Posts from 06/2018

Friday, June 01, 2018

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (PG-13):
This unnecessary reboot-sequel to the original movie updates the premise by making the titular board game a video game. It was surprisingly pleasant to watch (especially if you go in with low expectations) as it features actors playing out of their typecast and exploits common video game tropes. I remember very little of the original, other than the fact that it involved screaming children, screaming animals, and very poor sound mixing, but this did not affect my understanding or enjoyment of the new version at all.

Final Grade: B+

Jon Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous at Radio City:
This stand-up special was consistently funny, and the physicality of his presence adds an extra layer of humour above what you might get from an audio recording of the same jokes. Free on Netflix.

Final Grade: B+

Game of Thrones, Season Seven:
I checked out of caring about Game of Thrones somewhere in season two. However, this abbreviated penultimate season is much better than any season since the first and really pushes the plot forward (as long as you can accept the "Fast Travel" approach to moving people between far-flung cities that would have taken 8 years to travel between in earlier seasons). It seems like a basic script-writing lesson, but the writers have finally figured out that scenes are more interesting when all of the main characters get to play off of each other, rather than having each one of them off in their own little plot worlds. My only fear for the upcoming final season is that we'll get stuck with hundreds of boring battle scenes. You can only make killing a zombie intriguing so many times.

Final Grade: B+

Ali Wong: Hard Knock Wife:
Unlike an Amy Schumer stand-up special, this comedian is both vulgar AND funny. This particular special has a lot more new baby jokes than her first special (which was the right target market for us), which may get tiresome if you are kid-free. Free on Netflix.

Final Grade: B

tagged as reviews | permalink | 3 comments
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Monday, June 04, 2018

List Day: Changes in Habits

Pre-Maia Post-Maia
Bedtime 10:30 PM weekdays, 11:00 PM weekends 10:30 PM every day
Wake-up Time 5:00 AM weekdays, 6:30 AM weekends 6:30 AM every day except in-office day (5:20 AM)
Exercise 1.5 - 3 hours of jogging per week 0 hours of jogging per week
TV Watching 1 - 4 hours per day 0 - 1 hours per day
Gaming 2 - 5 hours per day 0 - 2 hours per day
Commutes 14 miles round-trip, 3 times per week 30 miles round-trip, 1 time per week
Hours Worked 40 - 45 hours 0 - 20 hours
Dinners Made On the Grill 2 - 3 per week 0 - 1 per week
Barbeques 4 per year 1 per year so far
Time Spent on Smartphone less than 1 hour per day 1 - 2 hours per day
Musical Compositions Created 0 per year 0 per year
Trips to the Mall 0 per week 1 - 2 per week
Diapers Disposed 0 per day 7 - 10 per day
Open-Source Computer Work Done 1 batch of work per month 1 batch of work per quarter
Restaurant Meals 2 - 3 per week 0 - 1 per week
Laundry 1 - 2 per week 2 per week (3 in the brief experimentation period of cloth diapers)
Progeny 0 1

tagged as lists, offspring | permalink | 0 comments
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Wednesday, June 06, 2018

Memory Day: Snapshots

This picture was taken ten years ago today, on Friday, June 6, 2008.

Following a rousing night of Jazz in the Garden at the Sculpture Garden in DC, a portion of the group (myself, Rebecca, Jessika, Baylis, Mike, and Shakir) split off for drinks at a bar near the Verizon Center. Mike is clearly impressed by Jessika's story. One of these people had too much to drink and became obsessed with playing catch with Mike someday, and then threw up at the Blue Line transfer point in the Rosslyn metro, forcing us to wait another 20 minutes for the next train.

tagged as memories | permalink | 1 comment
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Friday, June 08, 2018

Maia Week #48 Battle Report

Maia is now 11.0466 months old and reaching the end of the phase where everything is rigorously documented -- the next Battle Report will liking come out in 2035 and cover her angst in choosing between Virginia Tech and an out of state school because all of the other in-state schools will no longer exist due to inferiority. Maia still weighs in the 16 - 17 pound range and crawls all over the place. She can clamber onto platforms less than a foot off the ground and then use that perch to get elsewhere higher, but cannot yet go up stairs on her own. She has one more front tooth growing in from above now for a grand total of 3. Like her father, she is already adept at accidentally biting her lip between these teeth.

We've settled on May 14th being her first word day. It was just "Dada", but she pointed and laughed at me like a bully while saying it so clearly it has a connected meaning now. She still says "bwa" more than "dada" though.

Maia hates being on the changing table unless distracted by a toy, and loves being in the bathtub for her twice weekly bath. Last bath, she ignored every single bath toy and played with her belly button the whole time -- she has a future as the Army Liaison to the Office of Naval Contemplation.

She has almost every room of the house open to her now and is often content to just sit around playing by herself while we do our own thing nearby. A common game is to take things out of one container and put them into another. Another game, called "Truffle Hunter", is where she wrinkles up her face and makes heavy breathing noises. She still has not caught the cat, but the cat allows her to get within 5 feet of her before moving away -- I'm sure they'll be best friends in about 4 years.

There has been a gentle upswing in the amount of work I'm taking on, which makes the days a little bit longer. However, this is balanced out by the consistent 90 minute nap that Maia takes every day around 1 PM. The second nap is hit-or-miss -- it's either 30 minutes of crying followed by 30 minutes of dozing, or a full hour of fussing. I expect that this 2nd nap will be the first one to phase out as Maia grows up!

tagged as offspring, day-to-day | permalink | 0 comments
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Monday, June 11, 2018

Data Day: Cloud Hosting Costs

The URI! Zone has been running IN THE CLOUD for just over three years now, so I thought I would compute the costs to see if I'm really getting my money's worth. The answer isn't completely cut and dried, as I do a lot more with the flexibility offered by the cloud, spinning up new servers on the fly to work on Sparkour or taking over hosting duties for the Paravia Wiki. Still, I'm very satisfied with what I've gotten for the amount I've paid.

In the olden days, I was spending $240 a year on the "complete" hosting package for the URI! Zone. I could login to my space on the shared server and upload files but not much else. When I moved into AWS, I added a 3rd server (Web/App/DB instead of just App/DB), and also an SSL Certificate so I would appear more trustworthy when telepathically stealing your credit card information.

The data for year #1 in the cloud is a little skewed since I took advantage of the introductory year's worth of free services through AWS. At the end of that year, I also purchased reserved instances on multi-year contracts for a lower price. It wasn't until year #2 and #3 that I could actually look at comparable costs. Through the advanced mathematical process of hand-waving and bad estimation, I would say that my cost per server has gone down in the cloud from $114 per server to about $93 per server. My productivity and ease of deployment has gone way up and I've only suffered a single outage (5 hours in 2015) in the whole time.

Bottom Line: Moving to the cloud took a good deal of upfront effort to do intelligently, but the pay-offs in cost reduction, productivity, and flexibility have more than outweighed this. I am very happy with AWS as a cloud environment, even though I don't need or use a majority of the services offered.

tagged as data, website | permalink | 0 comments
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Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Chad Darnell's 12 of 12

12 pictures of your day on the 12th of every month

5:35 AM: Showered and ready for work.
6:07 AM: The new normal work breakfast, in the absence of giant boxes of chips or an office to store them in.
8:01 AM: Working hard.
11:49 AM: Arrived home to find a back porch party.
12:04 PM: Leftover chicken for lunch, 50% inedibly dry. Thanks, Safeway.
12:44 PM: Lunchtime for children (and kitties).
3:18 PM: Post-nap drinks.
3:55 PM: Using voting as an excuse to crawl around in the grass.
5:07 PM: Egg for dinner, followed by beefcarrotbroccoli puree.
6:18 PM: Using second "nap" to make some taco beef.
7:45 PM: Bellybutton bathtime.
8:55 PM: Taco Night!

tagged as 12 of 12 | permalink | 1 comment
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Friday, June 15, 2018

Review Day: Divinity: Original Sin 2

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is an excellent Kickstarter-based, old-school role-playing game with minor deficiencies that will probably be ironed out in the Enhanced Edition coming out later this year (free for owners of the original). It features a top-down view with a fully rotatable camera, turn-based combat built up around Action Points that allow you to cast, attack, or move specific amounts, and an involving story based in high fantasy without feeling overused. If someone were to modernize Ultima 6 and Ultima 7 today, this is probably as close as you could get to those classics.

I enjoyed the original D:OS game until its cumbersome UI got in the way. This round is much more polished but still a little on the clicky side -- my hands grew tired after gaming sessions in a Diablo 3 type of way. The first thing to experience is the completely open-ended character creation system with multiple races and classes that provides a starting point for your character but doesn't lock you into any permanent decisions. There are 6 ready-made characters with involved plot lines, as well as the option to roll your own. Instead of just attributes and skills, your character's build is broken down even further into attributes, talents, civil abilities, combat abilities, and finally skills that you can purchase based on which abilities you've selected. The sheer amount of options will give you party paralysis (as a perpetual reroller, I'm relieved that I managed to reroll only twice before committing to the rest of the game).

Graphics, sound, and presentation are all excellent, with great voice acting for every role and the ability to skip cutscenes. Combat is intentionally challenging, with overwhelming numbers of enemies that will quickly mow you down unless you maximize the use of the element-based battlegrounds (such as casting a rain spell to get the enemies wet then using lightning on them for bonus damage). Thankfully, there is also an easy difficulty mode for people that just care about the plot. Though I enjoyed the challenge in combat, it eventually wore me down. There are a limited number of set encounters (no random ones) and I always seemed to hit them just before I'd planned to stop playing. Encounters can last forever with so many characters taking their turns, especially when you die and need to try again.

I pooped out on D:OS2 about 2/3rds of the way through from simple fatigue -- there is so much to do and explore that it's not a great fit for my completionist tendencies and the journal system does not do a good job of juggling enough information for all of your different quests. Since I like to explore the whole map, I would also stumble into bits of the story that I didn't know I was supposed to be doing yet, which made some of the sidequests more confusing. In the 90s, this flaw would proudly fall under "old-school charm".

Still, I got a solid 50 hours of enjoyment out of this game and would recommend it for anyone who wants a classic RPG experience. I can see why so many publications made it Game of the Year last year even though no one in mainstream gaming had heard of it.

Final Grade: B

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Monday, June 18, 2018

Face Recognition Day

Have you noticed how creepily accurate the face recognition feature of Google Photos has become recently? Especially mapping from baby pictures to kids!

To see this in your own Google Photos albums, bring up a picture with people in it, hit the "i" Info button, and it will show you who it thinks is in the picture. Drill down on one of those people and it will show you every photo from your albums that it believes includes that person!

tagged as media | permalink | 2 comments
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Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Review Day: Beat Saber (Early Access)

"Not to sound like a shitty Ted Talk or anything, but virtual reality is finally here."

I pulled my Oculus Rift out of storage last week after not having played with it since that whole "having a kid" thing happened. In addition to re-downloading all of the games I partially played and dropped midway, I also used up some store credit on a pre-release version of Beat Saber, a rhythm game in which you slash through blocks with light sabers in time to the music. Since the awful first season of Riverdale proved that telling is inferior to showing, here is a gameplay video recorded in my new semi-permanent VR room (formerly known as "the workout room" and sometimes known as "the basement"):

I'm not usually the target market for rhythm games -- in spite of my music degree, I do awfully in Rock Band and Guitar Hero. As one of 4 people in the world that ever bought the dance mat for the Nintendo GameCube, I must make due with getting a barely passing grade while dancing to the Super Mario Brothers theme song and getting laughed at by a Goomba. In spite of this, I took to Beat Saber very easily.

At Early Access, the game contains 10 songs written exclusively for this game with 4 difficulty modes. I do pretty well on Hard mode, but fail almost immediately on Expert mode where there are more blocks flying at you than Funko Pop dolls when a tornado hits Gamestop. The game is very enjoyable at a visceral level, with satisfying feedback on block slicing and fun patterns that really get your body moving -- the designers clearly want you to play with your entire body instead of playing it safe with tiny, precise, controlled cuts. It can be quite the workout at higher levels and will no doubt fuel a demand for after-market headset covers that don't absorb all of your sweat for the next player to bathe in.

Since the game is still Early Access, it feels pretty limited in content. However, there's a lot of potential here (especially the possibility for mods, like this mod that puts Gangam Style in the game and forces you to do the actual dance). This could definitely be a game that pulls non-VR gamers into the fray without having to wade through the slow, extended tutorials and endless slideshows that currently act as a VR gatekeeper. Rebecca really enjoys playing as well and sometimes uses it as a wake-up workout before Maia is up in the morning!

Final Grade: I'd give it a B right now, subject to change when it's officially released!

tagged as reviews, games | permalink | 3 comments
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Friday, June 22, 2018

Rebecca Day

Happy 35th Birthday to the awesome Rebecca Uri! She is kicking ass as Mother of Maia and Licensed Physical Therapy Assistant Extraordinaire (LPTAE). Today, she is going to the 11:30 yoga class and then getting a special birthday dinner prepared by Chef BU.

tagged as day-to-day | permalink | 1 comment
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Monday, June 25, 2018

Paint Day

On Sunday, we went to one of those date nights where you drink wine and paint a picture. Here's the original:

Can you guess which one is Rebecca's and which one is mine?

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Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

No Shame by Lily Allen:
Every artist seems to go through an album fatigue phase where they do a lot of mellow songs and sound in need of a long nap (see also, KT Tunstall's Crescent Empire album, as well as Muse's Second Law album). Lily Allen is no exception. This album has a few pleasant songs but very little that is memorable or in the same vein as her older songs. Also, the album cover looks like her label texted her for art on a deadline and she sent them the last blurry picture from her phone.

Final Grade: C+

Arrested Development, Season Four Remix:
This is a re-editing of the awful fourth season of Arrested Development intended to overcome its core limitation: the fact that most of the characters are not interesting enough for an extended storyline and need the rest of the cast to play off of. Early episodes are definitely more like the originals, but this is not enough to make the fourth season stories any more interesting. It's telling that the best parts of the first episodes are newly-inserted flashbacks to existing scenes from the third season. I wanted to watch through this before starting the new fifth season, but gave up after just four episodes. It was interesting to see salient members of the cast of Outsourced (including the taxi driver that Mike went to high school with) in the India episode. Free on Netflix.

Final Grade: Not Rated

Downsizing (R):
This is an awful, pointless, overly long movie in which Matt Damon is shrunk down to help conserve our natural resources. The movie focuses on the story of the most boring character in the cast and it takes too long to get to any of the interesting characters. A whole ton of wasted worldbuilding potential can be found here.

Final Grade: D

Everything Sucks, Season One:
This comedy about high schoolers in the 90s feels a little like Stranger Things without all of the annoying fantasy bits. It drags a good deal in the middle but is over quickly and ends well. Free on Netflix.

Final Grade: B-

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Friday, June 29, 2018

End-of-the-Month Highlights Day

New photos have been added to the Life, 2018 album. Google Photos sucks.

  • Events
    • Rebecca got purple highlights in her hair on F 6/1 and we had a family dinner at Cafesano.

    • Visited Larry and Janice and the kids in Maryland and had Thai rolled ice cream for the first time on S 6/2.

    • I ordered unhealthy Chinese delivery for dinner while Rebecca opted for a weird hippie dish from Mom's Organic Market on S 6/3.

    • Took Maia to see the paternal grandparents while Rebecca took a continuing ed class on S 6/9.

    • Ghazaley came to visit Rebecca and Maia while BU had a Dad Dinner at Miller's on S 6/10.

    • Voted in the VA primary on T 6/12.

    • Maia learned to go up 14 stairs on W 6/13.

    • Went to the doctor to get rid of my month-long congestion with DRUGS on F 6/15. Maia had her first pool experience at Ghazaley's.

    • Rebecca hit the Farmer's Market with Maia on S 6/16.

    • Spent Father's Day with the family on S 6/17. Hit Crestview Park, set up a semipermanent VR space in the basement, and ate burgers at Burger 21.

    • Made chicken pesto for Rebecca's birthday on F 6/22.

    • Rebecca and Maia went to the Farmer's Market with Tammy and Jessika on S 6/23.

    • Went on a Paint Date with Rebecca on S 6/24.

    • Went to the Inova summer picnic on F 6/29.

    • Having the Smiths over for food and games on S 6/30.

  • Projects
    • Worked on a big proposal effort at work all month long.

    • Reacquired my expired AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate cert on S 6/10.

    • Reacquired my expired AWS Certified Developer - Associate cert on S 6/17.

    • Obtained my new AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional cert on M 6/25.

  • Consumerism
    • Pulled the Oculus Rift out of storage and enjoyed Beat Saber this month. Invested in an SSD hard drive for faster load times.

    • Watching TV more slowly than ever. Enjoying season two of 3%.

    • No new music of note this month.

June's Final Grade: B+, no peaks or summits, but a nice rhythm with lots of fun daily activities.

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