Booty is six months old today. To celebrate her birthday, I fed her breakfast and told her she didn't have to do chores. I also put her 150th picture up on the Photos page.

My future plans (I of V):
After I return to Virginia in a week's time, my first task will be to become a resident of the state again. This means I need to do all the paperwork, get licenses and IDs, and get my car inspected. At the same time, I'll be looking for a comfortable one or two bedroom apartment outside the Beltway (hopefully in an established development between the Toll Road and I-66). I'd like to have all the moving and signing busywork taken care of before Memorial Day so I can start work with a fresh slate.

Once work is underway and I'm back in a routine, my next big project will be to overhaul this site and move it to a paid server where I have more control over its contents. I'll be doing weekly updates through the summer and I'd like to open up the new site with daily updates starting in September. I've already started tinkering with this, but there's plenty of boring non-fun work that needs doing, like transferring 100 MB of old photos and making sure old pages will still work. Right now, the interface looks pretty snazzy, if I may say so myself.

To be continued tomorrow...

More than 100 animals found in Bear home
Almost 100 tigers found in tiger home

This is the pool table that I've ordered for the house, except with oak laminate rather than black laminate. It has a tripartite 1" slate and ball return, and comes with a standard accessory kit, free delivery from Georgia, and free installation from the company. All of that for a price that's still six to seven hundred dollars cheaper than the nearest walk-in store model in the area.

It's the end of the semester at FSU, so it's been almost a year since I was a Tallahassite.

Yesterday's notable search terms:

miles killed peter quint, t.c. williams high school band, brian uri is odd

Every so often on XM 29: UPOP, they'll play a "global hit" from another country. I find it quite amusing that this song is apparently one of the best that Europe has to offer: (418KB MP3)

One Time At Band Camp

because blogs always have to have at least one post titled as such, to show that the writer is hip and with it

Last year, I mentioned that my arrangement of Brick House would be featured on the next Marching Virginians CD. When I went down to Blacksburg last weekend, I scored a free copy of the CD, irrevocably eating into the profits of the marching band and forcing them to march through cow dung for the rest of their days. You can now hear this buzzworthy arrangement here (505KB MP3). It's actually the first version I wrote in 2000, not the revised edition from 2001, because (as all musicians know) the version you don't want anyone to hear ever again is the one that gets recorded for posterity. The classical musician in me no longer likes the fact that the song ends with a long fall whose tempo is dictated completely by the whims of three-hundred and thirty separate musicians, 80% of whom have been drinking heavily.

On a side side note, I love the fact that my site's been around for so long that I can refer to previous blog posts to capture moments in time. I can pinpoint the exact day that someone found my site by searching for animated squirrels or the first day I gave you clowns the gift of speech by providing a comments section.

• New Version (873KB MP3)
• Old Version (335KB MP3)

Dr. Sochinski is still up to his old tricks, surgically inserting classical repertoire into the field shows for an audience that doesn't even recognize Blood, Sweat, and Tears. Here's his latest stealth arrangement: The Toe Cutta (629KB MP3). Hopefully you can recognize it, even if you are Mike Catania who had never heard of Thriller.

I have to admit that it was fun playing the last movement of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony on the field. Not because it was a fine piece of art, but because it was fun to watch everyone pretend to be able to read music and fall down a lot. We probably sounded something like this: (299KB MP3).

I'm not sold on songs where the band has to say stuff during the song. I think Crazy Train (91KB MP3) and Crosstown Traffic (173KB MP3) were perfectly fine arrangements before the sound effects were added, most likely by a clarinetist disgruntled with her role as "warm marching body that we can't hear anyhow #327" in the band.

Memory Day: Indoor Track

This is me in a 1994 indoor track picture, sitting next to Jay Morrison and two seats down from Ian Schmidt's hair (not pictured). When you don't turn 16 until your senior year in high school, you tend to bike everywhere, and years of criss-crossing the city by bike had blessed me with calves the size of migrating bison. As a sophomore, I decided to put these muscles to use for the good of humanity by joining the indoor track team.

Actually, my reasons weren't quite so philanthropic -- the spring crew team made a big deal out of staying fit through the winter, and I had a choice between running around a heated gym or wearing a Speedo. Plus, there were lots of hot chicks on the indoor track team.

When I joined the track team in tenth grade, I considered myself a pretty good sprinter, and figured I could use the extracurricular time to look good on college applications and meet some new people (high school in Alexandria started at tenth grade, and of the two junior high schools that fed into the high school, I went to the one where students lacked both money and ancestors from Switzerland). I had to miss the first day of practice because my sports physical couldn't be scheduled until that same day, and on the second day I sprained my ankle while doing a "self-timed workout" (a.k.a. lazy coaches) around the Chinquapin circle. It only went downhill from there.

There are several situations in which I am an excellent sprinter and a powerhouse of near-quantum-teleportation speeds:

Unfortunately, none of these situations apply on an indoor track team. When I think sprints, I think "run the length of that football field" or "get away from the po-po", but indoor track sprints come in three sizes: 55 meters, 300 meters, and 500 meters. The 55 is over before you know it, and depends entirely on being a muscle-bound hammer thrower who can fool the starter into thinking he didn't leave the blocks early, and the 500 is so long that you realize you are running in a circle for no reason far before the finish line. The 300 was usually stacked with seniors and good runners, which always left me stuck in the 500.

The good thing about indoor track is that the entire track is only 200 meters long (an outdoor track is about 400 meters long). So, no matter how long your workout is, you are always close to the water fountain when you finish, and you never have to "run home" which is why I never did cross-country. The bad thing about the 500 is that you had to run two and a half laps around this circuit at sprinter speeds. The worse thing is that your entire team is camped right next to the edge of the track so all the cute girls can see how awful you are at the 500 TWICE, and you have no breath left to argue that the 500 is a sprint like The Thin Red Line is a good movie.

Surprisingly, I stuck with indoor track for two incredibly long years. Two years of a coach whose entire teaching repertoire was to shout, "DIG DIG DIG!" as you ran, and two years of lifting weights on sweaty AIDS-infected public-school weight machines to get some sprinter guns. I can no longer recall what compelled me to sign up for a second year of torture, but it was probably a girl.

The only redeeming feature of indoor track was the post-game. When I was a tenth-grader, my sister was a senior, and on the swim team with her friend, Kerry Crowley, who had a car. Every day after an arduous workout, I would cross the street to the rec center and order a massive side order of fries capable of nullifying the entire exercise. Then I would sit in the warm lobby of the indoor swimming pool, eating fries, watching the swimmers, and waiting for my ride home.

Euro-tic Adventure, Part V of X

Monday, April 7, 2008

Throughout the trip, we learned a great deal about the conversion between Celsius and Farenheit. For example, 28 C = 82 F and 20 C is room temperature. The average temperature in London was around 12 C, and the average temperature in Paris was 7 C. However, we did not need to pass our SATs to know that -2 C is very cold. We woke up early (around 6) on Monday to make a train, and were greeted by a cold, slimy, sleet & snow mixture with wind gusts up to a million kilometers per hour (evidently I need work on my distance conversions). It was the perfect type of day to spend in a warm train, and we checked off Day 1 of 5 in our Eurail Saver Pass. This pass lets you travel for free on five days out of two months as long as you travel with a friend. Because of our changed itinerary, we only ended up using 3 days total, but the convenience factor was still very nice.

One of the things that set Paris apart from London was the prevalence of graffiti in every subway and train tunnel. This did not change as we went further south -- if anything, we saw MORE graffiti everywhere. The trains also travelled through the worst-looking parts of the cities we passed through (Tolouse and Bordeaux, for example) but it's as if no one seemed to care. If you were to walk through a portion of D.C. with as many tags on the walls as Toulouse, you might fear for your lives, but in France, you eventually just accept it as part of the landscape.

Our train encountered multiple delays, so that we didn't arrive in Carcassonne until around 5. By then, we were tired of trains and the ridiculously edgy X-files sound effect they used for station announcements . We received a mail-in rebate form from the train company for the delays, but all the forms were in French, and it didn't seem like a worthwhile use of our time.

Dumped in Carcassonne, we immediately purchased a 3 euro ($4.50) map of the city from the magazine stand in the station, only to walk outside and discover a Tourism Kiosk right across the canal (this was rip-off #2 of the trip). In the kiosk, we received a map of the entire city (which was only a few square miles), restaurants, hotels, and all their prices and locations. We used this guide to create a list of cheap hotels and started walking through the city.

We ended up at the Hotel Central, where 40 euros scored us an excellent spacious room with a shower and sink (bathroom down the hall). After being on the train all day, stumbling into this city and finding this hotel felt like winning the lottery -- it was very central (as advertised), inexpensive, and charmingly decorated. Hoping to tell all my readers about our trip so far, I asked the desk clerk where the nearest Internet Cafe was (every hotel we stayed in had Wi-Fi, but I don't have a laptop). She gave me directions and told me to look for the Seabird Cafe. It wasn't until the next day that I realized that that's how you pronounce "Cyber".

With our room straightened out, we wandered toward the edge of the city and found a gigantic walled city looming on the skyline above us. With no other tourists around, we had our pick of restaurants, and ate at the Il Ponte Vecchio beneath the walls. This was a tiny Italian restaurant with a resident cat named Nuom who sat with us during dinner and the strains of Michael Ball singing American showtunes playing over the speakers (I suspect the workers put it on just for us). The food was delicious although it was a little weird to be eating all alone in a restaurant. After dinner, we took a stroll through the grounds of the walled city (which many people still live and work in) and walked along the outer walls, enjoying the novelty of being in a castle.

To close out the evening, we had wine and strawberries in our hotel room and watched a French reality show called C'est du propre where two French ladies teach a slob how to clean his apartment.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

We were so enamoured with Carcasonne that we decided to stay one more night here. After reserving a train for the following day, we wandered along the canal and through the lower city. Carcassonne had two parts -- the walled city on the hill, and then the trade city down below (where we stayed). The trade city seemed like a microcosm of Paris, allowing us to do the parts we enjoyed the most (wandering around and exploring neighbourhoods) all compressed into a square mile. Roads through the city were barely one lane wide, and pedestrians were everywhere. They had a McDonald's by the train station, but otherwise they were free of American culture. Every shop seemed to have dogs and cats wandering freely inside, although most of the dogs were of the tiny kickable variety.

For lunch we ate (alone) at the Lotus d'Or, a Chinese restaurant decorated with covers from the Rin Tin Tin comic book series. The food was delicious, and we learned that Chinese people in France speak much better French than Chinese people in America speak English. However, we did not receive two free eggrolls with our meal.

A slight misunderstanding meant that we did not get our 1/2 bottle of wine (free with the meal) until after we had finished the food, but that made for some fun tipsy wanderings in the city during the afternoon. By 2, we had exhausted the possibilities of the lower city and returned to the walled city, marveling that it must be really neat to be a resident who wakes up every day and sees a castle out the window.

In the afternoon, we took the tour of the main castle, explored the chapel, had a chocolate eclair, and bought a white French poodle named Pierre. I also ogled the cool medieval weaponry sold in the gift shops, but reasoned that we probably would not be allowed to keep it in our carry-on bags. A lone fellow with a pan flute serenaded us as we left the walled city and walked along the banks of the Aude River. Apparently, there was a military school somewhere in town, as we passed three or four squads of young ROTC-like trainees with camouflage on their faces, heading purposely towards the castle. We were undecided as to whether they were going to storm it or defend it though.

As night fell, we walked through the last unexplored sections of the lower city, but found nothing worth seeing. It felt like we had spent the perfect amount of time here -- a night and a day will let you see everything there is to see and not get bored. The only thing we missed out on was the Parc Australien which apparently had baby kangaroos, but it was a couple miles outside the city and required a car to get to. Carcassonne is definitely a must-see site if you ever come to France though!

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

On Wednesday, we were up bright and early to catch the train to Collioure. Because so many people take the train, ticket-checking was lax and we totally could have hopped on for free without anyone knowing. We arrived in Collioure around 10 AM, after driving through the graffiti-filled Perpignan. On an unrelated note, you poop a lot more in Europe than the States, so from this point on, I referred to the act of taking a dump as the more polite "going to Poopignan".

To Be Continued on Monday...

You can view the Carcassonne pictures here .

Weekend Wrap-up

The weekend opened on Friday night with Shells and Cheese and a viewing of Black Swan, movie that got progressively weirder as it went on. This was our first experiment with Amazon On Demand, and although the 480p download was a little blurry on a 1080p display, it was no worse than an analog TV show, and good enough for the convenience factor.

On Saturday, I managed to mow the lawn between thunderstorms, and also worked a bit on DDMSence. In the evening, we had a random get-together which turned into an Easter-themed free-for-all, complete with eggs in both the dyed and hidden varieties. There were also homemade margaritas, which didn't quite fit into the Easter theme.

We met up with the Loudoun third of Rebecca's family for Easter Sunday in Leesburg, and then returned home for lunch. Afterwards, I updated my Warsong Gulch guide, started reading Into the Plex by Steven Levy, and finished Portal 2. In the evening, my parents came over for birthday burgers, and our famous Swiss and Mushroom Burgers made a reappearance, this time with thyme!

Memory Day: Calculator Games

I enjoy rereading Steven Levy's book, Hackers, on occasion, but am sometimes disappointed that I was born just a few years too late to really appreciate the evolution of the personal computer. Though I probably gained some retroactive credibility by publishing my text adventure game (fifteen years too late), I never threw together a stick-figure game and sold it in a Ziploc bag -- my 1980s resume consists of reams of unfinished BASIC games and an MS-DOS batch file that I modified for Jack Wilmer so it would insult his sister whenever she tried to play Sierra On-line's Eco-Quest. There was only one area where I was ever legitimately a technology pioneer: video games on graphing calculators.

In 1993, graphing calculators were the laptop of a public school generation. Prophetic initiatives to get one graphing calculator for every kid in school were even accompanied by the worries that kids would steal them or sell them for cash (because Alexandria is just teeming with pawn shops). Even before No Child Left Behind, T.C. Williams High School was a "Harvard or HVAC" school, and you could make completely wrong assumptions about who valued their education by whether they owned the TI-85 graphing calculator or the cheaper "free school breakfast" TI-83.

At first, the TI-85 was merely a cutting-edge tool to facilitate cheating on math tests, not that anyone ever stooped to such a level. This all changed in March 1994, when classmate, Randy Reddig, arrived at school with a copy of Break-Out!, a classic game where you knock a ball around a screen with a paddle, breaking bricks. (I just looked Randy up, and apparently he went on to become one of the co-founders of Square, the company that lets you swipe credit cards on smartphones).

Being able to play a game during class was a novelty in and of itself, but I was more interested in how it was done. Over the next month, I used Break-Out! to learn how to program TI-85s (in TI-BASIC) and rewrote the game from the ground up. Ten levels became twenty (becoming my first and only application of a matrix as a data structure), the velocity of the ball would change based on where you hit it with the paddle, each level was decorated with fancy 2-color graphics, and you could even pause the game and hide the screen when a teacher walked around.

Writing games for calculators wasn't easy, because each came with 28KB of memory (and 4-5 KB had to be reserved for those pesky programs that did legitimate math computations for class). I resorted to all sorts of unhealthy tricks that would get a programmer fired today, like renaming the calculateBallVelocity function as a and stripping out all of the whitespace. In some cases, the code would write more code, so that static data could be unpacked while the game was running but then free up the space at the end.

After doing everything I could think of to Break-Out!, I decided to branch out with Battleship and Connect Four, notable only because the computer opponent had a bare minimum of artificial intelligence. I also started working on Whack-a-Mole before running completely out of memory. The games had the side effect of raising my profile with the popular kids, because everyone wants to know the guy who can get them games to play in the classroom. On the downside, most of the notes in my yearbook from cute girls assumed that I was predestined to become a calculator programmer, which probably doesn't appear in any Top Ten Jobs list.

So where are all of these games today? Well, sometimes when you drop a TI-85 on the ground hard enough for the batteries to fall out, the memory clears. This happened sometime around 1999 which means that if there is a copy of URI! GAME CALC floating around out there today, it belongs to someone I went to high school with who has treated their calculator with the utmost respect, and religiously replaced their batteries on a yearly basis.

Highly unlikely.

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Zero Dark Thirty (R):
I don't really understand why this obligatory Bin Laden movie received so much hype. It was, by far, more boring than any given episode of Homeland but thankfully less boring than Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The movie felt like a paint-by-numbers book with only binary digits: it set out to tell the story of catching Bin Laden, and then proceeded to do exactly that for 2.5 hours, no more and no less. Characters had no motivation outside of pushing the plot forward, and the lack of subplots or fleshed out characters just highlighted how boring the main plot actually was.

Final Grade: D+

Spring Recipes by Gary Mak, Josh Long, and Daniel Rubio:
Having learned the Spring programming framework seven years ago, I picked up this book as a refresher to see what had changed. The Spring reference documentation has the annoying habit of being too comprehensive: "Here's twenty different ways to do the same thing, but we won't give you enough of an example to do what you actually want to do". This book excels at filling that gap, providing common use cases, example code, and patterns to greatly reduce the Spring learning curve. It's 1000 pages, but most of that is example code -- the actual prose is nicely compact. On the plus side, I liked that examples were usually complete, and provided all of the extra bits that most books would just gloss over. On the minus side, the book is full of typos and much of the code doesn't actually compile. If all you need is a book to learn or relearn the paradigms, this is the one for you. If you need working code, move on.

Final Grade: B-

Parks and Recreation, Season Four:
Another season of harmless laughs in which Leslie runs for city council. It's as strong as the previous two seasons, and features a fun guest appearance by Paul Rudd.

Final Grade: B

Nice Day to Cross a River by Greg Giraldo:
I was first introduced to the comedy of Greg Giraldo through the spoken-word song, "Underwear Goes Inside the Pants. His specialty was scathing social commentary wrapped in dialog just slightly less profane than Dave Attell. This album has some great bits, and is definitely worth a listen.

Final Grade: B+

Brag Day

It's time to brag!

What is something you've been proud of recently that hasn't been properly noticed by the people in your real world life? Post in the comments section for maximum adulation and we can all pat each other on the back!

If you have done nothing you are proud of recently, post something impressive you plan to do in the coming year, besides not dying!

Weekend Wrap-up

This was a relatively unstructured weekend, mostly spent on writing a proposal response for work and enjoying the final weekend of the closed beta for Overwatch. On Saturday night, we went to Cheng's Oriental Restaurant for the very first time to relive the traditional 80s Chinese dining experience. It's much harder to find good Americanized Chinese food these days as all of the hipsters have pushed the needle towards Thai and Vietnamese food.

On Sunday, we went for a run in Claude Moore which had exploded in green like an accident at the leprechaun factory and saw up to 8 deer at various points on the trail. For dinner, we ate grilled glazed salmon and had a classic rewatching of The Princess Bride, which I hadn't seen in 20 years and which stands up very well to the test of time.

How was your weekend?

Stuff In My Drawers Day: Mail Edition

thrilling emails received on this day in history

I abused multiple listservs to get the broadest dissemination for my undergraduate recital.

I totally accepted this late submission even though Elizabeth should have known how to submit her own file in the LAST WEEK OF THE SEMESTER. This is probably why I got such great evaluations on my ear-training / sight-singing class.

There was a time when our work project had amazing onsite system administrators who would proactively identify problems and work with us to correct them before they affected the end users. Within five years, they had all been replaced by entry level staff who thought that racks only occurred on women and in dishwashers. Also, 4 GB of RAM seems like a rather small allotment for a webserver serving the entire Department of Defense.

Ian Day