After work I walked across the street and took a picture of the sun setting on the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The haze was pretty thick today, but there will be some nice photo opportunities on a clear day.

I've readded all the URI! pictures and Delta Mu pictures to the Photos page.

Record industry to sue downloaders
Ritual murder will not get you a Parliament seat
Virginia Tech offered an ACC spot
The definition of agnostic in the Urban Dictionary
Woman inches over cop
Spike Jones Jr. jumps on the Spike suing bandwagon
Glowing bunnies for next Easter

This can't be good for business:

I'll keep you posted as I discover details.

Marriage Media Monday

Jack and Kristy were married on Saturday and are currently spending nine days in Fiji for their honeymoon! Jack is the oldest childhood friend that I still regularly keep in touch with. Booty likes ribbons.

The ceremony was held at the Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown. The bridal party outnumbered the guests fourteen-thousand and five to one.

After the ceremony, guests threw a rice substitute that smelled like candy (and, according to at least one guest, tasted like it too). Jack was confused by the rapidly foaming champagne. Paparazzi photographers abounded.

I'm only including this picture for the womenfolk. All women have a centerpiece fetish.

The reception was held at the River Bend Country Club in Great Falls and the filet mignon was so soft you could cut it just by staring at it.

The first dance was done to "Fly Me To the Moon" and involved at least four spins. Jack must have done some hardcore practicing.

After dancing, all the guests who couldn't afford the eighty-thousand dollar membership fee of the country club took advantage of the empty greens before being chased away by sprinklers.

Congratulations!

There are more pictures up on my Facebook account, and I'll get them added to the Photos section here in the next couple weeks.

Caption Contest

Vote for (only one) favourite entry using the Poll in the left sidebar! Voting closes on Monday the 30th!

Capsule Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews, although I do mention that Jurassic Park had dinosaurs.

Combinations by Eisley:
This is Eisley's sophomore effort, and there's definitely improvement here. The vocalist sisters still sing a little too much, in terms of voice to instrumental balance, but they now have more technique and vocal chops. A few of the tracks make them sound like less annoying versions of the Cranberries, and a few others try to be hardcore, but fail because of the light quality of their voices. You can listen to samples here -- the first three on the album are particularly catchy.

Final Grade: B

So Sudden by Hush Sound:
I was immediately drawn to one of this band's later songs on Pandora, but I like to start from the beginning when I actually purchase albums. There is a ton of potential here, but it's not as good as their later stuff. The guy sometimes strays into bad frat rock territory, and the girl doesn't have any confidence when she sings, but there's plenty of room to grow -- I'll probably buy the next album as well. The most detracting part of this CD is actually the sound mixing / producing -- it's mostly flat and doesn't do anything to bring out the vocals, as if someone recorded it on a Minidisc player in a club. You never really know how much a good sound engineer can do until you hear an example of bad mixing.

There are no samples for this one, but here's one I got off the CD:

Jurassic Park I and II:
These two movies have actually aged pretty well over the last decade -- even in hi-definition, you can't tell that the dinosaurs are made of Cheese Whiz and toilet paper. I really prefer the second movie over the first -- it's nonstop action and people getting eaten by dinosaurs. The first has a boring first hour followed by a great thirty minutes, as if anyone going into the movie theatre did NOT know that dinosaurs were somehow involved (SPOILERS!) I am scared to watch the third movie out of fear that it might sully the Jurassic branding.

Final Grade: C+ / B+

Vacation Day

This is me on my day off with our new Kindle.

Have a great weekend!

List Day: Bachelor Plans

Rebecca leaves on a 1000 mile road trip tomorrow, burrowing into the Midwest like a prairie dog after farm subsidies. When it comes to driving and vacations, we dwell in two separate camps: I was indoctrinated to think that the drive is a necessary evil keeping you from the fun, so its length should be minimized via 4 AM departures, radar detectors, and traffic avoidance, while to Rebecca, the trip itself is part of the vacation. So for this trip, I will be staying home and making my own fun. Here are some of the fun activities I have planned:

• DDMSence 2.1.0


• Adding boolean operators to the URI! Zone Search box


• Mowing the lawn and repairing the string trimmer


• Finishing at least 2 of the following TV shows currently in progress: 24 S4, Pushing Daises S2, Burn Notice S5, Wonder Years S2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer S3


• Grill a steak and eat the entire thing


• Continue playing Diablo 3 (currently playing a level 18 Monk and a level 48 hardcore Demon Hunter, because level 60 is nothing but SimRepair at the moment)

List Day: 5 Lessons Learned from Bugler 0.4.0

1. There are way too many frameworks in software development now. My page shows that I already have over 20 dependencies on existing software libraries and I'm nowhere near done. While it's nice to rely on other peoples' proven works to save time, some of that time is lost by virtue of the fact that you have to learn and integrate all of these frameworks upfront before you even get to the work you want to do.
   
   For non-programmers, suppose you want to write a short story in English. You know the rules of English grammar and what makes a compelling story, so it should be straightforward. However, you then learn that there's a special pencil that will ensure that your sentence structure is correct and will beep on errors, but you have to take a special class to know how to use this pencil. Just when you've mastered pencil skills, you realize that the eraser on that pencil is crappy, but that another company makes a special eraser that has the bonus side effect of automatically using semicolons properly as you write. You put the eraser on your magic pencil, only to find out that the pencil only writes in French, so you take a refresher class in foreign languages. After spending years learning all of these tools, you might end up writing a decent story, but you also might have gotten so far away from the original goal of story writing that you just drop out of your creative writing club instead.
   
   Meanwhile, the world has decided that real writers use pens, and your pencils are obsolete.


2. Thirty to forty hours of effort for a software release is a nice size and scope for an independent project. It's small enough that you can keep it all in your head and make noticeable progress, but large enough that you haven't just changed the font by the time you make your next release.


3. I've gotten very good at estimating how long a discrete programming task will take within a half hour. However, I'm less effective at actually identifying all the necessary tasks during the planning phase.


4. I remain ambivalent about DocBook, which is an XML language for writing technical documentation. The selling point of DocBook is that you can write your docs a single time, and then magically convert them into all sorts of output formats like PDF and HTML. I've evaluated DocBook for two separate technical documentation projects now, and the barrier to entry remains high. I find myself researching DocBook, downloading all of the bits, realizing that the documentation doesn't mention two other bits, playing around with samples, and then essentially wallowing into inaction.
   
   I'm sure DocBook is great for complex projects, but I just find myself four times as efficient by writing in straight HTML. Plus, I think that separating content from presentation is a wonderful theoretical goal, but sometimes, the way you present your content is equally as important to reading comprehension as what you write.


5. Even though the JavaScript language remains barely better than PHP, it has gotten so much easier to work with in the modern world. I cut my teeth on the awful JavaScript of IE 4 and Netscape 2.0, when the original URI! Domain at buri.campus.vt.edu was apocryphally the first site in the world to autostream irritating MIDI music in the background while the page loaded. It's like going from driving an SUV with my hands on the pedals to having a chauffeur.



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Memory Day: Snapshots

This picture was taken on a dreary, overcast day on the campus of the University of Rhode Island. Although I don't have an exact date for this trip, I would peg it around early 1990, based on Ellen's baggy clothes (which were the style when she was in 7th grade), my Egghead T-shirt, lack of glasses or British Knights, and giant waterproof wrist watch that could tell time in every world time zone.

Update from my Dad: "Your photo of the day dates to August 1989. The highlight of the trip, you might recall, was our visit to Lexington and Concord."

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Robocop (2014) (PG-13):
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this remake of the 1987 classic. The remake manages to tell its own story while still hitting a few major story beats. Where the original was a satire of society cloaked in a violent action movie, this iteration focuses heavily on the moral questions raised by fusing humans with robots, and the mental conflict between being human and having an AI. It stands well on its own, and limits its callbacks to the original to a few quotable lines. Free on Amazon Prime.

Final Grade: B+

Derek, Final Episode:
The British love their Christmas Specials, and this extra hour-long episode permanently wraps up the series in a warm way. It suffers a little from the second season exit of Karl Pilkington, but otherwise goes out strong. Free on Netflix.

Final Grade: B

Mr. Robot, Pilot Episode:
The pilot episode of this new USA show hits all of the right marks, and leaves an intriguing setting that I would enjoy exploring in future episodes. It feels a little too like Fight Club sometimes, and Christian Slater just acts like Christian Slater, but otherwise, the characters are interesting. This may also be one of the few shows that gets its technobabble and computer screens right -- it's hard to make computer hacking exciting without someone yelling "Enhance!" while zooming in on Google Maps, but Mr. Robot pulls it off. Free on Amazon Prime.

Final Grade: B+

The Book of Mormon:
We saw this show at the Kennedy Center last week and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's highly profane, has a definite vein of South Park running through it, and will keep you laughing, although it's probably not a show you need to watch more than once. The cast and the pit orchestra were both universally strong, although the overwhelming wall of sound often prevented me from picking up the nuances of the book. It's easy to hear the lines that elicit laughs, but less so to understand the chorus.

Final Grade: B+

Paint Day

On Sunday, we went to one of those date nights where you drink wine and paint a picture. Here's the original:

Can you guess which one is Rebecca's and which one is mine?

Data Day: A Typical Day

This chart shows a typical summer day in the life of our family. The red overlay shows who's keeping an eye on Ian at any given time.