Memory Day: April Fool's Day

♣ On April 1, 1995, twelve of my close friends received an invitation to an end-of-the-year party. Well-versed in my rambling multi-page invitations and penchant for planning months in advance, invitees were surprised to discover that this party would take place at King's Dominion on a day when the park was closed to the general public. They were more surprised when the last page revealed it to be an April Fool's joke. My dedication to this joke was so strong that I actually put the invitations into the mail on varying days in advance to make sure that everyone (even clowns in Arlington and Fake Alexandria) got them on the 1st.

♣ In 1998, a girl I knew solely from the Internet confided that she was in love with me over ICQ. "Is this an April Fool's joke?" may have been my shocked, unfortunate reaction, which is never what you want to hear in that situation. We talked it out the next day, though, and I normalized my Canadian relations.

♣ I released Augmented Fourth on April 1, 2000, although the only cruel joke in that scenario was the statue with the moveable arm that seemed to unlock a secret passage in the house where inventory was forbidden, but actually did nothing at all. Players were still stuck here over a year later.

♣ April Fool's Day in 2001 was the sophomore recital of Dave Day and Dave Ball (and the world premiere of Clown Facades). For this occasion I created an alternate version of their recital poster, featuring their accompanist, Jim Bryant.

♣ In 2003, I changed every word of my homepage to be "bork" and infinitely looped a clip of the Swedish Chef singing. I also gave a ridiculously hard dictation question to my ear training students, although most of them were too street-savvy to fall for it. One student did try to visit our Blackboard class page to study before the exam, and ended up at Bork-fest instead. She was rather confused.

♣ Last year on 1 April, Rebecca and I were setting foot in London for the first time ever. Though we didn't feel that our presence was any sort of American prank on the British, we did get to say "Cockfosters" in polite conversation all day long.

Your turn! Share your April Fool's Day memories in the Comments section!

Review Day: Pandora.com

Pandora.com is a free Internet radio station that learns what sorts of music you like over time, and tailors future songs to those guidelines. Starting up with Pandora is simple: you give it the name of a band or a song that you enjoy and, through the Music Genome Project's research, it will play other songs that are similar in some way. You can choose to "like" or "dislike" a song at any time, and this choice is remembered for the future. The reasons for its musical selections are as varied as "songs by the same band" to "songs with fast string accompaniments and triple meters".

When I first started out, I tried to put all the bands I liked into a single station, which confused Pandora into thinking that the Cardigans and Muse had something in common, but I soon learned that I could get better results by creating a separate station for each particular genre. With too much variety, the number of songs played on a station is minimal, so you start to hear the same tunes over and over. Now, I have a harder rock station, a station for chicks that sing (which, amusingly enough, plays lots of Jack Johnson), one for movie tunes, and a couple for different branches of jazz. I have not tried searching for classical music yet.

Here are a few samples of songs that Pandora recommended from my "chicks that sing" station (which I created by selecting Wallis Bird, KT Tunstall, and Ingrid Michaelson), that I would never have discovered any other way:

A Fine Frenzy - You Picked Me
Eisley - Plenty of Paper
Courtney Jaye - Can't Behave

Pandora also makes it easy to purchase new music -- if you stumble upon an unfamiliar tune, you can view information about the song and its artist, and bookmark it for later. At any time, you can view a list of all your bookmarked songs and download them in one fell swoop from iTunes or Amazon MP3. This is quite possibly the smartest feature ever.

Pandora is not perfect -- my biggest complaint is that it's too easy to accidentally close Firefox and have to restart the radio station. Ads have slowly become more intrusive to the point where you now get at least one uninterruptible audio ad per session, and the music stops playing if you don't touch your computer for an hour (making it annoying if you want to use it as background music). However, these are small prices to pay for a free service, and you can completely eliminate both issues by subscribing for $36 a year. If XM Radio continues to go into the pooper, or goes bankrupt, I might just end up doing that.

Final Grade: A-

Friday Fragments

like a fragmentation grenade filled with FUN

♠ The weather has been damp and rainy all week, to the point where my lawn is so oversaturated that I sink two inches into the turf when I go out to get the newspaper in the morning.

♠ Speaking of oversaturation, if I have to hear Metro Station's "Shake It" on the radio one more time I'm going the shake the moles right off the lead singer's face. Any time your song repeats the same word five times in a row, you need to learn more words.

♠ Worse than "Shake It", though, is Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" which not only has a mind-numbingly repetitive chorus, but also uses Autotune. I honestly believe that this song is just an inside joke of the sound technician who makes "poker face" sound like an obscenity in the robotic middle section.

♠ If I had a robotic middle section, I would trick people into chest-bumping and send them flying across the room. I would also incorporate a 100% efficiency waste recycling organ that would permanently eliminate the need to take pit stops ever again. They would have to rename the book, "Everybody Poops, Except BU".

♠ I really don't understand why the Everybody Poops book is so popular. It has no overarching storyline, is full of exposition without conflict or resolution, and the characters are usually full of it. In these regards, it's kind of like the third season of LOST.

♠ LOST isn't great right now, but it isn't bad either. I haven't been surprised at all in the past few episodes, and I feel like they're taking too much time explaining the time travelling aspects of the story to the viewers, but I'm still going along for the ride. The smart bets are currently on the last season of LOST devolving into metaphysical chaos like the end of the Blazing Saddles, and the LOSTies will jump through time and end up in the ALIAS universe fighting Melissa George's eyebrows (except for Sawyer, who accidentally skews off and ends up on Gilmore Girls).

♠ There are no big plans this weekend, although there are only 183 days until our wedding. That's enough time to redo fifth grade and still have a few days saved for snow.

♠ Have a good weekend!

Weekend Wrap-up

The gay kitty brothers have come over for a week while Kathy and Chris head to Key West. In payment, we had a barbeque extravaganza from Famous Dave's which included ribs, chicken, brisket, pulled pork, corn, beans, fries, and Alex.		My neighbour two doors down has never heard of metric wrenches, so he used brute force to take off an old license plate. That's seriously going to affect the resale value.
It's a Booty bag. Booty does not like other cats.		Booty is online, looking for kitty porn. Actually, she's looking for scraps from the leftover barbeque I had for lunch on Sunday.
Rebecca's wedding girls come over to go bridesmaid dress shopping. These dresses are possibilities for flower girls. Afterwards, we had rosemary lamb for dinner.		It's obviously springtime in Sterling, since the inaugural trip of the Ice Cream Man occurred on Sunday afternoon. I'm guessing that it doubles as a short bus on rainy or cold days.

Happy Birthday to Ella!

Museday Tuesday

Oleaginous: (adj.) Unctuous; fawning; smarmy.

I kept being interrupted by post-workday work while composing this one, so I didn't get to smooth out the kinks as much as I would have liked -- I envisioned a short, pudgy, used-car salesman type with a forced levity, who waddles around spouting perfectly agreeable answers that are just a little bit off. Listening to it this morning, the only memorable aspect of it is that the vibraphone lick in the middle somehow sounds like it should be on Wheel of Fortune.

Audience Participation Day

The migraine I had yesterday after an extended day of work eliminated any enthusiasm I might have had for sitting down and writing a Memory Day (which would have been about my stint with the National Guard in Burkina Faso in 1993 and the time I was attacked by a monkey), so I spent yesterday evening lying on the couch watching an episode of Breaking Bad instead. Since today's post is now woefully devoid of real content, please share with me your true stories about migraines, Mograines, or more grains.

Weird Search Day

or "how I stumbled upon the URI! Zone"

hokie mascot hire for weddings

For a limited time, you can have the Hokie Guy officiate your wedding for only $3999.95. (Hokie Pokie not included in the base price).

pictures of yoshi pooping on the toilet

You're welcome.

"mike catania" mold photography
Mold photography should be Mike's next short-lived hobby, to go with aquariums, martial arts, and Settlers of Cataan(ia).

Jack Bauer & Morgan Freeman voices on answering machine message

I'm guessing someone confused Morgan Freeman with Dennis Haysbert, although it's a solid conspiracy theory that Morgan Freeman might actually play every black role in Hollywood. The script for this answering machine message would involve Jack Bauer yelling, "Damnit! There's no time to leave a message!" after which the machine would hang up on you without recording.

Friday Fragments

where April showers bring Jack Bauers

♠ Happy Birthday to my Mom who turns 28 today! Yes, she's one year younger than I am, either because there was a skew in the space-time continuum resulting in 1985A, she is curiously aging in reverse, or "the island is like a skipping record".

♠ If I could travel through time, I would just go back to yesterday and prevent myself from smashing my hand against the doorway while running down the hall, which resulted in a divot of missing skin from my index finger -- it now looks like a roll of cookie dough attacked by a spoon.

♠ I didn't take a picture of my injured finger because I posted a picture of moldy bread yesterday AND a link to the meth head gallery, and there's a gross picture weekly quota here at the URI! Zone. On a similar note, I'm very far behind my goal for "pictures of attractive people" and "pictures of bacon", so expect more of those pictures in the future.

♠ Speaking of goals, I've been using Wii Fit off and on over the past month (borrowed from Mike in exchange for Six Feet Under) and continue to miss the two-week goals I set for myself. In fact, the program now thinks I'm a malnourished east African child hovering just over 90 pounds. For my next goal, I said I wanted to gain 16 pounds in two weeks, which I'll probably do by picking up Booty.

♠ The resident cats and the two visiting gay brother cats are getting along just fine now -- it only took two days this time, and Lake has only honked on the carpet once.

♠ Because of work, a cat honking on the carpet was probably the most exciting thing to happen this week. If you're looking for excitement, visit some of the blogs in the sidebar to see what other people in the world have been up to, like Brianne who is now a Virginian, or Katie Morton who finished writing a novel.

♠ Have you ever wondered where people go after visiting the URI! Zone? The chart on the right shows the relative popularity of blog links from the past couple weeks. I think the 100 next to redzeppelin may be a miscalculation though, because there's no way that Chompy is cooler than cats talking in broken English. I'm guessing Mike clicks his own blog multiple times a day to inflate the numbers -- that's why his business cards say, "Mike Catania -- Performing SEO".

♠ Plans for the weekend include in the inaugural mowing of my lawn to kick off the spring season of being a home-o(wner) and a trip to Maryland on Easter to see part of Rebecca's extended family. I also have another Amazon shipment of singing-chick-CDs arriving this afternoon which should lead to more Review Days in the coming weeks.

♠ Have a great weekend! Don't forget that Sunday is 12 of 12!

Chad Darnell's 12 of 12

12:01 AM: Reading in bed, one minute into the new day.	8:13 AM: A blurry Booty requesting breakfast.
8:53 AM: Toasted bagels with cream cheese for breakfast on a plate painted by Rebecca. The cream cheese was yet to come...	9:59 AM: Rebecca wasn't feeling well, so Booty and I played games while she napped a little while longer on the couch. I'm not sure why Booty spent the entire day looking up into the heavens.
11:42 AM: Looking up Easter recipes online to see which ones we could do without any major shopping trips.	12:23 PM: In preparation for a dinner of ham, ham, and ham, I had a light lunch of spaghetti with a little butter and onion salt.
2:56 PM: Now it's time for cat naps. This was an incredibly lazy day.	4:53 PM: Mike (of Mike and Chompy) arrives for an impromptu Easter dinner.
5:31 PM: What better way to celebrate Easter than with eggs of the devil?	5:34 PM: Trying to figure out a flow chart of the essential ingredients for things you do that you later regret (but that make a really good story).
6:01 PM: Easter Dinner. We may have eaten a lot today.	8:11 PM: Chocolate chocolate cake and an episode of Weeds for dessert!

See more 12 of 12ers at Chad's site!

Newsday Tuesday

Obama looking at cooling air to fight warming

In fact, global warming is occurring so rapidly that the current administration is also investigating its use as a distribution mechanism for the federal stimulus package, as many states are complaining that the money is not arriving fast enough. "We have a very fortuitous overlap," said Holdren, "since the states that do not believe in global warming, like Alaska, are also the states that are refusing to accept the stimulus money." Holdren also mentioned that successful attempts to harness the speed of global warming could ultimately lead to improved response times in clearance background checks, passports, and the time it takes to get from the end of the Blue Line to Metro Center.

To promote consumer awareness, the Nantucket Nectars corporation has trademarked "Summer Sea Ice" and is donating 5% of the profits from their new drink to geoengineering research. They will also be sponsoring cow tipping (point) competitions on college campuses, since explosions of methane are both hilarious and educational.

Like all good politicians using bad analogies, Holdren's description of global warming was open-ended enough to be interpreted multiple ways. He did not specify whether we were driving the car towards the base of a cliff, which would probably result in immediate death and dismemberment, or whether we were driving off the top of the cliff, which would assuredly be scary, but would also give us precious seconds to fashion a makeshift global warming parachute out of seat cushions and safety belts.

A closer look at the schedule revealed that 7 other sessions discussed the legitimacy of climate science, with an 8th devoted to bad weather jokes like "How many meteorologists does it take to change a lightbulb?¹

Although John Holdren insisted that no approaches were off the table, it was discovered that he had already abandoned less promising approaches:

• Telling people to stop breathing.
• Gathering melted Arctic ice in ice cube trays and refreezing it.
• Breaking down CO₂ into its base elements, and then starting a carbon dating website to pair up the newly single carbons with other less destructive elements.

In mentioning these possible catastrophes, Holdren inadvertently revealed the Soviet Union's secret Cold War stash of methane bombs, painstakingly created by feeding the populace lentils and beans for over thirty years. Although Khrushchev had hoped for power on the order of Hiroshima, the research was devalued after the bombs "just made people run out of the room", and permanently discontinued after some test subjects merely reported that "it smelled like popcorn".

¹: Three -- two to hold the ladder and one to climate.

Memory Day: Fifteen Years Ago Today

On Friday, April 15, 1994, I was fourteen years old, and a stalwart tenth grader at T.C. Williams High School. With public schools slowly migrating away from the "junior high" system, tenth graders were at the bottom of the high school caste (and freshmen had a school all to themselves like some sort of prepubescent syphillis quarantine). Here are a few memorable moments from this day, taken from the journal I kept at the time.

♠ Homeroom was a hodge-podge amalgamation of students who weren't actually classmates -- anyone who took Art at some point during the day might end up in the Art room for morning announcements. As such, I was at a paint-splattered table with upperclassmen, Kathryn Danaher, Diana Polson, and Emily Roberts, reading my book while they talked about field hockey and other chick stuff. A very young Matt McGuire (long before his present day woes) had a crush on Emily, and chose today to try out his intricate plot to accidentally on-purpose bump into her. During homeroom, he came in and nonchalantly asked in a campy voice, "Hello Brian, do you know if we have English today? Oh hello there, Emily!" Given that we had English every day, and that Emily knew of Matt's secret love, this was as painful for me to watch as it was for you to read about.

♠ Fourth period was Biology BSCS (an utterly worthless suffix that didn't actually stand for anything, but does rhyme with buenos dies if you ever need to write about it in a Spanish poem). With eight weeks and eight chapters left in the book, Lois LaPlante divided the class into groups so we could teach ourselves while she continued to get paid. Her trouble-meter must have been on the fritz (not the Fritz in the class) when she allowed me to group up with Jack Wilmer, Ben Seggerson, and Jenny Holland (before she got famous and changed her name to Ada). We were told to get started on The Immune System, but spent the entire period making smart-ass remarks instead -- when she asked Jack how to alphabetize a table in WordPerfect, I'm sure she didn't want to hear, "Well you start at 'A'...".

♠ When the weather was nice, I spent fifth period lunch under the trees in front of the school, eating with my junior high friends like Jennie Geisner and Cheryl Sherling. Michelle Cao came out to eat with us today, since taking fifth period Photography gave her free reign to wander around the school for an entire period, pretending to take pictures of questionable artistic merit. Like no one has ever taken a picture of the flag pole FROM RIGHT BELOW IT before...

♠ I spent sixth period Art doing preliminary sketches for my surreal locker scene, which still hangs on the wall in my office to this day. Our school did not have wooden floors, but the picture looked dumb with shiny floors, and dumb art is dumb.

♠ After school came Crew. With clowns like Ben Seggerson, Tim Shaw, and Dutton Hauhart, I was on the 3rd 8, which translates into "all the rowers that weren't good enough to be in the top sixteen slots" and we brought the concept of mediocrity to roughly the same old levels. Because it was a Friday, we were spared our normal workout. Instead, we were "allowed" to do a three mile run and ended up at the Lee Street Park where we played ultimate frisbee until it got dark and I bummed a ride off the nearest rower with a car. This was followed by a "boat party" at my house to pump us up for Saturday's race. My hosting of the party made little sense since our boat also had a surplus of bad coxswains, and I wasn't the one in the race. Even so, I diligently woke up the next morning at 6 AM for the races, partially for moral support, but mostly for all the girls in spandex.

Review Day

There are no spoilers in these reviews.

Slumdog Millionaire (R):
Rebecca and I watched this a couple weeks ago and enjoyed it a lot, she more than I. I felt like it was a perfectly agreeable movie, but a little too overhyped for what it was. The movie tells the story of a poor Indian fellow who ends up doing amazingly well on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Suspected of being a cheater, he tells the stories behind how he knew each answer through flashback.

Final Grade: B+

Traveling Light by Courtney Jaye:
This was a Pandora recommendation, and features a strong singer with catchy slightly-country songs. I haven't listened to this CD as much as the other two reviewed today, but it's pleasant to have on, even if none of the songs have stuck out yet as memorable. You can listen to online samples here -- #2 is the song I heard on Pandora.

Final Grade: B

One Cell in the Sea by A Fine Frenzy:
This CD is the reason I've devoted less time to the others, since it's been playing in my car all week long. Fine (or Ms. Frenzy if you aren't tight with her as I am) focuses on whimsical, dreamy lyrics and harmonic textures in her songs (somewhat like Ingrid Michaelson's arrangements) and has two distinct singing voices: one that's richly wispy and another that's bright and clear, reminiscent of Nelly Furtado. Sometimes her clear voice is a little too shrill, but this is only noticeable in a couple songs. The song, You Picked Me is well-constructed and well-performed, and a strong contender for my 2009 songs of the year. You can listen to online samples here -- My favourites include #1, #4, #5, #6, and #10.

Final Grade: A-

Room Noises by Eisley:
You can immediately tell that Eisley is a young band -- this CD was their first back in 2005 when the siblings-turned-band were still high-school age. The singing isn't perfect, and they have the classic new composer problem of overusing certain textures (you don't have to sing in every moment of every song), but you can also tell that there are some great ideas in here that could germinate into something more as they mature. They're as whimsical as A Fine Frenzy, but more tempo-oriented. You can listen to online samples here -- I really like #10.

Final Grade: B-

Friday Fragments

a roundhouse kick to the Internet

♠ Exactly three weeks ago, I started a new Warcraft character on a new server after learning that Kelley had the secret shame of playing the game. We are now members of the Delta Mu guild on Dawnbringer. Leveling up is ridiculously easy now, and the new character is already level 67. Maybe in 2 more levels, we'll be able to convince Doobie and Philip to play as well.

♠ Besides playing games and conscripting my dad to build a closet in the basement, I've been busy at work because our four month "sprint" is finally drawing to a close at the end of this month. When not assisting clueless users with testing or accidentally calling a woman with a Vietnamese name by "Mr." in support emails, I've kept up with technology by taking the annual security training offered by the government.

♠ The briefing is more annoying than usual because each page is a Flash applet that takes ten seconds to load and asks ridiculous questions about what to do when your coworker Miguel tells you that he's found a website with free music downloads. Apparently the RIAA has infiltrated the Department of Defense, since the only correct answer for this question was "THAT'S STEALING!". I was not aware that 100% of music downloads on the Internet were illegal. Damn those Hispanic coworkers and their pirating ways.

♠ There are surprisingly few Spanish pirates in popular culture. I suppose they all lost their mojo after the defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588.

♠ Surprisingly, I remembered the date of the armada's defeat from fifth grade history class, although I did look it up on Wikipedia to be sure. Meanwhile, I don't remember a single fact from my "Roman World and Early Christianity" class at Virginia Tech except that it's very hard to skip during a class with only 7 people.

♠ Speaking of Wikis, the series whose Wiki I contribute to is being rereleased in the United States with fresh new covers (and maybe even different characters and a bonus ending). I'm purchasing the set as it's published, which means that I have old paperback copies available for borrowing if anyone is curious about the books. People either love or hate the series though -- one person I recommended it to (actually the Internet Canadian who was in love with me) was bored out of her mind. Paige also read the first book, but she never revealed what she thought about it. On the other hand, Paige is naturally reticent and unopinionated unless you ask about her former piano teachers.

♠ With work (hopefully) returning to normal soon, I've been in search of something new to fill the void left by paid overtime. The last time work receded like low tide was February 2007, and in the single week that followed, I beat the Legend of Zelda on the Wii, renovated my office, and also met some random chick who's now going to become my future wife. Since I don't necessarily need TWO wives, I've decided to fill the upcoming void by writing the music for a marching band show for Patrick Butler, in his role as the director of the Pulaski County High School band. This ought to be good.

♠ Plans for the weekend include the tentative possibility of nonstop work punctuated by the birthday of Rebecca's dad. I may also finally get around to implementing a Birthday Calendar here on the URI! Zone now that Facebook's revised edition has the usability of a two-ply toilet paper condom.

♠ Speaking of birthdays, Happy Birthday to Kim! Have a great weekend!

New Feature Day: Birthdays

In between a birthday dinner at Foxfire Grill (where I had a delicious prime rib), Dim Sum (which is not just a TI-85 calculator command) at China Garden on Sunday morning, and five hours of work, I finally managed to complete the URI! Zone Birthday Calendar. You can see it on the right, just underneath the little calendar that links back to recent posts.

Gleaned from an initial dataload of every birthday listed by my 359 Facebook friends merged with the list I'd been keeping since high school that mostly had people I will never, ever see again, the Birthday Calendar now knows the birthdays of 361 different people, and will show you the birthdays coming up over the next four days (as well as any birthdays that happened yesterday, in case you're a horrible human being and missed one).

First up is Marc Nagy, who shares his birthday today with both Adolf Hitler and Carmen Electra. Happy Birthday!

Now that all this data is in place, I can add other features, like the ability to look at all the birthdays at once, see which days have the most birthdays, or link your birthdays to your Comments name so balloons and strippers appear on the screen when you visit. If your birthday isn't listed on Facebook and you'd like to feel important enough to be recognized by a website when the day comes, feel free to email your birthdays or your kids birthdays using the email link in the top bar!

Newsday Tuesday

A statistically insignificant amount of students tested thought that only 20 percent of the rain would hit the ground because of "evaporization and stuff".

The use of Pacific Northwesterners may have skewed the results, since they all presumed that it would always be raining every day of the week. Therefore, the numeric percentage would obviously have to represent something other than the chance of rain. Attempts to normalize results by polling villagers from Wadt Halfa, Sudan failed because they didn't understand what rain was.

According to Wikipedia, the Precipicons were a third faction of Transformers which could transform into various stages of the water cycle, led by Hailotron. Susan Joslyn noted that this faction was relatively unknown, which might have influenced the results. Students performed more strongly in a second experiment which used familiar Mega Man villains to represent weather patterns, but unfortunately those results could not be published because of a rights dispute with Dustin Hoffman.

In this experiment, only 22% of students correctly interpreted the forecast. 54% were utterly confused by the format of the test and expressed that they were angry at the researcher but didn't know why. The other 24% predicted that it was going to rain at the bakery.

Somewhere during the course of the study, the conclusion that "people are failing to interpret a symbol with a commonly accepted definition" morphed into "people are intentionally changing the meaning of a symbol because they don't like uncertainty". This is a patently false observation. If an escalator consumes your child because you thought the safety sign told him to play Dance Dance Revolution near the edges or the top, it's not the escalator's problem -- you are most likely a moron.

It is actually highly useful for the government to know that 48% of their citizens aren't so bright, because it makes the decisions quite easy. Close schools? Morons needs schooling, so no. Close roads? Morons can't drive, so yes. The possibilities are limitless.

Memory Day: Learn2Drive

My first driving experience (outside of steering on my dad's lap) came at the Go Kart Raceway after sixth grade, at the birthday/going-away party of the occasionally mentioned Daniel Bethancourt. The track workers were leery of letting someone so small drive a go kart, and after getting stuck on the tire-barriers twice, they drove me back to the beginning and told me to go wait in the video arcade.

Three years later, I took the classroom portion of Driver's Ed during 10th Grade Summer Gym, since it was offered freely to all public school students in Alexandria. The quality of the offering matched it's price, since the entire session consisted of old reel-to-reel films about accidents (and not even any gory precursors to the Saw franchise). Unfortunately Asians age much slower than those around them, and I was only 13 at the time of the course. This meant that I wouldn't actually be able to drive for another 3 years.

In the summer before my senior year, my parental training consisted of three full laps around the NOVA campus parking lot before taking it to the next level with Interstate 395. After proving to my dad that I could drive in a straight line, I took the test to get my learner's permit. I failed two questions -- one on blood-alcohol limits and another on types of license penalties, and then passed the practical test with an Examiner who didn't care about my driving as much as he cared about having a new audience for his governmental conspiracy theories.

With learner's permit firmly in hand, I set out to acquire the mandatory "seven hours of road driving" required to become a full-privilege driver in Virginia. Although today I realize that seven hours is barely enough to master the radio, at the time I hated it because it seemed like such a long period, especially when stretched into seven hour-long sessions. We went with Keith's Driving School, probably because there was a discount involved, but also because Keith looks like an upstanding not-at-all-shady individual who would also be able to sue for millions and protect our rights if we got in a car accident.

My instructor ended up being Big Mike, an overweight fellow with rainbow stickers on his car who asked me if I had a boyfriend. During the hours driving around Hybla Valley, he would play demo tapes of his amateur recording sessions on country guitar. One of the songs he'd written had the chorus "You're the only man I'll ever love". Then he'd get hungry and force one of the drivers to take him to 7-11.

Money well spent.

New Feature Day: Birthdays, the SQL

Buoyed on the tidal wave of positive feedback for the Birthdays feature, I've expanded it with two new perks:

1. At the bottom of the Birthdays panel is a "more" link which will take you to a complete list of all the hundreds of birthdays I've collected.
2. If a birthday person has a Facebook account, you can now click on their name to visit their profile, where you can leave any birthday wishes you'd like. Since many souls don't necessarily visit my site on a daily basis or AT ALL, this will have to suffice until The URI! Zone, like Catholicism, takes over the world.

Currently, only birthdays in April and May have had their Facebook accounts connected, but I'll be sure to add the rest as their birthdays approach. If you think some birthdays are missing that deserve to be listed, please let me know.

You may have noticed the site going up and down a couple times yesterday -- this was me testing the new features, because as everyone knows, the only hardcore way to test a beta feature is on a live site that affects millions of users. Since I was busy doing that yesterday, I did not get to write a new update for today, so I'll end with a few fun birthday facts culled from this tottering Jenga tower of data in my database.

What is the most popular month to make babies in?

Currently, May has the most birthays, and February has the least, which means that your parents were the most amorous in September when the kids went back to school and they regained some privacy, and the least amorous in June at the start of summer vacation.

Which birthdate is the most popular?

April 27th, which is just around the corner, squeaks ahead with five people having birthdays.

Who's the eldest of them all?

Dr. Allen Bachelder wins the prize with a 1939 birthday!

Interested in any other unseen facets of the birthdays that I might be able to expose through a SQL database query? Ask in the Comments section!

Friday Fragments

♠ Yesterday, while driving down to DISA for the eight hundredth time, I saw road crews busily erasing the dotted white lines from Sterling Boulevard and replacing them with pinked zigzags of merriment. I had half a mind to steer the car as the zigzags dictated, but then remembered my experiences from childhood, where zigzagging my bike always resulted in a crash of some sort.

♠ I presumed the lines were to warn motorists of the bike path and found out that I was right. That article's a little too short to mock in a Newsday, but I'd definitely like to mock the fellow from Connecticut who's complaining about having to walk his bike across a four-lane highway. The appropriate solution would be a bridge or a tunnel.

♠ The other day, while driving past my old middle school, I saw students in their ugly gym uniforms riding bikes in tight circles around the fenced-in tennis court. As each kid got their chance to bike for 100 yards, they dismounted and gave the bike to someone else. I don't know where the school got the funds to buy twenty communal bicycles, but I'm guessing that's why some of the students still have to learn in trailers next to the school.

♠ The students who didn't want to ride bikes were walking slow circles around the track, gossiping and getting their heart rates up over 50 to avoid obesity. Back in my day there were always 3 or 4 of them, but now it's almost half a class. We always hated the Perpetual Walkers in our class because never had to do a thing, and the gym teachers had long since given up on motivating them.

♠ I've been perpetually walking in my new brown shoes for over a month now, and still haven't encountered the curious knee wasting disease that afflicted me when I was walking all over Europe. For the better part of two weeks, I hobbled through subway stations like a gimp with an uneven pegleg.

♠ Plans for the weekend include lots of work, unless we finish successfully this evening. Maybe I'll even get a birthday dinner into the mix (though not my own). What are you doing this weekend?

♠ Happy Birthday to Pip and Andrea! Have a great weekend!

Overtime Day

I worked all day and all night on Friday and came home at 1 PM on Saturday. I then slept through the night to Sunday. On Sunday, I did not write anything for you to read today, but we did have sushi for lunch, and then a whole roasted chicken with barbeque sauce for dinner, which we ate on the back porch in the toasty warmth.

I've consumed too much bacon in my lifetime to get the swine flu, but the overabundance of pollen in the air is making my nose itch. It's not as bad as my last month in Blacksburg back in 2001, when I couldn't stop coughing for two continuous weeks, even while sleeping. I think it was prolonged exposure to my roommates.

I have nothing else to say today so I'll leave you with a story. Two years ago, one of our users at work decided to create a "Planning and Operations" domain to hold all their data. After months of uploading thousands of metadata artifacts, the domain was presented to the people who might be interested in using it. For some reason, no one took it seriously, possibly because the chosen abbreviation for the domain was PLOP.

Today, it is called PLAN.

Just Plain Tuesday

I was stuck in the alien autopsy room until late last night, so I didn't have time to write a Newsday, or a Museday, or even a Boozeday.

Just Plain Wednesday

Today is also the eighth anniversary of my recital featuring Doobie.

Mini Review Day

There are no spoilers in this review.

Battlestar Galactica: Season One:
This show has a relatively huge following, and the entire series recently ended, so I figured it'd be a good candidate for a new show to watch. The first season opens with a three hour miniseries pilot and then about a dozen more episodes.

I've never really gotten into space shows -- I could care less about Star Wars or Star Trek, so I may not be the target audience. However, I thought that this show was reasonably entertaining, although sometimes it felt like something intangible was missing. Firefly was several orders of magnitude better, but this series would be good enough to keep you watching.

The effects are pretty solid throughout, although sometimes they veer towards the cheesiness of the first ten minutes of the Firefly pilot, which almost make you embarrassed to be watching. The show really overuses the effect of quickly zooming in and out to show the sheer magnitude of spaceships -- once is enough. Dream sequences are also overused, almost to Sopranos-like extremes, and usually they're just an excuse for a hot half-naked chick to walk around to increase viewership.

The bottom line: If you were to take Firefly, give it characters that you care less about, and include the annoying lady from Dances with Wolves, you'd end up with this show. Since my other shows aren't releasing new seasons anytime soon, I might pick up another season, but I don't need to keep watching.

Final Grade: B-