No news is good news.

Right?

This weekend I went out to Winchester with Anna, who had an extended family gathering of sorts. We were all going to go to some big Apple Blossom festival (apparently it's a big deal) but the crowds were so bad that we just had a cook-out at Anna's sister's new house.

On the way home today, I saw a guy in full fatigues with a backpack jogging along the side of the road (in the rain). About fifty yards later, I saw an old guy in a blue coat carrying a single fluorescent bulb, about six feet long. Make of that what you will.

I wrote an update yesterday but now I can't find out where it disappeared to.

I've watched a couple movies since Sunday -- The Cooler with William H. Macy and Alec Baldwin, and Big Fish with Ewan McGregor. The first was pretty good and I liked the second one a lot. Most symbolic feel good movies don't tug at any heartstrings, but this is one that I would watch again. The style is patently Tim Burton, and all the actors are perfect for their roles. Plus, I always like Elfman scores, even though they start to sound the same.

We're giving a demo of some of our stuff at a technical exchange this afternoon. I got in today at 5 so it looks like it will be a long day.

Yesterday's web update was written in the style of Mike Catania (ha ha).

Two hundred and thirty-six episodes later and Friends is finally off the air. Not quite though, since NBC plans to air reruns of all the recent Friends episodes and Friends-related news shows throughout Sweeps Month. They also made tons of money by shorting the final season by six episodes and then filling those timeslots with reruns tagged as "fan favourites".

They should have ended the series in a completely unexpected manner. For example, the friends are sitting in their apartment chatting it up when a plane crashes into the building because the pilot was involved in a freak tuna fish mishap. Fade to black with no explanation and roll credits.

You can tell Sweeps Month is here because every other commercial is an ad for some series finale, like "The Final Fear Factor of All Time!". ABC, the perennial ratings loser, is pre-empting Sunday's Alias for the second Harry Potter movie and a never-before-seen trailer from the new movie, Harry Potter and the Puberty Conundrum, followed the next week by seven straight nights of Who Wants to Be a SUPER Millionaire where the prize is TEN million dollars. Don't worry, because Regis Philbin has said that they learned the lesson of oversaturation from showing 363 episodes of the original show in a single year, and will not make that mistake again.

It's very hard to find a place that makes good egg drop soup. You either get a batch that's spiced up, or a batch that takes like corn. We ordered some Chinese food from China Express last week with the best egg drop soup I've ever had. However, all the rest of their food tasted like ass and the delivery took over an hour.

This weekend was a low-key, no-Alias affair with a pleasant mix of errands, house projects, and hanging around. This afternoon is the first work soccer game of the year followed by another round of thunderstorms and rabid cicadas (they should be here any day now...)

I caught some sort of bug yesterday that kept me from work today. I had already planned to take the morning off for a car inspection, but ended up staying home for the second half and napping as well.

I still had the lingering effects of Monday's bug, so I took another day off from work. I didn't want to waste another day though, so between bouts of rest I got a haircut, hung some pictures, fixed a corkboard, and cleaned the house.

Back at work today, business as usual. I have my annual performance appraisal sometime today but the salary review won't come for another few days.

My weekend plans including a little yard work, a little trim painting, and buying some new curtains to finally cover up the back patio door. I'm also going to make some new mix CDs for the car, since I've exhausted the stalwart six from last year.

Booty's plans include catching and sautée-ing a pigeon with mushrooms and onions.

Today is movie and photo day. Check out the new cat photos, the new BU photos, and see Booty fight another chair.

I finally got the home network set up a couple weeks ago. Now both of our computers and any computers plugged into the two free hub ports can access the Internet without a router and can game with each other and folks on the Internet.

Based on the number of people who visit and my intrinsic laziness, I've decided that the URI! Zone will not be updated on the weekends for the duration of the summer months (until August or so). I may occasionally post an update on the weekend, but there is no need to do ADD-refreshing of the page in anticipation of weekend profundity.

This weekend was a fairly productive one. I've gotten everyone in my general vicinity hooked on Alias, and ended up watching about eight back-to-back episodes from Season One with the guy living in my basement who'd never seen them before. Yesterday, I washed the years of accumulated dirt and mold off the house's siding and removed the backing from a wall bookshelf to brighten up an internal room in the basement. I'll post pictures later on -- this is the first step in tearing the bookshelf out and replacing it with a bar to go next to the forthcoming pool table (which is supposed to arrive in a couple weeks).

Today will be marked by a trip out to Skyline 7 and a game of soccer in the evening (if it's not pre-empted by a massive thunderstorm).

There are tons of cicada shells everywhere, and I can hear them all over Herndon while driving through, but they still haven't taken over Loudoun County yet.

The story of the Stradivarius cello left out on the porch came to a conclusion . The finder of the cello was ignorant of what it was, and decided that it would look much better as a custom CD holder until she saw the news. I guess the age old question of "How many discs will fit in a real Stradivarius?" will never be answered now.

The pool table should be here in two weeks.

Desparate Housewives: This darkly humorous show looks at the secretive lives of four women living in a cul-de-sac. Eva Longoria will play one of the women, an unhappily married former runway model. Said unhappiness drives her to become involved with their 16-year-old gardener.

This is the show that ABC is hoping will do better in the Alias timeslot next fall. Luckily they're not completely retarded, as Alias will return in January 2005 with twenty back-to-back new episodes.

We saw Shrek 2 on opening night. Though not as cohesive a movie as the first, it was still very funny and hit all the right notes. The animation and graphics were improved, but for every bumpy bitmapped surface with warts, there was a scene where the models didn't quite gel as being in the same environment (such as a cat on Shrek's shoulder that looked like it was cut and pasted Southpark style).

One of the characters in the movie, the Fairy God Mother, had a business called FGM, Inc.

To get you through the weekend, I've posted a couple house pics in the Photos section, as well as two shorts featuring Booty on a desk.

Until tomorrow, this is Brian Uri!. Over and out.

The cicadas came out in full force yesterday, swarming trees and plants and sounding like police sirens when echoing from the nearby creek. There'd been a few before this weekend but they didn't really get their groove on until now.

Here's a picture of some plants I have growing in the backyard. See how many cicadas you can count in this square footage of greenery. The answer is shown in the next picture.

Here's the difference in volume through my fancy double-paned windows, taken with artistically horizontal cinematography.

In some parts of Herndon and Sterling, the cicadas are actually physically painful to drive by with the windows down. I'm on the fifth floor at work and constantly see them buzzing and bouncing off the window in the courtyard.

The season finale of Alias on Sunday was good but not great. They gave themselves maximum room to dig out of several plot holes that have appeared this season. They also killed off a horrible actress which will improve the show immensely next year. I have two friends hooked on the show now who are about halfway through the second season.

Florida-Mike is on a quest to get a job as Senior Departmental Liaison in Humanities at the College of William & Mary . He's out there today and tomorrow doing the on-campus interview, after having been pared down from 6 applicants to 3.

I like Oreo cookies, but I hate that they make your teeth look like they're coated in some communicable fungus. Cookies, and snacks in general, have shrunk dramatically over the past twenty years. Quaker Chewy Granola Bars used to be ruler-length, and Chips Ahoy! cookies are now about the size of my watch face.

If you're a fan of my Warcraft III maps, I've released version 2.0 of Caravan Assault on the Games page. It features a variety of balance changes and improvements, including clearer instructions for new players. I'm currently working on a new map, Micro Frenzy, which should be released in about a week or so.

Not counting three years of internships, I've now worked at FGM for one consecutive year.

One thing I dislike about the business world is the predominance of the backwards email thread -- where older responses appear at the bottom and each new reply is stuck at the top. This style works in news posts, such as this page, but that's because each entry generally does not depend on understanding of previous entries. I guess people are too lazy to reconfigure their Outlook preferences or just scroll down to the bottom for the latest info.

There's a family of geese living at our building. Yesterday I saw the mother goose teaching one of the babies how to poop on the lawn.

Happy Memorial Day from rainy Sterling. I'm going in to work for a few hours this morning, and then taking the afternoon off.

On Friday afternoon, I saw the resident mother goose teaching the baby geese how to cross the street at the crosswalk.