There's never enough time to do all the things you want to do. Since the last big update, I've been constantly on the go, between work and my "during-the-week" residence. I've managed to get a little composing in, but not nearly as much as I'd like. For Memorial Day weekend, I went down to the beach house of the family I'm staying with during the week. Even though it's still under construction, you can really tell that it's going to be a great place to vacation and/or retire. The lot is on a small inlet to the Potomac River (down at Colonial Beach), and is surprisingly undeveloped. The generic "supermarket" was filled with rural folk that some would call rednecks (no doubt, affectionately), and the town is far enough away from I-95 to not be part of a metropolitan area.

Last weekend, I visited my other old roommate who was up for the weekend. Surprisingly, her brother and about five other people I knew from Tech (including my original roommate from '96) now live in an apartment complex just down the street from my house. To make the living arrangements even more incestuous, her boyfriend will be moving there next month, with someone else I knew from band. I finally got around to seeing Lord of the Rings last weekend too. Though on the long side, it did a good balancing job between making a good movie and pandering to the book-fans. The result was an entertaining movie that never quite got too cheesy for its own good. I can definitely see why it won so many art and special effect awards at the Oscars.

This week (after work of course), I saw Insomnia, the new cop-flick by the director of Memento. For a relatively "normal" movie, it was really good, if slower paced. The story was more character-driven than your typical cop movie. The Alaskan scenery was pretty cool as well.

On the computer/work front, I'm learning the JUnit testing framework to perform unit tests on our applications. With the next "code-freeze" coming up, there probably won't be any immediate development concerns, so the focus is cleaning things up and testing. I've been using Eclipse, a free IDE developed by IBM and others, for Java development and really like it. It takes the functionality of VisualAge and gets rid of the ridiculous method-based editing, returning to the classic file-format. If you do any coding or Java development at all, I'd highly recommend trying out a beta copy. A program this good may even get me back on track with my PRIMA project next year.

Speaking of software, I'm downloading Netscape 7.0 Preview. It's gotten pretty positive reviews so far, being billed as the next IE-killer. After the Netscape 6 fiasco and the infection of AOL, it'll be a pleasant surprise if the preview is as fast and useable as all reports indicate.

Last on my writing agenda: I finally got the real CD of my recital from April 2001 and generally it's very good. Not much effort was put into correcting anything -- rather, its selling point is the high sound quality and mixing. The only problem is that the encore march didn't get onto the recording. However, it should be handy to have good recordings of some of my works.

If you have any news to report, or just want to say hello, feel free to e-mail me with the mail icon to the upper right of this news box. Until next time, this is BU signing off.

I had a big housewarming party over the weekend, but haven't had time to do much more than clean up since then. I'll try and get some pictures posted in the next few days.

My sister's two cats are here for a month now while I watch over them. So far so good, although there's been quite a bit of growling between the home team and the visitors.

These new mayo containers are great. The opening in the top is wide enough so that your knife can scrape every last bit of mayo out of the container, and there's a small lip designed to let you scrape the excess mayo back in when you're done lubing up your sandwich. Whoever invented this plastic goodness should get a raise.

In Dreams

In Dreams was a really bad horror thriller from 1999, starring Annette Bening and a bushel of apples. That's all I can remember from a movie which was otherwise repressed from my mind. We watched this movie in the theatres in Blacksburg -- it was picked out by Shac who was notoriously bad at choosing good movies to blow seven bucks on (see also, The Thin Red Line).

When I was in junior high, I used to record my dreams immediately upon waking up, but that habit is so far in the past now that I rarely even remember that I dreamt at all most days. I don't think there's ever been a case where significant events I dreamed eventually came true (which was the premise of Annette Bening Makes Applesauce) although I generally have very literal cases of déja vu about three times a month.

Yesterday, one of my coworkers who I work with regularly but don't really talk to outside of the work setting was in my office when she suddenly recalled a dream she'd had the night before. Apparently she was at home watching the Tonight Show when I suddenly appeared onscreen as the musical guest. After performing or conducting or doing something rather musical, my girlfriend turned out to be the next guest of the show. My coworker prefaced this with "I don't know if you even have a girlfriend, but she was your girlfriend in the dream".

After the two of us had had our forays into the entertainment biz, we were being interviewed by Jay Leno and I ended up proposing on live TV, something I had set up before the show with the producers or whoever runs things. That's as far as my coworker's dream went, so I don't know what the outcome was, but I sure hope that I don't have to compete with "live proposal on the Tonight Show" should the time ever come to do it in real life. I had always planned on something tamer, like being shot out of a cannon with the ring, or etching the words into the surface of the Moon.

On an unrelated note, my free Amazon Prime membership expires on Friday and I don't plan on renewing it, so if you would like to take advantage of my free two-day shipping, just let me know as soon as possible.

What Celebrity Do You Look Like? II

Some old-timers may recall that I did a feature over a year ago where I matched your faces to the celebrities you most resemble. Now that we are all taller and fatter, I thought it'd be interesting to revisit the results with a different subset of URI! Zone readers. Try it yourself at MyHeritage.com!

Weekend Wrap-up

The weekend opened with a bout of high-humidity lawn-mowing on Friday afternoon, followed by a quickly-prepared dinner of shrimp-decorated linguini and other hyphenated deliciousness. Afterwards, Rebecca left for Arlington to be hip with her friends, while I stayed home and relaxed with a few games of Starcraft 2 and some cats.

We woke up decadently late on Saturday, and spent the afternoon doing responsible things like car washing and trip planning, followed by dinner at Ted's Montana Grill where I had the S.O.B., a bison burger with Swiss cheese, carmelized onions, and bacon. I can't really taste much of a difference between bison burgers and cow burgers, though I suppose the latter is garnished with the tears of American Indians.

Rebecca and Annie ran in a woodsy 5K early on Sunday morning in Algonquian Park while I stayed home and did some floor cleaning -- scrubbing the laminate floors in the kitchen and foyer, and wiping down years of accumulated cat litter dust in the room with the litter box. Although, it's convenient to keep the litter in the laundry room, it also means that you can't hang clothes up to dry for more than a couple days before they become infused with the scent of clay dust (this is also a good incentive to only wear clothes that can go in the dryer, like any good male should).

We closed the weekend out with a double-parental barbeque in Alexandria, and then came home and promptly fell into bed.

Museday Tuesday

As part of this feature, which I started in 2007, I compose a very brief work (under 30 seconds) inspired by a randomly generated title from an online word generator or suggested by a reader. The composition can be for any instrumentation, and could even be a purely synthesized realization that might not be possible to perform in the real world.

I work on the excerpt continuously for an hour and then post whatever I've managed to complete, even if it could be the hit single from Glenn Gould Plays Tatu.

Slinky: (adj.) Characterized by or proceeding with slinking or stealthy movements.

Although I tried to write something stealthy, the end result seems to be more about the toy of the same name. This excerpt's written for bass, percussion, and a thin section of woodwinds. The three-quarter time probably came about because I've been listening to too many Buddy Rich arrangements recently.

Review Day

There are no spoilers in these reviews.

Our Idiot Brother (PG-13):
This is a pleasant, understated Paul Rudd comedy, good for a few laughs. The title is misleading, and suggests the type of movie that Will Ferrell would star in and poop all over, but Rudd and his co-stars manage to give the proceedings a little dignity. The wrap-up is a little too neat and sudden, but again, this is not supposed to be Oscar-worthy material.

Final Grade: B-

Coupling: The Complete Series:
This is the British series that led to Friends in the US, with slightly more intelligence, frank sex talk, and British accents. The first three seasons were very fun, although the last season suffered from the sudden loss of the best actor (handled with the other actors pretending to talk to him on the phone for several episodes) and the heavy-handed replacement of his character with a more annoying version with the exact same hairstyle. Apparently this actor didn't want to get typecast -- a motivation I don't understand since the series is only 28 episodes in total (British shows don't feel the need to pad a season out with the origins of Jack's tattoos). Free on Amazon Prime.

Final Grade: B

Bumpy Ride by the Hoosiers:
This is actually a re-release of the album, Illusion of Safety. Apparently, the group had issues with Sony under-promoting the album, so they left the label, struck out on their own, and added four new songs to the re-release. The package also contains a DVD of live performances which I have yet to watch. The four new songs are definite B-sides, and don't make the album better on their own (one song is annoyingly repetitive), but more Hoosiers songs isn't a bad thing, and it's always nice to have longer albums for car trips.

Final Grade: B+

Vacation Day

I took the day off today, so in my stead, Booty will entertain you.

Have a fun weekend!

List Day: 8 Hair Facts

1. I cut my own hair using a patented system of two mirrors at right angles, where one is on the front of a medicine cabinet and can be opened into an acute angle to show the back of my head.


2. I have given myself 33 haircuts since July 4, 2014, which means I cut my hair every 21 - 24 days on average.


3. Assuming barbershop rates and tips, I have saved about $600 by cutting my own hair in that time.


4. I do not have any appreciable bed-head until about 14 days after a haircut.


5. I cut the hair on the sides at 3/8", and the hair on top at 3/4" or 1" depending on the season. I do not know what the numeric codes of the attachments are so I can't tell myself to "give me a number 3 on the sides".


6. I have between 1 and 4 grey hairs, but I can only see 1 of them myself.


7. I donate the discarded hair to my toilet, and will continue doing so until such a time that short spiky hair is useful to a donation organization, possibly one for porcupines with cancer.


8. There are currently so signs of baldness anywhere on my head.

Cat Jokes

I was trolling through old URI! Zone posts in search of material to write a Time-lapsed Blogography Day update and stumbled across this excerpt from a Weird Search Day 8 years ago.

Google Search term: really bad "your cat's so fat" jokes

1. Your cat's so fat, she has eleven lives.
2. Your cat's so fat, she sinks in the litter box when she pees.
3. Your cat's so fat, she rolled over a lab puppy and turned it into a pug.
4. Your cat's so fat, she lands on her yards instead of her feet.
5. Your cat's so fat, she says, "WEow".
6. Your cat's so fat, Virginia Tech put a glass window in her belly.
7. Your cat's so fat, she poops smaller cats.
8. Your cat's so fat, she sank the Eukanuba.
9. Your cat's so fat, she's in the bourgeoisie.
10. Your cat's so fat, she falls on the wall.

Maia Month #23 Battle Report

Maia is almost 2! A couple weeks ago, she weighed 21.8 pounds though she feels much heavier when she goes sack-of-potatoes on my arm. She enjoys assisting with our routine, from putting away the clean dishes to watering the plants outside with her own personal watering can.

Her brain continues to word associate -- when I pointed at a bench, she mentioned the statue of frogs sitting on a bench drinking coffee at the grandparents' house. When I said Rebecca was tall, Maia said "long neck giraffe". She also likes to remind us to finish unfinished tasks or rectify unresolved situations by saying things like "shoes off", "put shirt on", "close gate", "put back". Other recent likes include riding on my shoulders, The Berenstain Bears Forget Their Manners, the lawnmower, and fountains.

With 2 rapidly approaching, the first signs of tantrums are on the horizon. She will make the continuous "whiny noise" instead of applying her English skills when she wants something. Her two true tantrums to date resulted from not getting to walk through a fountain while clothed and running out of chocolate milk. If a lack of chocolate milk is the worst thing in your life, you're living a pretty good life.

Naptime is roughly 50% effective right now. She goes down to nap around 2 PM and if she hasn't fallen asleep in two hours, I get her up. It takes her much longer to settle into sleeping nowadays and she still recaps her entire day to her stuffed animals before calling it quits. When she does nap, she'll do a house census upon waking up -- "Mommy at work, Daddy at home, Amber sleeping on the big bump in the bed"

Ian Week #6 Battle Report

Ian is six weeks old and exactly twelve pounds (he now outweighs the cat). He recently discovered how to swat hanging toys in the Enrichment Jungle and deigns to spend a few minutes lying there on his back without complaints. Otherwise, he strongly prefers being carried around by someone as he grunts his way through gas, poops, and life in general.

Data Day: 5.75 Years of Haircuts

Sep 2017 - May 2023

I've cut my own hair since 2004, having always hated the barbershop experience. I keep a piece of paper with the dates of my last haircut taped to the inside of my medicine cabinet as a reminder for when the next cut should occur. Here is the most recent data before the page filled up:

• Average Time Between Haircuts: 21.677 days
• Least Time Between Haircuts: 13 days
• Most Time Between Haircuts: 35 days

• Total Haircuts: 96
• Total Money Saved (Assuming $20 Per Cut): $1920
• Extrapolated Money Saved Since 2004: $6344