house and heading down to Colonial Beach to celebrate the first birthday of Ella and her cousin Thomas. Ella is developing typically for a baby -- she can now recite the divisors of non-prime numbers up to 63 and can bisect a triangle using only a ruler and a stick of gum. After the party, I plan on finishing up my Europe packing and then playing lots of Warcraft to make up for the boring two weeks to follow, where I'll have to run around some foreign cities without a Night Elf or an Auction House in sight.

♠ One of the hunters in my guild has a pet named after me. There's also rumours that the Horde are making a guild called <I Hate Plinky>. I highly approve of this and plan to join it as soon as possible on Evil-Plinky, the Horde priest I'm leveling to fight against Good-Plinky's teammates whenever the games get too easy.

♠ Though I won't promise anything, feel free to check back here throughout the month of April for my updates from the road. The next update you can count on will be on April 21.

♠ Also, happy birthday to Cheryl, Tim Galyen, Geoff King, Baylis, Australian Rachel, Diana D, Ben & his mom, Ella, Mom, Angela Oh, Kim, Carly, and Marc... all of these clowns will have birthdays while I'm gone!

♠ Have a great weekend!

Rubik's Cube solvable in 25 moves
Miss Bimbo site sparks outrage
NZ man sentenced after claiming to have been raped by a wombat

tagged as fragments | permalink | 1 comment

Monday, March 28, 2011

Weekend Wrap-up

After a warm, indoors Movie Night on Friday (a reairing of Music and Lyrics), we ventured out of Sterling on Saturday to visit Kathy & Chris' new daughter, Hannah, who came into the world just four hours after our visit last Friday night for Game Night. If we were going to be a mathematical proof, we would no doubt be "The Induction of Labor".

Following baby time, we grabbed a quick lunch at Subway and then headed for Hemlock Overlook Park for a nice four-mile hike around Bull Run. Thankfully, my toenails did not turn black this time, but I do have to wonder how long it will take the black parts from my last hike to grow away. At the end of our hike, we stumbled upon a new winery, Paradise Springs, just feet from the park entrance, and had a tasting. We liked one of the wines, but the others were pretty unmemorable.

In the evening, we made pork chops (check back tomorrow for the recipe), and rewatched Moulin Rouge so Rebecca could decide if it was still lame. I don't think her opinion deviated too far in either direction.

On Sunday, I caught up on some work while Rebecca went to a "tools for girls" party that involved trowels and spades, rather than the more racy tools one might expect. I wrote some code, watched some of Weeds, Season Six, and played a little Warcraft.

How was your weekend?

The Accidental Activist
Genius at work: 12-year-old is studying at IUPUI
Amoebas: Sexier than anyone knew

tagged as day-to-day | permalink | 0 comments

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Back-from-Norfolk Day

The tidewater region of Virginia is very similar to Northern Virginia, except that if you make a wrong turn, you'll probably end up at a military base rather than a Panera.

tagged as day-to-day | permalink | 1 comment

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

This is 40 (R):
This Judd Apatow movie is a quasi-sequel, in that it takes some side characters from the movie, Knocked Up and continues their story, but none of the other characters from the original movie make an appearance. There are a few humorous scenes and some well-deserved trash-talking about LOST, but the 2 1/4 hour running time feels more like 3 hours. It kind of feels like they left all of the deleted scenes in from the get-go.

Final Grade: C-

Jeff who lives at home (R):
This indie film starring Jason Segal and Ed Helms as two dysfunctional brothers is actually a bit more low-key and charming than you might expect. It will not change your life, and you probably won't remember it after a couple weeks, but it's free on Amazon Prime.

Final Grade: C+

Oh Myyy! by George Takei:
This incredibly short (completable in a couple hours) Kindle-only book tells about George Takei's transition from aged actor to social media star on Facebook and Twitter. It's a pleasant read, but sometimes has an identity crisis between biography, humor essay collection, or how-to manual for growing your online presence as a famous person. The humor is hindered by relying on incredibly small screenshots from the Internet, surrounded by enough margins to resemble a high school book report with a page requirement. Since you can't get this as a print book, the fact that you can't read half of the jokes gets old pretty quickly.

Final Grade: C-

The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll:
This is the true tale of a hapless system administrator who started out tracking down a 75-cent discrepancy in a university computer and ended up on an obsessive pursuit of hackers. The build in suspense is very well-done, and his occasional tangents into too much technical detail are minimal enough that even a non-computer-oriented reader could probably follow along. It peters out towards the end (because catching a hacker in real life is nothing like the movies), but was definitely worth a read.

Final Grade: B+

tagged as reviews | permalink | 2 comments

Friday, March 28, 2014

Random Chart Day: How I Use A Rolling Pin

tagged as data | permalink | 1 comment

Monday, March 28, 2016

Weekend Wrap-up

Not much happened during the final weekend of March. On Friday, I cleaned the house, had wings from Joe's Pizzaria for dinner, and played some Overwatch. On Saturday, I published a new Sparkour programming recipe and watched The Big Short with Rebecca. In the evening, Rebecca's yoga friend, Michelle, came over for porch burgers, although the cooling temperatures pushed us inside pretty quickly.

On Sunday, we had lunch with Rebecca's parents at Panera and then I returned home while Rebecca had girl time with a visiting Annie. I then sustained repetitive stress injuries to my finger trying to scroll through everyone's Easter family pictures on Facebook. Before bed, we finally got around to starting the 4th season of House of Cards, which featured the introduction of a grown-up Neve Campbell looking eerily like an aged Kate Mara. Hopefully this season will not involve time travel or doubling technology.

How was your weekend?

tagged as day-to-day | permalink | 1 comment

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Murder on the Orient Express (PG-13):
This is a light, forgettable whodunit with fun performances often overwhelmed by CGI shots of trains. Hyperbolically speaking, almost half the movie consists of CGI trains chugging through the mountains, CGI trains with real people inside, and CGI trains unfolding into weirdly placed camera shots, even though no trains are given mention in the credits.

Final Grade: B-

American Made (R):
An embellished true tale of a pilot who gets caught up in the 80s drug trade, this movie stars Tom Cruise as Tom Cruise and feels a bit repetitive after having watched 3 seasons of Narcos.

Final Grade: C

Coco (PG):
Pixar's latest animated movie is vividly rendered, if not uniquely imaginative. It reminded me of the old game, Grim Fandango, but is probably not a movie I'd watch multiple times.

Final Grade: B-

Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb:
The second book in the Farseer trilogy has a confusing beginning, which backtracks in time before the end of the first book before rejoining the established canon. There is plenty of character development throughout this (slightly too long) book, but absolutely no plot satisfaction in the end. I appreciate that the second book always has to be like Empire Strikes Back, but when I got to the last page, I felt like it was a stopping point rather than a conclusion. In spite of this, I enjoyed the book and started on the 3rd one immediately. However, if I were a slower reader, I probably would have gotten bogged down halfway through this one.

Final Grade: B-

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Monday, March 28, 2022

Ian Week #48 Battle Report

Ian is 11 months old!

He can raise himself up to a standing position at the coffee table and maneuver around it, crawl very fast, and ascend stairs with ease. Going down is still prevented since he prefers a heads-first approach.

He has no teeth (Maia had her first at 8.5 months) and no words, although he just learned to form the word "Ohhh" so it sounds intentional. Now we can pretend to feed him fun facts and have him say "Ohhh" as if he just learned something new. He loves to eat: carrots are in decline in favor of carbs, yogurt, and bits of food off the adults' plates.

His phase of screechiness never went away fully, and it becomes his go-to mode when annoyed or tired. He gets upset pretty quickly and is full of emotions. He takes a solid morning nap (1 - 2 hours) and a questionable afternoon nap (0 - 1.5 hours), and he usually sleeps for about 11 hours overnight.

He likes toys that have wheels most, followed by toys that play music. However, he still doesn't like bass tones as evinced by the Saturday night neighborhood party that emitted a reggaeton bass line until 11 at night and kept him awake in his crib.

tagged as offspring, day-to-day | permalink | 0 comments

 

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