Christmas was a good excuse to make a cheesy little banner graphic and call it an update. I hope everyone out there had a good holiday with their families and/or loved ones. In the gifts department, I got the usual array of books, scores, and CDs, and some minor extras. Other than doing some updates to the URI! Domain and internal pages, I've done very little productive so far. I've timed it so that I'll reach maximum boredom (and thus, maximum productivity) during that first week of January when I'm back in Tallahassee. I plan on doing lots of practicing and score editing before school starts.

Things still seem to be on track for the Gator Bowl. I'll be leaving Virginia and its cheap gas early Friday morning, and my old Tech brethren will be staying at my place the night of the 30th before we all head into Jacksonville together. Nikki's dad is ex-military, and was able to get an extremely inexpensive deal on a room at a military base for the lot of us.

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Ho ho ho, and welcome back from your weekend of debauchery and food. My own was quite pleasant, starting with a Friday afternoon filled with movies and Chinese food. I saw Serenity for the second time, and Batman Begins for the first. The latter was definitely good, dispelling my belief that action movies longer than two hours automatically suck (see also, Bad Boys II: Stuff Blows Up). Christian Bale made a great Batman, and Actor Who Auditioned For Batman But Didn't Get It made a great Dr. Crane. The Katie Holmes role was pretty anemic, but that generally seems to be the case with any movie where a superhero has a love interest. You'd think they could use their super powers to attract better women, but I guess women are the Unstoppable Force, even to superheroes.

As a belated Christmas treat, I've recorded a MIDI of an Agnus Dei I wrote in 2001 in the hallowed halls of Evan Jones' modal counterpoint classroom. It uses a familiar Christmas carol for its cantus and is aptly titled, "Deck the Halls with Lamb of God" (573KB MP3). You can see the last surviving copy of this masterwork on your right, which I narrowly salvaged from an overzealous trash man -- a slip of paper which will no doubt be worth millions some day.

Actually, the crinkly look is a feature of Finale 2006, which lets you put graphics on the score, because making the score harder to read obviously enhances a composer's creativity and makes him more loved by the irate performers who have to excavate the notes from the morass of swampy bitmapped backgrounds. It's almost as bad as company e-mails sent in purple fonts with "Piece of Notebook Paper.gif" as the background. Every company has at least one perpetrator of those.

Today, I also released an open-sourced version of my Warcraft 3 map, Onslaught, which you can download at www.nohunters.com. I give it less than two months before some novice mapmaker steals it wholesale and releases a crappy derivative map, but I'm not working on it anymore and I figure that it could be a good learning tool of the JASS programming language for aspiring mapmakers. I didn't even realize that people still played Warcraft III, but I guess it's still pretty popular.

Now that Christmas is out of the way, it's time to prepare for 2006. I usually don't make New Year Resolutions and 2006 won't be any different. Resolutions are for people in need of improvement, and I have obviously been a perfect specimen of idyllic human existence since puberty (or at least since I bought a propane grill). In fact, my agent is currently in talks with the Dover Area School Board to use me as proof-positive of Intelligent Design, a lucrative deal that will also put my mug on a set of coffee mugs, T-shirts, and playing cards. In the short-term though, I'll be busy unpacking, assembling, washing, wearing, and watching my various Christmas gifts, like the cozy scarf I wore to work this morning where I managed to close it in the car door (I am a scarf newbie). Luckily the scarf survived. What did you get for Christmas?

Happy News: Upbeat stories, all the time
Substitute music teacher spills the beans about Santa
I don't know if it was on ring or vibrate, either.

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2007 in Review, Part I of III

based on Reuter's Pictures of the Year

Old Pictures of the Year: 2005 | 2006

Drunk Santas on a rampage
Chuck Norris' tears don't cure cancer
Cards from heaven have dead man talking

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2011 in Review, Part I of III

based on Reuter's Photos of the Year

Old Pictures of the Year: 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010

Pudding machine tells kids to scram
Volkswagen turns off Blackberry email after hours

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2012 in Review, Part I of III

based on Reuter's Photos of the Year

Old Pictures of the Year: 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011

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2013 in Review, Part I of III

based on Reuter's Photos of the Year

Old Pictures of the Year: 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012

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Christmas At the Ahlbin's

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Advent of Code Wrap-up

Advent of Code wrapped up yesterday (although the comapny's internal competition will continue through December 31 to allow people to catch up at their leisure). I did much better than expected, managing to be one of the first 10 people to finish each puzzle every night. It took me about 38 hours to finish every puzzle.

In addition to earning all 50 stars for 2018, I went back and completed all 50 stars for 2017 (which was very helpful for discovering reused concepts and algorithms between years, shaving some time off of my 2018 attempts). I also wrote a blog post for the official company blog detailing my experiences with a healthy dose of company rah-rah incorporated.

It was fun to participate in a shared experience like this, and actually making it to the end while doing it at midnight every night was the coder's version of running a marathon. It whet my appetite for more tech side projects in 2019. Now I can sleep normally again!

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Advent of Code Results Day

I ended up in 2nd place overall in my company's private leaderboard for Advent of Code. 3rd place is still in flux (people have until the new year to catch up on puzzles they missed), but my ranking should be locked in now.

This year's puzzles felt a lot more demanding than last year's, but in comparing the times, it looks like I spent about the same total time working on them.

Now to resume my classic old person schedule of "going to bed between 9 and 10 PM" and my classic overachiever schedule of "waking up between 5 and 6 AM"!

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