Call me old-fashioned, but sometimes modern music just gets to me. This afternoon, we had a guest forum with freelance composer and FSU graduate, Stephen Montague. The lecture he gave was articulate, opinionated, and full of good information, but while I respect how well crafted his music seemed, it really didn't do anything for me on any level. As I glanced around the room and saw various students smiling or nodding with comprehension, I had to wonder just how many were faking it. The list of excerpts Stephen distributed was for a mixture of acoustical and electronic playback, often with a tape accompanying a live ensemble for sounds they can't replicate. He's also done off-the-wall commissions including a work for 1000 performers on the beach, and a work for claxton horn soloist and twenty automobiles. Though I haven't heard the works, I've always thought that ventures like those reduce the credibility of new music by emphasizing a gimmick over musicality.

Then again, I still don't stray very far from the bounds of functional harmony, so my opinion is definitely not the status quo of modern composers.

"It was horribly out of tune, but it was good enough for jazz." - professor, on his "A-B-C" trumpet

I watched two movies yesterday that had been on my list to see for quite some time: Panic Room and Vanilla Sky. The first was a suspense movie from this summer which was really well done. I thought it'd be hard to stage a suspenseful story around a single room, but this movie managed to pull it off with flying colours. I didn't care for Vanilla Sky as much, although I know some people back home who really liked it. It tried too hard to be clever, and ended up as a muddled mix of Total Recall and Fight Club.

Everytime I jog under a streetlamp and it goes out, I think I'm about to be part of some high profile kidnapping where I fend off twenty attackers in masks and disarm a nuclear bomb. It hasn't happened yet though.

I did a little house-cleaning around the site today, and added my latest battle report to the Writings page.

Talk of brainstorming may be offensive
Coke's new billboard
Living in Fast Forward

I took the Sun Certified Programmer Exam for Java this morning and passed with a 90% (you need 52% to get your certificate). The map to the Prometric test center took me to the wrong building, but luckily the correct one was only a half mile down the road. After waiting ten minutes for them to figure out what their Windows password was (someone had changed it), I sat down at a Windows 3.1 e-Machine with a 20Hz refresh rate monitor to take the exam. There was nothing really unexpected since I'd taken a bunch of practice exams. If you're planning on doing it, some basic studying is all you need.

I used the Kathy Sierra study guide mainly, although it was disgustingly full of stupid jokes and could have been a much better guide with 400 fewer pages. As an alternative source, I used the Exam Cram book which was more concise, but also had a lot of typographical errors in it.

Surprisingly, the section of the test I did the poorest on was the one I taught to new Java programmers back in June.

Now that that's over, I can start focusing on other tasks again, like finishing that bar in the basement...

Have you ever been roused out of a deep sleep by a loud noise that's gone by the time you become aware? That happened to me last night -- I woke up at 12:22 AM to silence. I hadn't consciously heard anything, but knew somehow that an incredibly sharp, loud crash had happened somewhere in the house. I was going to blame it on the cats, because Booty has been known to fall down the stairs, Kitty has been known to tip over trash cans with turkey bits in them, and Sydney and Amber just mess everything up. But as my eyes adjusted to the pleasant darkness caused by the lack of street lamps in Loudoun County, I saw that both of my cats were sitting on my beds, staringly intently out into the hallway. I say beds because I have a twin bed next to my full bed temporarily while I renovate the upstairs guest room. It's been in my room and sheetless for over two months now, and sometimes I will nap on it for kicks. Booty sleeps on it at night.

After becoming awake enough to be alarmed, I peeked at the clock to make sure that it wasn't 3 AM and also checked to see that the room didn't smell like burning. I assured myself that I had not fallen into a horror movie about demons and did what any self-respecting guy would do: I threw on some jeans and went to investigate. This is good practice for ten years from now when I have to protect the missus from strange noises in the middle of the night, or cattle rustlers. I'm not saying I'll be marrying a cow, but rustlers are bad news for pretty ladies too, and we all know that I live on the frontier of Northern Virginia.

Booty and Amber decided to stay in bed while I investigated because they are both big pussy cats. I didn't have any weapons handy, so I pulled my thick leather belt ($19.99 at J.C. Penney) from around my waist and held it like a garrotte. I figured I could ninja my way up to any malefactors and choke them from behind, or use the belt like a whip Indiana Jones style. It turned out that I didn't have anyone to beat up, because the noise had been caused by the heavy marker board that (no longer) hangs on my fridge. When we first moved in, we had a heck of a time keeping it up, so finally we coated every inch of the backboard with two-sided sticky tape. Apparently the lifespan of sticky tape at room temperature is approximately one year and seven months, and apparently gravity is still an unstoppable force.

This pointless personal story reminds me of another story in the local news: A martial arts instructor tried to abduct two of his students in the middle of the night, but they kicked his ass with martial arts moves . The criminal not only taught his targets how to defend themselves, he also got repelled by two 10-year-olds, and then tried to cover it all up by saying it was a robbery gone sour. Personally, I would not have let my kids in his class to begin with -- he's just got that unsettling creepiness about him that would send up parental warning flares from my parental raft. I'm glad he failed though, and I'm also glad the dad got to hit him with a lamp. That's so much more satisfying than just letting the police catch him, and it's what I would want to do if any crazies every came after people I cared about.

Don't forget, Lost, Episode 2x03 is on tonight!

Yesterday's search terms:
quixtarsucks, spywire, composers stealing ideas, meteorite in egypt 1922 that hit a dog, cowboy bebop - sax quartet midi downloads

Cat Media Thursday

Lake, the poster cat for the coming famine. Last night he walked across a heating vent and fell in.	Lake wants to be a tuba player because "that's where the bass clef is".
It's like a Pottery Barn advertisement but with more wrinkles and a digital clock.	The crafty Siamese mix plays dead until lunch prowls into view...
Contortionist Kitty climbs a rope.	What is left of dignity?
"Red Rover, Red Rover, send BOOTY on over."

Titan amuses the older cats (1.8MB WMV)
Lake takes a turn (2.4MB WMV)

You can see more pictures on the Photos page.

Friday Fragments

a fifth of october is not nearly as good as a pint of guinness

♠ I finished the second season of Prison Break this week -- it was a fun watch but the final episode suffered from "we should end this show now but we want to set up another season and make more money" syndrome (see also, the end of Alias' fourth season).

♠ Last night I started watching the Heroes pilot on the recommendation of Rosie and Jason. It's neat but hasn't really hooked me yet. So far, I think it would be a far cooler show if it were completely about the adventures of Hiro, the Japanese office worker who can "bend the space/time continuum like Star Trek".

♠ One of the characters on the pilot is essentially invincible, which would be a very helpful superpower to have when doing all my manly work in the basement. For my efforts, I generally collect a manly assortment of cuts, scratches, and scars.

♠ It's strange to consider how many scars I have now which I don't remember getting. I can only remember the stories behind the big ones, like tripping over the tennis racket on the first serve, slicing digits on razor blades and bow saws, and (in the case of my knee) tripping next to the pool at my grandparents' neighbours' house in Michigan.

♠ When my sister and I went to Michigan for summer vacations, I only liked going into the pool when the water was over ninety degrees (Farenheit, of course, for the Euros). I preferred jumping on the trampoline all day long instead.

♠ The love of trampoline-jumping carried on into my college years, the trampoline was one of the reasons we went to Jason Chrisley's house in Pulaski so often (he also had the best meat). Here's a picture of Shac and Philip on said trampoline.

♠ Jason Chrisley is now a paramedic in Radford -- no word on whether he put his Virginia Tech music degree to work.

♠ This weekend was one of the weekend's I'd originally planned to go down to Virginia Tech on, since I haven't taken a trip there since the retirement concert last April but it turns out that I'll be going down on the 19th instead. In lieu of a road trip, I'll be heading out to Winchester this afternoon to celebrate VT Fall Break with the Spellerbergs.

♠ Tomorrow night, I'll be partying it up in Arlington, and Sunday, my dad and I will be installing the carpet in the basement, using Harry Potter magic and jacks to levitate the twelve-ton pool table while we stretch the carpet underneath it. You can see the color of the carpet in the swatch nearest to the wall in this picture. You can also see what it looked like when I moved in over three years ago .

♠ Happy Birthday to Mike Robb on Sunday. Have a great weekend, everyone!

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. 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's a poorly constructed slum of a song supported by a foundation of droning double stops and abused tubas.

Vermillion: (adj.) a bright red to reddish-orange colour

This excerpt is written for piccolo, viola, sitar, electric bass, accordian, vibraphone, and assorted percussion. As such, it would probably never make it onto the program of any young composers' concert series. I think a bright reddish hue would have lots of major 7ths in it.

Stuff in My Drawers Day: Letters of Chastisement

This is quite possibly the most scathing letter I have ever written.

Spring 1999 was a tight time for music majors at Virginia Tech, because one of the standard piano accompanists had just had a baby and another was only taking half of the usual performers. To meet the mandatory performance requirement, I decided to jump ahead of the pack by performing early and employing the services of a new pianist who had just arrived in Blacksburg.

After the first rehearsal, it was apparent that we were not well matched, as she was expecting a vocal accompaniment of the recitative variety, where she could pound out a whole note chord while some soprano tried to emulate the vocal arc of a drunk butterfly. Instead, she got the first movement of the Halsey-Stevens trumpet sonata, which switches meters more often than the National Geodetic Survey, and treats downbeats as general suggestions. She insisted that she could soldier through though, and promised to improve by the time of the performance.

Two additional (oft-rescheduled) rehearsals didn't give me much more confidence, but I reasoned that I could just use the standard "well, I'm not really a performance major" excuse should it turn out poorly. On the day of the Convocation, she arrived at the Recital Salon in tears, moments before we were scheduled to play. It was obvious that some great personal tragedy had befallen her, and after a quick check with the everpresent-backstage Jim Glazebrook, we agreed to postpone the performance to the following week.

The problem with this strategy was that she didn't show up the following week, and didn't answer any phone calls. After I finally went to her home to make sure a refrigerator had not fallen on her, she told me that she would no longer be able to perform with me, closing with a request for the money owed on three hour-long rehearsals.

And when I finally got the piano score back, I found that she had scratched out every note under a tie to the point where pencil markings outnumbered the original notes, rendering it useless for any future performances.

Movie Day

In public school, I learned that you should always show a movie on Fridays. This pre-1982 home movie is probably why I have short hair today.

Weekend Wrap-up

Dinner on Friday night was supposed to be a Cornish game hen, but for the first time in recorded history, the hen had gone bad, dripping in cloudy fluids and smelling like death. The backup dinner plan was Domino's, so the evening was saved.

Saturday was our anniversary, and we spent much of the day relaxing at home. Hurricane Joaquin never appeared, and after many puns involving the phonetics of "joaquin", we went up to Leesburg for a visit to Crooked Run Brewery.

We had dinner at Tuscarora Mills, which was pricey and hyped, but deservedly so. It was just un-fancy enough to be comfortable (unlike the time I started eating bacon crumbles out of a bowl at Morton's and the waitress made a show of bringing me a fork). I had the short ribs and Rebecca had the pork platter, and both of us had enough left over for dinner on Sunday.

Rebecca had to work on Sunday while I stayed home playing The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited (ESO) and getting my high elf templar up to level 10. I also finished the book, Law and Disorder, ran for 40 minutes on the treadmill, did laundry, and exercised the cats.

How was your weekend?

Memory Day: 1984

In 1984, I continued to live in the weekdaily care of our babysitter, Rosa. During the hours when my sister and Rosa's sons were in school, I had sit in a room with the door closed and the TV on to such gems as The 700 Club. I got in trouble if I changed the channel or made too much noise, but occupied most of my time with large brown bags of He-Man and Transformer (Generation 1) action figures brought from home. My action figures made me popular with the other kids that Rosa babysat in the afternoons, although one of them named Rashaad tried to steal a Transformer that turned into a bird from a cassette tape by hiding it under a bed until he could reclaim it later. I also got my earliest scar at Rosa's, when I sliced open the back of my thumb on a disposable razor in the bathroom.

At home, I had a He-Man bicycle (to go with the He-Man sword and shield I'd received for Christmas in '83) and rode it up and down the street constantly. It had plastic wheels and I spent hours skidding to a halt on the sidewalk, leaving trails of shredded plastic until my dad yelled at me for making a mess. Besides He-Man and Transformers, my favourite cartoon was Inspector Gadget, and I had a Cabbage Patch Kid solely because my sister had several.

I had not gotten into Legos yet, but I had a healthy collection of CONSTRUX!, which were the economy version of Legos in the early 80s. I always had to deconstruct my creations before going to bed (because all toys must be picked up and put away) and one time I had a massive tantrum where I threw my CONSTRUX! creation at the pine wood dresser in my bedroom. This dresser currently lives with my sister in Rhode Island, and the battle scars are still there.

In the fall at the age of 4 going on 5, I started kindergarten at William Ramsey Elementary School under the kind eyes of Ms. Lovo and Mrs. Wheatley. (I didn't realize that preschool was a thing until people later in life asked me why I didn't attend). I made rapid friends with a boy named Yunus from Turkey, a fellow adoptee named Gina, and another girl named Gigi. I've been told that Yunus and I would take charge of the sandbox, but I don't really remember this.

I do remember taking field trips to the attached Dora Kelly Nature Center to see the bees fly in and out of their hive and being disappointed with the selection of reading materials available in class. I had a reader, Birds Fly, Bears Don't, intended for first graders and I had completed it by the end of the second quarter.

Above is a picture of my sister, Gina, myself, Yunus, and his sister, taken in our backyard. Gina once wrote me a letter saying "I love you" so I replied in turn with the same. My family made fun of me and my "new girlfriend" until I had yet another tantrum and tore up the letter.

Other posts in this series: 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1990 - 1991 | 1991 - 1992 | 1992 - 1993

(Re-)Review Day: Super Mario Odyssey

I first gave this game a C- after playing for several hours and not finding much to draw me back to it. After 6 months without turning on the Switch, I recently dusted it off and gave it another shot. One key difference between my original abandoned attempt and now is that I can play for longer periods (sometimes an hour at a time) and on a big TV screen rather than the portable screen. Back at Christmas time, I was squeezing in games while Maia barely napped for 10 - 20 minutes at a time (just narrowly long enough to get through the interminable load screens and reminders to use motion controls) while walking around quiet corners of the house.

I appreciate this game much more on the big screen, but it's still hindered by flaws that grow more apparent as the series progresses:

• Moon fatigue is real -- there are too many moons to collect. Many are just sitting out in the open as if the designers were saying "This is the laziest possible way we could think of to draw the game out longer". There are 999 moons, over a hundred of which are simply bought in stores and require boring coin farming to afford. I would have preferred a total in the 100 - 200 range, where each one is uniquely challenging and provides some satisfaction and achievement.


• The camera has greatly regressed, resulting in more missed jumps or deaths caused by poor camera angles than mistakes. Super Mario Galaxy was the high point for 3D camera work that never got in the way and made 3D jumping puzzles as minimally frustrating as possible.


• Mario now has too many different moves, whose controls are poorly explained and often interfere with each other. Precision movement can be a huge frustration when different moves (especially the not-so-optional "optional" motion controls) interact incorrectly. Some designer seriously thought that binding "jump" to "shake the controller" was a brilliant idea.

Super Mario Odyssey misses the mark on the right level of frustration to build into a game. Maybe in middle school when there was nothing else to do, I would have loved the challenge of dying 20 times on a single moon (mostly from "helpful" camera movement, random control issues, lava, or horribly controlled vehicles) but I just don't have time for that anymore. Nowadays, I want to win a game because I'm good at it, not die a lot because of random elements outside my control.

On the positive side, there is a solid amount of varied game content (filler moons notwithstanding), you can finally skip cutscenes, and the soundtrack is great (similar to Galaxy's, the one I own the CD for). In spite of its flaws, I did play this game for about 50 hours and got to about 809 moons before moving on, so it definitely does something right. I guess that just makes me more disappointed that it could have been so much better with a few different design choices.

Final Grade: B-, engaging and by no means a BAD game, but too much frustration and tedium involved

The 57 moons I skipped (because foot-racing takes too long to retry over and over, and no one wants to fight through the horrible boss fights again)

• Cascade Kingdom: Master Cup
• Wooded Kingdom: Master Cup
• Lake Kingdom: Master Cup
• Lost Kingdom: Regular Cup
• Lost Kingdom: Master Cup
• Metro Kingdom: Jump Rope Genius
• Metro Kingdom: Regular Cup
• Metro Kingdom: RC Car Champ
• Metro Kingdom: Metro Kingdom Master Cup
• Snow Kingdom: Snowline Circuit Class S
• Snow Kingdom: Dashing Over Cold Water!
• Snow Kingdom: Dashing Above and Beyond!
• Snow Kingdom: Master Cup
• Snow Kingdom: Iceburn Circuit Class A
• Snow Kingdom: Iceburn Circuit Class S
• Seaside Kingdom: Beach Volleyball: Hero of the Beach!
• Seaside Kingdom: Regular Cup
• Seaside Kingdom: Master Cup
• Luncheon Kingdom: Regular Cup
• Luncheon Kingdom: Master Cup
• Bowser's Kingdom: Regular Cup
• Bowser's Kingdom: Master Cup
• Moon Kingdom: Master Cup
• Mushroom Kingdom: All 6 Boss Re-Fights and 3 Achievement Moons
• Dark Side: All 24 Moons, because the world starts with a Boss Re-Fight that I don't want to go through again
• Darker Side: Final Moon because the controls keep knocking me into the lava

More Deep Thoughts Day

More Facebook posts I want to preserve for posterity:

August 20, 2020

September 25, 2020

What's Maia Up To Day

Maia is 5.25 years old this month and chugging along happily in school. She likes cats the most and bunnies the second most, and is always wearing some kind of headband with animal ears or crowns on it.

She gets up after 6:30 AM for school (bus at 7) and arrives home at 2:30 PM. Rebecca and Ian walk her out in the morning, and then we all pick her up at the bus stop. She doesn't do much "quiet time" anymore except on the weekends. We still try to get her to bed around 7 and she's usually asleep by 9. Unfortunately, the early wake-up has made the weekends longer since she can no longer force herself to sleep late into the morning.

I love exploring her room after she's been playing to see the things she's drawn and the imagination games she's played. Once, I found a blue purse full of broken chunks of clay and flat Duplo pieces -- she was pretending to be Mirabel Madrigal and discovering a vision buried in her room. Another time, there was a big box of Duplos (only green) behind the chair -- this was her litter box when she was a cat.

She has a surfeit of toys, games, and activities to play with now, such that she's rarely bored of doing any 1 of them and always feels like she needs more time to enjoy everything life has to offer. For her afternoons, we'll rotate through sports/biking outside, pretend games, drawing, puzzles, Khan Academy Kids on the iPad, Switch games, or PC games (Contraption Maker or Stray).

We don't know a whole lot about what she does at school because, like every kid, she doesn't want to talk about the school day after just having lived through it. She has a Chromebook assigned to her that stays at school but she says they just use the computers for games. I showed her the ancient "Luigi's Mansion" game series on the 3DS last weekend and she said she'd already seen it before in one of her "Brain Breaks" at school. "Brain Breaks" are not on the Chromebook -- it's some TV-based physical activity where they have to move around. All we really know about school is that she earns at least 3 "Dojo points" from her teacher every day for things like working hard, participating, or being a champion. This gamification of school is visible through a mobile app that constantly bugs you to upgrade to "Dojo Premium" (we have not).

Maia has a pretty nice life and routine at the moment. She enjoys her weekly three hours with the babysitter (in our own house), will involve Ian in her games without much complaining, and enjoys jokes and farts. She still raises her hand to interject in a conversation, an amazing habit instilled at Kids Under Construction preschool last year.

Currently, she wants to be a jellyfish for Halloween.