The report is coming along nicely. Depending on how much time I waste on it, I could ostensibly have it finished in a couple weeks. The execution is an ensured success -- now I just have to make the story behind it worthwhile. It doesn't matter how glitzy your report is; what matters is whether the writing can stand the test of time after the initial "ooh ahh" effect wears off.

It's already August and I still haven't finished the Writings section of this site. I'm still a little in summer vacation mode -- I bet real life won't hit until September when I realize that I haven't packed up to move. There are some new pictures of the resident cats and their zany antics, as well as pictures from my trip to Colonial Beach this weekend with my roommate and assorted compatriots (I caught two fish, bringing my grand lifetime total to three). Visit the Photos page for a few amusing minutes of your time.

I stumbled over an article in the Post a few weeks ago that was a little disturbing . The girl mentioned in the article was the same year as me, and we had gym and science together in eighth grade. I've even got an entry in an old yearbook from here. It's amazing how quickly you lose touch with schoolmates from your past that weren't necessarily your constant friends.

It looks like Alias will be around for at least five more seasons . Because you're all so interested in the show, you should obviously already know that the first season DVD comes out September 2, the second season DVD comes out December 2, and the third season begins on TV on September 28.

When Objects Impale People
Interesting Musical Contraptions
I dvrce u
Man guilty of animal cruelty opens up pet shop.
Eagle Scout Project to be used in Airports
Big guys don't always get the girls
Understanding the congruence of what's going on

While going through some ancient Java code from before my time at work, I found the following gems:

public boolean parse(String file) {
    boolean hasErrors = true;
    // assume we are going to have errors

and later on in the same class:

// NEED TO FINISH THIS CODE

Also one of my old music students at FSU is now Miss North Florida .

Friday Fragments

I won another Spanish lottery yesterday. This time it was the El Gordo Loteria Primitiva, which translates roughly as "the fat Stone-Age lottery" (I'm at least 15% positive about this translation). For people keeping score, this is the second Spanish lottery that I've won . I plan to use my winnings to buy gift cards for regular readers, and to promote world awareness. We all live in the world -- it's time you realized that.

I'm at a loss as to what this song is trying to say (407KB MP3). Is it happy? Sad? A love song or a leave song? The lyrics aren't much help, but either way it has an interesting, unsettling sound to it. At least it's not a really horrible lesbian Russian cover, or Macy Gray singing Walk This Way.

There was a story in the Post about a subcontractor for NCS Pearson who made $24 million after 9/11 for hotel and event planning . The head of the fly-by-night company paid herself $5.4 million and a $270,000 pension. The cutest part of the article is the line, "Her friends dismissed the possibility of impropriety, saying she and Sullivan are both devout Christians who would never take advantage of the government for personal gain." She now lives in a $1.9 million devout mansion.

While doing online research for the presentation, I came across the Giovanni Gabrielli Forum Frigate . I'm not exactly sure what's going on there, but I guess you're just supposed to chat about Gabrielli as if you were a pirate. "Yarr, we love the antiphonal brass, we do!" I also looked up the publication date on Aaron Copland's Hoedown only to get an entry on the hoedowns from the British version of Who's Line Is It Anyways? . Richard Vranch was so much better than the creepy women on the ABC version.

I want to take over the world, if only to have journalists at my beck and call. Apparently Kim Jong-il has a superhuman brain and could easily outsmart the Great Brain if he wanted to. Kim provides tips for brain enhancement such as, "A person's memory gets better when they use their brain often". I don't think I would have been able to figure that out on my own. Thank you, Kim, you do credit to dictators everywhere.

Cloud Day

In my ongoing attempts to appear more worldly than I actually am, I read an article in the Business section of the Post this weekend about a website called Wordle , which generates a Word Cloud for the most recent posts on your site. A Word Cloud is a visual depiction of the most commonly mentioned topics in your posts, organized by size and colour like a freakish colour-blind test. For example, here is the Word Cloud for the previous four posts on the URI! Zone:

This is a pretty nifty little invention, although I was sad to see that "boobies" did not play a more prominent role in the proceedings (prominent boobies are an often overlooked aspect of human survival and enjoyment, not unlike an Antarctic shelf of ice or a giant rack of spare ribs).

Because everyone loves a bandwagon, I imagine that it won't be long before there are other cloud generation techniques for analyzing websites. Here are four that might apply to this website based on the frequency that I mention things.

TV Show Cloud

Tagging all the archives made me realize how often I once said some variation on "Alias is a little weak right now but it's still the best show on TV."

Game Cloud

I don't really play too many games any more, and more often than not I've played the Blizzard trifecta -- Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. Halo blows.

Food Cloud

I think I mentioned carrots at least once (now twice) to compare them to tasteless orange boogers.

Baby Cloud

Ella gets too much press. She must have worked very hard at that.

Memory Day: Christmas

Every family has their Christmas traditions (even the Jewish ones who bemoan the fact that everything's closed on Christmas Day). The Uri! household traditions were fairly tame -- we did not construct ear wax candles in every window or go a'carolin' in four-part Hi-Lo's harmony, but we did go through the same motions every year for many, many years.

A Uri! Christmas began with a tree, much like the French phrase, tr?s bien, when pronounced by a redneck. In the early years, we'd always shuffle off to the live tree lot for a giant, misshapen natural tree with all the roots still on it. After the holidays, it would get a ceremonial berth in the backyard where it would survive for about ninety-seven days before gaining a Patrick Henry complex and promptly dying. Later on, we went for the economic route of a fake tree that folded up into a box and had the lights permanently attached.

Once the tree was up, my sister and I would place our collection of eight thousand ornaments on the tree. Seven thousand, forty-two ornaments were given to us by the elderly lady who lived next door to us and kept trying to invite us over for conversation when she was bored (because talking world politics with a seven-year-old was preferable to being alone), and the other nine hundred fifty-eight ornaments came from the very unfortunate day when Red Apple ornaments were on sale at Walmart -- it's true that "50% off" ornaments bought on the day after Christmas are a real bargain, but the sheer volume of Red Apple ornaments that were left behind by shoppers made our plastic pine tree look like a very confused orchard transvestite.

Once all the ornaments were on (except for the two additional boxes of Apples we hid under the couch), my mom would move them all around so they were more evenly spaced around the artistic palette that was the tree.

The final piece of the Christmas Tree package was the topper, alternately called the crow's nest or the masthead, usually by idiots. Fairly early on, we had a five-pointed star that blinked on and off like the motel sign for a Super 8 Motel in Davenport, Iowa. When my mom complained that it made our house look like the Bates Motel, it was upgraded for a really creepy battery-powered angel that moved its arms up and down like it was running a marathon through molasses.

Next came the atmospheric extras, in the form of hanging sleigh bells that pissed everyone off whenever the door was opened, a kiln-fired church that I painted yellow with red trim (because the best churches are run by Asians in Annandale), and an Advent calendar covered in Hershey's Kisses that you could stage rehearsal Christmases with by eating the chocolate and tying a new one on before anyone noticed.

When Christmas Eve finally rolled around, we'd set out a plate full of sampler cookies from the metric ton of Christmas Cookies made in the days leading up to the holiday. I never got into the whole cookie-making scene, because we'd churn out scads of peanut-butter, oatmeal, and sugar cookies, but we'd never make a single one of the only true cookie: chocolate chip. Apparently chocolate chips don't figure strongly into any Christmas mythology, other than the time Rudolph really had to "go" after an Indian dinner at Dasher's house.

Christmas Day started as early as possible and involved far too many presents for any one child to experience. While it was definitely fun to get so many presents, I'm sure we could have donated a couple to other families and still felt perfectly happy. I remember meeting Anna for the first time in college, hearing about the time she got a lima bean for Christmas, and wondering if maybe we were spoiled. In one year, I think I got the complete complement of He-Man action figures. In another, I got one of every ____ Quest computer game by Sierra On-Line, and spent the rest of the day rotating through King's Quest V, Space Quest IV, Police Quest III, and the Adventures of Willy Beamish, in hopes of giving equal time to every game.

Once the presents were opened, the family portions of Christmas were mostly over. Each family member would retreat to enjoy their gifts in peace, and my mom would start cooking an Austin-Texasly obese turkey (I didn't even realize they sold turkeys under eighteen pounds until post-college). We'd eat the neck meat and then have Christmas dinner as a family, sometimes with the grandparents and the uncle, and occasionally inviting random single people over who had nowhere else to go.

And in the days after Christmas, I would enforce my personal tradition of not eating leftovers for at least two days after the original meal. Leftover turkey blows.

Census Day

It's been over three years since I last held a census, and in that time, I've picked up lurkers from such exotic locations as Washington State, Alabama, and San Diego. Even if you have never posted before, take the time today to click on the "comments" link in the lower right and reply to my census -- I would love to know who reads or subscribes to my tripe so I can tailor future updates to your interests! (If you read the URI! Zone from a feed, you will need to follow the link from the actual site, which protects it from spam-bots).

1. Who are you?
2. How do you know me?
3. How and when did you find this site?
4. Where is your website?
5. What would you like to say to the rest of us?

To encourage replies, one random census-taker will be selected to win their choice of a prize:

Prize #1: A nearly pristine edition of Music Theory From Zarlino to Schenker: A Bibliography and Guide

This five-hundred page tome will make you the most popular know-it-all at the next Society of Music Theory conference and has a street value of $85. I will even pretend to be the author and sign it. Delivery charges not included.

Prize #2: A $10 gift certificate to Amazon.com

By accepting this prize, you will also know what it was like to be one of the underpaid millions who performed in in my undergraduate recital. FREE SUPER SAVER SHIPPING.

I will leave the census open for a couple weeks to catch all the people with babies that no longer visit daily. Thanks!

Friday Fragments

the reason your kids are so popular

♠ You only have two days left to win a $15 Amazon.com gift certificate, in celebration of this site's 15th birthday. As of 10 AM this morning, there were only 6 contestants -- you don't want to lose to the guy that used a <blink> tag OR the guy that tried to use it and failed and then had to edit his post.

♠ I also took the opportunity to give this page a very minor facelift yesterday -- by the age of 15, it should at least have a pair of hairs or maybe some boobies growing in unexpected areas. I'm trying new fonts as well -- this one may not be the final, but Trebuchet MS is getting stale. On the right, you can find link buttons to the various social networks I'm currently on. Hopefully someone comes up with an Enemy Registry, so I can join it and then arrange my buttons to spell FINGER.

♠ Of all my old designs, the shortest-lived one was also my favourite. The image on the right shows how the URI! Domain looked for four months in 2003, right before I purchased urizone.net. The manila folder idea was classy, and the concept of having a PDA that did all of the navigation in a folder was light-years ahead of its time. Plus, it had Booty's feet. What's not to love?

♠ Today, the site and its layout are distilled to their very essences, not unlike a very Asian batch of moonshine. No one EVER visited the "Code" section, which had CGI C++ scripts for making your own chat room, and the only people that went to the "Olio" section were people in search of material to plagiarize for English essays. Plus, I like to keep things clean.

♠ Speaking of cleaning, we finally have a dishwasher that does more than "make the dirty dishes warm" and it's taking some getting used to (We donated the old one to a Mexican restaurant as a tortilla warmer). I don't know how anyone can actually fill a dishwasher to capacity -- we usually have to start it at 50 - 75% full or we'll run out of dishes. On the bright side, the dishwasher is so quiet that it has dropped to fifth place on the list of "Reasons We Can't Hear the TV", behind the air conditioner, the fridge, Booty when hungry, and earwax.

♠ Booty likes to eat her own earwax.

♠ This is the final weekend of vacation before I head back to work on Monday. It's perfectly timed because I'm right at the point of boredom where I waste time redesigning my website and have to resist doing things for work. Over the past week, I've watched half a season of Home Improvement, started The Wire, played the indie game, Limbo, done some World of Warcraft which is starting to get boring again, and refired Torchlight.

♠ Plans for the weekend include a camping trip near Hagerstown, and cat care for the inestimable Titan. I may also respray the lawn for mosquitoes so we can start preparing for the Fall Barbequing season.

♠ Have a great weekend!

Weekend Wrap-up

This weekend, we went on our annual camping trip to Greenbrier State Park which remains a pleasant place to camp, in spite of the low reviews from welcoming Marylanders on Google. We drove up on Saturday morning, joining Rebecca's Loudoun-side family who had come up the night before, and increased the number of times our wedding-gifted tent has been pitched from four to five.

After a brief, turgid period of rain on Saturday afternoon, the weather was perfect for the remainder of the weekend -- low 80s with partly cloudy skies and a killer breeze. We hiked through the woods, waded along the beach, and ate many camping-related meats.

We got back on Sunday afternoon, having successfully offloaded ten of our homegrown tomatoes on the campers, and closed out the weekend with homemade buffalo chicken tacos and the final episodes of House of Cards.

How was your weekend?

Weird Search Day

or "How I Stumbled Upon the URI! Zone"

Is Mia Maestro bowlegged?

SHE IS NOW.

memi-cow born at Ray farm looks like panda bear
I'm presuming that the searcher mistyped "hemi-cow", which is like a hemi-cat, but favouring the opposite yoga position. Although the cow in the photo below does look like a panda bear, there is no proof that it's real, so don't be bamboo-zled.

is there a republican merit badge?
Requirements for this merit badge include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Develop a plan to create the smallest possible, yet functional, federal government that can support the current US population of 313 million people.


• With the help of your city hall's past voting records, redraw the voting districts in your state to ensure maximum Republican electability.


• Through family interviews, construct a family tree at least three generations deep. Circle any female, homosexual, or minority relatives in red and justify them.


• Contact a Green Party or Libertarian Party candidate in your region and trick him or her into thinking that your vote (or your parents' votes, if you are under 18) is guaranteed.

List Day: Purchases On This Day in History

• August 5, 2003: $60.85 TicketMaster, for a ticket to see Aerosmith and KISS perform at the Nissan Pavilion and then sit in a car in the parking lot for seven hours afterwards.


• August 5, 2004: $57.46 EBGames, for DOOM 3, a PC game which was creepy but ultimately unsatisfying becaus space marines are incapable of working a flashlight and a gun at the same time.


• August 5, 2006: $132.42 Macy's, for unknown goods. I am not a Macy's shopper and have no idea what I bought, so I'll presume this was for Kathy and Chris' wedding registry.


• August 5, 2008: $3.18 Popeyes, for a two-piece meal, dark meat / mild, with fries, no drink. The current price of this meal is $5.72.


• August 5, 2009: $429.23 Allstate, for renewing my car insurance. I interact face-to-face with Allstate so rarely that my primary agent is still across the street from the apartment I lived in in Centreville in 2003.


• August 5, 2012: $9.03 Wawa, for milkshakes along Route 17 on the way home from our OBX trip with the Smiths.


• August 5, 2013: $14.99 Steam, for the PC game, Swapper, which I played for about 56 minutes.


• August 5, 2015: $24.78 Amazon.com, for the new season of Orphan Black on DVD.

Trip Plans 2016

Now that August is well underway, we're preparing for our upcoming vacation, this time to Colorado. Although it will be no Grindelwald (where we went last summer), we'll be able to use real money and speak English at the expense of slightly smaller mountains.

We plan on flying direct to Denver (and in fact, the "Direct Flights Out of Dulles" page is our usual brainstorming launchpad when planning new vacations) and heading to Boulder for two nights, where we'll meet up with Oklahoma Emily and do hippie things. From there, we'll spend five nights in a swank studio cottage in Estes Park, where we'll do daily hikes throughout Rocky Mountain National Park and hang about for "long enough to get bored". I'm hoping Rocky Mountain National Park will be more exciting than Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a sad stop on I-95 that's only reknowned for being an exit to the Outer Banks when approaching from the south.

After Estes Park, we'll drive through the mountains to Breckenridge, where we'll stay for 4 more nights and do even more hiking. Finally, we'll head back to Denver for two nights, where we'll meet up with the inestimable Mike and Annie to do city things before returning home.

This trip was incredibly easy to plan -- we blocked out the logistics like planes and cars and hotels early in the year, and will finally figure out what, specifically, we'll do each day while flying into town. I'm also looking forward to browsing the airport bookstores before buying the books on my Kindle -- this would feel more like sticking it to old media if the average price of Kindle books hadn't risen over $10 though.

Have any suggestions for our trip? Let me know in the comments section!

Dark Day

Interested in watching Dark on Netflix but worried that you'll get lost amongst the millions of white actors speaking German? I've created a set of character reminder sheets to guide your watching in a progressive, spoiler-free way.

The intent of these sheets is to provide quick reminders of names and faces, not a dedicated family tree or relationship structure. Characters are only added after their first extended scene or speaking role. You can print a sheet out after you finish each episode, and use that sheet to remind yourself of the characters in the subsequent episode. Enjoy!

Spoiler Warning! There are spoilers from Season One of Dark in these links. Do not look at them until you have finished the specified episode.

1. Characters after S1E01: Secrets
2. Characters after S1E02: Lies
3. Characters after S1E03: Past and Present
4. Characters after S1E04: Double Lives
5. Characters after S1E05: Truths
6. Characters after S1E06: Sic Mundus Creatus Est
7. Characters after S1E07: Crossroads
8. Characters after S1E08: As You Sow, so You Shall Reap
9. Characters after S1E09: Everything is Now
10. Characters after S1E10: Alpha and Omega

Spoiler Warning! There are spoilers from Season Two of Dark in these links. Do not look at them until you have finished the specified episode.

1. Characters after S2E01: Beginnings and Endings
2. Characters after S2E02: Dark Matter
3. Characters after S2E03: Ghosts
4. Characters after S2E04: The Travelers
5. Characters after S2E05: Lost and Found
6. Characters after S2E06: An Endless Cycle
7. Characters after S2E07: The White Devil
8. Characters after S2E08: Endings and Beginnings

Beach Day

Our beach trip last week was a great success in spite of the lack of Olympics to watch. We drove down in 7 hours on Sunday the 26th, a task made more logistically difficult with fewer public restrooms open. 100% of observed people at the Fredericksburg rest stop wore masks, and this decreased to 75% around Hampton Roads and 50% in North Carolina. Maia had her first Happy Meal outside of Richmond, eaten in the shade of a tree near the restaurant.

After extra quarantine time upfront, we merged our bubble with the Smiths for the week, which meant we got to have normal interactions like "too many people in the tiny kitchen" and many esoteric Kickstarter board games. The house was a perfect size for us, and featured a private pool and a short stumble to the beach. This was my first time in Duck, which I would have liked more if the boardwalk had been accessible.

Maia loved the ocean, digging, and the pool, but also wanted to stay inside like a computer science major much of the time. She especially enjoyed playing with the Smith kids and said two things of note during the week: "We have a big family now!" and "I want it to be like this all the time!"

Apart from brief trips to pickup dinner at Coastal Cravings and late week groceries at Wee Winks, we stayed isolated the entire week thanks to Instacart deliveries. We went to the beach almost daily but it was a little too crowded for my tastes. We were among the few groups that wore masks along the beach access, and many people wandering down the beach walked wherever they wanted (until I dug a 12 foot trench that forced them seaward). We definitely took advantage of the beach on Saturday when most of the people were leaving / arriving.

On our last day, there was a mandatory evacuation warning for Hatteras Island to the south. So not only did we make the impossible beach trip successfully without the county reclosing for COVID-19, but we also narrowly avoided a hurricane during our stay! We drove back on Sunday the 2nd and made it in a record 5.5 hours, after which I mowed 3 bags of rampant crabgrass in the awful heat to avoid mowing after Isaias blesses us with his rain.

Beach time is different with kids. I read one half of a book rather than six, did no running on the beach (one evening masked walk that was still too crowded to be restful), and learned nothing new. Still, it was nice to be in a different location for a while, and I feel rested and relaxed as I dive into August.

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Booksmart (R):
This coming-of-age movie plays out kind of like a female version of Superbad (and also stars Jonah Hill's sister). If that's the kind of movie you need at the moment, this one hits all of the right marks and is full of pleasant and vulgar laughs. On Hulu.

Final Grade: B

Cascadia:
We got this board game for Rebecca's birthday. You build an ecosystem in the Pacific Northwest and place different kinds of animals, with points based on best habitats (longest salmon runs and number of hawks not near any other hawks, for example) and longest terrain runs. Replayability comes from different sets of scoring criteria, which allows you to learn the base game very easily and randomly choose cards with more advanced scoring later on. We've enjoyed this a lot over four or five games although it's very easy to let the game drag by overthinking any single move.

Final Grade: B

Formentera by Metric:
Metric's newest album is as good as Art of Doubt but doesn't quite reach Pagans in Vegas. The placement of a ten-minute overture as track one feels out of place, as it's the kind of song that Muse would tack on to the end of one of their albums.

Final Grade: B-

Upload, Season Two:
This show about a digital afterlife was pleasant in season one but doesn't really go anywhere in season two. There are only 7 episodes and events end just as the plot really starts to pick up. On Amazon.

Final Grade: C+

Weekend Wrap-up

On Friday afternoon, we went to the "closing ceremony" of Maia's STEM Camp at the Herndon Community Center. Teams of kids (Maia's team was "The Artists") had spent the week building little cars out of straws and other detritus and then raced them down a ramp. We also watched a stop-motion video that Maia had made on an iPad, showing a rainbow car driving down the road.

Afterwards, we transferred our kids to the grandparents' car at the nearest Target parking lot and drove to the Wiehle Metro station. Our kid-free trip to DC got off to an inauspicious start when our train went out of service for a broken A/C. The next train through the station experienced multiple delays, being stuck behind the out-of-service train through several more stations.

We made it to Gallery Place around 5 and checked into the Fairfield Inn which was crowded with concertgoing families as well as people heading to Otakon. After a quick dinner at the Irish pub on the ground floor of the hotel, we crossed the street to the Capital One Arena for the AJR concert.

We reached our section 121 seats without any problems (although the new Ticketmaster paradigm of "you must have a mobile phone to go to a concert" is irritating), missing the first opener, Almost Monday, but catching the second, MXMTOON.

AJR finally came on around 8:15 to a packed audience. There were more moving parts than the MUSE concert we went to back in 2008. The pageantry sometimes overshadowed the music -- I would have preferred about 20 minutes fewer of audience interactions and gimmicks and 20 minutes more of music, but they sounded great and were onstage for just over 2 hours.

The composition of the audience was sociologically interesting, spanning white, black, Asian, young, old and everyone else. There were lots of tweens and teens accompanied by their parents but I was amazed to see that both the kids and the parents knew all of the lyrics to almost every song!

The old people earplugs we brought along were definitely worth it -- I could hear the full range of timbres clearly without subjecting myself to the constant 125db speakers echoing through the arena.

The band managed to perform their whole fifth album, Maybe Man, and fit in tons of previous hits like BANG! and Burn the House Down.

On Saturday, we Metro'd back to the real world and relaxed around the house. In the evening, we drove through the massive thunderstorm to celebrate our friend Ghazaley's 40th birthday somewhere in South Riding.

Meanwhile, the kids were having a great time at the grandparents' house.

On Sunday evening, the kids were returned home by the grandparents and we all ate an easy meal of ham and potatoes.

How was your weekend?