I signed up for spring classes yesterday. I'm planning on taking eleven credits-worth: Composition lessons, Pedagogy of Music Theory II, History of Jazz 1950-Present, and Fugal Writing Styles. I was a little disappointed that Dr. Spencer doesn't teach the second portion of Pedagogy, but I made up for it by taking Fugal Writing (which covers an elective requirement anyhow). He's a sharp teacher, and his dry wit makes classes interesting as well. I'll do better in History of Jazz than History of Music Theory, because I'm much more interested in the subject matter.

P.S. The Hokies are ranked 5th in the BCS.

"The 'whatever' will hit the fan, and we need to make sure the fan is running very slowly when that happens." - professor on the pitfalls of overexplaining figured bass symbols in basic theory classes

A "Composition Challenge" has been added to the SCI website, in an effort to entertain composers and their offspring. Go check it out if you're in the mood to write against a motive. On a sidenote, I'll try to limit the crossposting of news after that site has an audience, but until more people than myself and Jim Barry visit, I'll whore out this news page to get new faces over there .

Next semester I may be taking as many as seven credits of Independent Study to stay in the assistantship game. I'll probably continue doing Fundamentals software work as a D.I.S. while teaching a class or something like that.

I've uploaded a new edition of Caravan Assault on the Games page, with greatly improved gameplay and balance. Check it out.

In my spare time, I'm working on creating a PHP/SQL forum for the URI! Zone. If this site had a forum, what sort of features would you want to see?

Happy Birthday Jason Mirick!

Tag Day: Soundtrack of Our Lives

I borrowed today's idea from a bulletin that Anna answered on MySpace, the world's most poorly designed social networking site. Simply load your entire playlist on your favourite music-playing device (be it an iPod, WinAMP, your 99-disc CD changer, or a comely soprano named Katya) and hit the Shuffle button. Then, use the shuffled playlist make the soundtrack for the movie of your life, using the life events in the table below. The choices Shuffle bestows upon your life will range the gamut from completely nonsensical to eerily perfect.

Long time readers will remember that the movie of my life is currently in production, so creating the soundtrack is the logical next step. I now tag Mike , Brianne , and CC . The running commentary is unnecessary -- feel free to just do the column where you shuffle your playlist if you are feeling lazy.

Event	Fate's Soundtrack	Commentary
Opening Credits	Coldplay - One I Love	This is one of several Coldplay songs that involves singing random phrases over a nondescript vamp for three to four minutes before fading out -- a perfect underlay for the extensive credits, since some of my stars will not want to share the same screen of credits with their rivals.
Waking Up	Procul Harum - Whiter Shade of Pale	This choice doesn't make sense at all for a wake up song. I would choose the aptly-named "Wake Up" by XTC because I could take the metrically ambiguous beat and mix it in with the sound of a digital alarm clock for extra artsiness.
First Day of School	Natalie Imbruglia - Counting Down the Days	Though the "I don't wanna be here" is apropos, this song seems too girly to start school with. All the other boys would make fun of me (rather, the actor playing little me, a.k.a Short Round).
Prom	Monkees - Giant Step	Apparently, it's a retro prom.
Life's Okay	Vertical Horizon - Forever	This is a good, upbeat, status quo song. Good work, Mr. Shuffle.
Driving	Aerosmith - What It Takes	Not quite impatient or fast enough to accurately characterize my insane driving skills.
Falling in Love	Cardigans - I Need Some Fine Wine	"So I need some fine wine and you, you need to be nicer, for the good times and the bad times we know will come"... Such a positive forward-thinking way to start an affair of the heart.
Breaking Up	Chopin - Preludes 28 #16	Apparently, the break up occurs in black and white, after which I don a Charlie Chaplin hat and comically run through a general goods store causing mayhem. I then rob a bank in subtitles and escape with white canvas sacks that have $ emblazoned on the side.
Mental Breakdown	Henry Mancini - Shot in the Dark	Not a bad choice at all.
Reconciliation	Blood, Sweat and Tears - And When I Die	I don't know why Shuffle would match this song with that event, but maybe it's so I can yell "Yeehaw!" afterwards.
Wedding	Candide - Oh Happy We	This is the song in which Candide and Cunegonde have completely different perceptions of what married life is like and sing about how happy they will be after marriage. I swear I didn't manually pick this -- you can't make this stuff up!
Sex Scene	Muse - Feeling Good	Based on the music, this might be the most disturbing sex scene in cinema. However, moviegoers will get to see Daniel Dae Kim get it on with Rachel McAdams and Alyssa Milano, so box-office receipts will probably be overflowing regardless.
Birth of Child	Peggy Taylor - I Can't Sleep	Very appropriate. I almost hit Shuffle one more time, because it was too good and I didn't want it to look like I was influencing the results. However, what you see is what I got.
Dance Sequence	Mitch Rider - Devil With a Blue Dress	At first glimpse, not a good choice. However, I then realized that this was one of the songs from the Marching Virginians which had a dance in the middle of it, so I expect the sequence would somehow involve "Shopping", "Riding the Burro", and "The Butt". All of these will get good acclaim at the Sundance Festival, but a better choice for the masses might have been "I Don't Feel Like Dancing" by the Scissor Sisters , which is (no doubt) destined to be this generation's Dancing Queen.
Flashback	J.J. Abrams - Theme from Alias	Perfect.
Final Battle	Henry Mancini - Baby Elephant Walk	I did not realize that my nemesis in life would be a clowny, oafish pachyderm. It may not be the most intense boss fight of all time, but it'll certain draw the chuckles!
Death Scene	Erin McKeown - Born to Hum	With my final dying breaths (after being gored by the elephant), I gather my closest friends in a circle and sing folk songs until the end.
Funeral Song	In-Grid - Only Lies	The funeral will be held in a French discotheque (after which Carlos Adolfo Dominguez will take all the ladies to the movies).
Closing Credits	Decemberists - O Valencia	No one sticks around for the closing credits anyhow, so might as well go with a song that no one knows!

On another note, new cat pictures were added here (scroll down) and new weekend pictures were put here .

Happy Birthday Jason Mirick!

Museday Tuesday

in which I have thirty minutes to write a thirty second song

Trampled: (adj.) To tread heavily, roughly, or crushingly My Composition (0:29 MP3)	Old Musedays: Sidelong Moodily Obnoxiously Obsessively Spikiest Leggier Carsick Dinkiest Reclusive Trifid Frowzy
I find it more interesting to hear about what you hear in these fragments than to write about how I came up with them. Share your Music Appreciation 101 thoughts in the comments section!

Happy Birthday Jason Mirick!

Weird Search Day

or "how I stumbled upon the URI! Zone"

Here is the most recent collection of weird search terms for the site. Though the original searchers may have left feeling unfulfilled, future searchers will no doubt be satisfied by my attempts to providing meaningful results.

kristen bell eclaire

Yum!

how to sleep surround dreadlord

Have your Dreadlord cast Sleep on the opposing player's Hero. Take a control group of ghouls and Move them to a point beyond the location of the Hero. When the ghouls are evenly distributed around the Hero, right-click on him to attack from all directions. If you simply right-click without first moving past him, your ghouls will only attack from one side, and the Hero will have plenty of space to flee.

ear squat

Always be sure to stretch before performing these, because you might ear a muscle.

Final Fantasy pantie pooping stories

When I saw this in my logs, I was 100% sure it would have originated from Japan, but instead, it came from Lorain, Ohio. Seek help. Please.

celebrity yearbook picture chad kroeger

jogging booty pics

Booty does not jog yet, because she still has trouble tying (and fitting into) her running shoes.

Happy Birthday Jason!

Media Day

The official wedding pictures should be uploaded in the next couple of weeks!

Survey of Jazz History

Between 1994 and 2002, jazz was the primary type of music I listened to. I was that annoying kid that had 90.1 FM blaring in the car until they ran out of money and stopped playing jazz before 11 PM. I own at least twelve CDs by the Stan Kenton Orchestra, and stayed home learning the chord changes to Eager Beaver while all of the other high school senior boys were searching for eager beavers of their own.

I lost some of my interest in college, after multiple semesters of failed jazz band auditions while watching some obliviously horrible trumpeters make the cut -- apparently Chip McNeill was not a fan of my mellow tones. He did, however, teach me one important lesson: always take courses taught by the jazz faculty, because they're never in town to have class. Numerous jazz arranging classes and studio labs became easy As on the transcript, and all I had to do was show up to find the cancellation note on the door (jazz musicians don't dig email).

This lesson stuck with me in grad school when, for some peculiar reason, I had to fulfill a Masters requirement with a survey level music appreciation class. I ended up in Jazz History II, a lecture course full of uninterested freshman that only met about 50% of the time because Leon Anderson was always touring.

Our final assignment was to listen to a CD of an improvised jazz solo and transcribe it to the best of our abilities. Curious to see if I could still follow the changes, I picked the fastest solo I had in my CD collection, Wynton Marsalis playing Well You Needn't with Herbie Hancock:

• Listen (0:30 MP3)
  

I will always treasure the comments I received on my assignment:

When I resume my trumpeting career, and open at the Montreal Jazz Festival, the copy on my poster will read: "Internationally acclaimed trumpeter, Brian Uri!: It's like he knows what he's doing and he's pulling it off."

Memory Day: Amazon MP3s

Six years ago, on October 23, 2007, I made my first MP3 purchases through Amazon.

Up to that point, I had purchased all of my music through Walmart, which required the extra step of converting their DRM-draped Windows audio files into MP3s.

Amazon has always had a nice set up for MP3 orders, including the cloud player to keep track of songs after I've deleted them locally. They toss enough coupons out at regular intervals that you can usually get a song or two per month for free, and they now offer free digital downloads with real album purchases.

I tried iTunes once, but uninstalled it immediately after it added multiple extra Apple background services to my machine. Ain't no one got CPUs for that.

Lake Crescent Day

Going up the death-defying rope lines to conquer MOUNT STORM KING (4534 ft).

List Day: Lowest Grades from Review Day

I'm a fairly lenient grader, as can be seen by the fact that I've only given out eight Fs in over a decade of Review Days.

D-

1. My Name Is Earl, Season Three (TV)
2. Excelline Chicken and Cheese Quesadillas (food)
3. 2012 (movie)
4. Paul Blart: Mall Cop (movie)
5. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (movie)

F

1. Amazon Prime Day (event)
2. Down Dog, Pilot Episode (TV)
3. Hamilton Beach Set 'n Forget 33967A Slow Cooker (gadget)
4. Under the Dome, Season One (TV)
5. Weather.com (website)
6. Western Digital My Book 3.0 (1TB) (gadget)
7. The Heartbreak Kid (movie)
8. The Darjeeling Limited (movie)

Weekend Wrap-up

On Friday, the first day of our now-regular three-day weekends, we drove down to Fredericksburg to visit with the Ahlbins and their freshly baptized one-month old, Felicity. With a partial tally of sisters and their children present, there were a total of 17 people under the age of 18 present -- had they chosen to overpower the adults and set up their own government, they probably would have succeeded.

Maia had a good time observing the tornado of children, as the scenery at our house is much more placid. We stayed through the evening on Saturday and then made it up I-95 to get home in a surprisingly rapid fashion.

On Sunday, Rebecca taught a lesson on anatomy at a yoga teacher training session through her studio while Maia learned the ins and outs of napping. In the evening, we took a nature walk through Claude Moore, then had a successful dinner at Cafesano -- Maia is pretty good at enduring fast-casual outings but we have not been brave enough to try waiter-style yet.

How was your weekend?

List Day: 10 Questions to Ask When Doing Local Election Research

1. Is the total count of their Twitter tweets greatly out of proportion with the sum of their Followers plus their Following count (-1)?


2. Do they own a real domain name (www.candidate.com, +3), or are they camping on a subdomain (candidate.blogspot.com, +2)? Or, even worse, a social media group (www.facebook.com/candidate, +1)? Do they even have a web presence (-3)?


3. Did he include a picture of himself in the Sheriff Department coloring book passed out at SterlingFest (-3)?


4. Is their platform purely aspirational ("I want to bring transparency to government!", -2) or executable ("I will post all meeting minutes to the county website!, +2)?


5. Does anything come up when you Google their name and "controversy" (-2), "lawsuit" (-2), "embezzlement" (-2), or "llama" (+2)?


6. Does it look like they tried way too hard to get a balanced roster of minorities in their campaign images (-1)?


7. Are they wearing a hard hat in any campaign image (-1)?


8. Did she file to run for Loudoun Commonwealth's Attorney after backdating a lease agreement to make it look like she moved there in time for residency requirements while still living in Fairfax for another 6 months (-3)?


9. Is he Eugene Delgaudio (-3)?


10. Do we really need more Fire Departments (NEVER)?

Review Day: Long Light by Paige L. Christie

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Long Light is Book Three of the four-book series, Legacies of Arnan, by Paige L. Christie (I also reviewed Book One and Book Two). This story decisively belongs to Kilras, who was easily my favourite supporting character in the previous books. We learn (in a mostly sequential manner) of his growth from a child in a specific village to the empathetic caravan master that eventually befriends Cleod.

It would be too easy to dismiss it as "just a prequel" (in spite of the vexing fact that Book Three ends without any closure about the climax of Book Two) -- Kilras' journeys across Arnan also serve to introduce new people, customs, and factions that have only been hinted at. This adds some "epicness" to the consequences of Leiel's, Cleod's, and Kilras' decisions and breaks away from the mostly-regional perspective we've been given so far.

This broadening device reminded me a little of the recalibration required with Janny Wurt's Wars of Light and Shadows, where everything we learn in previous books has a deeper interpretation as the camera steadily pulls away from the seemingly simple tropes introduced at the beginning. I expect that future rereads of the Legacies of Arnan series will be just as rewarding.

Long Light is structured very similarly to Wing Wind, with an emphasis on one character's evolution instead of the future-facing plot. I wondered why I devoured Kilras' story so quickly yet struggled when the same structure was applied to Leiel in Book Two, and came to two conclusions: (1) Kilras remained enigmatic enough in the early books to have a lot of blank canvas to cover here and (2) Kilras' introspective musings are swirled into a revolving backdrop of interesting cities and situations, while Leiel's growth was more contained to a single location, so it was often the only thing happening for pages.

The bottom line: Book Three worked completely for me. I enjoyed the journey to this point enough that the forthcoming conclusion, Storm Forged, will definitely be a release-day purchase.

Final Grade: B+

Easy Photos Day

Ian heads to Frying Pan Farm with Grandma during Rebecca's 3-day holiday in Atlanta.

Exhausted parenting.

Maia comes home from her Cox Farms field trip with a new pumpkin.

Forest cleanup party of one, along Fillmore Rd, while Ian's at preschool.

Supine parenting.

Rebecca comes home!