May 26, 2003

I had a nice, if rainy, Memorial Day weekend. Kathy, my friend from Florida, was in town for the weekend and invited me to a barbeque in Falls Church with an odd amalgamation of her various cliques (I have to mention people from Florida as such, since I'm now writing from the point of view of the Virginian cadre). Tomorrow is my first day of work.

May 27, 2003

Today was mainly a paperwork day -- signing up for benefits and designating beneficiaries and such. I don't have a desktop computer yet since they waited until I arrived to order it (they wanted me to have some say in its customization). In the meantime, I'm running on an old 433MHz laptop computer that can barely keep two apps up at once. It's good to be back though. I'm in an inner office that's equidistant from the bathroom and the free soda room. The company will be moving somewhere close by (within five miles) around October, but for now, I have about a ten mile commute.

I'm going to be working on a brand new project that just came down the pipe. It's still at the stage where no one's very sure about what the requirements are, but it should be interesting.

May 29, 2003

I had an all-day offsite meeting at Northrup Grumman today. Even though I hadn't been in one since my PEPCO days, I could tell that it was your standard government meeting with all the major players -- the person in charge of information who started every sentence with a variant of "to the best of my knowledge", the developer who brought up relevant concerns at the wrong times, and the developer who interrupted every presentation slide with a tidbit of technical trivia for show, among others. I'm hard at work learning portlets which, intelligently enough, are servlets deployed on a portal.

On the homefront, I haven't had time to do more than practice my cooking.

May 31, 2003

I've gotten into the routine of things now. I get up and get to the office in the morning by 6 AM and get home around 2 or 3, depending on whether I take a lunch break. I then read the paper, have a snack, play with cats, and sometimes take a nap. After dinner, I get back to work on one of my various back-burner projects.

Booty and Kitty are both doing well here. Booty only gets crazy once a week instead of once a day, and still retains all her personality. Kitty has gotten happier now that Booty is around to harass, so she exercises more and mopes less.

June 2, 2003

My parents, as well as Anna's sisters and boyfriend, came to the apartment yesterday evening to sample my cooking. We had pot roast and assorted side dishes. This week, I'm hoping to get my new computer at work, and I'm also planning on some soccer and basketball. People at work play every week on Tuesday and Wednesday.

I wasn't planning on posting a new update until next weekend, but I heard that people in Florida were bored. Since I didn't post any news stories last week, here's all the tidbits I've collected since I left Florida. This should give you some reading fodder on those long, boring afternoons. I've also put up a few new cat pictures (at the bottom of this page ).

Typing monkeys, but no Shakespeare
Hospital seeks Klingon speaker
The SATs: Answering all the questions incorrectly.
Eminem disallows Weird Al parody video.
Badger kicks ass.
Officer resigns over allegations he made girl exercise topless.
Developers are stupid on Mondays.
Every state has its winners.
Deaf woman earns Master's in Music.
Spicing up your water supply.
One more woman has no self-respect.
Michael Jackson wants a f*ckin' burger!
Meow TV to premiere this month.
KFC's secret spices discovered.
Homeless cops give traffic tickets.
Woman has broken bathtub.
Miracle baby 'grew in liver'.
Tyson says he would rape victim now.
Dishwasher kills woman.
The meaning of 'comforted'
Dog robs gas station.

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

Micro Frenzy, my latest Warcraft III custom map is now available on the Games page. It's similar in concept to Micro Arena, but greatly improved with an extra year's worth of mapmaking experience. Have fun with it and send any feedback or bugs when you can.

'Curb Your Enthusiasm' clears murder suspect
Because propane trucks are so easy to hide

tagged as games | permalink | 0 comments

I'm glad this child abuse story had a reasonably happy ending. In my opinion, child abuse in any form is the most insidious but ignored root cause of society's problems, and the chance that offenders will reform is essentially nonexistant. Someone needs to discover a new island mass (or create one out of landfill waste) where child abusers can be ostracized and forgotten about -- the upside being the hope that it would normalize into a high-demand tourist getaway after two hundred years (see also, Australia).

Wear thicker clothing
Hundreds of U2 fans saved from concert
Robby Gordon complains about being a fatty

permalink | 1 comment

Friday Fragments

A traditional Korean delicacy for your Friday morning blues

LOST actress, Michelle Rodriguez, avoided jail time for her DUI for the second time. She was sentenced in Hawaii and served one day of time before being allowed to walk, and then she was rearrested in California because she had been on probation from a previous DUI incident. She then served a few hours of a two-month term in an L.A. jail before being allowed to walk, after which she "celebrated her release at the Tropicana Bar". Someone needs to give that woman a pimp-slap back to reality. She's not a very good actress, she doesn't come off as someone I would invite to one of my rocking dinner parties in interviews, and she obviously has a false sense of entitlement because she's famous. They should have at least let her get beat up by a couple of thugs before they let her go.

I also think it's ironic that the last LOST episode which featured her prominently last season was called Two for the Road.

I started watching the fifth season of Alias on abc.com last night (who, by the way, has a very clean and snazzy interface for watching old episodes of all their major shows) and I'm on the third episode now. I can't yet tell if the season will be as good as previous ones, but I have learned that incorporating an actress' pregnancy into the storyline is trite and stupid, and that Rachel Nichols is far hotter than Jennifer Garner ever was, but not quite as hot as Mia Maestro. You'd think that in a real spy organization, they would take plain and homely people to be spies, because others would be less likely to notice them.

I smell a new Internet business in the making: uglyspies.com. At this site you'll be able to hire a homely, plain, or ugly person to blend in to your immediate surroundings to get dirt on your coworkers and relatives. You could also make ad money by putting a fake search page at ugypsies.com. Paranoia will rise because you'll never be able to tell if your ugly friend is observing your daily habits or just has an unfortunate visage.

Spies wouldn't be able to get much dirt on me despite my exotic lifestyle. Every night this week except for Thursday, I spent the evening outside weeding the garden beds. For those of you that live in big cities, weeding is when you dig up all the plants you yourself did not plant so they can grow back in the next day. As a result of my weeding, I now have a farmer's tan and some itchy sores on one arm where a spider must have bitten me. My arm looks like it has the syphillis.

The coming weekend looks just as exciting: I'll be doing some shopping for sundry goods and house stuff and might go into work one of the days. I'm hoping Alias will get good so I can get sidetracked for a whole day watching the entire season. If that doesn't pan out, I may go over to the Herndon day laborer center and make a little extra cash weeding gardens.

When I was in elementary school, we'd spend every recess picking dandelion heads and throwing them at girls on the playground. We called it the War of the Weeds and actually had strategies and attack plans and such. We also used to kick dandelions that had bees on them and then collect the stunned bees in jars. I believe our ultimate plan was to get enough for them to make a new beehive, but we always had to let them go at the end of recess. That's how kids in my day got their buzz -- none of this cough syrup and choking game nonsense.

Happy Birthday Amy Giraldi! Have a good weekend everyone!

Dodge Neons: Roomier than expected
Up Next: the axeless pick axe
Boy blows up house with deodorant

tagged as fragments | permalink | 5 comments

Weekend Wrap-up

Friday night marked our first salvo into the weekly phenomenon that is Jazz in the Garden. Crowds streamed in various scales of fancy clothing depending on which lobbyist they worked for, and though they only had red sangria this year, it was just as tasty as last year. The jazz group was The Young Lions (who may have used that name instead of The Cubs so people wouldn't automatically think they sucked) and the genre was "jazz rock", which implied that the music had a recognizable beat and every female would think the bass player was hot because he looked like Lenny Kravitz.

At one point, they asked an audience member to come up and play three notes on the keyboard for an improvisational number, but the timid girl picked C, G, and high C, so the resulting tune sounded like any tune in the Chick Corea playbook.

Despite the impending doom of thunderstorms, my dad and I laid concrete underneath my heat pump on Saturday. This job only took 1120 pounds of concrete bags, so we were actually able to drive around turns on the way home without slowing down to 1 mile per hour. With creative use of tarps, we were able to finish the job and keep it dry. This job also has the side effect of reducing the mowable area of my property by about 2 square feet. After concrete, I took a shower, had some wings, and played Warcraft all night long.

On Sunday, we went out to Front Royal for the First Birthday of Rebecca's cousin's daughter. It was ladybug-themed, from the cupcakes to the cakes to the decorations, and one guest brought a giant rideable plush ladybug that was amorously investigated by the dogs. After realizing that we had been in Front Royal twice in two weekends, we resolved that next weekend we would stay home and save the environment.

What did you do this weekend?

The art of Adolf Hitler (with a little help from the Chapman brothers)
UFO blamed for mystery explosion
Last night for alcohol on the Tube sparks mayhem

tagged as day-to-day | permalink | 2 comments

Museday Tuesday

1. The composition can be for any instrumentation. It can have an actual score or be a pure synthesized realization that might not be possible to perform in the real world.
2. It must not be longer than thirty seconds.
3. It does not necessarily have to have a start, middle, and end -- it can just be a fragment of something grander.
4. It should be composed in thirty minutes or less. If time runs out, I post whatever I managed to finish, be it good, indifferent, or makeup on a corpse.
5. The title of the piece must be a word from a random word generator, although this word doesn't necessarily have to be incorporated in the piece.

Supernatant: (adj.) Floating on or above the surface

My Composition (0:30 MP3)

I seem to have an attraction towards paired flutes at the moment -- this is the second Museday in a row that has called out for that texture. I think this fragment could be expanded much more, but didn't think it should be any faster than it is, so the thirty-second limit was the main constraint here.

Fairfax sues Krispy Kreme over internal corrosion
Monkey Island to return to PCs
Swiss cleaning bug reaches new peaks

tagged as museday | permalink | 1 comment

Weird Search Day

or "how I stumbled upon the URI! Zone"

It's time for another round of strange Google keyword searches that lead to my site. All of these searches were actually performed by peculiar people over the last couple of months.

did totino's change their recipe there are no seeds in it
At least on the East Coast, Totino's pizzas still have seasoning seeds on them. The only noticeable change is that the packaging now tells you to cook the pizza for three additional minutes, as if that will protect you from the E. coli on the pepperoni.

john tesh wedding registry dishes

Start your marriage off on the right foot by eating green beans off of John Tesh's face.

where is josquin phoenix

After a rambling, incoherent cantus firmus on the David Letterman show, famed composer, Josquin Phoenix, gave up on masses altogether and retired from the public eye.

tiger scent markings buttered popcorn
If tigers have scent markings that smell anything like Booty's anal glands, they definitely do NOT smell like buttered popcorn.

grinnell alums on world of warcraft

Given the paucity of night life in Grinnell, Iowa, I bet that there are plenty of alumni who cultivated a Warcraft addiction in college and continue to play today.

MICKEY MOUSE STAINLESS STEAL TOASTERS DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY FOR SALE THAT IS NEW PRODUCT
WHY DO THEY NEED TO BE FOR SALE IF YOUR JUST GOING TO STEAL THEM

Atlantic puffin breading season

Every season is breading season... with Mrs. Paul's!

Kelley Corbett trumpet
The number of web searches for Kelley Corbett has spiked ever since he won in some recent audition -- this is scientifically expected, because the standard MO for trumpeters who receive second place or lower in any competition is to come up with reasons to trash talk the winner. Since May 27, I've had 32 searches for "Kelley Corbett trumpet" and 1 for "is demolay a cult?"

Pa. pair born in same hospital on same day to wed
Inmates' uniforms make them easy to spot
Frugal woman leaves behind $4.5M

tagged as website, searches | permalink | 7 comments

Review Day

There are no spoilers in these reviews.

Overtones by Just Jack:
This CD is an earlier release than All Night Cinema, and is just as good in a different way. The music has less going on melodically and harmonically, veering more towards laid back British rap over catchy beats. It has the first song of his I heard, Starz in Their Eyes, along with a handful of songs that are catchy enough to get stuck in your brain, like Glory Days, which is a perfect ambient background song for tooling down the Fairfax County Parkway in my 2001 Honda Accord with the windows down.

Final Grade: A-

Terminator Salvation:
Even though this is billed as a Terminator movie, it has the barest of connection to the feel and flavor of the original movies. Sure, there are terminators and a familiar musical score but it could have taken place in any given post-apocalyptic universe without many changes. Ultimately the movie is a just a series of slightly-connected action sequences, all of which are good, but most of which aren't necessary for the plot. Decent, mindless entertainment.

Final Grade: B-

A Microsoft Life by Stephen Toulouse:
I tend to enjoy the books of "guys who blog while working for famous companies", and picked this one up for $7 on the Kindle. It was a light, enjoyable read, although I really can't remember much of what I read two weeks later. It's a little less technical than Joel on Software, but still targeted towards someone in the computer industry who can relate to the computer history presented.

Final Grade: B

Top Ten New Species of 2011
Cultured people feel less stress
Metro cans French music after complaints

tagged as reviews | permalink | 0 comments

Weekend Wrap-up

Happy June!

On Friday, I took the day off and burned through eight hours of coding to release DDMSence 2.3.0, with cats snoozing at various elevations around the computer and nearly an entire season of West Wing streaming into inanity in the background. This release adds support for automatic conversion into JSON, which means that if you haven't had any reason to use DDMSence in your daily life so far, you probably will not have a changed opinion today.

On Saturday afternoon, we took advantage of the pleasant weather and minimal mosquito population to have a barbeque. Plenty of badminton was played as well as cornhole, also known as the most effective way to cover your lawn in chalk dust in the shortest amount of time.

On Sunday, I learned about Scala collections in my online class, and did some laundry. In the afternoon, we started the first season of Derek, did a 3.9 miles run through Sugarland park and then ate barbeque leftovers for dinner.

How was your weekend?

tagged as day-to-day | permalink | 2 comments

New Words Day: Restrooms

adapting the English language for a rapidly evolving future

1. stallcough: the polite, obligatory sound you make from inside of a stall to inform new arrivals that the restroom is not empty


2. piloriphobia: the irrational fear that a Dyson Airblade hand dryer will suck your hands in and clamp down, trapping you in a pose of potential ridicule


3. the dripping point: the maximum amount you can lean forward on an automatic flushing toilet before it believes you have stood up, resulting in a soaked undercarriage


4. multi-ply: when the cleaning staff leaves a new roll of toilet paper atop the old one, doubling the effective thickness as both rolls dispense at the same time


5. pigeonstall principle: the mathematical theorem which states that if there are n stalls and n - 1 are occupied, the next person to enter the restroom will leave rather than claim the last empty stall


6. stalled technology: the rhythmic tapping of a mobile keyboard in an otherwise silent restroom which indicates that the owner still has a Blackberry


7. unmasking the ghostwriter: the act of matching sounds or smells to an otherwise anonymous person in a stall, based on recognizable features below the stall door such as distinct shoes or a badge hanging from a belt loop


8. handicap stall: an unusually large stall with an unusually high toilet in every restroom that reasserts the daily physical challenges that short people must endure


9. wash Nazi: an automatic sink that shuts off ten seconds before you finish washing your hands


10. Niagara tourist: someone who uses their phone for a voice call at the urinals

Share your own new words in the comments section!

tagged as lists | permalink | 2 comments

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Humans, Season One:
This show takes place in a near-future where robotics have progressed far enough that the "synths" look exactly like real humans and are ubiquitous like Roombas. It has shades of both Ex Machina and Black Mirror and raises plenty of questions about sentience and robotic ethics. The plot is nicely paced and ends with sufficient closure while leaving enough space for the next season.

Final Grade: A

The Nice Guys (R):
If you liked Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, you'll enjoy this new detective / mismatched buddy movie from the same director. Set in the 1970s, the movie remains breezy and engrossing without ever getting more serious than it should be. The action starts to run together towards the end, but it was perfect for an Alamo date night.

Final Grade: B+

Windows 10:
Windows 10 is better than Vista and 8, but worse than XP and 7. It's got a rock solid core that does what it's supposed to do most of the time, hampered by an overwhelming number of annoyances. It essentially solves many problems from previous versions while introducing new problems in the traditional Microsoft way. For example, my print spooler no longer shuts down mysteriously every second day, but now my laptop resets projector settings every time I hook it up to the TV and has decided that it should lock itself whenever I step away for more than 2 minutes on battery power. It also reboots on its own time (in spite of what I configure), turns on and off at weird times throughout the night, and is loaded with useless instructions and workflows intended for tablets that have no relevance in a desktop world. I don't mind if you design an OS for both tablets and desktops, but telling me to "swipe up" on the very first lock screen during my very first startup is just poor UX.

There have been plenty of articles on the unsettling amount of telemetry built into the system (pretty much everything you do is reported back in some way to Microsoft, from searches to keystrokes), and Microsoft's increasingly stalker-like attempts to force you to upgrade that sometimes feel like monopolized malware. In the case of my dad's desktop, the upgrade bricked his hard drive by overwriting the boot sector with a new Windows partition.

The bottom line is that it sucks, but you'll probably have to get it anyways if you do anything that requires Windows.

Final Grade: C-

tagged as reviews | permalink | 3 comments

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Catastrophe, Season Three:
This is Season Three in name only, and truly feels like a continuation and conclusion of the events from Season Two. That said, I enjoyed its progression, and it even managed to raise my opinion of Season Two (which I felt ended abruptly and without much development). I enjoy how the main characters are flawed and sometimes mean-spirited, but they maintain a good chemistry and rarely ever cross the line into easy hateful humor.

Final Grade: B

Lovetap! by Smallpools:
This is an upbeat collection of indie rock that reminds me a little of the Hoosiers. It has a solid collection of beats and catchy melodies. Dreaming is a good, representative track.

Final Grade: B+

Connect the Dots by Misterwives:
The sophomore album from Misterwives is pretty solid, although I don't yet know if I like it as much as the first. They play around a lot more with tempos on this album, which reduces the efficacy of any one song as a workout beat.

Final Grade: B+

Cardboard Castles by Watsky:
Watsky got his start in slam poetry, and his rap shows off a polished, rapid-fire diction. His arrangements are nicely varied and keep the album interesting on successive listens when the lyrics grow less clever. Moral of the Story is a good, representative track (lyrics not safe for work). The only flaw are the interjections of random conversations with his son between tracks -- this device is never as interesting for a listener as it is for the parent.

Final Grade: B+

tagged as reviews | permalink | 0 comments

Maia's 12 of 12

Another day in the life of Maia with a camera (culled down from 104 photos).

Other posts in this series: Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII | Part VIII | Part IX | Part X | Part XI

tagged as 12 of 12 | permalink | 0 comments

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Man Seeking Woman, Season Two:
The second season of this show full of bizarre skits about relationship tropes has some very funny moments but doesn't feel as fresh as the first season. With only one more season to go, I'll probably finish it off, but am in no hurry to binge it.

Final Grade: B-

Party Down, Season Two:
The second season is better than the first, although the vibe feels a little different with Jane Lynch gone to Glee and Megan Mullaly taking her place. Worth watching if you like raunchy humor mixed with a tiny bit of character development. On Hulu.

Final Grade: B+

The Diplomat, Season One:
This show about a woman becoming the ambassador to England when she had expected to do "real" work in Afghanistan has a very unique flow and fun energy. It sometimes feels like the show, Homeland, if the main character weren't broken and if people cared less about who carried out the terrorism and more about who should be invited to tea. There's a lack of closure in the ending (another season is probably in the works), but otherwise we enjoyed the whole first season. On Netflix.

Final Grade: B

A Man Called Otto (PG-13):
This is a by-the-book sentimental movie about a curmudgeon whose suicide attempts keep getting interrupted by the well-meaning people around him. There are no surprises, and I think it would have worked a little better if Tom Hanks had looked about 10 years older than he does. On Netflix.

Final Grade: B-

tagged as reviews | permalink | 0 comments