Tuesday, 6/6/06
No, I'm never going to update my blog (to whomever it was that asked without filling in their name on the contact form).

My site-updating tool is offline right now (the web hosting service must have upgraded the PHP version or something), so it's impractical to write updates (I'm editing directly into HTML source for this one) and I don't have time right now to debug the problem.

Since I'm already working on getting the church praise team online, and since I'm doing some Struts work for my day job, what I'll probably do is port the site-updating tools to Java / JSP / Struts, and then you'll get your updates. Whoopidy-doo!

Some news, while I'm here: Sarah and I have just purchased a condominium in roughly the same area as our old apartment ("no more we leev like-a peegs in this Pottah's Feeld"), so we're moving in, and Sarah's parents have graciously driven up from Tennessee to help out and to do a bunch of painting.

And I've worked for a year now at JEM Engineering (started either in May or August, depending on how you look at it). Things are going fine, and while I haven't accomplished everything that I hoped to in the first year, we have made some good progress.

Sarah's switching jobs, too. Get in touch with me if you'd like to know more (it's a good thing).

That's all for now. Expect to go a month or two without seeing another update here (you can always just email me).

Saturday, 1/14/06
Hooray! After figuring out that my laptop's overheating problem was getting progressively worse and was therefore probably due to something degrading or accumulating, I came across these guys' writeup of how to disassemble your Toshiba Satellite P35 laptop and fix its overheating problem. Turns out that my laptop, like so many other high-quality products from Toshiba, tends to create giant dust bunnies in its cooling system. Now that all that junk is out of there, the laptop isn't shutting itself down after a few minutes of high-intensity grinding. All is well (as long as I perform a dust-bunnyectomy every six months or so).

Local friends will be disappointed that the Redskins lost today's quarterfinals game against the Seahawks, but I don't feel too bad about it since the Seahawks have been crummy for many long years, and so it's about time that they went to the conference championships.

Sarah and I finally went to see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe today. It was decent, and they didn't really mess anything up too much (although they did re-arrange things a little).

Tuesday, 12/20/05
Lots of people (i.e., two) are complaining about my update being not up-to-date. Fine! I'll write another one, just for you. Happy now?

I was so proud of my additional 512 MB of laptop memory (see last update) and how I could run gobs of programs simultaneously. Pride goeth before a fall, verily: now my laptop overheats (too much power!) and shuts itself down. So I've taken to running a little temperature monitor on it and to pointing a decently big clip-on fan at it, at least when I'm crunching things hard. I guess that's what I get for buying a "desktop replacement" laptop instead of one of those lower-powered Centrino-type laptops. I am humbled.

The church choir did its big cantata thing this Sunday. It was neat, because our director brought in a bunch of his friends to form a small (professional) orchestra to accompany us. They sounded really good, and they made us sound better, too. Sarah and I are both overjoyed that we will probably never have to sing "Mary, Did You Know" in a funky / jazzified style ever again (this particular rendition was occasionally referred to as "Mary, Can You Dig It").

I whacked my right little toe really good about a week ago, perhaps breaking it (doesn't make a big difference, because they don't do much for broken toes besides maybe taping them), so I'm still hobbling around a little bit and not running at all. The hip injury (on the other leg) is fine now, though (yay!), and that was a much bigger concern to me.

Wednesday, 10/26/05
With some help from Derek (who actually knows how to install circuit boards and/or read instructions), I just installed another 512 MB of memory in my laptop. Yay! Now I'm not grinding down to a crawl whenever I open more than five applications at a time. What a concept, being able to run Eclipse, WinAmp and Thout Reader simultaneously. I should have done this a long time ago, since the time saved would have paid the cost of the memory (~$70) within about two day's worth of use.

Sarah and I are, of course, back from our expedition to Maine. It was fun. Henry makes enjoyable grunting noises. We just missed the nasty weather, too.

Thursday, 10/20/05
Sarah and I are on the road, headed for a reunion / early Thanksgiving thing up in Maine with my side of the family. Right now, we're sitting in a coffee shop in Portland (ME) while Mom & Dad drive down to pick us up. We'll spend the next few days at their place.

We've both been working pretty hard for the last one and a half weeks, so taking a break will be nice. And we'll get to see Henry, so Sarah is very excited; between this trip and our upcoming trip to Tennessee (for Thanksgiving and, more importantly, to see 1.2 year-old Andrew), Sarah is calling this "the Fall of the Baby" (Gibbon-style).

I don't have a lot of time to get into social / culture issues lately, so these updates are correspondingly less interesting. And even if I do have some current events topics that I'm on top of, I don't have time to write much about them here. For instance: I think Harriet Miers should withdraw her nomination. That's all. (See, isnt' that annoying?)

Wednesday, 10/12/05
Another "working from home" day today. I don't actually work from home that often; I just write updates when I do (so know you know what's meant by "not that often").

The way it's sort of shaping up is that I work on company-wide stuff on Mondays, projects for external customers on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and a little of both on Fridays. Wednesdays either get sucked into the mix, too, or I get to reserve Wednesdays for software design / development tasks (which are better done from home, usually). It's still pretty experimental, though.

I ran in the Army Ten-Miler last weekend, which ended up being an estimated 11.2 miles because they re-routed us to avoid a suspicious package under a bridge. And I ended up wonking my hip pretty good, because I had an (unknown) existing muscle injury (just a strain or something) that started acting up pretty badly around mile five. I actually ended up dropping out of the race around mile eight, which wasn't all that bad because I got to cheer for the stragglers. I limped around a couple of days, but now things are starting to get back to normal. I'll start doing weights for a week or two, and then we'll see how running goes after that.

No more races this year, then (unless there's maybe a Christmas fun run or something). I was going to run in my church's annual 5K run this weekend, but that's out of the question. No big deal, and they need volunteers more than they need participants (it's a very well-attended race).

Tenor-singing is not too bad, so far. I squeak by (pun sort of intended) with about half an hour of casual warm-up (just a bunch of "zim-bah"s, for you Cross Products alums out there), since we don't usually have to sing anything higher than about a high D. I just got a bunch of tenor tips from Bryan Bilyeu, so I should be dabbling in some falsetto pretty soon (the horror!).

Tuesday, 09/20/05
I'll finally be working from home tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes. I think I'm going to make a whole bunch of progress on some of those oft-neglected internal projects that I've been sort of working on for the past month.

I am now the proud possessor (if not owner) of a Red Swingline Stapler (sorry for the pop-ups). As part of our recent expansion to the upstairs office space, our boss went out and bought a bunch of office supplies, and somehow I ended up with a Red Swingline. Let us hope that this is not an omen of future unemployment and arson.

And, in further "dubious honors" news, I have now been "promoted" to singing tenor in the church choir. Oh, the shame. It's definitely more interesting, musically speaking, but I've got to warm up a whole bunch beforehand. Maybe my upper range will expand over time, and maybe I'll get some kind of actual falsetto control going. Or maybe my vocal chords will just snap with a loud "twang", splattering little droplets of blood across the first three pews. Cool.

Wednesday, 09/14/05
I was going to work from home today, but an important meeting got rescheduled from yesterday to today, so no dice. Oh well. Maybe tomorrow.

One of the things I own at work is "knowledge management" (KM), which is basically a broad topic along the lines of "how do we remember and apply important / useful stuff in our work". Since it's such an amorphous topic, I figured it made sense to set up a wiki, specifically MediaWiki. That way, we'll have a nice dumping ground for various KM tidbits that come up, and I won't have to bother with creating some sort of structure from scratch (instead, you just let the structure emerge from work that people do on the wiki).

It didn't take that long to set up the wiki (about a day for everything, including installing the underlying operating system). Now I'm just sitting back and trying to encourage people to use (by talking it up and by writing a few "how to" articles). There's a few initial signs that the wiki is going to be a successful (=useful) venture, but we won't really know until a few months from now.

In other news, Sarah and I are part of a new couples' "small group" that's starting at our church (not actually located at the church, but whatever). It's your usual sort of thing, meeting once a week and doing studies together. Should be good.

Wednesday, 08/31/05
Full-time work at JEM has been going well. It has been about what I expected (that's easy to say, since I was "expecting the unexpected"), and I generally think it was the right move to make. There's still a bunch of challenges to overcome, but challenging work is what it's all about.

The biggest challenge right now is (as always) sorting out priorities and figuring out how to identify and tackle problems. My role at work is a combination of manager / engineer / business consultant / IT tools developer, so I've got a prospective tasks list that's a mile long. So being able to figure out what tasks are truly critical and what's merely "really important" is probably my number one challenge.

The commute up to Laurel is, as expected, taxing but bearable. I head to work ~early, before traffic on The Beltway gets nasty. I try to leave work early, too, although I've been less successful at that (but at least evening traffic isn't usually too bad). Sarah has been really good about putting up with my occasional working late or bringing work home (thanks, sweetie). And when I'm finally able to start running at work (at the end of this week) and when I'm able to work from home occasionally (once I get schedules to be a little more predictable), then things should be pretty sustainable.

I've gotten to dabble a very little bit in some genetic algorithms work. We'll see if any more is on the horizon. As I've said (maybe not here), just even being around "researchiness" is a good thing, even if I'm not constantly getting to do it myself.

Sunday, 07/31/05
My last day at Sapient was Friday, and I'm starting full-time at JEM on Monday. For someone who's got so much going on, I sure don't have many interesting things to talk about here.

One thing's for sure: I'm definitely going to have to start keeping track of and priorizing the "stuff I gotta do" list(s). I've had mixed success with this in the past; it works okay for a while, and then I get "too busy for planning" (which generally ought to be a red flag, when that happens). I anticipate that the planning/prioritizing thing should work a little better now, since that's going to be a major ongoing part of my new assignment (at least for the foreseeable future).

Random note: if you're looking here for updates about Sarah, you're not really going to find many of them. She'll just have to go and get her own weblog or something (although I'd be happy to build one for you if you like, honey).

Yay... I've finally got the playlist generator (for the "now playing" thinger) working again. It's so nice to be able to say, for example, "don't play any songs that are distracting or that have english lyrics" so that you can put your head down, get some reading done without having to get sidetracked when an annoying song comes on. Hooray for me.

Friday, 07/22/05
One month is long enough to go without an update, so I'll just go ahead and write one.

I've finally started leaving Sapient in earnest (next Friday is my last day). I sent the obligatory "goodbye, everyone" email (note that I did not spam any Sapient mailing lists other than the DC office list, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do... such a good citizen). If you're a co-worker who sent me a note, I'll have a response back to you pretty soon (probably over the weekend), and thanks a bunch.

Sapient is definitely a really neat company. If I could somehow transplant them into the ~industry into which I want move, I'd do it in an instant. The folks at Sapient are, across the board, probably the smartest and most motivated people with whom I'll ever have the chance to work; not that there aren't smart/motivated people anywhere else (there's plenty of them everywhere), but to find a company that's full of them (and nothing else) is pretty unusual.

I'm getting progressively more involved at JEM, but things aren't really going to hit full tilt until August 1.

Sarah had mono a while back, but she's mostly over it now. And now I'm either dealing with mono or something somewhat like it. I got nailed w/ some flu-like symptoms last Sunday (7/10) that went away really quickly, but I've been getting tired all of a sudden most evenings. It's not too bad, because work's still not extremely demanding, but I was hoping to be getting in shape for the Army Ten Miler by now. Argh.

Tuesday, 06/21/05
I'm in a crunch period for the next month or so. I don't know if that means you'll actually see some more updates here: yeah, I'll have less available time, but I'm also getting (temporarily) more organized about how I spend that time. Who knows. We'll see.

With this re-organization, one thing I am going to start doing again is running ~every day (hadn't really done it much since last October... go figure). When you're running regularly (or doing whatever other form of regular exercise that you prefer), it has so many other positive side-effects on your life that it's really hard to justify not doing it.

Still working one and a half jobs. It's manageable, but I'll be glad when it's over.

That's all for now. If you want something more up-to-date, just call.

Wednesday, 05/18/05
I'm working from home today, since I'm hacking and snorking with a cold and since I have plenty of stuff that I can work on here. Ella's enjoying it, I guess. I've stopped taking her to work every day, and she has more or less re-acclimated to the whole cage thing, but she'd still rather stay at home with a person than by herself.

The wedding was great, everything went well, and everybody seemed to have a good time. Sarah and I honeymooned in St. Lucia, which was fun (never been to the Caribbean before), even if the evenings were a little too warm for my taste. I'll try to grab some of the pictures (wedding, honeymoon, etc.) and get them posted here some time in the not too distant future.

So now we're back in Virginia (have been for a couple of weeks), 100% moved in and probably about 80% settled (still have to get a couple of rooms straightened out). Married life is agreeing with both of us, and every day I'm increasingly sure that I've picked a good one here. Yay.

I have started working in earnest w/ Derek's ~new company, JEM Engineering. For now, I'm still full-time at Sapient, and then on top of that I'm working part-time (up to 20 hours per week) at JEM. It wouldn't be feasible to work ~1.5 jobs if it weren't for the fact that my current project at Sapient isn't very demanding (only allowed to bill up to 40 hours per week). So far, the two-job thing hasn't gotten too hectic. At some point (this summer), I intend to start working full time at JEM (we'll see whether I can still do some part-time work at Sapient after that, but whatever).

Monday, 04/11/05
My family is, at this very moment, driving down from Maine to D.C. (via the Red Sox home opener). Sarah and I will leave for Tennessee in two days, and then we'll all be down there by Friday for the nuptials.

As you can imagine, I'll be incommunicado through pretty much the rest of May. If you need to contact me, try my cell phone and you might get lucky, or maybe call my close family if it's a real emergency.

Thursday, 04/07/05
So much for DSL. I got service ordered and connected (I thought), but then the DSL modem couldn't get a steady connection to the network. It turns out that "the loop is too long" for us to get DSL service. I guess their initial estimates (the ones they make when they tell you up front that "yes, you can get DSL service") must have a pretty significant margin of error, and I must be inside that margin.

Stink. Oh well. It wouldn't be so disappointing if I hadn't been thinking all along that it was going to work out. So I guess we're sticking with the cable modem thing. Or maybe we could go with the "IDSL" option (which is basically an ISDN connection), which I could still do through Speakeasy. Yeah, guess I'll get back on the phone with them to talk it over.

I'm going to be pretty busy for the next several days, so don't expect me to respond to emails very much unless it's urgent. Probably the earliest you can expect to see any more updates here will be some time in early May.

Monday, 03/28/05
The move went pretty smoothly. We're still doing a little more back-and-forth to Ashburn, to get the old apartment completely cleaned out, but that should be done as of tomorrow night (with some final cleaning help from Becky and Derek). Many thanks to the Lindens, Amanda and Kim et al., the Collins family, the Bittenbenders, the Applegates, Adam, and Mr. Lamb.

Slowly we're getting things set up and sorted out at the new place. We'll do most of our hanging out there now (since Sarah's apartment is mostly empty).

That's just about all of the news. Now that we're through the worst of this moving stuff, there's really nothing big on the schedule between now and the weddding. So we get to relax a bit, get settled in, and take care of smaller details. I'll probably try to start running again later this week; there's allegedly some kind of running trail near the new apartment.

Thursday, 03/24/05
I signed the lease on the new apartment and took a couple of looks at it last night. Ella likes it a lot. She was pelting up and down the stairs, exploring closets and then getting lost, and doing her crazy "run in circles, pause, run in circles, pause, etc." routine.

The apartment is pretty much what Sarah and I expected. Mostly good stuff (icemaker... yay), and the only real downside is that the washer / dryer (for clothes) is dinky, like one half of the normal size. As Sarah noted, we'll have to wash some laundry every day (argh). Maybe we can go commando and buy our own (bigger) washer / dryer unit and replace the crummy little unit with the bigger one (replacing the pre-existing unit when we move out... hey, we're already doing that with the kitchen sink faucet, so what's the big deal?).

I'm definitely taking tomorrow off. With all the moving that's happening on Saturday (and with me being waaaay behind on packing) and with the Good Friday singing stuff, it's pretty much mandatory. Things will be very low-key at work tomorrow (I think), so taking the day off shouldn't be a problem.

By the way, Speakeasy (DSL service) rocks. Thanks for the tip, Bryan.

Monday, 03/21/05
I have been busy doing various stuff for this past month (being sick w/ the flu, stuff at work, stuff at church, and some wedding preparations), hence the lack of any updates. It's not that I have absolutely no time to write updates; it's more like I need too much time before I start feeling like writing anything. Plus there's some sort of effect whereby being in a relationship makes me less likely to write updates (or maybe it's the converse: lonely guys write more updates (in my case, anyway)). Well, as with everything else, I blame Sarah.

I'll be moving to our new place in Alexandria this Saturday. We've got a bunch of friends lined up to help with the move. Sarah will be moving most of her bigger stuff that day, too (so that we can get a jump on things and we won't have to come back from the honeymoon with a bunch of moving work still to be done). It sure will be nice to live about 30 minutes from downtown (instead of 60-90 minutes).

This Friday there will be the usual "Good Friday" services at Potomac Baptist. In a bit of a change, the praise team will be leading all the music and the choir will be singing as backup. Since I've done this same sort of thing already (with Total Praise), I got to arrange the music. The work basically consisted of taking the existing praise team arrangement, tweaking just a few things, and then adding new parts for the choir to sing. It seems to be working out pretty well (if you want to take a look at the music, it's available here, for a short time only). Although I won't be around at PBC much more to help w/ this sort of thing, I'm hoping that maybe this ~new musical style (praise team w/ backing choir) becomes something that they can use more in the future (because it's relatively easy to do, and because it's very effective and neat).

There's a lot of other move-related and wedding-related tidbits of news that I won't go into right now (but I'll try to be better about posting some updates here, at least for the next month or so). I do want to at least warn you, though, that I might be switching from hosting this site at a third-party hosting service to hosting it myself, from home (again). So you may see a few hiccups in the near future (although, frankly, I'll be surprised if I really have time to transition to hosting things myself until some time in mid-May).

Monday, 02/14/05
I am horribly delinquent in writing back to various old friends (at least four of you) who have contacted me ~recently. Sorry, I really will write back to you soon... how about some time this week?

Not a lot of other news to report. Mom & Dad, I may try to give you a call on the way home tonight. Jenn, I still owe you a call, but it's nothing terribly urgent.

Wednesday, 02/09/05
I just discovered yesterday that my definition of the word "glib" was almost exactly opposite of the word's actual meaning (not exactly, but close enough). How annoying. I have been propogating error all these years, and now I owe Sarah $5.

This last weekend's visit to Sarah's family (in Tennessee) was great. We actually ended up attending the funeral of Sarah's maternal grandmother (to whom she was very close); sad though it was, I got to see how Sarah's family handles this sort of thing (very well... they are excellent people) and I got to meet a lot of extended family. Anyway, I like Sarah's family a lot, and they like me, too.

The bit that I lost from the update two weeks ago: I'm now in the habit of taking Ella to work with me every day. She doesn't actually come into the office (that would be fun, stuffing her through the X-ray machine), but she sleeps in the back seat of the car (I've got a big dog bed set up in there) and we go out for a walk or two during the day. The car is in an underground parking structure, so it's well-insulated and very safe. Ella loves it, and it seems to be working very well.

I will be moving to the new apartment in Alexandria on or shortly after March 23, which can't come soon enough. It will be so much better to be closer to Sarah and closer to work. We're starting to plan out the move now (we already have floorplans and furniture arrangements mostly figured out), and I probably need to start packing and cleaning soon, too.

Wednesday, 01/26/05
[Argh... I lost the first half of my update. Here's the second half]

In a bit of completely random weirdness, I got an email from someone working in the art department for "Law & Order". They have an episode coming up that involves the Tappan Zee Bridge, and their websearch for related photos (to be used for set dressings, apparently) found my snapshots [1 2 3] from last year's trip up to Boston. They were contacting me for permission to use some of the images on the show. I doubt that the resolution on the pictures is good enough, but I went ahead and said "okay" (1) because I feel sorry for anyone who has to search the web and contact random people for what ought to be available through stock photography and (2) because it's an opportunity for another fifteen milliseconds of fame (or at least it makes a good "little known fact" to use at client workshops).

So if someone who has a television and who watches "Law & Order" could tune in, like, several months from now (?) to see if they ever talk about the Tappan Zee Bridge, look around for any of my images (probably showing up as screen savers or wall hangings in some sort of transit authority office).

Monday, 01/24/05
Sarah and I will be flying up to Maine this Friday to meet the Libby relatives and to freeze our tails off. Low temperatures of 10 degrees F (in Virginia) just weren't cold enough for us. Ella will be back at her favorite kennel (yay!), so I need to take her to the vet tomorrow night to get her vaccinations updated (boo!).

Getting sort of snowed in this weekend was fun. The snow actually wasn't too bad, but it was just deep enough to cause a few minor problems (e.g., church cancellations and neighbors unable to get their cars unstuck). Sarah and I took the chance to hang out, watch movies, drink hot chocolate, and go looking at apartments. We found a nice place in a good part of Alexandria, so we went ahead and put some money down on it. I'll be moving in around the end of March, and Sarah will be moving in around the end of April. It's a nice big place (for an apartment).

Mom / Dad / Mike / Jenn / kids, my clever idea for you guys to come down here and visit D.C. (on your way to Tennessee) still stands, and I'll have plenty of room to house all of you (and much closer to downtown D.C., Mount Vernon, and all kinds of other neat stuff). We'll talk about it, anyway.

Last week, I went and interviewed with the JEM Engineering folks (Derek's ~new employers), for whom I could maybe do some part-time work. They are very nice people, and the work seemed like a good fit. We'll see.

Tuesday, 01/18/05
Things are starting to lock down for the inauguration. The underground parking lot in which I park (when I'm working downtown) is closed, so I'm definitely going to be taking the Metro tomorrow. Fun.

We a cappella group folks were facing a decision about whether to disband the group, since some of us are getting too busy and or are moving too far away to keep doing rehersals the way that we've been doing them. We put our heads together about it last night, and we decided to switch to an "eight weeks off, four weeks on" approach (in which we spend around four weeks preparing a single song for a very targeted performance opportunity, and then we take a roughly two-month long break before we try to do anything again). Yay. I'm glad that the group is not going to disappear, and everyone is also happy to be recovering some more time for other things (because, as I've mentioned, a cappella music demands a lot of time and effort if you're going to sing any better than "crummy").

I'm really thinking hard about trying to learn Swedish. Perhaps as an initial project I'll try to create (literal) unauthorized translations of various The Real Group lyrics. "Man é man" is definitely the first candidate.

Monday, 01/10/05
I accidentally let my domain name expire. That's why you couldn't see this site for the last couple of days. As Bryan Bilyeu has so perceptively pointed out, I am a loser. If you sent any email messages to my mlibby.net address between 1/6/05 8:30am and today at 10:30am, then those emails probably failed on you and you should resend them (or just call me).

Sarah and I are engaged now. [waits for CPR to be administered to those of you who just passed out] Yay! She's really nice. We've set a date for April, at a location that is perilously close to Dollywood. It's going to be a very, very small wedding (so you'll probably see an announcement but not an invitation... sorry, and we do still love you... this wedding is so exclusive that you basically have to have been pregnant with either Sarah or me to be allowed in). We're going to stay put in the D.C. area for the forseeable future.

I haven't been running at all lately (for now-obvious reasons), so I was a little apprehensive about going out on this last weekend's trail run (with the Frontline folks), but it was fine and so far no parts have fallen off. I haven't even been limping or anything. I've set a somewhat arbitrary goal of running in this year's Cherry Blossom 10-Mile Run so that I'll something for which to train. Not sure if I'll actually run it (since other big things are going on in April), but it's nice to pretend, at least.

Tuesday, 01/04/05
I have been out of touch for a while because (1) I've been on vacation for 1.5 weeks and (2) my new router at home wasn't on speaking terms with the cable modem (and I didn't have time to sort things about between them until just now... turns out that the solution is a very careful, delicate operation of pulling out the power cord, spinning around twenty times, and then plugging the power cord back in).

Thank you, Jenn, for all the nice The Real Group CDs. You're right, I didn't know what I had been missing. I haven't listened to much of it (on headphones) yet, but so far I really like "Man é man" and "Lift me up".

Work is still work, and my current project still has a long way to go. But I'm starting to actually get some things done now, and that's always nice. And I'll probably be meeting with some folks from Derek's new company to discuss the possiblity of doing some part-time work for them (finally). They sound pretty neat so far; having something interesting to work on would certainly be refreshing. Gripe gripe gripe.

I am soon going to begin some major cutbacks on my many activities. Being super-busy was fun for a while, but the time for that is over. And I'm still very serious about moving closer to the city; the cutbacks and the move pretty much go hand-in-hand.

Thursday, 12/23/04
"Roots reggae" is so wacky. It's reggae music that is more intensely Rastafarian than the typical Bob Marley stuff that you hear. So it figures that the music would be wacky, since Rastafarianism is so wacky.

[I bought a box set of roots reggae music a couple of years ago, and one of the tracks ("Never Gonna Give Up Jah") just came up on my WinAmp player's shuffle, hence the sudden ranting.]

Mom and Dad should be somewhere between Michigan and Connecticut by now. I'll be driving up to Maine (to see them, the Phillips folks, and a moose) on Christmas Day (twelve hour drive = fun). I'll be heading back down here on Wednesday of next week. Sarah gets back from visiting her family in Tennessee and Georgia on Thursday, so we'll get a little bit of hanging out time around New Year's Eve and stuff.

I realized about forty minutes ago that I am the only one on my team who has showed up for work today (duh... it's not like everybody's vacations weren't already marked on the low-level plan whiteboard). So yay! I should hopefully get a bunch of things wrapped up today in time for my own upcoming vacation, thus limiting interruptions when I'm away from work myself.

Hmmm. I know there's a bunch of other interesting things to write here, but there's really no good way to pick and choose. Such are the perils of not writing regular updates and thus building a huge backlog of momentous developments. I'll just have to start over with the whole keeping-up-to-date thing, and all those archaeologists who will be painstakingly reconstructing the details of my private life will just have to cope with what will eventually come to be known as "The Mysterious Dark Period of Late 2004" in the recorded history of Matt the Tremendous.

Tuesday, 12/14/04
Busy busy busy, hence the ~half-month without an update or even a new movie review. As a measure of the busy-ness: I was pleasantly amazed to discover that I don't have anything already scheduled for this Saturday afternoon and evening. My schedule has been literally 100% full (as in, booked at least ~three days in advance) for the last three to four weeks. Don't get me wrong, I've been very happy about how well all the various activities have dovetailed together, time-wise, but I'll be very happy to get some downtime (starting next week).

I have all kinds of interesting tidbits to report, but the most interesting and important thing is about my "special ladyfriend" Sarah. We first met about a month ago (through eHarmony, believe it or not... yes, we're part of the problem) and hit it off immediately. So we've been doing all kinds of things together, meeting each other's friends and family, and talking each others' ears off. You could definitely call it "courtship", Josh Harris style. Expect to see Sarah's name pop up some more here, from time to time.

So, with all the various stuff that we have been out there doing, I've got a bunch of cultural tidbits about which I could ramble on and comment (such commentary tends to be the more interesting material written here, I think), but there's just too much of it. So I'll hit the reset button and just try to keep up with future activities.

We're going to go on a "Christmas tour" of the White House later tonight. Apparently you have to know someone to get on these particular types of tours (?), and Sarah seems to know a lot of someones. Way to go, Sarah. Allegedly you can bring a camera along, so I'll have some pictures for you later (like by the end of the week... I'm still in a minor crunch mode, after all).

Thursday, 12/02/04
Finally, I now have some sort of internet access at work. When you aren't able to access the internet during the work day, there's a major ripple effect through the rest of your daily schedule (because there's only so much that you can get done at work, so you end up just sitting around a lot... argh... and then you have to take some work home with you, cramming in a bunch of correspondence before leaving in the morning, staying up late to do your online research, being completely out of touch with emails sent during the day, etc.). So hopefully my schedule will get slightly more sane now.

The local classical radio station is showing its true colors again by switching to its annual "all Christmas music, all the time" format (I like John Rutter just fine, but hearing his arrangements twenty times a day gets to be a bit much). I don't think a more legitimate classical radio station would go quite so gaga over the holidays, but then again this is the radio station that likes to boast, occasionally, that it's "the number one Arbitron-rated classical radio station in the country", which is to say that it's probably also the radio station with the most commercials and the radio station with the most predictable / repetitive playlist (when not in holiday mode, they typically play snippets of Scheherazade about three times a day).

Saturday, 11/27/04
I bailed on the Thanksgiving Day race thing, mostly because I was lazy. But I'm glad I did so, because (1) it rained a whole bunch that morning, (2) I got to sleep in, and (3) my hip would have gotten messed up (because it does that when I run on it after a long hiatus... now it's acting up just a little bit from the trail run this morning).

I'm starting to think pretty seriously about moving at least a little closer in to the city. Anything on the Beltway would be okay (as long as it's still in Virginia), and something actually inside the Beltway (not too far in, such as, hmm, I don't know, Alexandria) would be ideal. We'll see what happens. I'll probably do a little bit of apartment-hunting after the New Year.

Speaking of beltways: I have decided that anyone who disagrees with the need for an Outer Beltway is a raving loon. These coalition for smarter growth people astutely point out that "few people travel in a loop around the outer edge of the region". Well, duh... few people do it because there's no outer loop on which to travel! By the same rationale, there's no real need for the (inner) Beltway, too (and goodness knows that practically nobody travels on that little road... everyone's way too busy driving "in and out of the region on radial roads", right?).

Another damning piece of evidence: outside of the existing Beltway, how many bridges are there (along a twenty-mile stretch of the Potomac River) to connect northern Virginia (growing like gangbusters) with Montgomery County ("Maryland's most populous jurisdiction and its most affluent")? Try zero (0)... how's that for "smart growth"? So anybody wanting to go from Major Growth Area #1 to Major Growth Area #2 has to drive in to DC first. That's like having a rule that all communication between the left and right halves of your brain must first travel through your colon (sorry, it's a grotesque metaphor, but very apt).

It's time to start getting pretty serious about Christmas shopping. I'm going to try to stick to a "less is more" theme this year, but that takes so much more effort (sometimes).

Monday, 11/22/04
The Turkey Outreach thing went fine. First of all, navigating through northeast D.C. wasn't as hectic as expected. We showed up, did some warmup, and then got a ~quick orientation for a future outreach that we'll be doing at a youth prison in December (didn't really have much of anything to do with the Turkey Outreach, but the dude who had to give us the orientation was there, so whatever). Then it was time to sing. We were at an African Methodist Episcopal church, so sitting in on the sort of worship service that they hold (or at least an abbreviated version of it) was interesting and enjoyable. Many fans were waved.

Then it was turkey-distribution time. There wasn't much for us choir folks to do, since the distribution team was pretty well organized (they had to be; there were a whole lot of people there to pick up turkeys). They were actually distributing big boxes (each with a turkey and a bunch of other stuff) weighing about twenty pounds each.

I'm allegedly running a five-mile race this Thursday, and I have barely trained even a bit for it. Oh well. Gotta have your priorities, after all. I'll run, but not terribly fast.

Wednesday, 11/17/04
Finally, some movement: my project at work looks like it's about to get in gear (at least for the short term). We're going to run a workshop with the clients on Thursday, and hopefully that will help sort out some of the deeper issues that the project is facing.

This probably means that I won't be able to do the MBC Christmas choir thing (since there's a reheasral Thursday night). I've already missed the first rehearsal and may miss the sectional rehearsal this Saturday (because of the "Turkey Outreach" thing that we're doing down in DC... handing out something like 75,000 Thanksgiving dinners, and Total Praise is going to sing a bit), plus random conflicts are popping up for later on (not surprising, since the Christmas thing pretty much consumed the entire week of 12/13 - 12/17).

Since today will be one of my last days working at home (hopefully), I'm doing a bit of cleaning.

Friday, 11/12/04
Yesterday was very nice, and today should be pretty stinkingly good, too ("stinkingly" is just a quantity multiplier... no actual smelliness happening today). I took yesterday off as promised, but I kept pretty busy with some extracurricular activities. Work today will be pretty non-demanding, but I'll be pretty busy with other stuff still.

So if I'm overdue on corresponding with any of you, sorry about that. I'll get caught up over the weekend.

Tonight is (finally) our small group's first Bible study together.

And the weekend is looking pretty typical.

Yeah, this was kind of a "nothing" update. Sorry. I'll try to live a more publicly-exciting life next week.

Thursday, 11/11/04
Since I wasn't getting much work done anyway, I've promoted today from a "work at home" day to a full-on vacation day. Gotta honor those veterans, after all (thanks, Dad). I'm still keeping pretty busy doing some cleaning, some laundry, and a few major personal projects.

Sneaky sister Jenn... I just discovered your secret Xanga page. If it's supposed to be personal and you don't want me linking to it, just say so (but it's right out there for anyone to find).

Let loose all your wacky election-stealing conspiracy theories, because it's definitely open season. This was so completely predictable. As with the 2000 election, some of the liberals (those given over to believing whatever reality they care to make up... i.e., all of them) seem to be going through a "reversed grieving process": acceptance, then depression, then bargaining, then anger, then denial (hint: it's supposed to progress in the other direction, folks... get over it already!).

Wednesday, 11/10/04
25 degrees for the overnight low. It's thneed weather, to the great excitement of greyhounds everywhere. And to think that the high temperature on Sunday was pushing 70 degrees.

I'm working from home today and tomorrow, so I get to intersperse the occasional diversion or chore amongst the work tasks that I'm doing. It's so much better to do housework in a leisurely manner throughout the day instead of trying to rush through it late at night.

Feel the excitement.

Sunday, 11/07/04
Another busy Sunday. Mom and Dad, I probably won't have time to call you today, so that's why I'm writing this update. Sorry.

I went to the early (contemporary) service at Potomac Baptist, then I bipped over to MBC to give a Bible study guide to one of my small group buddies and to catch the 10:45 service. Halfway through the offertory there (with the "big church" choir singing this cool Latin-rhythm song), the fire alarms went off, so they stopped the song and started evacuating people. Apparently it was a false alarm, because we got back in and got going again after about five minutes.

I'm toying with the idea of participating in the choir for McLean's upcoming Christmas Special thing (or whatever they call it). It's once-a-week rehearsals (on Thursdays, the one night that I have free) plus a couple of dress rehearsals and sectionals on a Saturday (not sure which one). So it works out time-wise. The performance would be on Friday, Dec. 17. I'm presuming it wouldn't require the wearing of dorky costumes, but who knows... I'm hearing the name "Christmas Star" thrown around a little too much to feel really comfortable about that.

The weather is so nice today that I am required to go out and run now.

Thursday, 11/04/04
If the day after Election Day is Gloating Day (and remember, Peggy wrote that article yesterday, so she was allowed to gloat), then the day after that is "Scrape Your Failed Candidate's Bumper Sticker Off of Your Car Day". Yes, it's a very long name, but it's a very somber holiday, so a little bit of formalism helps lend an air of dignified solemnity.

Note to liberal voters: using a marker and some white-out, you could instead modifiy your "Kerry / Edwards '04" bumper sticker to be a "Hillary / Whocares '08" bumper sticker. Think how far ahead of the trend you'll be. And then you can spend the time you saved by not scraping to instead learn how to play "Taps" on the bugle. That way, you can have a truly moving SYFCBSOoYC Day ceremony in '08.

Tomorrow, I'll feature a fun and informative article: "101 Things to do with the Wooden Stake from Your Failed Candidate's Lawn Sign". Here's an excerpt:

#41. Whittle it into a Rush Limbaugh figurine and burn him in effigy.

#42. Whittle it into a Michael Moore figurine and sacrifice virgins to it.

#43. Whittle it into a backbone and send it to the DNC.

#44. Stab yourself through the heart with it, you blood-sucker.

#45. "Why would I pull up my lawn sign? CBS News hasn't called the election yet."

#46. Four words: Giant Jell-O Pudding Pops.

Wednesday, 11/03/04
Well, my world is falling apart: michaelmoore.com isn't accessible. But whatever am I supposed to think about the election outcome? I know, I'll go to barbrastreisand.com to get some guidance. Funny Girl, show me the way! Drat, nothing new there, either.

Yes, it's officially "Gloating Day"; lately (as long as the clued-in part of the country grows and continues to realize how wacked-out the Democratic Party is becoming), Gloating Day is to Election day as Boxing Day is to Christmas... i.e., it's always the very day after.

Well, I'm still waiting for Al-Qaeda to show up, so I'm actually taking the day off again, getting some cleaning done, and listening to some gloating on the talk radio shows. Maybe I'll go for a run later... figure that, if my blood isn't going to be running in the streets, then at least my feet can be (running in the streets, that is).

Oh, good, michalmoore.com is back up. Now I can get all the hard facts on how this election was stolen by The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

Tuesday, 11/02/04
Technically it's Election Day, although I don't think the polls are open at 1am.

Can you believe this Bin Laden punk? I saw a story linked on the Drudge Report (and now the link's gone... maybe it was discredited?) that said the original translation of Bin Laden's message from this weekend was actually not threatening the entire US if it re-elected Bush, but he was actually threatening every individual state that ended up going to Bush.

Nowhere else have I seen this story of state-specific threats reported, so maybe it was bogus (or maybe news people were too afraid that it might actually impact the election, although (1) we kind of already crossed that bridge when the message and its first translation came out and (2) the news people no longer have sole power to decide what stories will or will not be reported widely... domo arigato, Mr. Intarweb).

But, in case it's a true story, I'd like to make it a little easier for all you Al-Qaeda goons (since I will be voting for Bush, and since Bush is definitely going to win Virginia): after voting pretty early in the morning, I will probably be hanging around home for most of the day. So if you're going to come and slaughter me and make the streets run with my blood, that's probably the best place and time to do it. Or I might be around home on Thursday, too, in case Tuesday is no good for you. But Wednesday and Friday are definitely no good for me.

Sunday, 10/31/04
Briefly overwhelmed by the Spirit of Halloween (?), I bought a bag of candy corn and some caramels. Nasty. I can't imagine how sick the little kids must get with all the junk that they pick up while trick-or-treating.

As promised, Total Praise sang at Frontline tonight. We had a real good time doing it (I've long since gotten over the fear of sacrilege when talking about enjoying yourself in the act of worship), and having the choir out there really helped make things more musically impactful (and, we hope and pray, more spiritually impactful) to the assembled congregation.

Some of the musical technicalities of the evening are becoming food for thought. For instance: we had a forty-two person choir tonight, and while that may sound like a lot of people (and it is), remember that we were singing in a room of one or two thousand other people (who were singing) and there was a very well-amplified band playing with us. So there were some situations in which our musical effect was just that of a large "voice pad" and/or "congregational supplement", but then there were other situations where we were able to make a meaningful contribution to the tone and style of the music. Studying these different situations and getting at their root causes would be a great exercise for arranging this type of music. Maybe I can get my hands on an archival recording or something.

Another interesting technical tidbit: our director has just about perfected some direction techniques (of the hand-wavy / finger-pointy variety) whereby he can cue the whole choir to jump to ~any major part of the song in harmonies, unison, or some pre-arranged combination thereof. What this allowed us to do (in this performance and, to a lesser extent, in some previous ones) was to be more fluid with each song's "roadmap" (i.e., which verses, choruses, and bridges are to be sung in what order), a very handy thing since the praise band (who we were were backing up) often needs to re-jigger their arrangements right before the performance. A creative choir direction approach such as the one we employed, then, lets the choir continue to participate in these last-minute adjustments (and frees us from the wasted time of having to completely memorize arrangement road maps that are just going to be changed anyway).

Yeah, it's probably not a new discovery (I think I understand now the derivation of that "talk ahead of your choir" thing that gospel music directors sometimes do), and it's not earth-shattering, but it does open up some interesting ideas. For one thing, any choir arrangements that one writes for this ensemble should be kept very modular, ideally with at least two different good-sounding voicings for each passage (or perhaps with different optional parts that can be layered), so that you can have some more variety in how you string together sections of the song.

Saturday, 10/30/04
Well, it looks like the duathlon folks recorded and published some split times after all (my relay team with Scott was called "In The Spirit"; yeah, it's dorky... we need a cooler name). So it looks like the running distances were 2.93 miles and 2.96 miles, not 5K (= 3.11 miles). Argh! That's annoying.

Anyway, now I have my split times. My pace wasn't as fast as I hoped: 5:53 miles translates into an 18:18 5K time. So much for breaking 18 minutes, but at least I'm in the neighborhood. And, now that I think about it, I could have definitely run the first leg 18 seconds faster if I had warmed up enough and if I hadn't started too fast.

So instead of checking off that "break 18 minutes" goal and moving onto better things next spring (after training all winter), I'll have to figure out an equivalent 5-mile time and try to break it in the Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot thing.

Earlier today, Total Praise went and sang at a local retirement home. It was fun. We got to spend a lot of time talking with the old folks. After we sang, I got to chat a bunch with "Fred". He had a stroke three years ago, and I tend to mumble, so we both had to listen to each other pretty intently to understand what was being said. Some interesting tidbits: Fred was in the Battle of the Bulge, he has owned a collie and a Polish Lowland Sheepdog (?), and he has been to every state in the union except Oregon, Washington, Utah, and New Mexico.

Total Praise will be singing tomorrow night at Frontline. In order to be uniform, I just went out and bought my first all-black dress shirt (all mobbed up now... just need a pinstripe suit and a fedora). Black is definitely not my color.

Sunday, 10/24/04
The race went okay. I got there later than I wanted to, so things were a little hectic and I didn't get warmed up very well (and the weather was pretty cold, like 45 degrees). So the first 5K leg stank. I went out too fast, then I got passed by a bunch of people (like a dozen or more).

The second leg, however, was fun. I was warmed up pretty well, and I was getting to pass a lot of people (since the poor suckers were doing the duathlon solo, unlike me; they had just finished riding ~11.6 miles whereas I had just finished recovering in the run/bike transition area), so I ran a pretty fast time... I think.

I don't have the split times, and I probably won't ever get them (they didn't use the little "race chip" RFID tags, unfortunately). Our total time (5K run, 11.6 mile bike, 5K run) was something like 1:09. We were guesstimating that the bike part took 34.8 minutes (= 20 mph). I'm a little skeptical about that, since it would mean I averaged 17:10 for each 5K (my high school PR was 17:02, albeit on a cross-country course), but who knows. I think it might be safe to say, though, that I broke 18 minutes on at least one of the legs, so at least I probably achieved that particular goal (the one that I really cared about), plus we got the "first-place men's relay" thing (which was gravy).

Anyway, now that the race is over, it's time to go crazy with the Bowflex.

Total tangent: any time you see a (new) VW Bug being driven by a female (and 80% of them are driven by females), check to see if there isn't a big silk flower (or, sometimes, a whole pot-size arrangement of silk flowers) sticking up somewhere from the center of the dashboard. I think it's something that you have to agree to do when you buy a Bug, apparently. Update: my sister, the best internet sleuth / stalker I have ever known, has uncovered the hideous truth (i.e., the new VW Beetle comes w/ a bud vase... scary).

Friday, 10/22/04
As I've said, live-performance albums (for jazz and blues, at least) are great: you've got to love any album that has a track called "riot prevention".

Work continues to be slow. Yay. I should enjoy it while I can.

Drawing some inspiration from bcblue, I am throwing together a web page for our ~new small group. Yeah, I'm going with a wacky color scheme, but why not? Most of us need a little more harmless wackiness in our lives (as opposed to, say, some very harmful wackiness).

The Bowflex thing is working out pretty well. I'm not really hitting it hard until after this Sunday's race, but already I've been able to use it for a couple of good exercises that you just can't do with free weights.

Thursday, 10/21/04
How about those Red Sox? I'm not going to pretend to be some overnight convert, but I definitely think that everyone besides pre-existing St. Louis fans should be rooting for them (this means you, Mike... if I could root for the Jazz, then you can root for the Sox).

My new headphones arrived yesterday, so now I'm trying them out. Wow. [WAV, 66KB] My old headphones (also earbud style, and also by Sony) were pretty much the same level of product (i.e., targeted at the same level of user), and those old headphones were very good, but the new design is absolutely terrific.

I'm already used to the "insert-it-into-your-ear-canal" type of earbuds, so no big surprises there. These new headphones go one step further, and actually seal up your ear canal (with a little rubber skirt thing... not sure if that's what they're talking about when they say it's a "closed-type" design). So the new headphones act like earplugs, blocking a wider frequency range of outside noises (and making it easier to hear noises inside your head, like when you yawn, swallow, or move your jaw).

And whereas the old in-ear design was just a rubber, air-filled housing that stuck down into your ear canal to channel sound that was still coming from speakers sitting somewhere in your outer ear, this new design actually puts the speaker down into your ear canal, meaning you can get a much better bass response from such tiny speakers.

So now I can finally hear those Russian basses on "Augmented Litany (Gretchaninov)" (from The Art of the Deacon in the Russian Church). This reminds me of back when I had some really nice Bose speakers a few years ago: when I first started listening with them, I realized that I would have to re-listen to all my music to hear what it really sounded like. Now I'm going to listen to Rachmaninoff's Vespers a bit. Cool... I think I just heard an undertone (at roughly 2:08 in "Priidite, Poklonimsya"); allegedly you can get audible undertones an octave below the bass when you have an open fifth sung by a bunch of basses and baritones.

Yep. I just got another undertone at the tail end of "Home on the Range" by The Vocal Majority. That reminds me that I need to some day do my "notes for listening" project, where I somehow capture and catalog cool / useful observations on music to which I'm listening. [It's a very particular subset of this whole music metadata kick that I'm already on.]

Wednesday, 10/20/04
MIT's OpenCourseWare (a Sapient joint) has finally published their course material for Unified Engineering (the huge / nasty sophomore-year aeronautical engineering class that is probably the toughest class taught at MIT... and that's saying something). As you'll see on the course's home page, Unified Engineering is a combination of several topics, including structures, control systems, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and some other stuff (and apparently they're really into programming in Ada now, which makes sense)... basically all the foundational multi-disciplinary stuff you need to know in order to design airplanes.

And it looks like they have made a whole lot of Unified Engineering material available (there's a pretty wide range of volume and quality in the all the course materials provided through OCW), and so far it looks pretty good (although I haven't really had time to do more than just sniff around a little). Now I can probably forget about digging back through my old Unified lecture notes to re-capture them electronically. And it looks like the fluid mechanics materials are from Professor Drela (he of Daedalus fame), who was my undergraduate advisor but from whom I never got to take any classes; so I'll definitely be taking a long look at the fluid mechanics stuff, at least.

I went brainless and left my laptop computer at home this morning. Argh. Well, at least most of the material that I'm working with is hard-copy stuff (sitting in my otherwise-empty computer bag). So I'll "rough it" today. Maybe this will even help me get a couple of issues figured out (since I'll mostly be doodling on whiteboards now).

I'm also thinking of taking a longer run at lunch today, so maybe I'll run down into DC. Running up here in Arlington (on Monday) kind of stank. For good running on this side of the river, I probably need to figure out how to get over to Arlington National Cemetary (I think people go running there, but I should check first; hmm, nothing about it on Running Places (cool site!)). Anyway, we'll see how today goes.

Tuesday, 10/19/04
Take a look at the new look and feel for the collegiate Christian a cappella web site (it's still a work in progress). You go, Ryan. You are one stylish dude.

I'm seriously considering running in a race on Thanksgiving (all such races are called "Turkey Trots", apparently). It's a 5-miler, so it'll be less of a sprint than all these 5-K races. It'd basically be the last race I do this season, probably, and then I'll switch into full-on training mode for the winter.

Our (very) small group is going to start doing studies soon, and it looks like we'll start with Community by Bill Hybels. Seemed like a good idea, anyway, since it addresses a lot of topics related to why small groups are good. Just as a reminder to myself: I need to throw together a "small group" page like the one that bcblue made.

The co-worker sitting next to me is very chatty. I need to get a pair of headphones that work... then I can do the thing where you just shake your head and mouth the words "I can't hear you". Maybe I'll just pretend that my current headphones still work or something.

Saturday, 10/16/04
Hooray... I finally made it through the "Jazz" documentary (by Ken Burns). It was almost twenty hours long or something. I'm probably not going to run right out and buy it (Netflix is good), but it was definitely very worthwhile. Now I have a pretty long list of jazz albums that I want to buy eventually. I'm I'm getting much better at identifying individual artists' names and remembering their historical context. And I have a much better idea how some of the various types of jazz emerged.

I'm going to go do some cleaning now.

Friday, 10/15/04
No, seriously, buy my parents' house (just trying to drive some search engine hits and generate some leads).

I went ahead and bought that Bowflex machine on the way home from work last night. It comes in a large box (20" x 24" x 60") that allegedly weighs 280 pounds. Fortunately, the large box is just a container for four separate boxes; they were still pretty big and pretty heavy, but they were small enough to jam into my car and light enough that I could lug them up two flights of stairs.

I took my time assembling the thing and finished around midnight. It's pretty big, but it will fit just fine once I move a couple of things around. I messed around with a couple of the "lat tower" exercises, and it seems like a pretty solid machine. You can even do pullups on it.

So now I need to nail down some goals and make some training plans. Included with the machine was some software to help you do that, so we'll see how well that works. I'm going to get just a little more serious about the diet, too (already pretty serious about it).

Speaking of nutrition (and bad news on that front): on Wednesday, I randomly happened across a Potbelly's out here. Life is good. If you don't have Potbelly's in your area, then you are a savage and I pity you.

Hmm, I really haven't been running enough this week, especially considering that I have a race next weekend. Not a big deal, since I already got into decent shape for the 5K race last weekend (pictures). I just need to do some moderate runs through the next week, so that I don't regress or something.

Wednesday, 10/13/04
I'm almost done making the 1860Thatcher.com page (still a few tweaks to go).

You should buy my parents' house (in beautiful Forest Grove, Oregon), because it has all kinds of goodies.

Tuesday, 10/12/04
Vacation's over. I'll drag myself into the Arlington office pretty soon (still going in ~late, though). During this next week, we'll probably find out whether this next project (down in DC) is going to pan out or not.

Wow, WeatherBug says it got down to 37 degrees Fahrenheit last night. Fall is definitely here.

I got Ella back from the kennel yesterday morning. As usual, she is very happy and calm after coming home from the kennel. I think it probably shows that she'll do better staying at home alone when she's also getting to have more social interactions (with other dogs). So maybe I'll try to make a push to take her to some dog "play groups" or something. We'll see.

That reminds me, I need to make an "Ella page" or something. Also, I'm going to be wrapping up my parents' "buy our house" site today.

I bought a director-size music stand at Melodee Music, mostly to use as a book holder for when I'm trying to read while ~sleepy (mostly for during devotions), since standing up might make it easier to stay alert. Now I need to get a baton, some of those half-glasses (or whatever they're called) complete with neck chain (or whatever it's called), and a snooty attitude (with lots of name-dropping). Get it? It's because it's a director-size stand, and that's what all directors are like. Anyway.

In further materialism news, I'm getting pretty tempted to get a Bowflex machine of some sort. They have one for a pretty good price at Costco. Having some exercise equipment here at home would probably work pretty well for me; right now, there's really no way that I can go out to exercise at a gym (or even at the apartment complex's local exercise room).

Saturday, 10/09/04
The race was fun. I ran a 23:50-something, which was good enough to come in first place, even though it sounds pretty slow. Apparently the course is more like 6 km long, which is something like 3.73 miles, so I averaged about 6:26 per mile (the course was a lot hillier than I expected, plus I spent about a minute towards the beginning thinking I had gotten lost or something... excuses, excuses).

Running in spikes worked just fine (and it was a good way to wear some half-inch spikes down into quarter-inch nubs). There was a fair amount of clicking on pavement and gravel (as expected), but for the majority of the race it felt like a couple of the spikes had fallen out; they hadn't, so that meant they were sinking into the ground pretty cleanly.

The turnout was sort of disappointing to the race organizers. We had a very enjoyable time and things went smoothly, but the feeling is that we really didn't get the large-scale promotion we needed from the main Frontline folks (especially not getting any serious time in the spotlight in the prior Frontline service). We probably also could have used an actual "race information" web page, too. Oh well. There's always next year. And like I said, those who showed up had a good time.

Thursday, 10/07/04
I got back from Oregon about five hours ago. I gave a little internal whoop of joy when the airplane crossed the border into Virginia (because I was just so happy to get out of Chicago again), but then we got put into a holding pattern, so I had to give a couple more internal whoops when we zigzagged back and forth across the border. Since the plane was a 777, we had the seatback LCD screens with the route-mapping thing; the little red path traced by the little white plane looked like a missile-evasion maneuver or something.

So... 5K race in 1.5 days. I took the day off from running. Tomorrow I'll get in an easy run with a bunch of "form strides" (basically just short, fast near-sprints to get your legs working again). Then I'll probably go help with marking out the race course in the evening.

Yeah, so Oregon was definitely a nice change of pace. Running around town was, as usual, strange, since a lot of things have changed there. Jenn and I both agree that, while change / progress is okay, it's good to be ~permanently done with Oregon right before things get completely wacky (e.g., invasion of the tract homes).

The site's not up just yet, but in the spirit of advance spidering by search engines: you should buy my parents' lovely home in Forest Grove, Oregon.

Wednesday, 09/29/04
I'll be taking vacation for the next two days ("comp time" that they gave us in thanks for working our tails off), and then I'll be leaving for Oregon on Saturday. I'm using the rest of this week to take care of a bunch of things that I haven't had time to handle all summer. I'm also taking the opportunity to follow up on a few job leads (like with Derek's new company, which is definitely looking for people now).

The FranklinCovey organizer is working pretty well. So far I'm mostly just using it to find large schedule conflicts, but even just that has been decently useful. Now I'll probably try to also get into the habit of planning out (in the organizer) ~everything I do each day, at a finer level of detail.

I went ahead and bought that juicer. Many a carrot has been sacrificed. I also juiced some cucumbers, but I'm not a big fan of how that turned out.

And I bought a blender, too, mostly for making protein shakes and stuff. Now that I'm getting all this protein, I should probably actually be lifting weights more, huh?

Saturday, 09/25/04
We did another application release on Thursday night. It was a so-called "E2 drop", which is basically a follow-up release with fixes for any ~major bugs that were found after the main release (one week earlier). Even though this particular release was smaller and quicker than the one last week, we actually uncovered a ~big pre-existing bug while testing the release. The bug was nasty enough that we decided to throw together another fix (overnight) and do another release the following day (Friday). The follow-up release went fine, and so now (finally) we're done done (as opposed to just "done").

I'll spend the next couple of days finalizing some documentation and cleaning up a little bit of test data (and we'll probably run a "lessons learned" session on Wednesday), but aside from that stuff, it's time for The Next Thing (TM)... which, for now, will be some vacation in Oregon (yay). After that, I'll probably either (1) be messing around trying to line up some new business or (2) be sent off to some unrelated project in some other office (which basically means I'd go ahead and quit Sapient... as far as I know, there's no way I'm going to uproot from Virginia any time soon).

The Singers Unlimited are definitely a very good group, but some of their music is a little bit hokey. [Sacrilege! These are Gene Puerling arrangements we're talking about here!] The vocal technique is great (flawless, as far as I can tell), and the arrangements definitely have neat stuff in them (especially the harmonizations). But there's occasionally some pretty twinky parts (both instrumental and vocal), and many times the musical arrangement is way out of line with the message (e.g. "You are My Sunshine" sung as a swingin', boppin', razzle-dazzle big band number... jazz hands!).

I have (re-)discovered something about running mechanics (and I'm writing it down here so that I won't forget it): when my poorly-defined shin pain (not shin splints) starts happening on a run, it seems to be associated with not lifting my knees enough (perhaps because otherwise my feet don't have enough time to rotate into the right position), and not lifting my knees enough seems to be associated with not pumping my arms enough.

On three of my last four solo runs, I got the mysterious shin pains after a downhill stretch (understandable). On the first two runs I didn't change anything and eventually had to cut the runs short because the condition was worsening. On the last two runs, I started "pulling" my arms through (and lifting my knees), and the pain went away (and never developed into anything significant). The wacky thing is that you end up going pretty fast as a result; on the last run, I turned in a personal best for that particular training loop (36 minutes on the nose, which is 6:40 miles).

So, based on what I've learned, I'd say that the shin-pain condition (whatever it's called) happens when my lower body is out-running my upper body. A corollary discovery is that I can run as fast as my upper body allows (with some obvious limits). I'm definitely going to keep up with the hill training and weight training, because that helps a lot with the "running with your upper body" thing.

[A visualization technique that seems to work: when, in your stride, you're pulling back an arm, imagine that your pulling on a cable that runs through a pulley (somewhere in front of you) and attaches to your leg (on the same side), such that when you pull back your arm, your leg lifts (high and ~effortlessly). Another (less useful) visualization technique: imagine that you're carrying cross-country ski poles, and use them, especially on the uphills.]

Wednesday, 09/22/04
I have joined the dark side and have purchased a FranklinCovey organizer. It's not actually a big deal... I already do a lot of organizing and planning, but on about seventeen different lists. So I got this organizer thing so that I can have it all in one place (I've pretty much given up on the PDA approach (for now) because I can't take a PDA with me everywhere at work). I use one of these types of things back in college (not so fancy, though), and it worked very well, at least until I lost it.

Cross Product Buddy Ryan Lee's saga of being mistaken for NKOTB-wannabee Lee Ryan has risen to ridiculous new extremes. What I'm wondering, though, is how this particular Maltese fan-freak found Ryan's mailing address.

With very little notice, I have decided to fly out to Oregon w/ sister Jenn and niece Libby, to spend some quality time with Mom and Dad (who are packing up and moving to Maine) and to say some goodbyes to The Molden State. I'll be gone from 8/2 to 8/7. I'm looking forward to getting in some good hill runs.

There have been no recent updates to the passé film of the week because I'm working through the ten-disc "Jazz" documentary by Ken Burns. It's pretty good.

Thursday, 09/16/04
The application launch last night went reasonably well. We got through it with only a few temporary setbacks (although we finished around 11:30pm... we had planned for as late as 2am but had hoped for 8pm), and things seem to be running pretty well. So now we're in the mode of monitoring things, wrapping up various tasks, and probably of doing another minor release to fix a few small things. Hopefully I will only be working sane hours from here on out, too (which, for me, means arriving at work early (~7am) and leaving early (~3pm), which is important since inbound morning traffic has gotten very bad again... I blame the school busses).

Tonight there is a rehearsal for this weekend's singing at big church. I'm going to try to get a run in, too (had to miss the last two days).

Monday, 09/13/04
Another semi-eventful weekend. I saw Hero with Small Group Buddy Brian. It was definitely interesting and probably worth seeing again (at some point).

Speaking of Small Group Buddy Brian, he has started singing w/ Total Praise, too. So that's nice. My goal is to turn him into my evil twin.

Having seen how hilly the race course is for the upcoming 5K race, I've switched my training plan from using track-based speed training (yuck!) to hill training (yay!). I did a preliminary workout yesterday with about twelve minutes of total on-hill time (or "TOT", as they apparently call it) on a rather steep hill, and it wasn't too bad. Actually, the heat was probably the biggest problem. It was neat, because my arms actually got tired, which doesn't usually happen when you're running (and which means that you're effectively doing some speed training, too).

I am probably going to buy a juicer, mostly to have a ready supply of carrot juice handy. I have always liked carrot juice ever since great grandma Telford introduced me to it.

Oops, I guess I just lost Saturday's update, huh? Well, it was basically saying things like "the 5K race course is scary" (so I won't be breaking 18 minutes on it) and "we're launching our application this Wednesday" (so don't expect to hear much from me until after that).

Friday, 09/03/04
Still working pretty hard, but things are definitely under control now, and we're even starting to wrap it up a bit. I have my job about 70% automated, but I need to get it to 80%. Shouldn't be too hard to do, and I just have to be careful not to catch "senioritis".

We're going to be doing an inaugural Saturday morning run (tomorrow) for the new "Road Running group" thing (tentatively as part of Frontline's Adventure Sports ministry). In a stroke of (literal) coincidence, the location and time is exactly the same as the location and time for the regular ChristianAthlete Saturday morning run, so I'll get to hang out a bit with both groups, and we'll probably chat a bit about future plans and how the two groups relate to each other.

Aside: it's interesting / weird when two different areas of you life start coinciding (not that that's what is happening here), like when your work friends meet your old college chums. Maybe it's an indication that you're compartmentalizing your life too much, or something like that.

Bob Cringely's column for this week has me thinking about the possibility of creating some sort of link from my "now playing" / music library thing to iTunes. I had already been thinking about links to amazon.com (mostly for the purpose of displaying album covers, but not for the nobler goals of making money and marginalizing the RIAA).

Monday, 08/30/04
Wow, August just shot by. Having survived the last three weeks (and the last couple of months), there's finally some time now to catch my breath and to get caught up on some things that I was letting slide. My goal is take care of the most of it (or half of it?) within this week, preferably before the weekend. Time to start making lists.

Using this week to re-organize would be a good idea for the additional reason that, with the end of summer, most of my extracurricular activities are starting to pick up again. I definitely need to pull together a schedule, to make sure that it all fits.

The first Total Praise rehearsal at which we actually sang anything was last night. It was good, and things went pretty much as expected. The women vs. men ratio is about 4:1, though (or 3:1, at best), so I'm definitely going to be practicing on volume some more (just like w/ the PBC choir).

Our first performance of the semester will be on the 18th and 19th, singing backup when Will Pavone introduces the song "All the Glory" at McLean Bible Church's main services (which the Frontline folks refer to as "big church"). It's not a terribly big deal (the song is very simple), but it will be something of a marathon because they have so many services at MBC (one on Saturday night and three (?) on Sunday morning). I'm sure it will be fun, though. Maybe I'll bring a Game Boy or something (just kidding).

Completely random: a former co-worker posted a friend's job posting (he's looking for an apprentice in NYC... nothing that I'd ever do, mind you), including a neat / cute "skills matrix" thing. Once you've checked off enough skills to meet the "cutoff", you get a link to contact this dude by email. Pretty clever.

Wednesday, 08/25/04
I'm back in the mode of having to choose what to neglect, for the next couple of days. So if you haven't heard back from me on something just yet, then guess who's getting neglected? Do you feel loved now?

Work is keeping me very busy (e.g., I'm trying to leave for Maryland at about 4am tomorrow morning), but it's also good because we're wrapping things up and I'm just about to lick a problem that's been haunting the project for a long time. So I'll try to fix that problem (in the next day and a half) and then stagger into the weekend. After that, there will still be a couple of rough spots on the project, but nothing so extreme as what I'm handling right now.

My cross-country spikes have arrived (at the office), but I haven't had time to drop in and pick them up yet. Maybe on Saturday.

Saturday, 08/21/04
Just got back from running with the ChristianAthlete folks. Since some of them are racing in the Annapolis 10-Mile race next week, we made a longer run out of it today (80 minutes instead of the usual 40). I got the chance to break in some new shoes (complete with vanity tag... I told you that I am the Imelda Marcos of running shoes).

I'm so pooped (from the run and from general sleep deprivation) that I'm going to take a nap.

Friday, 08/20/04
Awww, yeah, baby... the now playing thing is back in all its track-announcing splendor. I'll just go ahead and commit to getting the album cover feature (and the server-side metadata thing) stood up over this weekend. Rest assured that the tool's features will include some utilities for cleaning up the very grungy-looking Gracenote-generated (and ID3-clipped) data that you're seeing posted at present (e.g. "artist" values such as "Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berl").

I heard through the grapevine that some folks might start a road-running / race-training activity through Frontline Athletics. Since the only ~serious running stuff that they've offered up until now is the trail-running (which is enjoyable but not very demanding), I'm pretty happy to hear about this.

ChristianAthlete has been cool, and I'm definitely going to keep running and racing with them, but I feel like they've been missing out on tapping a (very) large pool of folks who are interested in training for races together (i.e., young adults in Frontline). So maybe I can help bridge the gap somehow (by being active w/ both groups). But I'm turning into a major two-timer now (with the two churches, and the two running groups, and the two singing groups, and possibly with two jobs at some point (?)).

Wednesday, 08/18/04
I've been listening to the Total Praise "learning tape" CD a bunch over the last couple of days. It has recordings of the songs that we'll be preparing this semester, a few of them recorded by the group (whereas the rest of the recordings are from commercial albums, apparently). You can't necessarily always hear the group fully (go figure... they're doing backup vocals), but it sounds pretty good. I already knew that the music at Frontline was extremely well-performed, but the acid test definitely comes when you put on the headphones and listen to a live recording, and so I'm very impressed. I probably need to go get a few Frontline-releated albums now.

Duathlon Buddy Scott (get it? it's like "Malibu Barbie") and I are signing up for another race, this one on October 24. I believe it's the same race distances as the last duathlon thing, so that means two 5K runs for me. It's on the weekend after the previously-mentioned 5K trail race. I'm going to actually train a lot for this duathlon, then, and I'm going to try to break 18 minutes for both of the legs of the race. Depending on how deep the field is, we'll probably be trying to place high in the "men's duathlon relay" group (we possibly could have won that group in the last duathlon, had not the malicious thumbtack-spreader intervened). So I will get religious about daily runs again, and I'll actually try to make it onto a track one to two times a week (starting in a week or two), for some speed workouts.

Monday, 08/16/04
I had an enjoyable weekend, partially because I was able to avoid going in to work. I still kept pretty busy with other stuff, but all of it was enjoyable.

Saturday was the usual "go running in the morning" routine, this time with the Frontline trail running folks. It was one of the better runs I've been on with them, mostly because we got to go pretty fast (I've always enjoyed running through mud and jumping over stuff, but it's a lot more fun when you're doing it at something close to breakneck pace). I got inspired to run in the 5K trail run that they're organizing (tentatively on Oct. 16), and to also maybe do some track races (has to be in the next month or two, though, since the season is almost over). So, of course, that gives me an excuse to own some spikes again.

I spent Saturday afternoon cleaning up around home and working on ripping CDs to MP3 (almost done; 13.7 GB so far). I've had so little time lately to straighten up after myself that I had forgotten how nice it is to have a clean house. And I got to do a little cooking, too, so that was fun.

On Sunday, the PBC a cappella group sang "Be Thou My Vision" for the offertory. We were trying to do a low-key "just sing a hymn / keep it simple" sort of thing, and it worked out pretty well.

The first Total Praise rehearsal (for the semester) was Sunday afternoon. We just went over a bunch of introductory information and didn't actually sing, but that's fine. Looks like it's going to be pretty neat.

Wednesday, 08/11/04
This new laptop is slick. I'd ramble on and on about the cool features, but that'd probably be annoying. I have loaded up about 10 GB of already-ripped MP3s (about 200 hours' worth), and there's still about 50 more CDs to rip, and even so the hard drive is going to have gobs of space left over. Hooray for copious drivespace!

This week (to some extent) and the next two weeks (to a large extent) are going to be "just try to survive" weeks, and then I should pretty much be done with the big crunch at work (and, dare I dream, done w/ commuting to Maryland?).

Monday, 08/09/04
My work project is at a brief, minor lull, so I took the opportunity to bip on in to the office (I normally work at a client site) to trade my old work laptop for a new one. The new laptop has a whole bunch of drive space, so I'll be able to drag ~all my music around with me... meaning there'll be much more incentive to have a functioning now playing thing, so I'll put in a little elbow grease to get that back up and running.

In the spirit of looking gift horses in the mouth: the new laptop has a tiny, somewhat difficult keyboard, which is tough because I'm one of those mouse-eschewing "I'd rather use keystrokes" types. It's not too bad, and I'll get use to it eventually. Everything else about the laptop is great, including the memory stick reader (no more draining of digital camera batteries).

I spent several hours last night yanking stuff off of my old laptop, and I'll probably burn several hours tonight reconfiguring this new guy. Have to be careful not to play around too much, though, since spare time is mostly non-existent right now.

Ella's cut on her paw is healing up gradually, but she's in the nasty habit of chewing off and eating whatever bandage I put on it (after more than about eight hours of bandage time). I've figured out how to manage, and Ella has recently proven that, yes, the bandages do make it safely all the way through her GI tract (ewww), so things should work out fine, ultimately. [Notice how I carefully avoided saying that things would come out okay, in the end.]

Sunday, 08/01/04
Just got back from meeting with the small group guys (four of us, anyway) at a morning service at McLean. They seem like a good bunch of guys. We're going to hang out a little more next week.

The worship service was neat, too: they had a "big band" (a la swing jazz) playing as part of the service, like with dudes standing up to take solos and everything.

In a fit of domestic spending, I bought a new kitchen sink faucet (tall enough to fit things under it, and with a built-in sprayer hose thing) and a set of Calphalon One Infused Anodized pots (over which I have been drooling for half a year). So I'm probably setting up for another big cooking kick; I want to get to where I'm doing some fancier techniques (searing, sauteing, deglazing, etc.) as part of my regular cooking.

On her last day at the kennel, Ella got a small cut on her right front foot; the kennel folks took her to the vet to get three stiches, so now Ella has a bandage on her foot. She looks sort of like a race horse or something.

I won't be running in the 10-mile race later this month after all, because the race registration is already full (and who am I kidding... there's really not enough time for me to train appropriately for that distance). The next race event I do will probably be another duathlon (but only running) on October 24, with the same "two 5K legs" sort of thing as my last race. Given that my injury is apparently healing up and that I should definitely have more training time available, I'm goign to say that my goal is to run both 5K legs in less than 18 minutes (and to do some serious weight lifting as part of my speed training work).

Friday, 07/30/04
You guessed it: I'm supremely busy. It's one of those "I get about 15 minutes for myself each day" situations. Sorry if I haven't responded to an email from you... I'll be catching up on correspondance this weekend.

The push to deploy my team's application has begun in earnest; hence the busy-ness. Things are going decently well on that front, but it's still a lot of work.

It looks like I'm going to go ahead and do the Total Praise thing (mentioned it a few weeks ago). The first rehearsal is on August 15 (because they're taking the summer off, and because they only rehearse every two weeks or so).

I'm continuing to make contact with the guys in my prospective small group. It turns out that one of them has actually been coming to Potomac Baptist off and on, unbeknownst to me. So I'll probably see him there this Sunday morning. Then I may swing over to another service at McLean to meet another small group guy (still have to arrange that, though).

Monday, 07/26/04
The race was fun. My duathlon team didn't get to finish (because some moron, soon to be caught, spread thumbtacks on the bike route, resulting in 50-100 flat tires, including two on my teammate's bike), but I still got to run one of two 5K legs.

I ran a 19:09 (= 6:09 per mile, average), which was fine. Because of my injury problems, I was only shooting for a sub-twenty minute time. Even at the slower pace, I still got the full-on "race experience" flashbacks, so it was a good way to get back into the racing scene without running at a breakneck pace.

So now I'll probably go ahead and plan on running in the Annapolis Ten Mile Run in late August. Obviously that's a much different distance, but longer distances are more my thing, anyway.

With Ella socked away at a kennel, I'm going to be working quite a bit this week and spending a bunch of time on some extracurricular activities. The small group thing is going well so far (still in the "making first contact" phase), and I think it's going to turn out to have been a really good idea.

Wednesday, 07/21/04
Ugh. Because I dawdled in booking kennel time for Ella for this weekend, now I either have to hope that something at her regular kennel magically opens up or else I have to go find another kennel.

The running injury continues to stink. I'll stop complaining about it until after the race, though.

The small group fun is going to start pretty soon. We're going to try to start a new small group in the Ashburn / Sterling area (apparently there's already at least one such men's group in the area). Since it's new, we'll start without a real leader and probably without a real study going on. The point will be to do more of the getting-to-know-you kind of stuff, and then eventually we'll either get / grow a leader or merge with some other small group. I'm definitely looking forward to it.

Update on the kennel situation: I scaled back the size of the time slot I was asking for, and now the kennel folks think they can accommodate me. Hooray!

Monday, 07/12/04
Last week was pretty busy. This week should still be somewhat hectic, but not quite so bad. And I'm trying to make sure that the following weeks get progressively less hectic for the remainder of the summer.

I'm dog-sitting Putter for the Wilsons. We're having a good time, and Ella is reasonably okay with it (she'll probably be outright enjoying it by the end of the week, and I'm sure she'll whine at me a bunch when Putter goes back home). Putter is one of those "sympathetic howler" [3.23 MB] types of dogs, and I tend to sing random snippets of things when I'm bumming around the house, so she and I have been duetting a little bit.

My hip injury might (?) be getting somewhat better. Running on it last weekend was no good. I didn't run on it all last week (which stinks, since I have this race coming up), and so it wasn't getting quite so stiff and sore during the day. I went out for a short run last night, and things were reasonably okay (although it still took a while to straighten out my stride, and there was a little bit of swelling afterwards). What I'm probably going to do is (very carefully) take a little bit of ibuprofen before workouts and see how much that helps. I have the impression that this is some sort of inflammation injury, so anti-inflammatories (and lots of water) should be the right thing to do. Plus I really need to get back out there if I'm to have any hope of competing in this race.

Friday, 07/02/04
Hooray! I finally fixed my photo-viewer thing so that it doesn't make photos look all nasty. Apparently PHP changed something or other, and my hosting provider must have upgraded or something, so I had to switch from using imagecopyresized to using imagecreatetruecolor. So now my resized pictures actually look ~nice again, so maybe this'll motivate me to actually turn my online album into something cool (and it may motivate me to actually go out and take some new pictures of neat stuff and nice people).

As promised, I went in to work for a bit today. On the way, I got stuck in a ~three hour traffic jam on the beltway, because there was a major accident blocking three lanes of the ~only bridge into Maryland. They really need to build an outer beltway one of these decades, but Maryland is dragging its feet (because they don't like success or something... failure and misery keeps them humble, I guess, so they intend to keep things nasty as much as possible). I got a fair amount of my work done, but I'll probably have to go back in this weekend, probably on Monday (?).

About a week ago, I discovered that my apartment complex has a pool. No big deal, and I'll probably never use it, but that was just weird to realize that there's a pool back there.

Running has been mildly miserable, because I have some sort of minor injury (muscle strain?) in my upper right quadricep, and it gets really stiff between runs; so I'm limping a bit during the day, and the first five minutes of any run really stink (until things loosen up). It's probably happening because I've been running so irregularly. If I can run consistently over this long weekend, then I'll probably be able to eliminate the problem by the middle of next week (and I really need to get injury-free as soon as possible, because I need to start doing some speed training if I'm going to survive this upcoming race).

Thursday, 07/01/04
We (pretty much) wrapped up the development phase of my project today, and since we're a day early, we gave ourselves tomorrow off (making a four-day weekend out of it). I will probably still go in for a bit tomorrow, because I have some stuff to do (the sort of stuff that takes long periods of uninterrupted concentration) and because I want to see how running at work goes.

No real Fourth of July plans here, but I do have a lot of random busy-ness planned. This Sunday I'll be helping out some other friends as they sing "And Can it Be" for their church's Sunday morning service. And my church is having a picnic that I might crash. Plus the usual running and stuff. I will probably try to use Monday to get some personal / home stuff straightened out (haven't had much time for that in the past month), and I'm hoping to go see some Christian bands play at a fundraiser that a college friend is organizing for a local church.

If I'm really on top of things, I'll also use the break to get caught up on Bible-reading (haven't updated the status thinger in a while, but I'm floating about one week behind schedule) and to do the "album covers" upgrade to the now playing thing.

Monday, 06/28/04
The running shoe insanity continues: I have ordered some very nice racing flats. I figured it made sense to go for the better shoes because (1) racing shoes don't tend to get a whole lot of wear (so they last longer, calendar-wise) and (2) I'm worth it. Call it a birthday gift to my wonderful self.

That reminds me of a skit I saw once at The Second City (in Chicago): it was a jewelry store for people who were going to be marrying themselves (several people were in the news back then for doing just that), so various random people were in there picking out engagement rings and talking about their wedding / honeymoon / married life plans. The skit was completely impromptu; to pick the skit topic, they had told the audience to randomly yell out two letters ("A" and "J"), and then they had us yell out phrases that used those letters ("awesome jewel" for this skit, "arrogant Jesus" for another skit, etc.). The skit culminated when one of the guys came in to return an engagement ring because, as he said, "I turned myself down". It was absolutely hilarious.

Last night's Frontline service was great. They're in the new auditorium now, and it was incredible to have one to two thousand people in there. I went ahead and signed up to get into a small group eventually; I'll give some updates on how that progresses (should take a few weeks to get started).

Wednesday, 06/23/04
I haven't had time to run much for about a week and a half now. With this duathlon thing coming up (in a month), I need to keep at the running, but work is as crunchy as can be right now (and will continue to be so throughout the rest of summer). So I'm thinking that I probably need to start running at work, over lunch break or something. Shouldn't be a problem, since they have a shower here, but it's just something I haven't done yet. I'll try it out tomorrow (?) and see how it goes.

[Aww, who am I kidding... there's no way that I'll have enough time to actually run tomorrow during the day. It's nice to dream, though.]

If I could figure out an easy way to do it, I would put a "random Wikipedia article" extract (and link) on the page here. Wikipedia is an (open) online encyclopedia, and randomly reading entries in an encyclopedia has always been fun (and it's a great way to learn trivia and to stimulate your thinking). Maybe in a couple of months I'll slap something together. Hey, I could even post a question about this on one of the Wikipedia developer forums or something.

But I think my next big "bell and whistle" to publish here definitely needs to be the "album cover image" feature for the now playing thing. I get a ridiculous amount of site traffic from people who are searching Google for "winamp now playing" or who are linking from related articles, so I might as well give them some eye candy to drool over. Probably need to be prepared to share some actual source code, though (not a big deal).

Speaking of the now playing thing, I haven't actually been listening to Tchaikovsky's "andante cantabile" continuously since June 3rd, despite what the thinger on my home page says. I had been messing around with the tools by which information about the current song was transmitted to the server, and I broke the configuration but didn't have time to fix it. I probably won't have time to fix it until quite a while from now, but rest assured that, in the meantime, I still am actually listening to a wide and interesting variety of music. And when I do finally get the configuration fixed and get stuff automatically updating again, you'll also get to see several neat new features.

Tuesday, 06/22/04
This Sunday evening's Frontline service was pretty cool. The choir ("Total Praise") sang backup vocals for the band (and performed a number of their own), and that was neat. I had been toying with the idea of maybe auditioning for the choir eventually, but I thought that auditions were in the fall or something.

It turns out that auditions are actually coming up in about a month. I'm going to go ahead and audition, I think, just as a way of finding out more about the choir. If things work out (especially schedule-wise), then I might just go for it. They do more of a gospel / contemporary style, and that would be a nice change (although it means I'd have to sing "up"; that could be fun). Plus it's a good way to make some friends in the music ministry there at McLean.

It's settled that I'm going to be running in the duathlon event at the upcoming Riverwatch Triathlon and Duathlon thing. I'll be teaming up with Scott Dukes (from ChristianAthlete and Soul Purpose); he'll be doing the biking leg, and he's allegedly pretty fast, so we're supposed to be the "fast team", I guess. So I'll be running two 5K legs, with a 30-40 minute rest in between. I'm probably going to stick to my sub-19 minute goal. And now I really need to get out and do some speed interval work.

Monday, 06/21/04
Today is the longest day of the year (= summer solstice) and the first day of summer. It would have also been the seventh anniversary of my ill-fated marriage. There's probably no one who actually bothers to read these updates who doesn't already know this, but on the off chance that I missed someone: Shon and I are divorced, officially as of Feb. 22 '04, but she actually left me back in early 2002 (which, by no coincidence, is when I started writing these pathetic update things).

On the topic of airing divorce-related laundry: a divorce is not easy for other people to deal with, particularly when those other people are Christians. Not only does a divorce have all the emotional gravity of other difficult life events (such as, say, the death of a spouse), but there are also the underlying questions of "what caused this to happen?" and "what must be wrong with you?", questions which most normal people are asking internally but which ~no one has the guts to ask outright. In the spirit of perpetuating that problem, I won't address those topics here, because it would be inappropriate (but feel free to contact me about it individually (yeah, right... not all at one time, now)).

The "wondering about but not addressing the issue" thing is particularly problematic for Christians, because we all (generally) tend to feel pretty strongly about divorce (i.e., that it is to be hated) and, more importantly, about marriage, and I am no exception. It's also true, however, that there are a wide variety of opinions out there (among Christians) about what is acceptable and right on the question of separation and divorce, and I think that some of this is due to the fact that few people are really talking about the matter as much as they should (see above). So a vicious cycle develops: no one talks about divorce, so Christians come up with their own wild interpretations about what the Bible does or does not allow, so strongly-held differences of opinion develop between Christians, so people anticipate that conversations on the topic will be uncomfortable and unhelpful, so no one talks about divorce. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Just an observation, anyway. Don't worry, I'm not planning on turning this into an "all-divorce, all the time" talk radio station or something. It's just a topic that becomes important to me from time to time, so it made sense to go ahead a bring it up.

Saturday, 06/19/04
For a while now, the DVD player programs on my computer have been refusing to play DVDs, since my graphics card has a television output jack; Macrovision (ugh), in its infinite wisdom, is worried that I might be tempted to turn pirate or something (arrrrrrr). Of course, if I were to start copying DVDs, the last way that I'd choose to do it would be anything involving external output, but whatever.

So, since I'm too lazy / cheap to spend the time and money to get a player program that defeats the Macrovision thing, I just went ahead (finally) and uninstalled my graphics card. It's not like I'm playing any video games that require a lot of 3D graphics processing (since those sorts of things would eat up huge amounts of my spare time). If I ever need to use my graphics card a bunch, I'll probably go ahead and spring for a new player program; but, for now, my quick and dirty solution will do just fine.

So, after a hiatus of about nine months, I'm able to play DVD movies on my computer again. And naturally I ran right off to Netflix and re-activated my membership. I'll start watching a couple of films a week, and you can expect to start seeing new updates to the passé film of the week thing.

After running, breakfast, and political chitchat this morning, I stopped by Tyson's Galleria and bought a bunch of clothes (pretty much just shirts and slacks). I will never want for gaberdine again. Hooray for Father's Day sales.

In the Nordstrom store, they had a barbershop quartet roving around and singing (moving between songs, that is), I guess as a nod to fathers or something (the quartet never strayed into the more womanly areas of the store, i.e. the other 80% of it). They were an okay quartet, but it's pretty hard to ring a chord when you're surrounded by hanging textiles. They did a good enough job of it and even got some applause now and then. And it was a cute idea to have them there rather than the usual pianist playing show tunes.

In the necktie news: necktie fashions have been stuck in an "overly geometric patterns" rut for the past ~five (?) years. I discovered today that the only remaining source of tie patterns that I actually like is (gulp) those Jerry Garcia neckties (because, for the most part, they use strokes of well-coordinated colors and because they're not repetitive or depictive). Oh well. I can't pass up a good necktie, whatever its origins may be.

Friday, 06/18/04
Today's "My Utmost for His Highest" is, ultimately, about "reckless abandon" for God. It's kind of cool. The catch (for some personality types, anyway) is probably in being able to distinguish between reckless abandon for God and just general reckless abandon.

Speaking of recklessness: just when I thought I'd never get to play hockey again (in Virginia?), they're ~starting to organize a pickup roller hockey game at McLean Bible Church. So on 7/10 I'll be doing that (instead of trail running that weekend). Boy, good thing that I hung on to my equipment (from the little bit of league stuff that I did in Chicago). I just need to go buy another hockey stick or two (and they're cheap).

I asked the dude who's organizing the roller hockey thing whether I could play without a brake. He seemed a little disconcerted and reminded me that "you are also responsible for trying not to run into others". Huh? Is this not hockey? So I suppose there won't be any fights, either? Whatever. I'm still wearing my mouthguard and taping down my jersey, just in case one of these MBC punks wants to throw down the gloves.

Actually, skating without a brake should be fine. Having a 2-3 inch protrusion on your right heel can trip you up a lot. Plus, with no brake you just end up doing a few skid stops, and, more importantly, you learn to avoid obstacles rather than stop at them, which is exactly how you want to be playing hockey anyway. So that should be fine.

I've never really been one of those "gotta have something special going on every weekend" sorts of people (you know, like your co-workers who always have big, loud conversations about their upcoming plans for the weekend; I've noticed over the years that those conversations (and the general "make-it-to-the-weekend" focus) tend to happen more in less-demanding work environments... weird). Anyway, it's a little strange that I'm now in the mode of doing a bunch of social / athletic activities every weekend, but it's working out pretty well so far. We'll just see where it goes.

Thursday, 06/17/04
It has been one of those "stay really busy but don't actually get much done" sort of weeks. I'm getting a lot of issues & decisions nailed down (at work and at home), but I'm not really producing a lot of actual stuff (or progress) just yet. That's okay, though. Step A has to come before Step B.

The cicadas haven't completely disappeared yet, but they have definitely dwindled. We'll probably have them for just another week or two, I'd guess. Good riddance.

Looks like I'm going to do the running part of an upcoming triathlon/duathlon on 7/25, as part of a team. If it's part of a triathlon team, then I'll just run a single 5K leg; if it's part of a duathlon team, then I'll run two 5K legs (one at the start and one at the end). 5K was the distance I ran in high school cross country. My personal record was 17:02 (5:48 miles), which I'm very sure I couldn't run right now. So my goal would probably just be to beat 19:00 (which will be tough if I do two legs, but it's still a good goal... with a 30-60 minute break in between, two sub-19 5Ks is probably a reasonable approximation of a sub-40 10K, effort-wise).

Sunday, 06/13/04
Apparently I lost an update from last week (Wednesday?). It was probably about my purchase of trail-running shoes. So, since this update thing is supposed to serve as an exhaustive archive of my life (so that future generations may marvel at the wonder that was me), here is the link to an image of the shoes. They are nice and are now covered in mud.

I went to the Frontline worship service at McLean Bible Church tonight. It was pretty good. I have been listening to some of the recent messages that were given at these things, and so I knew what to expect. The music was very good, too (and full-on contemporary music can be hard to do well, so kudos to them). The audience size was huge (obviously), and it's going to double when they start meeting in the previously mentioned new auditorium (because they'll move from two services to one).

So, yeah, I'm pretty jazzed about the Frontline thing. It's probably mostly just initial reaction for now (and so I'll settle down a bit), but it seems pretty likely that I'll get involved. The next (and only?) major step is to get involved with a small group. That'll probably start in about a month or so.

Saturday, 06/12/04
Trail running was enjoyable, but not very taxing. It's a really nice day out, so I'm going to take Ella for a long walk, and then I'm going to go back out and do one of those "run again, only faster" kind of things. It's likely to become a Saturday tradition, looks like.

Yeah, so helping out with the construction wrap-up efforts at McLean Bible Church was pretty neat. It turns out that we weren't actually just there to only move sound equipment, but rather to help out with all kinds of odd jobs. We started out hanging lights and stuff in the catwalks above the main stage (that was cool), then we spent a bunch of time moving furniture and cleaning trash. We finished by placing Bibles amongst the auditorium seats.

It's a pretty massive facility they have there. I won't really try to describe it that much, because you have to see it for yourself. The lobby really looks like an airport terminal. Down beneath the center section of the auditorium, there's a control room from which you could coordinate World War III. The sound system (which wasn't in the control room) appears to have something on the order of 100 channels (?), all of them wireless (?). I forget how many watts' worth of lights (and speakers) were hanging above the stage, but it's certainly on the order of megawatts. As the ~foreman volunteer with whom we were working said, they really don't ever have to worry about heating the place.

Of course, that says nothing about the quality of the church itself. It's kind of like having neighbors who own a yacht. It's sort of neat to see, but it's very easy to read meaning into it that just isn't there (whether it's something like "oh, they have a yacht, they must be wonderfully happy together on it", or "oh, they have a yacht, they must be materialistic", or whatever else).

Friday, 06/11/04
It took me about ten minutes to figure out why traffic was so light this morning (impromptu federal holiday).

As one of my team's hokey penalties for breaking the "ground rules", I'm wearing a suit to work today (on a "casual Friday"). In my first two or three years at Sapient, we wore suits every day (before we went to "business casual"), because we were a younger company (with very young employees), so we were doing whatever we could to project a professional, mature image.

In a fit of randomness, I'm going to help out tonight with the transportation and installation (?) of some of the sound equipment for McLean Bible Church's new auditorium thing. I've been (only recently) participating in a couple of the ministries that they run, since they do a lot of things that my church can't (for numerous reasons which I won't elaborate here).

Anyway, the MBC folks have been scrambling to finish up work on their auditorium. So when I heard the announcement that they needed some grunts to help with the sound equipment, I figured "sure, why not?", because I like to pitch in where I can, and it's a good way to meet some new people, and ~mindless physical labor can be fun. And it's potentially one of those "work really late into the night" sort of things, which can actually be very enjoyable. We'll see.

Sunday, 06/06/04
I finished up my weekend work yesterday and didn't have to go in today, so that was nice.

My church a cappella group sang "In His Presence" (made ~famous by Columbia University's "Jubilation!"... wow, looks like they've actually acquired a couple non-Koreans now). It's a very nice arrangement. We did a decent job of it (although we've certainly done better... nothing new there).

I bought some more running shoes today, and they're working out pretty well. They're pretty similar to my other shoes, but the new ones are a little more cushioned in the heel, while the older shoes are lighter and more flexible. My older shoes were just starting to show some signs of wear, so it made sense to start rotating shoes (and I like having different types of shoes for different conditions).

Now I probably need to get some trail shoes, because I love trail running and plan on doing a good bit of it soon. You can call me Imelda.

Saturday, 06/05/04
Working on the weekend: such fun. Hopefully I can get things wrapped up quickly and get out of here (and not have to come back tomorrow).

On my way up here (to Annapolis Junction, MD), I took a jaunt through Washington D.C. (since I had to stop by the Arlington office and since I wanted to explore a quicker way up here than just returning to the Beltway). It was vaguely reminiscent of Boston, except that people were driving a lot more slowly and uncertainly. I'm sure it's nasty during evening rush hour, though.

Wednesday, 06/02/04
Busy day. At least I'm getting a bunch of stuff done. It's finally starting to feel like I'm "firing on all cylinders" at work now (more or less).

I have missed running for the last two days (bad!). Hopefully I can get out there right after work today. It's always a tight fit to go running before the various weeknight activities (usually around 7pm), and a lot of it depends on how traffic is on the commute home (which is why it's so important to leave work right on time).

Monday, 05/31/04
I am spending most of today porting the Potomac Baptist Church web site to a new hosting provider. Then I have some rehearsals later on.

In more thrilling news, Episode 9 of Making Fiends is out.

Sunday, 05/30/04
Running with the Christian Athlete folks yesterday was cool. We didn't run too terribly hard or anything (everyone was taking it pretty easy, and there didn't happen to be gobs of people there this week), so I actually went on a regular run by myself later in the day, but that was fine.

After running, we hung out at a bagel shop for quite a while after, and that was thoroughly enjoyable. As a result, I'm starting to think about maybe getting into bicycling a bit (without really being too keen on the idea just yet).

Friday, 05/28/04 (late)
I had a work-related errand in Virginia today (in the early morning), so I had to pretty much take most of the day off. Shucky-darn. Four-day weekends are such a pain.

So, since I had some spare time (for once), I ran a "church loop", which is basically a ten-mile loop to my church and back. Not the best running conditions, but it was okay. I had run this loop once before, and it was definitely a whole lot better this time.

Running the church loop has definitely made me appreciate my regular training loop a lot more, though, if only for the fact that you don't encounter many cicadas along the way. Not that they're aggressive or poisonous or anything, but dodging cicadas and cicada parts gets a little distracting. On the way to the church, you're running along and through a whole lot of trees, so the cicadas are basically everywhere; on my regular training loop, you're running along large, treeless fields and lawns (and cicadas pretty much just stick to the trees).

Mom and Dad sent me The South Beach Diet Cookbook (thanks), and it's pretty cool. It even has a nice short-and-to-the-point summary of some of the principals involved (now I finally know how fiber helps your body moderate its blood sugar levels, so now I can sleep at night again).

Wednesday, 05/26/04
Ugh. I got very little done at work today, and not for any inability to focus. I probably need to switch back into "go away and let me work" mode for a while, because I've been pulled into random, unexpected tasks a lot.

Running continues to be good. It's getting easier and easier to beat my "best loop times", and without really noticing it. So, for example, I'll be out running when it's really hot and muggy, and I'll be finishing up and wondering how crummy my time will be, and then I'm all surprised when I see that I've pretty matched or improved on my best time.

So the nice thing about getting out of shape is the positive self-image you get to enjoy when you've finally gotten back in shape a bit. But just wait until I start plateauing later on, and then you'll hear me whining.

I need to pick out a 10K road race so that I can start training on an actual schedule (and with some actual course / weather conditions in mind). Maybe I'll see what the ChristianAthlete folks think. For my first race, I would like to shoot for a sub-40 minute 10K time (40 min / 6.22 miles = 6:25 per mile); it's fast enough to be a reasonable stretch (and a nice round number) without being too terrifically much faster than my current training pace (6:40-7:00 per mile).

Then, eventually, I'd like to shoot for something like a sub-three hour marathon (= 6:52 per mile) or some equivalent pace on a shorter distance (if I don't ever work up to actual marathon distances); but I almost certainly wouldn't try something like that this summer, so probably next summer or late this fall (at the very earliest). If I can get to where I run a 10K at sub-six minute miles (which is reasonably hardcore for me... 37:00 or thereabouts), then I can probably handle a three-hour marathon (as long as the large mileage base is there, too).

We'll just see whether I actually keep up with the running or whether I get all slackerly at some point.

Tuesday, 05/25/04
The network gurus at my worksite have just made a couple of cool changes (the details of which don't merit description here) that basically allow me to stay on the internet ~perpetually. Previously, I had only been able to access the internet occasionally. So you might start seeing more stupid, random update things now.

As I've mentioned, I really don't like cicadas, but they are at least good for one thing: when you're screaming along the highway (with a bunch of other cars) past miles and miles of cicada swarms, you get to see all kinds of wonderful cicada stunts (since cicadas, being so stinkingly large, are really easy to see).

My favorite cicada stunt is the "cicada launcher", where a hapless cicada smacks the windshield of a car ahead of you and goes shooting about thirty feet into the air.

My second favorite cicada stunt is the "high speed tumble", where a handful of cicadas get sucked down by the wake of a passing car and start tumbling along the highway, bouncing off the road at about fifty miles per hour.

Saturday, 05/22/04
I just spent a good bunch of time with my church's praise team helping them prepare their set for tomorrow's contemporary service. My job was mostly just listening and providing suggestions. These guys are getting pretty good now, which is cool because they've been put in something of a tough spot lately.

Also, in order to get into racing a bit more and to provide a few more social opportunities (while also doing something that I'm already spending a bunch of time on), I'm going to start participating in this. Looks like it should be reasonably cool.

And, in related news, that one toenail finally fell off (with a little bit of help... it was having a hard time letting go). So now I am branded as a runner again. Don't laugh... being a runner was a very big and important part of my identity back in high school. When I stopped running back in college (because sophomore year of Aero/Astro is a bear), I went through a minor identity crisis for about a month.

Thursday, 05/20/04
I'm taking the day off to sort some things out and get my head back on straight.

Wednesday, 05/19/04
Just started seeing some of the 17-year cicadas (in Maryland, at least). Man, are they ugly.

I'm back in one of those "having a hard time concentrating at work" situations. It should pass in a couple of days, but we'll see.

The best thing I could probably do to help (with the lack of concentration) is to get more sleep (seems to be a theme). To that end, I need to not stay at work quite so late (so that I can make it back to Virginia in time to run, do some activities, and then get to sleep by 9 or 10pm). And so, while at work, I need to get my tasks done as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Surely you see the positive feedback loop here (and positive feedback loops can be very bad, when it comes to things like burnout).

Tuesday, 05/18/04
Argh. I can tell that my project at work is going to start grinding me up pretty soon. Must... sleep.

Sunday, 05/16/04 (late)
~Just got home from Boston, and I went ahead and posted some photos from the concert (in addition to some general photos from my trip, which I still need to finish posting). Have fun.

Saturday, 05/15/04
The concert was amazing, and everything came together really well. I guess being away from MIT for so long, I forgot what absolutely incredible people they have here, and so it was very refreshing and exciting to see how everyone pulled together to make this thing happen. Many thanks to the Cross Products alums and current members for being so totally cool.

I have downloaded about 150 more pictures from today (plus about another 30 from yesterday) which I need to filter through, captionize, and then post to the site here. I definitely won't get that done tonight (because it's about 1:46am and I'm completely pooped), but I'll get up sort of early tomorrow and take a first crack at it (with more to follow later). So if you're looking for concert pictures, then you should get at least a few very soon, with many more forthcoming.

Saturday, 05/15/04
Sight-seeing was indeed fun, and hanging out with various alums at Bryan Bilyeu's place was a real good time. I have some pictures (just a few), but there's no time to upload them right now, so I'll post them when I post pictures from the concert tonight (= pretty late, probably after midnight).

For now, I'm going for a run, and then we're going to assemble at MIT and start the last-minute rehearsing (yipes).

Friday, 05/14/04
Apparently I'm now incapable of sleeping in past about 6:30am. Anyway, I spent some of the morning finally uploading those pictures I promised, so that worked out alright.

Gotta go run, and then the sight-seeing fun will begin.

Thursday, 05/13/04
I have arrived in Boston. Now I will risk life and limb to go on a quick (?) run along the Charles River, and then I'm going to go get some good Korean food with a bunch of old friends. Pictures will be posted later this evening.

Wednesday, 05/12/04
I am just about to hit the road to Boston. I will post some stuff (pictures and an update) tonight.

Tuesday, 05/11/04
I am finally affirmed as a "real runner" again, because my left "index" toenail has now turned black and will soon fall off. Pictures of the happy event will be posted promptly.

Monday, 05/10/04
Hooray! I found a highly-recommended kennel for Ella, and it sounds pretty good. She will be very happy there, I'm sure, making many new little dog friends. In the course of finding the kennel, I got some information about the local greyhound rescue organization, so more fun for Ella is on the horizon.

And I just had a really good run, averaging seven-minute miles over a six mile course with gradual hills (including a brief stop to pet a local greyhound), all of it in mid-80 degree temperatures. Yipee! My left shin was fine and my right knee didn't hurt (so I think my recent campaign of massive hydration has been working). Seven-minute miles aren't that screamingly fast, but I haven't run multiple ones in quite a while.

[Note to self: at some point, write some pithy stuff on how a running injury (on a runner who really wants to run a bunch more) is similar to unconfessed sin in the life of a believer, with the whole "holding you back from your goal" thing.]

And the Cross Products anniversary concert is coming up this weekend. Pip pip! And so we (soon) won't have to work any more on getting alum songs pulled together. WAH-HOO!!! It will be (and has been) a lot of fun to perform these songs with old college pals, but I can definitely understand (now) why they only do this thing every fifteen years or so.

Sunday, 05/09/04
I made it through last work week without too many problems. It was definitely a major scramble, but having a quick break on Wednesday helped some.

Next week is going to be shorter, since I'm leaving early Thursday morning (heading to Boston). There will still be some "beginning of the next phase" weirdness at work (plus some "wrapping up the last phase" weirdness), but nothing should be too weird. Then I need to get Ella into a new kennel (starting Wednesday night).

I'm throwing together a quick "trip to Boston" page on which to publish photos of the trip.

Wednesday, 05/05/04
happy birthday, Jenn.

Adelphia service to northern Virginia is completely hosed right now, so i apologize if i'm a little slow responding to emails. ah, dial-up, how i have missed you (not). things will be a little better tomorrow (because i'll be back at work, where the internet connection is presumably fine).

Monday, 05/03/04
i'm in a major crunch at work and am simultaneously having a hard time focusing on what i'm doing. not a good combination. i basically need to make it through tomorrow in one piece, and then i'll get a bit of a breather around Wednesday (taking the day ~off to do some work-related and personal errands). the rest of the week after that won't be a cakewalk, but it should at least be manageable.

so the usual disclaimer applies: if i'm particularly slow in responding to emails, it's nothing personal (other than that i'm personally overloaded).

Tuesday, 04/27/04
i need to fix up my photographs web site. the JPEG converter thing is hosed (so the photos look nasty) and there's a whole lot of extraneous junk photos in there. plus i need to organize things by topic / album, and perhaps integrate some sort of security control.

it sounds like this coming weekend will be full of nerding, then, because i also want to (finally) develop my own "tracker" application (with security) for tracking issues / next steps / etc. (especially since that sort of thing is going to start being useful for certain church-related activities).

Sunday, 04/25/04 (late)
sorry, Mom and Dad, i got all tied up w/ the Cross Products alum rehearsal and didn't have time to call you (and now it's too late). i have tomorrow night off from any a cappella singing, so i'll call you then.

Friday, 04/23/04 (late)
i've been meaning to overhaul / clean out stuff on this bloated web page, so i just took the plunge and nuked everything south of the "updates" part. i will clean up and re-post some of the old content, but not really soon.

if you simply must see the old version of this page (with all of the old content, but now without the latest "update" thing), here it is; knock yourself out.

Friday, 04/23/04
running yesterday, i could feel that weird stiffness starting to appear at a couple of points, but i backed off, ran through it, and got past it.

i have a theory that it happens because the muscles on my left shin get fatigued, so that they can't lift my left foot up quite enough (so i land on my toes instead of my heel, and hence the stomping and the further irritation of the shin). i experimented a bit and found that perhaps increasing my pace helps (?), since it gets my knees up higher and gives my left foot more time to raise before landing.

we'll see whether that turns out to be true, but at least i've figured out how to run long routes again.

and hooray! episode 8 of Making Fiends is out, finally.

Wednesday, 04/21/04
if it's another update, then it must be a Wednesday.

as my sister astutely notes, I am listening to a bunch of Avalon. i just got their "best of" album. i have a personal rule (of sorts) that whenever a friend recommends an album, i'll go out and get it. it's a good way to force yourself into musical interests which you might not otherwise pursue.

i'm sort of taking the day off, or rather i'm at the office in Arlington (instead of going to Maryland). i'm actually taking time to shore up some personal projects and i'm wearing jeans, so this definitely counts as time off.

running continues to be good, but i'm starting to occasionally get that weird ~stiffness in my left shin (where my lower leg doesn't want to move as much as it should, so i kind of start stomping and then things start falling apart). I have some theories about why it's happening, and i'm backing way off whenever it starts, so hopefully i should be able to figure things out (and fix them) pretty soon. when this sort of thing would occasionally happen back in high school days, i noticed that it only seemed to occur when i was running by myself. strange.

Wednesday, 04/07/04
i think my running shoes arrived today. we'll just see how soon i get to use them (if ever).

the planning for the alumni singing at the Cross Products 15th anniversary concert is starting to settle down pretty well, so that's nice. i'm not exactly having to work around the clock any more.

Wednesday, 04/01/04
i figured out how to get my "now playing" tool thing to post information when i'm behind a firewall. so now you can see what i'm listening to again. oh rapture.

Tuesday, 03/25/04
i'm in another crunch mode, between work stuff, xprod anniversary concert stuff, church ~Easter stuff, and several other major things. i'll probably be through this particular push by next Monday (although a lot of this will continue through May).

Thursday, 03/25/04
there's a cool article in Technology Review on how MIT's Aero/Astro department overhauled itself a couple of years ago (which reminds me of the recent announcement of MIT's Complex Systems Research Lab and how frustrated i was that there wasn't something like this back in my day... argh!). when i have some more time, i'll dig through the article some more and write something up.

in the course of looking around, i also found some information on my Harmony and Counterpoint I professor and on the former TA who saved our collective butts in Aerodynamics (Darmofal). it's "blasts from the past" time, i guess.

Wednesday, 03/24/04
so very, very busy. if i have not responded to an email from you, sorry. i will be catching up pretty soon, in the next couple of days.

commuting to Maryland every day is, at present, kicking my butt. i'm still sorting out my schedule a bit, so hopefully things will improve, but i suspect that i'm going to have to make a major change somewhere, too (drop an activity or figure out how to work from home one day a week (yeah, right) or something like that).

Sunday, 03/14/04
i needed some new running shoes, and the "build your own shoe (colors)" thing on Nike iD looked like fun. i purposefully picked some really nasty-looking colors because, (1) hey, they're racing shoes (sort of), which are supposed to look nasty, and (2) that way i'll be less likely to wear them as normal shoes (not that i was in much danger of that, being such a running shoe snob as i am). i also got to put my own customized message on them, one on each heel, and that immediately made me think of the posterior of Mongo's ox from "Blazing Saddles".

the shoes will arrive in about a month, just in time for some decently hot weather (and these shoes are very well ventilated). and i'm probably going to have to switch to a lot of night running (or very early morning), so i bought a reflective vest thing, too.

Thursday, 02/19/04
sorry about not making any updates for a while (hey, i updated a "books i'm reading" thing... that should count for something). i've been very, very busy. i'll spend a little more time writing stuff up this weekend.

Wednesday, 02/11/04
i just found out (as suspected) that i will be helping out on a Fusion/RIP workshop in about two weeks (the actual crunch time being in two weeks, with a week of preparation before and a week of wrap-up after). that's okay, and at least it will be something interesting (at work) for a change. i will have to pause some of my extracurricular pursuits for a while, but i've used some of this downtime at work to get those extracurricular things straightened out and squared away, so putting them on hold shouldn't be a big problem.

singing "We Will Glorify" (a cappella) this last Sunday went fine. we did a good job with it, and we're getting better at preparing songs without a lot of stress. i guess you could say that we had already formed up as a singing group, but now we're actually starting to gel a bit more.

my church has been looking for a new "music pastor", and we're getting pretty close to final considerations on this one particular guy. in the process of getting there, the choir has actually gotten to do a bunch of work with him (he's directed a performance and a whole bunch of rehearsals), and he's very good. he's already demonstrated an ability to take the choir to a new level of craft and artistry (and that's not only a musical challenge, it's also a leadership / team-building challenge). i find the idea of actually improving our skills pretty exciting (instead of just cranking out one choir song each week with a minimum of effort). so yay. we'll see what the final answer on this guy actually is, but i'm feeling pretty confident about it.

Saturday, 02/07/04
the motorcade that i saw yesterday afternoon (going the other way on a local highway) was big enough that i'm guessing it was the President. seemed like about fifteen vehicles, not including the limos themselves and all of the police escorts (maybe about twenty cruisers and ten motorcycles), with that entire half of the highway being completely closed down. it was pretty cool. i didn't know that there were so many black vans in existence.

i am discovering the joys of freezing rain, which, for some reason, i really haven't much experienced before now. it makes walking around pretty hard (no harder than regular ice, though), but i do really enjoy what it does to my car (no kidding), basically encasing it in a 1/4 inch thick layer of ice, which i then get to peel off (of the windows). it's really fun, and i've found that the ideal tool is not actually an ice scraper: instead, i use a little plastic dowel, about two inches long and hollow (from Ella's dog bag dispenser thing), which i use like a glass cutter on the ice. once i've scored around the circumference of the ice, i can just peel off a big sheet of it. for some reason, i find the peeling off of shape-fitting semi-adhesive layers (in general) to be very gratifying.

Wednesday, 02/04/04
i need to shift to an earlier daily routine. traffic in this region is bad enough that i want to do most of my travel before the roads get really crowded (and, during rush hour, some of the roads are only open to carpoolers, so i'd like to be driving earlier so that i can use those roads, too). so i might try to switch to a "get up at 5am" sort of routine. we'll see. i at least need to start keeping a more regular schedule.

the next version of muscat is progressing pretty well. i should have album covers appearing in the now playing thinger some time this weekend.

which reminds me that we'll be singing "We Will Glorify" (a cappella) this Sunday. it won't be terribly nerve-wracking, since the song is mostly simple and since we've worked on it quite a bit. our next couple of songs after that will be somewhat harder, but this upcoming performance will be more of a breather.

at last some of this snow is starting to melt away, at least enough that Ella can find small pieces of exposed grass on which to relieve herself. getting her to take care of business on the snow (and especially the ice-covered snow that we've had) has not been any fun for either of us. but i guess it has at least been sort of amusing to see Ella staggering around the thick, cruncy snow (punching through the ice with every step) trying to keep her balance while sniffing around (it doesn't sound that amusing, but you have to see it).

Sunday, 01/25/04
Mom and Dad, i really will call you today (since i have my phone). such fun we shall have.

apparently we're going to get dumped on tonight. [checks forecast] yeah, four to seven inches of snow. not the worst thing ever, but i may try to work from home tomorrow (depending on how well they clean up the roads).

i'm finally going to try to update my muscat music catalog system to be a little handier. it'll be a combination of the two approaches that i've already taken (the earlier, now-dead database-driven approach and the current playlist-generating approach). the immediate cheesy goal (because every project needs an immediate cheesy goal) is to enable the album cover-finding tool that i had tinkered with earlier (because having the album cover show up on my home page would be a nice splash of color that adds some visual interest and that helps solidify the idea of "this is what's now playing"). you will gasp in awe and wonderment when it's finished.

Thursday, 01/22/04
i've been following the progress of MIT OpenCourseWare for a couple of years, and now they have published enough courses that there's something to really dig your teeth into. so i threw together a list of courses that i find interesting. we'll see if i actually spend the time it takes to get into this stuff. particularly if i'm going to start getting a little more reasearch-y, spending time on this sort of thing will definitely do me some good.

the cold weather continues. i can't complain about the weather compared to the what they've got in the northeast, but it sure will be nice when things warm up again.

one of these days i'll remember to bring a camera to the office so i can take a picture of the great view of the mall and the Capitol.

Sunday, 01/18/04
Mom & Dad, i left my cell phone up in Maryland (at work) last week, so i won't be able to call you today. i'll get it back tomorrow (or today, rather).

i just got back from hanging out with Dave Blagg and friends. we watched New England win and Philadelphia lose, and i kicked his butt at Trivial Pursuit (not really that one-sided of a victory, but enough to justify some gloating).

i'll do a little bit of work-related running around tomorrow, but only just a little bit. mostly i'll try to relax, get some stuff straightened out, and have a good a cappella rehearsal.

Saturday, 01/18/04
if only Ella barked more, i would get her one of these... do they have one that works on whines instead of barks?

it has been COLD here, like around ten or twenty degrees Fahrenheit, but i can't really complain compared to what some other family members have been going through. it gets pretty windy around here, too, so going out on dog walks has not been terribly enjoyable for either of us (me or the dog, that is).

we got through last week's workshop okay. it wasn't terribly hard, and i was very pleasantly surprised at how well a few of the logistical details went. the roughest part was just the commute up to Maryland (gotta get used to that). but our partners / customers definitely still have a long way to go (1) in understanding what workshops / facilitation are for and (2) in knowing how to run a good project. i guess that if there's one thing my 8.5(!) years of consulting experience has taught me, it's this: the customer is the customer because they don't know how to do this stuff, and you have to love them for it (because otherwise you'd be flat broke).

Monday, 01/11/04
as you have probably have noticed, my site has been down for a while. my domain name had expired, and it has taken a little while to get it set up again.

apparently one of my neighbors has a wireless network router now. my laptop (from work) has been spontaneously connecting to some Linksys wireless router every couple of minutes. the problem is partly caused by the fact that this neighbor hasn't yet configured their router to be a little more restrictive in who it lets on. ~fortunately, they also haven't configured their router to have some password other than the default, so i snuck in there and made a couple of more-friendly settings (so that my network connection wouldn't get all clanked up).

it's going to be a pretty rough week, because we're doing another one of those week-long, fly-by-night workshops in Maryland. hooray for 1.5-hour commutes (not).

and i went ahead and signed up for membership in Potomac Baptist Church. hooray!

Saturday, 01/03/04
Ella has gotten into this habit (when i come home and let her out of her crate) of coming out of her crate, saying hello, and then going back in the crate to grab something (either a rawhide bone or a squeaky hedgehog) and taking it out into the living room. sometimes she'll go out to the living room first, jump around a bit (in excitement) and then come back to collect the object of choice. kind of strange. now i make a point of always leaving at least one item in the crate with her (so she can take it to the living room later).

i saw Return of the King finally (and then a second time, too, and i still can't quite find the Bouncy Minas Tirith Guy); it was okay, but it wasn't absolutely thrilling. i'm kind of overloaded on that stuff right now, too, because i chaperoned for the church youth group's New Year's Eve lock-in, and they basically watched all the movies back to back (in the "special edition", which meant they were extra long-running).

you know, all the products at Think Geek are really cool, but for some reason i get really tired whenever i'm browsing through their stuff. don't know why.

Tuesday, 12/30/03
i found a bunch of detailed records for Ella and Piper. it's pretty cool, because you can follow their pedigrees way, way back (i like this one), and because you can see a bunch of interesting analysis on their racing careers (Piper's brother had a really good racing career). and here's what the pedigree would've looked like if Piper & Ella had had puppies.

Sunday, 12/27/03
the last a cappella performance of the year is tomorrow... we're singing "Child of Purity", which is a relatively downbeat / mellow song (w/ some nice ~jazz harmonies), so that will be a welcome break after the boisterousness (and hard-edgedness) of "O Holy Night". and i'm looking forward to moving on to the next batch of songs. we haven't really picked out all the songs yet, and we don't know when our next performance will be, but we're probably going to get several (four or five) songs ready next (through a more casual rotation, without really getting performance-ready on any one of them just yet).

Christmas was okay. i didn't go up to Maine after all, which was kind of disappointing, but it was probably the right thing to do (to not go). i got to hang out a lot w/ the Lindens (including the Colorado Lindens), and i got some nice swag out of the whole thing (thanks, Becky & Derek).

i have definitely had my fill of Christmas songs for the next eleven months. i usually turn the local classical radio station on for Ella during the day, to provide her with some background noise and some cultural enrichment, and ever since Thanksgiving the station has been playing Christmas carols, almost exclusively (most of them being King's College / boy's choir sort of stuff, with an inordinate number of John Rutter songs... he must be filthy rich from the royalties, you'd think). and "O Holy Night" is now ruined for me, at least temporarily.

Sunday, 12/20/03
the first of four a cappella performances went fine. we had to work very hard to get the song ready, which was to be expected. the idea was that we'll learn a bunch of stuff in preparing these earlier songs, and so later on we can handle songs without having to put quite so much effort into it. we'll see if that ends up being true or not.

well, i wish i had more interesting stuff to write here. i haven't had a whole lot of spare time, so i haven't been able to pursue any interesting nerd-hobbies (which typically compose the interesting topics covered here). sorry. i will try to start living a more exciting life.

Thursday, 12/18/03
i finally got my router working with my cable modem, so now i can finally connect to the the internet from other computers without going through all kinds of rewiring nonsense. now i can sit out in the living room with Ella while i do internet stuff, so that makes her a whole lot happier.

we got done w/ the choir cantata at church, and it was okay. doing back-to-back peformances (Sat. night & Sun. morning) was a little rough, but whatever. now we have four a cappella performances coming up in the span of eight days, and then that's it for the year, singing-wise.

Saturday, 12/06/03
the first serious snow arrived (~two nights ago), so there's about four to six inches on the ground. i'm happy to discover that i still now how to drive in the stuff. and it's always fun to bundle Ella up in her thneed (Ella-in-thneed pictures are forthcoming).

hmm, i guess there's really not that much to report, update-wise. i've been pretty busy with work for about a week, and i've gotten into the habit of just crashing (and reading) once i get home. this next week should be better (in that regard), so maybe there'll be all sorts of fascinating news in a few days. don't hold your breath, though.

Wednesday, 11/19/03
ah, broadband, how i have missed you. what's especially nice is not having to tie up the phone line constantly. now if i can only get my router to work with it...

Monday, 11/17/03
i'm re-installing operating systems on my desktop computer. Windows 98 is such a pain. it almost makes me want to go out and pay a ridiculous amount of money for Windows XP. almost. well, at least the Linux installation will be easy enough (assuming i'm still sane after eventually finishing this Windows stuff).

the PBC a cappella quasi-group is starting to work up a couple more songs, and we're also looking into the longer-term future of the group (increasing its size, repetoire, and usefulness). i had forgotten how much work this kind of thing is. but it's still fun. and i have a theory that singing a lot helps reduce the risk of sinus pressure headaches (by vibrating the snot out of your sinuses, to put it bluntly).

i will probably try to buy a used car this week, probably something cheap and reliable like a Honda. more about that later.

Monday, 11/10/03
the a cappella singing (Sunday, at church) went fine, and it was pretty well received. so we're starting to figure out what to sing next, probably including some sort of Christmas music.

Bryan and Ryan (both of them fellow ex-Cross Products) were down from Boston to visit over the weekend, and Ely and Genee Lyn (also fellow MIT a cappella types) came over from Falls Church to watch the singing, so we had a whole bunch of singing pals there (and we didn't even plan it that way).

Wednesday, 11/05/03
the workshop's over now. it went very well, but the future of this project is still kind of sketchy. well, we'll see. i sure am glad to have some more free time now. i've got a bunch of random things going on still, but juggling those things is nowhere near as tense & draining as a workshop.

yeah, so we're putting the finishing touches on an a cappella song for this coming Sunday, and i'm getting ready for Bryan & Ryan to visit this coming weekend, and i've got several different (non-hobby) personal projects going on.

[i won't write any more about this stuff right now, because i want a chance to unwind a bit first. maybe tomorrow (w/ the writing).]

Saturday, 11/01/03
busy, busy, busy... i'm in the middle of a workshop right now (through this next ~Wednesday); sorry if i'm neglecting emails, but i'll catch up very soon. between that and other random stuff (that i've already talked about here), i'm pretty much back to into a "no free time" mode, for a while. but i am getting a high-speed connection pretty soon (in a week or so), so that should (again) help me to be more responsive.

Sunday, 10/26/03
i've been busy (obviously, since i haven't had the time/energy to write an update for a while), not so much with any one thing but with a bunch of them: a bit of work (soon to increase dramatically), some work on defining the new vision / direction for the Potomac Baptist web site, a whole bunch of cooking, some buying of domestic stuff, and working with Becky to start an a cappella ~group at PBC (!). i guess i didn't realize how much spare time i had out in San Diego (which is now aflame, by the way) and how little spare time i'd have out here. but that's okay, because i'm spending my time on the right stuff.

Thursday, 10/02/03
at long last, connectivity is restored. if i've been ignoring your emails for the past ~two weeks, i apologize. give me a couple of days to catch up, or give me a call (and i'll give you my new phone number in Virginia).

it looks like DSL might be available in my area (still have to confirm), which would be great because i'd much rather host my own site than pay someone else to do it. if there's no DSL, then i'll probably get a cable modem, so either way i should be online a lot more and much more contactable.

Friday, 09/19/03
Ella & i are just about finished with our move to Virginia. we've got maybe 250 more miles to go tomorrow morning. just in time to miss the hurricane fun (which happened yesterday).

i haven't been having very many profound thoughts for the past couple of weeks because i've been too busy working, packing, and driving. settling down (for the first time in a couple of years) sure will be nice.

it will probably take a couple of days (at least) for me to get a real internet connection in VA (especially w/ all the hurricane cleanup that the utilities are handling), so don't expect a lot of great updates here for a while.

Tuesday, 09/16/03
i finished up the review of my stuff at work today, and things went decently well. there's still, of course, lots left to do, but we at least reached one of our milestones.

so i'm pretty tired now. i'm going to take it a little easier for a couple of days, and then i'll get cracking on the work that remains.

Sunday, 09/14/03
how about that updated Potomac Baptist web site there? it used to look really nasty, mostly because of a really freaky color selection; Bryant went in there, cleaned up the colors, tweaked the layout, and cleaned up some of the content. thanks, dude. now we have some breathing room in which to work on overhauling some of the functionality.

still preparing for Tuesday's ~big review of my work. i'll throw in some last minute material tomorrow, but the pressure is pretty much relieved until the review itself.

i've been contemplating the addition of a title to my updates (like Ryan Lee does with his journal). dunno... it would mean having to find a theme. i suppose it's just another level at which to explain to your reader what is the significance of the day's story. still contemplating.

Thursday, 09/11/03
still in crunch mode at work. i'm probably going to head back there soon(having spent some quality time with Ella) to take care of some stuff that i just can't seem to get to when anyone else is around. then i get to settle down a little over the weekend. then there'll be a big meeting on Tuesday, after which i'll probably be scrambling to fix a bunch of things for a while. such fun.

i went ahead and picked up Bobby McFerrin's last album. it was okay. now i have to go find "Jim's Journal" books.

Monday, 09/08/03
MIT's Musical Theater Guild (not, mind you, that i had anything to do with performing musicals... blech) is putting on "Into the Woods" and "West Side Story" again, which were two of the three musical productions that i ever saw while a student then (when they get back around to "Pippin", they'll be three for three). i guess musical theater isn't immune from the whole "repetoire" thing (such a shock!). whatever.

okay, i have to get to sleep. staying up late to do stuff you really don't care about makes no sense at all.

Saturday, 09/06/03
i'm sitting out on the porch with Ella, enjoying the weather and working on some stuff (things are kind of crunchy right now, in a not-too-stressful sort of way).

Ella has these bone-shaped treat things that are made of a bunch of layers of ~rawhide; after she has nibbled on them for a while, some of the inside layers pop out, leaving these nice hollow spaces where i like to squoosh in some peanut butter. then i give the peanut buttered bone back to Ella, and she goes nuts trying to get at the peanut butter... although i must admit she's pretty good at it. it's interesting to watch her try and to see how she figures it out. dog psychology at its best.

i have been waiting for a long while for the next Bobby McFerrin album, and i just found out that his latest release has been out for about eighteen months now. Amazon.com really ought to make it so that "latest releases" get top-of-the-list preference in your online search results.

Monday, 09/01/03
i have added some more dog photos (and two movies). sorry, some of them are sideways, because i am lazy. starting to hit my file storage quota, so i'll be removing some of the movies pretty soon (so download them while you may... you know who you are).

Sunday, 08/31/03 [late]
Dr. Dixon delivered a good message. they had a guest musician that played the harp, too, and he seemed pretty caffeinated (not the sort of style you usually associate with a harpist).

over the last 36 hours or so, i've been working on a small-scale alternative to JDO, not because i'm really into re-inventing the wheel (although that can be fun), but because i had slightly different requirements than those satisfied by JDO (or any other object/relational mapping tool that i could find). so, basically, i threw together the beginning of a rudimentary "persistance framework", and, to my great shock, it actually worked ~right off the bat. i probably won't be able to iron out all the kinks immediately (what with other goings-on), but this tool should save me a lot of time in the very near future (especially with all the transactional web applications i'm developing). technical details and libraries will be made available once they're ready.

i will probably go in to work for a while tomorrow, to try to get caught up and to take care of a couple of nearby errands. probably just four or five hours' worth, depending on how fast i can work and whether i go crazy with boredom.

Friday, 08/29/03
i'm going to get a lot of stuff done this weekend, which will be nice. i never look forward to doing the "big & nasty (because i've put it off)"-type tasks, but i have already taken care of most of those, so i'm left with the smaller tasks that are less angst-ridden and on which i can see immediate progress. this should be a pretty good weekend. i'm watching zero TV now (since The Wire finished its season), and i've got some serious motivation to get stuff done (see further below), so yeah.

Dr. Dixon (the (soon to be?) former president of Cedarville University) will be speaking at Shadow Mountain Church this Sunday night, so i'll probably go see him.

my main manager-dude (Sapient guy) went and talked with the overall project ~leader to get the okay on my relocation. i haven't spoken personally with my manager since then, but we traded some messages, and it sounds like things went pretty well. there remains one minor detail to be worked out, but it's purely logistical (for whatever that's worth), and the bottom line is that the willingness is there and we all seem to agree that it's a good idea. so hooray! i'm obviously going to keep an eye on that last issue, but i'm also going to continue with my relocation plans (about which i'm feeling quite comfortable, too).

Wednesday, 08/27/03
the discussion (with managers) about my relocation went pretty well. the bottom line, from my perspective, was that they were able to figure out (or start figuring out) how they could get the relocation okayed... that and i was able to share with them the timetable that i'm looking at for this stuff. i have a couple of items that i'm preparing, to help them in making their case, and i should be able to see some progress on this over the next couple of business days.

Tuesday, 08/26/03
it turns out that the hotel laundromat is not obliterated after all, and it's still available (albeit during some less-than-convenient hours). yippee.

tomorrow i'm going to have a discussion (with a couple of my managers) that should help pin down some of this "yeah, you're moving but not just yet" stuff that's been going on (for about four months). i'm getting to the point where i might just make that long-anticipated career change, depending on how the discussion goes. i'm going to try not to do anything rash, but i've already thought this over quite a bit and would not be adverse to making such a drastic decision (and i've already alerted the managers to this fact). so we'll see what happens.

about a month ago, some software application or another altered the gamma correction settings on my desktop computer's video card, making medium-bright colors much, much brighter (i clearly don't know how gamma correction works), to the point that a lot of text was completely illegible (and everything was really annoying to look at). i mostly stopped using that computer, since i had recently started using the laptop computer quite a bit instead, but it was still a very annoying / nagging problem. well, today i finally figured out how to reset the video card's gamma correction (it was disgustingly easy, of course), and now everything is just fine. it's like having a (very minor) migraine suddenly disappear after about a month. ah... sweet relief.

Saturday, 08/22/03
i have been very good and have gone running every day for the past week. and it's been mostly morning stuff, which is a bit surprising since i used to think it was harder to make yourself run in the morning. my revised opinion is that your body tends to be creakier in the morning (so you must be careful not to push it too hard) but your discipline is better in the morning (since you're not all worn out, since random events haven't really had a chance to happen, and since you're already sort of on autopilot through your morning routine).

i'm making this big push to run because i won't be in San Diego too much longer, and i'd rather get back on the running wagon out here where it's nice and dry instead of back in Virginia, where it's nasty and humid. and any running i do back there will pretty much have to be in the morning (or late at night), so it's good to be getting used to that, too.

the hotel here is almost done renovating the guest rooms, so now they're renovating the front office area. i got back from traveling last week to find out they had obliterated the guest laundry facilities, which means i'll be doing the "travel to a laundromat" thing. fun. well, at least it will help me appreciate the in-unit washer/dryer at the new apartment (as if i wasn't already looking forward to it).

speaking of renovations, i am now pretty much fully signed up to work on the Potomac Baptist web site. and it turns out that there is a PBC member who was also signed up (by someone else) to fix up the site and who specializes in the visual design parts of things (and who even has his own company for that kind of stuff: Visuance). that's handy, because our skills / expertise appear to complement nicely.

Thursday, 08/14/03
i ended up pulling an all-nighter last night (through a combination of a moderately large amount of work to do and an early flight to catch). i went to the airport early so i could be sure to get a window seat (very important on a non-stop cross-continental flight), so then i actually napped at the airport (which was something of a first and which wasn't too bad, although i would never have done it if i hadn't set the alarm clock on my cell phone... sleeping through your flight's departure would really stink).

so anyway, i'm back in San Diego now, and Ella is glad to see me. i've got a big long list of things to do (in support of getting ready to move, etc.), and most of the list is pretty well organized and pretty straight-forward. oh the schedules i shall make... there shall be great rejoicing.

Wednesday, 08/13/03
i'm wrapping up this (last?) business trip to the DC area, and it's been pretty good. got to hang out with some folks from Potomac Baptist and, of course, Becky & Derek, and i got to resolve a bunch of "will i move to DC" issues in a very positive way. i'm probably just a couple of days from getting the official green light, and i'm actually so confident that it will come through (and i'll have so little ability to do this later) that i actually put down a deposit on a nice apartment in Ashburn, VA. i've got a tentative move-in date of Sept. 15, which seems to be the date around which all the planets are aligning (roughly).

work has been decent, and i'm definitely in the "juggle a lot of big things" mode, which is a mode i typically enjoy. makes me feel like some kind of wheeler-dealer. if i do ultimately move out here and keep working on this project, i might be staying in that mode for a while, too, so that's nice.

so i'm working on nailing down the "blessing to move", and i'll be trying to wrap up my current efforts & divy up what i would and wouldn't be doing in DC, and i'll be starting in on the actual move logisitics (with a vengeance). i'm feeling pretty comfortable w/ that logistics part there, because i made the ~same move a year ago (wow... almost a year to the day).

anyway, i'll leave it at that for now. i don't have gobs of time (trying to accomplish whatever i can while i still have access to these project muckity-mucks, for the next six hours or so). i will definitely be providing more updates once i get back to San Diego.

Monday, 08/04/03
i forgot to bring my laptop on this latest business trip to DC (i'm here until 8/14), so (1) i'm making this update through the "web TV" thing in my hotel room (which is a pain in the butt) and (2) don't expect to reach me through email for ~1.5 weeks... just call me instead.

okay, well now i've actually borrowed a co-worker's laptop, so that's a little bit better (no more triple-archiving of old updates... hooray!).

Friday, 08/01/03
Charm School is pretty good... it definitely has a unique, stripped-down sound, and it's definitely "music for guys".

i will be spending a little bit of time (tomorrow) getting some stuff organized (work & personal), and then it's back to DC (on Sunday). i'll be in DC for about a week and a half. it's possible that this could be my last quick trip out there for a while, soon to be followed by a permanent move out there, i hope. we'll see.

Wednesday, 07/30/03
high-speed internet access, baby! the ~good folks at Marriott Residence Inn just put in (shared) DSL access for each room, and they're not even charging for it. so thrilling, no matter how briefly i may be enjoying it.

Saturday, 07/26/03
some nerd developments: i have posted my projects list tool thing finally (or, rather, i've posted a publicly-viewable version of it), so that you can take a look at it and be completely amazed.

also, i just finished making the first half of a new tool to grab and publish album covers (and the second half is something i've pretty much designed out and just need to slap together). the tool uses amazon.com's "web services" thing (nifty!) to find album covers (which i will then store locally in my muscat catalog system). to see roughly what i'm talking about, take a look at these example search results. [please be careful... you can ~easily get Amazon to run a 5000-results search for you, and that's a pretty big hit (on both Amazon and you)]

Friday, 07/25/03
the DC trip was very fun and very productive. staying over the weekend was a good idea; i got a bunch of quality time in w/ Becky & Derek, and i got to figure out many things about my tentative move to DC. their church (Potomac Baptist) was nice. Becky and I talked a whole bunch about some plans for updates to their web site (it really needs it). and we got to do some more strategizing about work on various projects.

i've got a whole bunch of work and a whole bunch of personal things to take care of over the weekend. and i'm kind of burnt out. well, if i get some huge, unusual surge of energy / productiveness, i might _possibly_ bip on up to LA for church on Sunday. we'll see... i'll make it a goal, but no promises.

i'm about ready (finally) to publish some information about my "project prioritization" tool. just need to get my security model working, and then we'll be all set.

Monday, 07/14/03
info.winamp.com (don't bother trying to go there) has apparently gotten wise (?) to my album cover scamming (or has otherwise ~decided to suspend service, which is more likely), because now my nifty "album covers" feature on the "now playing" thing doesn't even work occasionally. ah well. so that means, of course, that it's time for me to go ahead and implement the fancier image-swiping tool that i've meant to create for a while now (and probably to swipe from Amazon, instead, which means i'll get a better percentage of cover images, too). i do, at least, intend to store my own thumbnail images, so i don't think it will be a huge scam on anyone (and it's not like my site's volume is terribly high...).

i think i'll definitely stay over the weekend on this next DC trip. that will knock down the airfare a tad, and it will give me a chance to see Becky & Derek's church, too (even if, as Derek warned me, it's their annual "youth" service, which is run by the yutes... so there will be a big grain of salt, but that's okay). i'll mostly just be there to check out how nice their interior decorations are, anyway (kidding).

news on the actual move to DC is still in the "rumblings" stage, but there were more of those (good) today. doesn't seem like it should be too much longer now.

Saturday, 07/12/03
i'm back in San Diego now. i flew in last night, leaving Dulles around 7pm and arriving here around 11pm (local). i had a layover in LAX (first time there) and took a shuttle flight the rest of the way. thrilling.

i ~always get kind of pensive (?) when i fly, maybe from seeing civilization from overhead, or from seeing huge cloud formations, or from feeling like i've been momentarily removed from the world and am floating over it in some higher plane (heh) of existence. anyway, as usual, i scratched down a bunch of neat ideas and navel contemplations, so now i have more fodder for personal projects and for philosophizing. one of my better realizations was that i want to develop some system that helps me catalog such pensive thoughts. it's a pretty tall order, but it's definitely something i've wanted to do for a while. so we'll just see how that goes. you'll probably see something come out of it in about two years, i'd guess.

i will definitely be going back to DC on more business trips (wish i could just _drive_ out there finally... argh), including next week, but i'll spend a couple of days here in San Diego to wrap up some more of the "process re-engineering" work and to take care of some immediate inputs it has to the DC work. it turns out that the stuff we're doing in DC has huge dependencies on the process work i've been doing, so (1) it was actually extremely useful to be out there last week and (2) ~all the big muckity-mucks on the project team finally got a good look at what this process re-engineering thing is, and they really liked it. they understood why we were doing it, they got to see most of the material, and they got a feel for how it could be used (and to great effect). so, basically, they "got it", and that was nice. makes me think that we might actually be able to change this project for the better, to some extent (gotta be careful... in some ways, that's a dangerous / unrealistic thought, but that's what "hope" is all about, too). we'll see.

i'm going to go pick up Ella from the kennel now.

Thursday, 07/10/03
there's a big honking thunderstorm going on, and every once in a while the lightning is pretty close (the kind where you hear the "crack", and not just the rumble). and so several hotel residents here are getting assurances that their car alarms still work, which is always a nice thing to know.

wrapping up this week's DC business trip. dunno if i'll be out here next week (temporarily, again, and alas)... it depends on what transpires tomorrow. i'll be presenting a walk-through of the "end-to-end process", and we'll probably come up with a bunch of edits and a timeline on which those edits need to be made. i'll probably need/want to stay out in San Diego next week to get that stuff finished up (finally), but, again, it depends.

i went out for dinner w/ Becky & Derek tonight and then hung out w/ Derek a bit to talk shop. i'll probably be participating in one of his projects in a month or two, so we had a good time talking over some of the details and coming up w/ some new ideas. Becky's starting to get into making some changes to their church's web site... first thing to go will be the color scheme (spew!), followed shortly by the scroll bar. good for you, Becky. learn that HTML. format that table. optimize that image.

Tuesday, 07/08/03
i'm not moving out to DC on the 10th after all... it will still happen (i think), at some point, but there's been a temporary setback (external to myself... mostly in terms of finding something out there for me to work on). conversations are being had, though, and i'm confident that it will work out, and pretty soon, too.

and, oddly, i'm actually in DC this week, but just not permanently. i will be traveling out here for several (most?) of the next ~four weeks. seems kind of funny, since each weekly round trip flight costs about twice as much as it would cost for me to just drive out here (plus the expense of short-term hotels here in DC in addition to my long-term hotel in San Diego). oh well, it's just money, i guess, and not mine at that.

the work i'm doing (for the moment) is actually interesting and important, though... sort of a culmination of stuff i've been working on for a couple of months (and that we all have been stressing about for about a year). and it's another chance to hang out with Becky & Derek. and my hotel room has free high-speed internet access, something i haven't had available in many months (yeah, EarthLink is really stinking lately.... i look forward to getting rid of it).

back in San Diego last week, i had to switch rooms due to the renovations they were making at the hotel. their request that i switch came earlier (and with much less warning) than i had hoped, but i'm actually really glad it did. with me traveling out here for weeks at a time (but not completely moving), i shudder to think what would have happened if all of a sudden the good folks at the Residence Inn (in San Diego) had decided it was time to move my stuff while i was away in DC. so i guess the suprise move (this last Thursday night) was really for the best.

Ella's still a little weirded out by the new room, though. she was obviously somewhat attached to the old room, and with no other dog to keep her company, she has started getting pretty stressed out when i have to leave her alone, even after a couple of days to acclimate to the place. but she's in a familiar kennel while i'm on travel, so she's fine for now (she seemed very happy to see the kennel people when we got there), and i'll do the whole "gradual desensitization to new surroundings" thing when we're both back in San Diego (on weekends). and hopefully i'll still get to move pretty soon, so i can focus on acclimating her to a new place in DC, instead.

Friday, 06/27/03
[here's a long update, for a change]
well, i'm not going to be leaving this weekend (as much as i'd like to do so). as always, the exact timing of things tends to be squishy (especially when you're planning for more than one week out), and a couple of dates related to my move slipped a week or two. so now i'm targeting a departure from San Diego on about July 10, probably arriving in DC around July 14. i feel more confident in this new date... the last date (this weekend) was a little too slapped-together, but the new later date looks like it's locking in pretty well.

i have more time to plan the trip now, too, which is a good thing since i'm a little bit unsure about what size of vehicle to rent. having researched the pricing and availability of full-size (10-15 passenger) vans, i'm thinking of just going with a minivan again. the rental logistics (and reimbursement) will definitely be easier, but the packing will be pretty challenging (and i'm actually sort of looking forward to the challenge, i guess).

my other ~major concern is housing in DC, but i've got a pretty good handle on it. just need to get into the details and nail some things down. so, again, having more time for planning is nice. the only disappointment of the delay is that i won't be out of San Diego, which was sort of a goal, but not a big one.

the hotel here is doing some big renovations, and i can see the contractors working their way around from building to building (the layout of this hotel is a bunch of small ~bungalow-ish buildings, w/ four units on each side of each two-story building); it looks like they will reach my building a little bit after July 10, at which point i'd have to move out to another unit. so that timing seems to have worked out pretty well... and it even means i won't have to be quite so fanatical about leaving the unit spotless (since it's going to get gutted ~immediately). yay.

and my network account at work got magically locked out late today, so i won't be able to go in and work a few hours this weekend like i planned. so now i'm forced to stay at home, work on packing/planning, and mess around with some nerdly projects. how very relaxing. perhaps i'll try to make good on my threats to roadtrip up to L.A. for a Sunday morning service at John MacArthur's church.

Wednesday, 06/25/03
it looks like i'm probably going to be moving to the Washington D.C. area pretty soon. so i'm starting to pack things up, and i'm planning another cross-country van ride w/ Ella now.

i'm pretty happy about the move. i've been thinking about something like this for about a year now. it's probably going to be a somewhat permanent move, and so it will be nice to be able to put down some roots finally (after about a year of travel... blech). this move should also improve my overall satisfaction at work and will probably even help clarify some details of my long-hoped-for career change (which will probably be delayed for a while now, and that's a good thing).

i'll probably be moving this weekend or shortly thereafter. once i find out for sure, i'll post about it here.

Friday, 06/16/03
i haven't really felt like writing an update for a while. give me a call if you want the latest & greatest.

Friday, 05/16/03
pleh. i've been ~working my tail off (or at least having to go to a lot of long, detailed meetings) and doing all kinds of random, time-consuming tasks, so i'm kind of tired. and i've had a cold of some sort for the last several days. so i will probably crash pretty hard this weekend and try to rejuvenate.

[more later, perhaps]

Monday, 05/12/03
well, i didn't get quite as much accomplished on the project management tool thing as i would like, but i laid a pretty good foundation with some of the backend parts (database, data access framework, etc.). so now i'm going to work on the front end a bit more.

mostly i just need to figure out what exactly i'm going to use this thing for, so i'll probably just get a rudimentary system out there, and then let it morph into what it wants to be. that seemed to work pretty well with the music library stuff, so it'll probably work here, too. my real interest is to eventually hook this thing up with some kind of "ideas tracker". thrilling, huh?

actually, since i figured out a thing or two about running databases & application servers on my hosting provider, i'll probably take a moment to work on muscat again, to get its database server back up and running and to make a couple minor improvements. a quick diversion from the project management thing (without completely leaving that domain of work) should help me come up with some creative ideas for how to use it (the proj. mgmt. thing).

Friday, 05/09/03
still praying for you, Mike & Jenn.

Billy Graham is in town, so traffic stinks. apparently there's an absolutely ridiculous number of people going to the mission (they don't call it a "crusade" any more). i guess that's an okay type of traffic problem to have.

i broke down and gave Ella a bath the other day, so now she's nice and fluffy. i had to lift her to put her in the tub (no nice walk-in shower any more), and she started yelping and crying. she can be pretty wimpy sometimes. she didn't like the bath very much (as expected), but she really liked being clean afterwards.

i'm going to buckle down this weekend and make myself build the "project management tool" thing that i've been planning for some time. so hopefully i should have some wonderfully fascinating stuff to show by Monday morning.

at work, i'm in the midst of trying to help us clear up some team process / organization issues that have been killing us for a long time. there's no guarantee that our proposed fixes will work out, and it's not the first time we've tried to fix this stuff, but there's a few things that are different this time around, and i like our chances. so that's kind of gratifying, and it will be even more so if we actually succeed. of course, it's hard work (harder than usual, anyway), but ultimately worth it.

Monday, 05/05/03
Mike & Jenn, i am praying for you.

Ella is doing a bit better now. i've been pretty careful about the routine when i leave her in the morning (certain cues make her think she's about to be abandoned), and i'm coming up w/ some new ways to help her cope (i wish there was some sort of dog solitaire, or video games for dogs, or something). plus she's definitely getting to go on long walks with me now, and every once in a while we'll jump in the car and drive somewhere, which she really likes. what i still need to do is leave a tape recorder on for a while and see how upset she's getting while she's alone.

Tuesday, 04/29/03
Piper hurt his knee very badly last night (the cancerous knee), probably with some kind of fracture, to the extent that he was really incapacitated and in a whole lot of pain (much more than usual). so i did the humane thing and had the vet euthanize him this morning. he got through it okay, and i'm glad that he doesn't have to go through any more misery. but it's really weird not having him around.

i took the day off to take Piper to the vet and to spend the rest of the day with Ella. she seems fine. she never really took much apparent notice of Piper, but i know she'll get really upset about being home completely alone now. i'll start looking into more ways to reduce her anxiety. that's actually why we got Piper, originally, and it sure worked. but i think getting a second dog is pretty much out of the question right now, so other solutions will be needed. i was thinking about getting a crate for Ella, but that's only supposed to be a temporary solution, more for training purposes, and i don't think Ella is much of a crate-dog any more (in terms of thinking of a crate as a warm, snuggly place).

part of Ella's recovery program will be a whole lot of long walks, which she's had to do without for a while because of Piper's illness. i'm guessing that she'll be more relaxed if she has an outlet for her energies, and she'll probably have an easier time just falling to sleep when i'm gone, too. we'll see how that works. it will at least help her slim down a bit, and it should make for a lot of nice pictures.

i still have a bunch of photos to upload. uploading is a pain in the butt because i have to do it over a 19.2 Kbps connection (flakey), so that's why i don't do it very often. some day, when i get broadband again...

Monday, 04/14/03
i took a bunch of nice dog photos (and movies) over the weekend, but i haven't uploaded them. just to tide you over for the next couple days, here are a couple of the highlights.

Thursday, 04/10/03
more dog photos, for all you dog photo fans out there. i'm going to try and shape this stuff into more of a "pages in an album" type of format, so i'm using this latest batch of photos for a test case.

Tuesday, 04/08/03
i leave the television on for the dogs during the day, playing either CNN or Fox News, and then whenever i come home it seems like something big is going on (e.g. the possible elimination of Hussein last night), and i get hooked. so it's pretty hard for me to kick the television habit here. tonight i'll turn it off without seeing what's going on first (i have the volume muted, because i leave the radio playing for the dogs, too).

speaking of dogs, i have uploaded some more photos and some movies of the dogs (on my photos site). a note (in case it wasn't clear before): if you click on the thumbnail of a photograph, you'll get to see the full-size version. two of my favorite recent photos are this one (Ella close up) and this one (Piper resting his head on Ella's butt).

Sunday, 04/06/03
switching to daylight savings usually catches me by surprise on the morning of, and then i'm pleasantly surprised at how light it stays later that evening. it makes me think (indirectly) that i'd like to live more towards the western edge of my timezone, because i prefer more light in the evening to more light in the morning. early evening darkness makes me think "argh, where has the day gone", whereas early morning darkness makes me think that i'm getting up with the chickens (so hooray for industrious moi). conversely, waking up to already bright sunlight makes me think "argh, where has the day gone", too, and late evening sunlight makes me think of kids playing outdoors in the summertime (ah, pleasant thoughts).

i'm going to crack down again and switch to a no-television policy. it has been hard to avoid watching lots of (mindless) television since the war in Iraq started (especially since there's the ~twelve hour time difference, meaning you can watch live daytime war correspondance from the time you get home to the time you get up), but i'll live without it.

Piper is still hanging in there. i've spoken some more with the vet and i pretty much know how to take care of him. his appetite has picked up a little bit (or i'm getting better at conning him into eating), so that's a good sign. i don't think he really has that many months yet to live, but he's doing okay for now, and he seems to be having a reasonably pleasant time. if anything, he's just a little anxious because he doesn't get to go on walks (we just limp out to the grass and roll around on it, mostly, when the weather is nice).

Wednesday, 04/02/03
in a spasm of procrastination, i have re-factored the "passé film of the week" thing, to recover some space on the home page, to allow me to write longer reviews without blowing the home page's layout, and to inaugurate a "stars" rating system (warning: my rating scale is based on whether i'd want to ever watch the movie again and/or buy the DVD, and not purely based on the inherent quality of the movie itself...)

still bored. i ought to be filling out "formal feedback" things for work, but i find it best to always put those off to the last possible moment.

can you believe John Kerry with his bit about "a new president will be needed after the war"? that so totally sounds like the kinds of comments that certain little kids make when they're trying to manipulate their way into getting something they want (insert cute example here).

Kerry is losing sight of the big picture if he's just focusing on Iraq and if he thinks that our recent difficulties in the U.N. really have anything to do with the fundamental problems that are facing this country.

the real problem is in preventing Sept. 11th Part 2, Part 3, etc., and in preventing an ICBM-armed North Korea, and in preventing a nuclear-armed Iran. getting permission from the U.N. to address these threats in an effective manner has basically turned into a big joke. our "world allies" in Germany, France, Russia, and China are using the U.N. to try to weaken the U.S.'s power, rather than using the U.N. for its intended purpose, i.e. ensuring & protecting global security. in so doing, those nations (1) are shirking their responsibility of membership in the U.N. and (2) are weakening / destroying any power the U.N. might have had (because how can the U.N. be trusted when, as in this case, it is ruled by irresponsibility?).

and i'm really getting tired of hearing people who are still saying "we should have given diplomacy more time" in Iraq... i'm wondering what in recent history has given these people (such as Kerry) the notion that diplomacy with Saddam Hussein could have worked. people who say things like that are clearly not thinking critically and/or are trying to capitalize on stupidity.

Saturday, 03/29/03
the weather is gorgeous again. i will take Ella on a nice long walk today, and then tomorrow we'll all go on another one of those picnic / nap things (the dogs & i curl up out in the sun with a book, some snacks, and some stuffed friends).

work is sort of under control again. we have some loose ends to tie up, and there's still one or two ~major problems, but the mad dash is more or less over.

kudos to Zachary Mastoon on making a good album (he used to be an Ops guy at the Sapient Chicago office).

well, now that i'm not crunching at work so much, i'll hopefully be able to get to some other things that i've been putting off. i actually made a little schedule-thing for my weekend, and it has been working out pretty well so far. i don't actually do each scheduled thing at the exact specified time, but i still get it done at some point or another, and scheduling helps me know how much i can actually fit in.

Friday, 03/28/03
my hosting provider has some serious issues at the moment, so you may see random error messages appearing here and there, for a little while. it _looks_ like they're starting to get things sorted out, but no guarantees (even though they guarantee 100% uptime... so much for that. nevermind that 100% is impossible, too).

okay, it looks like things are better now. i have a sneaking suspicion that they had to restore part of my site from backup... i'll take a look around and see what's busted.

more pictures to be posted once i get them uploaded. dial-up access is slooooooow.

Wednesday, 03/26/03
for those of you (ahem) that are looking for photos of the greyhounds, i have uploaded some here. they are very large, some of them are sideways, and some of them are "action shots" (= blurry). i will get into the whole thumbnails / captions / organization / pretty pictures thing later. no time right now.

Tuesday, 03/18/03
Piper's blood test results came back, and they don't show any of the enzymes that (in theory) suggest large-scale metastasis. not sure how to parse that yet. i'm going to spend the next day or two coming up w/ criteria for decisions (including an understanding of what those decisions are), and then i'll get back in touch w/ the vet to weigh options and decide.

so i'm pretty stressed out, especially since today and tomorrow are the biggest crunches on this project so far. but the crunches are actually relatively small compared to some others i've been through, so that helps. i just wish i could be spending more time w/ the dogs right now, so that's pretty frustrating. oh well, nothing new there.

well, back to work. the sooner i finish for the day, the sooner i can get home.

Monday, 03/17/03
well, Piper has bone cancer in his leg. it's not looking too good for him. the vet, who is very nice, said that there's about a 10% chance that he will live for another year, and i think that's with an amputation and chemotherapy. poor guy. his X-ray looked horrible; the top of his tibia was a big darkish gray spot, because the cancer has eaten away the bone.

they're running a blood test to see if they can tell how badly the cancer has metastasized to any other bones. i'll hear back tomorrow. no matter what the results are, it's going to be very subjective... they're looking for a particular indicator that some people think means that the cancer has pretty much spread all over. and so it's not really a "holding out hope" situation. it really sucks.

Piper's been such a nice dog about it, and he hasn't complained at all about the horrible pain he must have been in. i wish he had made a bigger fuss about it (yeah, well, i wish a lot of things... pack your bags for the guilt trip). i've got some better pain medication for him, so hopefully that will help a lot. the other thing we have to watch out for is for him accidentally shattering his leg, which is a serious risk... he's just as excitable and frisky as ever, and he tries to run around and jump a lot. at least he knows to stay off his bad leg, mostly, but it's just a matter of him tripping or getting bumped (which happens, since there's another greyhound jumping around with him).

i think i'm going to start taking a lot of pictures, while i still can.

Sunday, 03/16/03
i'm at work, trying to get something useful done. the "big push" (work-wise) is getting near its end, and i think everything is going to work out. but we shall see.

i'm still being very delinquent about replying to a couple emails from some of you folks. sorry, and i really will get back to you very soon. busy busy busy.

i watched "The Pianist" last night with some teammates. probably won't write up a review of it real soon, but it was okay.

man, this thing i'm working on tonight sure is taking a long time to finish.

to all three of you Java developers out there who don't already know this, Eclipse rocks. makes your world a better place.

okay, it's done. i am getting out of here.

Tuesday, 03/11/03
John MacArthur was on last night's episode of Larry King Live ("Panel of Christians Speaks Out on War With Iraq"). i found out about it just as the 9pm show was ending, so i stayed up to catch the next rebroadcast at midnight. it was pretty interesting, especially since MacArthur usually steers clear of that kind of stuff. i thought it was pretty good, and i wrote a quick letter of support to the Larry King show, since i figured there would probably be a pretty negative response to stuff that MacArthur said on the show (he ended up confronting some pretty sappy stuff that one of the other guests was saying... read the letter (and the transcript) to see what i mean).

Saturday, 03/08/03
the "engineering design synthesis" book arrived today, and it looks pretty cool. it's actually the first book i've ever seen that's entirely dedicated to this particular topic, which is sort of weird, since i've hoped to make a career out of this field for about fifteen years now (so i've been looking for books on this topic for a while now, off and on).

i found about twelve CDs that i had brought out here but hadn't ripped to MP3 yet, so now i'll have a little more music in the rotation. there's already about 7.8 GB of stuff there (recorded in just 96 Kbps, so that's roughly 180 hours of music), but these CDs are all of music that i definitely like and will listen to pretty often. yay.

one of the CDs was the old Cross Products album, and i was surprised to see that the RealJukebox application i was using (to rip the MP3s) recognized the album and the tracks on it. i guess that means someone entered the track information into the gracenote/CDDB thing... which, considering gracenote "went evil" is a dubious honor, but anyway it was kind of neat to see stuff just pop right up there. brings back memories. man, we worked hard (and long) on that album.

Friday, 03/07/03
will the wonders of my magnificence never cease? check out the funky album cover image on the "now playing" thing there; if you don't see it any particular moment, it's because i'm not presently listening to a song for which my application can find an album cover image (the cover images are actually pretty few and far between).

yeah, just what i need... a little graphical thing on my home page that's fun to watch, leading to hour after hour of sitting, watching, and browser-refreshing. it's mesmerizing, like watching a fire burn. interestingly, the match between the actual album cover and the cover image that is displayed is not always 100%. the artist is usually right, at least. well, it's fun, anyway.

Thursday, 03/06/03
work is getting pretty "crunchy", but in a good way. i'll probably lay off the updates for a bit (the next two weeks?), unless something particularly interesting comes up.

Monday, 03/03/03
as you can probably see, i've added on a little feature to "now playing" thing whereby you can see the ratings that i've given the currently-playing song. typically i will select the songs to which i listen based on these ratings (using an application that builds a songlist based on the songs which do or don't have certain ratings). showing these ratings isn't particularly useful to others, but at least it will dazzle you with my amazing coolness.

i wonder if it would be neat to get to where you didn't need an alarm clock to get up in the morning. wouldn't that mean you were getting enough sleep? it would at least mean that you're good at getting to bed on time, presumably (or that you have an occupation with a very flexible daily start time).

speaking of going to bed, i need to get some sleep, especially since i've got some serious catching up to do at work tomorrow. at least the full team is finally coming up to speed, where they can start to get work done on their own more, but it means that i've spent a lot of time the last several days trying to bring them up to speed, so now i'm pretty far behind on my work.

if you're one of several friends who has written me recently but to whom i haven't yet responded, sorry... i'll write back pretty soon, once i get caught back up.

Saturday, 03/01/03
i didn't find any popular Fred Rogers biographies, but give it a couple of months and there will be one, surely. and my search on Amazon was not completely fruitless.

in other book news, i've ordered a cool-looking book about "engineering design synthesis", a topic which is the closest match i've found (so far) to the sort of work i'd like to be doing. we'll see whether this particular book lives up to expectations, but at least it will help clarify things, somewhat.

Piper continues to limp pretty consistently. it's clear that his torn leg muscle is tearing a little bit more, but i had expected it to heal up again (or, rather, to stop hurting him by now). so i'll probably drag him back to the vet again, to see if there's any update to the diagnosis, and to see if there's any sort of treatment possible (other than continuing to give him anti-inflammatories). last time we talked, the vet said that a complete tearing of the muscle would mean he wouldn't have any more chronic pain (although he would definitely be incapacitated for a while, from the acute pain). i don't think they'd want to surgically sever the muscle, nor am i eager to pay for more dog surgery, but i should at least get the vet's opinion.

while i'm thinking of it: the best place i've found to board greyhounds in greater San Diego is at Greywood Kennels, in Lakeside. they're used to dealing w/ greyhounds, the facilities are nice, and they're inexpensive. just putting in a plug, for Google to pick up (sorry, no URL... do a search on "greywood kennels" and you'll find their contact information).

tangent topic: if, like me, you have a slow internet connection (dialup) and you frequently perform online searches (on Google, Amazon, etc.), you should consider creating a "local search page" for yourself. the local search page is a file you save (on a local hard drive) containing the search submission forms for whatever search engines you use most frequently (because you can cut & paste the HTML for those forms into the local search page). the idea is that then you don't have to load the "real" search-submission pages from their respective web sites (slow!); instead, you can submit your searches from your local page (fast!). to see what i mean, try saving this page as a local file, and then open it in your browser. [okay, if you don't get it by now, then i'll stop trying to explain.]

Thursday, 02/27/03
well, Mr. Rogers died today. his show was the longest-running program on public television. i was just saying the other day how much i liked watching his show. people stereotyped it as dull and boring (mostly because of the way Fred Rogers talked), but i always found it interesting, sort of a variety show for kids (they'd bring random guests on the show, go out and look at things, build things, tell stories, etc.). the show encouraged kids to actually use their imaginations and to engage in conversations & exploration. i'm sure they'll be showing re-runs for a long, long time, because it was a very high-quality show.

just the other day i channel-surfed across the show and caught some sort of African vocal & drum group singing "Tree Tree Tree".

maybe i'll try to read a Mr. Rogers biography or something.

Wednesday, 02/26/03
regarding Iraq: people (such as the French prime minister) who claim the proper way to deal w/ Iraq is to continue / intensify weapons inspections are ignoring an important point: weapons inspections don't disarm Iraq, they just validate whether Iraq is disarming. if the weapons inspections haven't been successful, it means that Iraq hasn't been disarming.

folks who hope that Iraq is disarming and can be contained are perilously wrong. people who claim that Iraq isn't a huge, imminent danger aren't actually saying so because of their certainty that the claim is true.

(man, i have to stop writing such long movie reviews; it means i have to write really long updates, to balance the home page's layout, when i really don't have that much to say).

Tuesday, 02/25/03
many more entries & details added to the projects list; it feels like i'm getting ready for a big push here, which is probably a bad thing because it means i'm probably shirking things i should be doing at work (losing interest and all that) and because i have some other things going on right now to which i should be paying more attention. well, rather, i have other things on which i'm focusing attention but about which i can't do very much... so i guess it's okay to have a diversion for a while, as long as it doesn't become truly diverting.

today's message on Grace to You is about worrying, somewhat with a "worrying about physical provisions" slant (as part of the "dealing with money" theme of the current series), but also w/ regards to worrying about "bad things that are happening in my life". hmmm. i don't think i'm much of a natural worrier, and that's a good thing. sometimes my lack of worrying has been mistaken for carelessness (and sometimes it has actually turned into real carelessness, too); it's definitely one of the attributes about which i've been most misunderstood (and it's possibly an attribute about which i need to understand myself better). so maybe i'll spend some more time philosophizing about that.

what i can't stand, though, is people who just say "you aren't worrying about this enough" and who expect you to snap your fingers and magically become just like them. well, i guess what they're trying to say is that they don't think you care about [the issue at hand] as much as you should, and while that may be true, i think those people also get confused about what you should look like when you care about something. just because you don't run around in a tizzy exactly like them doesn't mean that you don't care about things.

i guess that at the bottom of this all (or near the bottom, at least) is the fact that people tend to make assumptions about other people's attitudes and that we're all pretty bad at communicating how we're really thinking about things (hence the assumptions). here concludes today's Lecture on the Obvious.

Monday, 02/24/03
i threw together a new (recovered) projects list page over the weekend. it's another one of those "lists of things i'm thinking" kind of things, and while i acknowledge that they're not terribly useful to other people, lists of this type are pretty useful to me, to help remember & organize my thoughts. some day (soon?) i'm going to build the much dreamed-of "idea server" to hold stuff like this, but until then i'll be using the lists approach, so quit your whining.

argh... another one of those work days where much is done but little is accomplished. well, it's not too bad for a Monday, actually. this will definitely be a tough week, though. and, on that note, i'm going to go home for the day.

Saturday, 02/22/03
the film review thing is obviously working now (see overly-long bluish box on right hand side of home page). i'm going to go back and (slowly) fill in reviews for some of the movies i've already watched (in the archive). i'll probably spend a (very) little bit of time this weekend paring down the site content and perhaps also creating the handy "edit this bit of content" tag that i once had but lost.

otherwise i'm going to spend a lot of time getting various affairs in order, and thinking & praying about certain future plans. i'll provide more juicy details later, but i don't want to get ahead of myself here.

Thursday, 02/20/03
not much to report. maybe something interesting will happen soon. i tweaked the "now playing" thing so that it shows the correct time & time zone.

site resurrection-wise, i think i'll get the "passé film of the week" thing up and running again. and i'll rename it "passé film of the moment" or something, because i watch a lot more than one film a week. isn't that special?

Tuesday, 02/18/03
i didn't actually get a lot done last night (and not for lack of time spent). it was another one of those "high effort / low results" kind of deals, in this case because i was debugging a code problem in a non-direct way (when a more direct way was available).

i need to (1) be more effective in how i tackle the details of problems and (2) be more careful about how i plan out what i do... i don't prioritize very well, not because i can't determine what's a higher priority, but because i don't first make a "list" of all the competing tasks i have (such that i can have something to prioritize). even though these two needs are sort of at different levels of abstraction, they are related by a unifying theme: i need to be more deliberate about where & how i spend my time.

i have had mixed success w/ past attempts to be more either more organized or more diligent in how i work. my typical pattern is that i will not organize at first, and so i'll get behind on the important things. eventually, because of nasty things happening, i am forced to prioritize what is most important and i make a big push to get caught up (or at least to not drop further behind); so the tasks perceived to be lower priority are pretty much dropped. and since i can't keep up the effort of a big push indefinitely, i eventually wear out, lighten up, and drop behind again.

every once in a while i'll wise up and re-organize how i'm working in a way that makes the job easier, but i don't do it regularly enough, and i definitely don't make a point of doing it up front. and i don't really make an up-front prioritization, or i don't really stick with it.

[need to think more about how my habits are similar to those of the guy in "Memento" (he had no short-term memory)]

[yes, this particular update/journal entry is written mostly to myself, to help me remember something i was thinking and/or something i want to do. i'll probably be writing more of these in the future, so get used to it.]

Monday, 02/17/03
i'll probably spend some time tonight working on my genetic algorithms project. so this is just a reminder to me to write a little more about it. at least an update, and perhaps the beginning of a "project" page (where you can download my code and see some of the experiments i'm trying to run).

i might clear out a lot of the "content" that's listed on my home page, too. since practically all of the internal links are broken, and since there's just so much stuff listed out, it would really make sense to trim things down a bunch. then, when i recover some of the presently-lost content (that's sitting on the server in Chicago), i can decide whether to work it back into the site, on a case-by-case basis. "less is more", don't you know.

[more later]

Sunday, 02/16/03
as you can see, i've brought the "now playing" thing back to life. and i fixed the tool i use to write updates, so you can actually start checking back here again, frequently, to see how i'm doing.

having my web server crash (see "archive", below) was a blessing in disguise. for one thing, i subsequently spent much less time dialed up (and less time browsing at random stuff having nothing to do w/ whatever i was dialed up for). for another thing, since my music catalog database was inaccessible (and still is), i was ~forced to throw together another quick & dirty version of the catalog. i took a different approach to this one (based on per-track "properties" files stored in amongst the actual MP3 files), and it has actually turned out pretty well.

what's best about it is is that i finally implemented the "generate WinAmp playlist" feature, and so now i'm able to pull up a handy interface, say to myself, "hmm, i feel like listening to music that has no English lyrics but that is mentally stimulating and is reasonably peppy (without being distracting)", press some buttons, and blammo WinAmp pops up and starts playing music that matches those ratings. i learned another lesson from my previous attempts and made sure that i can edit ratings right in WinAmp (in the minibrowser window). so i guess this second, more successful attempt is emphasizing ease & speed of editing (since there's no remote web application involved), along with a greatly reduced set of ratings parameters (something like ten, three of which are completely objective, and all of which are more quantifiable & practical than the earlier set of parameters).

one other minor note: for now, the timestamp on the "now playing" thing is set to east coast time and is inexplicably twenty minutes fast. not sure why. blame the hosting provider.

Monday, 02/10/03
well, i'm going to bite: i've gone ahead and signed up for a hosting service (not GeoCities), so i'll at least be able to re-implement a couple of the features that once existed on this site (most importantly the "edit update" thing).

give it a day or two for the new DNS registration to take, and then you should start seeing very frequent updates. hooray.

[because my server went down (c. Dec. '02), there is a large gap at this point in the archived updates, since (1) i only have those updates which i could recover from Google's cache (for now... i'll recover the rest eventually) and (2) i stopped writing updates for a while]

Tuesday, 11/12/02
i switched the time on the web server to the Pacific time zone, even though it's still sitting in Chicago. o, the marvels of modern technology.

i ordered a MacArthur Study Bible, and it arrived today. so far, it appears to be very good and exactly what i had hoped. first and foremost, it's about 50% commentary from John MacArthur, which is just great; he really knows how to break things down (and he's really good at putting things back together again). many times i've been reading some passage and i've wondered "what would MacArthur have to say about this?" so now i just have to look at the footnotes to get the basic answer. and there's a bunch of additional material, including an unusually large "topical index" and an "overview of theology" section (which is pretty much a detailed statement of faith). so yeah, good Bible. i highly recommend it, as i also highly recommend MacArthur's daily radio show (Grace to You).

i am still watching the occaisional movie, but i'm just too lazy to write reviews. once i set up a little editor tool thing to make writing reviews easier, i'll be more consistent about it (not that it really matters).

Saturday, 11/02/02
after about a month of neglect, i finally put some of the finishing touches on the detail-editor for the now playing feature, so now it's actually very useful & powerful (to me, that is). i still have a lot of neat ideas for features and stuff, e.g., tools for visualization of song meta-data, tools for data-mining, and music query tools (with "download localized playlist" capability). but now "phase 1" is complete, i.e. the creation of the basic database and fundamental editing capabilities. "phase 2" will be the (eventual) addition of some select bells & whistles, but i'm going to wait quite a while before i start that (so that i can figure out what are the most important features to add). for now, i'm going to focus (casually) on improving the song data i've captured and on improving the paramaters under which that data is captured (take a look at the "details" for whatever track is playing... you'll see what i mean, and you'll probably see some better song details now than you have in months past).

Netflix turned out to be a very good idea; it's perfect for this "watch movies for leisure, instead of watching TV" thing that i'm doing, and they've really slicked up the Netflix web site very nicely, too. my first three movies arrive Wednesday. in case you're unfamiliar with the Netflix business model (and you're too lazy to browse to their web site), here's a summary. they charge you a flat rate of $20 per month. you pick out ("rent") a whole bunch of movies on their web site (i have about twenty-five picked out right now), and they send you the first three movies in the mail. when you finish a movie, you mail it back (in the supplied, postage-paid package) and they send another movie from your list to you. so, ignoring shipping time, you basically have about three rented movies in your possession at ~all times, and you don't have to worry about late fees (because they don't really care how quickly you return the movies). so it's not necessarily perfect for everybody, but it sure works for me, and it's going to save money, too.

Piper has been off of his anti-inflammatory pills for almost two days now, and he's definitely limping again, although not quite as badly as before (yet). so we're definitely going to go back to the vet (the recommended one) and probably getting an X-ray (or at least another examination and a second opinion). i'm guessing that it's arthritis. it appears to be localized to the upper part of his left hind leg (and his lower back, the vet said last weekend). he's being a real trouper, though. he's a very pleasant dog.

Friday, 11/01/02
phew. this was a hard day at work (not in a terribly productive way, but in the usual scramble / stumble sort of way), and i got very little sleep the night before. no, i didn't go out for late-night Halloween revelries, although most of my teammates did. it definitely seems like Halloween is becoming a bigger and bigger thing among the twenty-something crowd. it's now a big party holiday, sort of like a mini-Mardi Gras. not exactly my sort of thing.

i'm thinking of trying out Netflix ~again. they were pretty cool a couple of years ago, and i've heard good things about them lately. it would certainly help expand (and cheapen) my film-reviewing pasttime... let's hope that's a good thing.

off-topic comment: Circle of Life has to be one of the crummiest albums i've ever owned. i'm a big fan of The King's Singers, but this album stinks. there are a couple of decent tracks on it, such as "Kokomo"... oddly, the exact same track appears on another album released by the group in the same year (and not a "best of" album), namely Spirit Voices. both albums feature the otherwise-a cappella group singing with instrumental backing (mostly), but SV is successful at it, whereas COL demonstates how not to do it (to wit: take a talented six part vocal group, make the (British) soloist give it some "soul", and give them a crappy arrangement that doubles lots of vocal parts and pits the group against the orchestra). it took me a while to get used to SV, but now i really like it; COL, on the other hand, makes me want to bash my own brains out to make the pain stop. SV experiments with smaller orchestrations and interesting combinations of vocal and intrumental parts, but COL is just a big "let's get together and sing our lungs out with an orchestra" album, a style which must be popular in England or something.

Wednesday, 10/30/02
Piper now appears to be doing much better, so much so that i took him & Ella for a medium-length walk. they hadn't been on a good walk in a couple of days, and they were getting pretty restless each night (especially Ella); tonight they are more relaxed. ahh... peace is restored.

so Piper will finish his medication (one more day's worth), and then we'll see if any symptoms return (limping and asking for piggyback rides). if not, then i guess it must have been just a bruise (good!).

i am getting geared up for Election Night. i'm actually going to watch television (have to make special allowances for special occaisions), and i'm gonna get some munchies and root beer (and some heavy-duty caffeine, very necessary if you want to still be awake to hear the results from Broward and Palm Beach counties). i plan to shave "GOP" on my head, paint a red, white, & blue elephant on my stomach, and do a victory dance around the building every time a Democrat loses.

since i'm waxing political: it definitely looks like Terry McAuliffe is going to be looking for Bill Clinton to set him up in another job soon (that's too bad, seriously). i wonder if this signals that the Clintons' control of the DNC is going to be questioned, too (Bill Clinton is definitely still the leader of the DNC, and McAuliffe was one of his installed mouthpieces). if such a move is going to be made, you can expect it to become a "civil war" within the Democrat party... if history has taught you anything, it's that Bill Clinton will go down kicking and screaming ("what, me, do the honorable thing?").

people talk about the DNC potentially splitting (it has been mentioned a couple of times, at least), but i really don't see how that would unfold... there's no clear ideological lines / differences along which the split could happen. if there's a power struggle going on right now in the DNC, it's not between one philosophy and another, it's simply between one personality and another. basically, it's a struggle between Bill Clinton (w/ those who still support his power position) and everyone else. if a split along these lines were to happen, what would the two resulting faction parties look like? the "Democrats-minus-Clinton Party" and, what, the "Clintonite Party"? yes, the DNC has been hopelessly stuck w/ Bill Clinton for the past four-plus years (figuring 1998 as the first time when it should have been undeniably clear to all Democrats that Clinton was damaged goods), and they have still stuck with him to ridiculous extremes (remember the "Clinton perp walk" obscenity at Al Gore's big DNC nomination?), but i can't believe that the Democrats would be so idiotic as to split over the personality of Bill Clinton (with the exception of many Hollywood entertainers... they're definitely Clinton-worshipping idiots, and they're sucking the DNC down with them).

well, regardless of how (or whether) the DNC sees its way out of this particular crisis, i think it's perversely ironic that Clinton's "legacy" (with which he was allegedly so preoccupied throughout his second term) is as the ~destroyer of his party (but if that party was already rotten to begin with, how much credit can he really be given?).

Monday, 10/28/02
Piper is doing a little bit better. he's walking on his leg more, but not completely (still favoring it a bit). so i guess the anti-inflammatory stuff is helping, or else he whacked it real good and it's just healing up (from a bruise). well, we got a referral to a local vet that specializes in greyhounds, so we'll probably go in there to at least say "hi", and to see what they recommend.

MIT OpenCourseWare is really cool (i forgot to put in a big plug when it first came out (last month). yes, i've heard all the standard complaints and arguments(in various articles on Slashdot), but this sort of thing is really neat for folks like me who like to dabble and who like easy access to concise, authorititave treatises on various topics. most of the debate i've seen on the topic centers around the question "how are you ever going to get any official credit for studying w/ OCW" (answer: you won't), but my opinion is "why would you care if anyone gives you official credit, this is just good stuff to know and to have available". it's sort of like having a good encyclopedia on the shelf. you don't have to read the whole thing (although that would be neat to do, if you had the time), and you don't have to prove to anyone that you know each & every thing that's in there, but it's just very nice to have it available.

as the now playing thinger will attest, i am listening to Wagner's "Das Rheingold" (the James Levine / Metropolitan Opera version, from Deutsche Grammophon). i have had "Götterdämmerung" for some years now (ever since we had to write a big paper on it for Opera class), and have intended to eventually get all the other operas in the cycle ("Der Ring des Nibelungen"), preferably from this same label (even though it's definitely not supposed to be the best recording available... i am a brand loyalist). it's not the easiest music in the world to listen to at first, but after a month or two it becomes more familiar. it's very much like listening to movie soundtracks (w/ all the incidental music).

Sunday, 10/27/02
Piper didn't come when he was called for breakfast this morning. he has started limping pretty badly on his left rear leg. i took him to the local veterinary ER (the only thing that's open on Sunday), and they looked him over a bit. we're not sure what it is, but it might be arthritis (he is pretty old, and that kind of thing does happen to retired racers sometimes). so he's taking some anti-inflammatory medicine, and we'll see if that makes a difference over the next couple of days. if not, we'll go back for X-rays.

so i missed church for the second week in a row (w/ the whole ER thing), and i'm going to be tied down a bit watching Piper for the next couple of days. maybe i'll try to take some time off from work or something. not sure.

Hillary Clinton is such a liar (as if you needed that explained to you)... if she were up for re-election this year, she would definitely be defeated. i'm guessing that she would still be able to get re-elected in four years, since she has four years to try and gin up some credibility and respectability (and since Democrats are famous for fighting for their incumbents no matter what their moral repugnance), but i'm also guessing that she's not interested in running for Senate again in four years. she'll either be running for president or governor in 2004... she has to keep the appearance of motion, and she has absolutely no interest in serving the state of New York as a Senator for another term. i'll be very surprised, actually, if she finishes out her full term (through 2006).

Saturday, 10/26/02
well, it's Saturday, so that means it's time for the local Christian radio station to play all its "alternative medicine" call-in shows & infomercials (as opposed to weeknights, when it's all debt-managment, all the time). i guess that ~all Christian radio stations do pretty much the same thing (to some extent or another), but it's still annoying. it seems like an unwritten rule that the actual Bible-teaching shows must be on when you can't really tune in (i.e., during work hours). listening to Christian radio should be like watching Shakespeare (engaging & demanding), but most of the time it's more like watching the Home Shopping Network (banal & materialistic).

so this is shaping up to be the typical weekend; i'm just hanging out, not really doing anything. i guess i should pick some specific things to get done. and i'm probably going to go pick out a movie at Blockbuster. i saw "Formula 51" last night (it's the movie w/ Samuel Jackson in a kilt), and it was stupid. oh well, i hadn't expected anything more than that, and it was really just an opportunity to spend time w/ some co-workers.

okay, i'm off to Blockbuster. i'll probably write some more here, later.

and now i'm back. i found a Tower Records out here. they're usually overpriced, but they always have a really good selection. i picked up a CD (on sale) of B.B. King playing live at San Quentin (in 1990), and it's great. the prison warden even gets up to say something, and he gets booed, and B.B. says "oh, come on now". live blues albums are so much fun.

Thursday, 10/24/02
i'm watching The Civil War on DVD (it doesn't really qualify as a passé film of the week, so no such review). i've seen it before, of course (who hasn't), although i haven't seen all the parts of it (who has). definitely makes a very good DVD, if only for the assurance that you actually get to see all the parts you've missed. i haven't begun to scratch the surface of the additional commentaries, either.

i like documentaries. i should watch more of them. they don't even have to be Ken Burns wow-style documentaries; i can handle the more mundane ones. it's fun to appropriate knowledge, and documentaries are quicker than books. i haven't actually read a whole book in a long time (the only books i finish are fiction, and there hasn't been any fiction i've wanted to read in a long while).

i'm going to go out on a limb here: the upcoming elections are going to include (1) widespread voter fraud by the Democrats and (2) widespread victories by the Republicans. we're going to have two years of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. expect to see some judicial nominees confirmed, finally.

Tuesday, 10/22/02
i want to start really making some progress on the project w/ Derek. aside from jotting down random thoughts, i really haven't spent much time on it yet, so i'm going to start by reading some or all of Derek's thesis (it's pretty interesting & accessible; you should take a look at it if you're even just the slightest bit nerdy).

hmm... there was some other interesting thing that was going on, but i forget what.

Ryan, i'm going to steal some movie ideas from your movies list. wow, the list has grown quite a bit, hasn't it? the exhaustive "movies seen" part is especially ambitious.

remember when you were a kid and your mom (or school teacher) made a points system where you got a gold star on the days when you were good and did your chores and whatever other things you were supposed to do, and eventually you got some sort of reward (when you accrued enough star-points)? i'm thinking of creating some sort of personal (web-based) application to do that. call it regression, but i think it would be useful to have something like that again. i'll probably tie it in to my fabulous online schedule. who knows, if it works really well, then i may turn it into some kind of business, quit the day job, and become a motivational speaker.

Sunday, 10/20/02
i went running today, and it was okay. it's the first time i've been running in quite a while, and the first time i've been serious about running in a very long time (like eleven years). of course, just going running once doesn't make me a serious runner again, but the converse is true as well... there's no magical number of runs you must take before you can consider yourself a "serious" runner, and you risk discouraging yourself if you say things like "oh, i missed a day... oh well, i'm not a serious runner any more". so basically i'm magically declaring myself a serious runner again, and i'm committing to running every day. hooray for me.

i had forgotten one useful side-effect of running: especially right after a run, you don't feel like eating greasy, nasty food. as a matter of fact, i've got a sudden, massive craving for grapefruit.

earlier today, i kept hearing some sort of rumbling. at first i thought it was just more of the upstairs neighbor kids jumping around on their fat, stubby legs. then when i stepped outside at some point, i realized it was coming from way far away, so i figured it must have been the F/A-18s that swarm around all day (except it sounded a lot deeper and it rattled more). later in the day, i made a run to Costco & PETsMART. i was driving up I-15, minding my own business, when all of a sudden the Blue Angels (in a big diamond / triangle formation) zipped right across the highway (several hundred feet above it), made a big vertical loop, crossed the highway again, and then did some kind of horizontal bomb-burst thing. so i guess that explains the rumbling, and the random F-117 sighting yesterday, and the crummy traffic on I-15 last evening. my life is now slightly more explicable and slightly less charmed.

Saturday, 10/19/02
i went ahead and got a DVD drive/burner for the computer, so now i'm watching movies (cool). back when i bought this computer, there were (and still are) a whole bunch of competing format standards for writeable DVDs, so i purposefully didn't get a computer with a DVD drive in it because i wanted to let things settle down / straighten out a little. and now they've finally started making drives that can handle all the various formats, so now i finally could get a drive and not risk its immediate obsolescence.

now that i've got the thing installed & working, it's pretty nice. the first one i picked up was defective... the drive door wouldn't open (it took me a good hour and a half to install it, find out it didn't work, troubleshoot all other possible causes, uninstall it, troubleshoot some more, and decide that the drive door had a mechanical problem. then i had to get back to the store to exchange it (there were only two such drives at this store, and i consumed both of them today). the second one works like a charm, though. it'll be nice to be able to back up some of my data now, and it also gave me an excuse to go get a Blockbuster Video card. it's so nice to belong... they like me, they really like me.

man, when i was driving home from Best Buy (on the second trip?), i saw an F-117 stealth fighter flying around. typically we have just F/A-18s flying all over the place here (never really liked them, and they're pretty boring), so it was definitely surprising to see the stealth fighter. i noticed a rather non-descript plane in level flight, and then all of a sudden the pilot banked hard for a turn, and then it was pretty obvious what kind of plane it was. very neat. i guess they have to fly somewhere, don't they?

Friday, 10/18/02
okay, Peggy Noonan's column for today is wacky. typically she sticks to "politics and society", but today she's getting into "Catholicism and society", which topic i find about as worthwhile as, say, "Mormonism and society". as usual, she has some interesting ideas and new ways of looking at things, but she also has some gems like "[Jesus] must have loved life. He must have been in love with life on earth. Why else would he ask that the cup pass? He must have wanted to grow old. Why? Did he love bread, changes in the weather, wine, the feel of rain?" ugh... appalling. not only does this completely trivialize the message of who Christ is and why He actually came to earth to die for us (i.e., the Gospel) and why He actually was in anguish, but it also flies directly in the face of many things that Jesus said.

but what else do you expect from an article searching for deeper spiritual meaning within the earth-shattering news that the pope has added another "mystery" to the rosary's existing three-pack of "mysteries"? argh... the Catholic church is so preoccupied with the packaging. it's just about like getting all excited if Bill Bright should happen to decide that the Four Spiritual Laws booklet should really have five pages instead. who cares if it's four, five, three, or whatever, as long as the message comes across? oh, right, i forgot about that whole "the rosary is basically holy scripture given by Mary" thing. you're right, this is big news. [can you imagine how you'd feel if you were Mary and knew that your life was being used as cover to create and perpetuate all this garbage (i.e. god-like authority attributed to someone other than God)?]

and if, as Ms. Noonan's column excitedly proclaims, pope J.P.2's "dramatic" decision to add "luminous mysteries" to the rosary means that Catholics everywhere ("millions of ardent believers") can now also contemplate "Christ's ministry, his teachings" as part of their regular "rosary-saying", then does that mean that the ardent throng were not contemplating Christ's teachings up until this point? no big loss, i guess... you know, it's just Christ's teachings. gack.

in other news, i think i'm going to stop watching TV altogether. i had stopped for quite a few months there (because i didn't have a TV... that sure makes it easy), but now i've got this TV in the hotel room here (and it's got all that great (?) HBO... that makes it kind of hard). my real problem (among other things) is that i'll finish watching some show, let out a big sigh, say "now what?", and then start channel surfing for something else (and so i spend all kinds of time watching stupid stuff). so i've made a deal with myself: if i don't watch any TV (at all), then i'll buy a DVD drive for my computer and rent the occaisional movie. this kind of targeted, limited, intentional entertainment should prove much better, both in terms of the time consumed and the fun involved (hmmm, what film do i want to watch this week? and, oh boy, i can do a "film of the week" critique for the web site here! will the excitement ever end?).

Wednesday, 10/16/02
i finally caved and watched Star Wars: Episode II on the hotel pay-per-view. it was pretty good. even with all the spoilers i've heard since it first came out, there were a good number of plot twists & details that caught me by surprise. the action effects were spectacular, not only in their technical achievement (of course) but also in how they were employed, to produce a sense of dynamics & motion (particularly in some birds-eye views of flight and free-falls).

i also happened to watch Moulin Rouge on cable a couple of days ago. it was a little bit weird and sometimes annoying (and cheesy), but it also had some very interesting effects, especially in its appropriation of recent pop songs (throughout the story) and in its visual composition. the story probably would have been more interesting if i were more familiar with La Traviata, but then again the resemblance appears to be pretty loose, so that might have just made it more annoying.

as i sit here writing this (and working on my travel expenses for the last 1.5 months... gack!), i'm watching / listening to a Great Performances broadcast of Daniel Barenboim and the CSO playing for opening night of the 2002 season at Carnegie Hall. i got to go to a bunch of CSO performances last season, and so i'm getting this weird effect where i'm watching the TV and seeing orchestra members that i recognize. not sure why that seems so odd, but it does. now i'm watching that one percussionist kid play the snare drum part on Bolero. weird. and now, instead of waving his arms around, Barenboim is just standing there watching the orchestra play (hey, Bolero kind of directs itself)... what a cool dude.

Saturday, 10/12/02
i took the dogs to the beach today. it was very a new experience for them, so they were a little bit confused and definitely excited.

there were lots of other dogs there, so there was some butt-sniffing (no big deal, and all the other dogs were very friendly). we walked in the surf a little bit. i had to lure Ella out into the water with treats. she was okay with it, but every once in a while she would sproing up in the air when she decided she didn't want an incoming wave (of three inches' height) to hit her feet. we also waded into the channel, the banks of which were a bit steeper, and Ella ended up leaping out into the water at one point (not on purpose, i think), so she got to paddle around a bit and i got to tow her back onshore. it was fun.

unfortunately the beach is not fenced in, so i couldn't let the dogs off the leash (greyhounds aren't noted for coming when called, and it's way too easy for them to take off, get spooked, and then completely disappear). there were all kinds of dog-games being played here and there, so Piper was particularly frustrated that he couldn't go join in the fun first-hand. he was so busy watching other dogs that he wasn't interested in any treats (not even string cheese, which is his favorite). we spent some time just watching dogs who were swimming way out into the surf to pick up tennis balls that their owners were chucking out there.

back to church tomorrow. i'm going to try to find somewhere to sit where the TV cameras won't obstruct my view, and now that i know what to expect, the stylistic pecularities of this particular church probably won't be quite so off-putting. so that's good. i'll probably dig up some info on their Sunday-school type of Bible studies, too.

Tuesday, 10/08/02
Shadow Mountain Community Church was okay. it was a little like being in a television studio, and of course the music is different than what i'm used to (different songs, and big "production value"), but that's not a big deal. so i'll go back next week and give it another shot, and start poking around about small groups & the like.

hmm, what else... not much. it sounds like maybe a few buds of mine from the Chicago office will come out here to work on the same project as me, so that'll be nice, to know some of my teammates a little better and to have the team be a little closer to a critical mass of people who already know how to work Sapient-style (that's our mission, to bring our company's commercial-industry experience to these teams that don't have much of a feel for that kind of thing).

maybe i'll work on the "details editor" for muscat a little more... i'm achingly close to being done with the update/save feature, and then i can put this project aside for a good long while. until then, it's ~constantly on my mind and very distracting, so it would probably make sense to make a big push here and finish things off (for now). i just need to make sure it doesn't get out of hand (web development tends to take a lot longer than you might otherwise think).

Saturday, 10/05/02
more good rabbit-hunting yesterday. if you go at the right time of day, you can find batches of three or four of them plopped on the grass, munching away. in my super-snazzy new schedule, i've allotted a full hour each night as "dog time", so we're pretty much going on a long walk up to the campus every night. i figured that putting in a good, long walk w/ the dogs at a regular time every day would help them be more happy & relaxed the rest of the day (meaning they don't require as much attention for the rest of the day, so the time spent actually "pays for itself").

well, the schedule says i'm supposed to be working on the "research project" now, so i better get cracking. i'm going to go out to Shadow Mountain Community Church tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes.

Wednesday, 10/02/02
Barbra Streisand is such a joke. (Rush Limbaugh calls her "BS" for short... actually, he calls BS her, as in "ohh, that's a load of Barbra Streisand"). i love how she'll occaisionally whip out (and publish) a letter to Democrat legislators and tell them what they should be doing. i'm sure they don't all say "ooh, a note from Barbra, i better read it"... they probably think it's about as funny (and stupid) as i do.

we definitely had some good bunny-stalking tonight. there was one apparently retarded rabbit that let us get really close (five to ten yards). Ella almost got an early dinner.

Tuesday, 10/01/02
i got so annoyed with how i spent / wasted my weekend (and many weeknights prior) that i've gone ahead & created a schedule for myself. i've had mixed success with this kind of thing before, but i think there's a pretty good chance that i can follow the schedule (or at least get some benefit from it, one way or another).

part of the deal is a plan to start running again (every morning). i'm not actually going to start doing that until after this weekend (don't want to jump right in w/ morning runs until i've "broken in" again). but i'm definitely looking forward to it; there are some nice hills & scenery around here, and i'm a closet morning person.

another part of the plan is to get 7.5-8 hours of sleep each night. that should be good, too. basically, i'm going to be testing whether trimming my "personal pursuits" time and getting more sleep & exercise will make the time i spend doing other things more effective. a "less is more" kind of thing.

and another neat thing about the plan is that i'm carving out some time to work on an extracurricular research project with Derek. definitely looking forward to that. i'm going to start by giving it about 12 hours a week (the standard amount for an MIT class). excitement!

Saturday, 09/28/02
Ella, Piper, and i went on a very long walk on the USCD campus this morning. last weekend must have been their orientation or something (for the froshlings), because the campus was peopled entirely with roving "family clumps" (a mommy, a daddy, a younger sibling or two, and a confused/excited-looking teenager carrying a cardboard box). but now it looks like all the students are back, and classes are probably just about started.

on our walk, we found a monster-big athletic field with really nice grass and a fence all the way around. so it's possible that i could actually let the dogs run around out there (off the leash), and that sure would be nice. we're going to check it out late at night or in the early morning, so that all the extraneous gates & fences might be closed off (except for the main entrance, which is permanently open) and so that we'll have the field to ourselves (hopefully).

anyway, whether they actually get to run free there or not, the dogs really liked it. the grass is that stiff (but not sharp) sort of grass that they seem to have a lot of out here (maybe it's hardier or something?), and it's cropped super-short so it's nice & bristly, perfect for rolling around on. Piper rubbed himself silly on it, and Ella actually did the same kind of "roll around on your back / try to roll over" thing (rather tricky for a greyhound, with their deep chests), which is pretty unusual for her. so i know she really liked it.

in other dog news, i've constructed a little play area out in front of my room here (using the playpen / fence thing i brought with us), so now the dogs can sun themselves a little outside. although they're not very keen on heading outdoors unless i'm out there with them. well, it was a nice gesture, anyway.

Wednesday, 09/25/02
i've been having trouble getting Tomcat to behave, which is one reason i haven't really been writing updates much. not because the updates tool uses Tomcat, but because i end up spending my spare time trying to get Tomcat to work (and not writing updates)... but it seems to be working better now.

stuff is starting to pile on at work, so at least things are getting back to ~normal in that regard. this is definitely one of the weirder projects i've been on, that much is for sure.

i picked up an album of slack-key guitar music by Ledward Kaapana today. i heard him on an old PHC broadcast, so i figured "sure, why not". it sounds like he will also be on the show again in a couple of weeks (10/12/02).

i also picked up the WOW 2002 album, so that i can see what all the kids are listening to nowadays (sort of). a lot of the vocal parts on the tracks have that weird "clippy" sound that you hear in pop music nowadays (where the soloist's voice pops from pitch to pitch, making it sound kind of robotic / artificial)... i wonder how that sort of sound is produced (must be some sort of post-performance manipulation).

Saturday, 09/21/02
ah, the weekend. it's so pleasant to feel like there are no immediate demands on your time.

[more later]

[okay, so much for "more later"]

Thursday, 09/19/02
the management at Residence Inn La Jolla has finally seen the light and agreed not to charge me an exhorbitant fee for having dogs. so (1) hooray and (2) it looks like i won't have to move after all.

i made a lot of progress on muscat last night, and i've almost finished tying it in with the "now playing" feature. you will gasp with wonder when you see how cool it ends up (maybe).

i've taken to going on extended walks with the dogs on the USCD campus. there's nice big stretches of grass and random college goings-on, but what makes it really fun is the wild rabbits that live there. Piper's mildly interested in them, but Ella is crazy about them. she keeps looking all around trying to spot rabbits, and then when she sees one she'll either freeze and stare at it for minutes on end or start bouncing up and down (wanting to chase it). even when we're walking nowhere near the campus, if she sees a lawn that reminds her of the UCSD campus, then her ears perk up and she starts expecting rabbits to appear at any moment.

[oops, i forgot to archive my previous update from Sunday, 09/15/02. oh well. it was something like "i'm getting EarthLink, so you'll see more updates" and "work is starting to make sense, sort of", so no big loss.]

Thursday, 09/12/02
i am in San Diego and things are still going fine. my internet connectivity is, um, less than great, so i haven't really been able to write any updates to speak of. in that department, things should be changing in the next few days or so, so you should be seeing more frequent updates here, and ~soon.

Wednesday, 09/04/02 [early]
well, yesterday wasn't that hectic, but it was long, and today will be, too. i have everything packed and accounted for, and i'm taking off soon. should be in Denver tonight. i will write an update from there if possible (and if i remember to do it).

Tuesday, 09/03/02 [late]
yes, it's definitely going to be a long, hectic day. i'm about one quarter into it, so i know what-all's going to be involved. we'll see how much sleep is actually slept tonight.

well, i pretty much got everything packed in there... we'll see how it works out. must sleep. i'll leave in a few hours.

Monday, 09/02/02 [late]
today was a day of packing (without actually loading stuff into a van... that's tomorrow). i've pretty much got everything ready to go (w/ the exception of stuff that has to be packed last minute).

tomorrow is a partial day of work, a day of getting Piper's teeth cleaned (fun!), and a day of picking up the van, and of buying last minute needed stuff, and of loading up the van (which should be interesting & challenging). so i probably won't have time to write an update. i'll probably give a quick "leavin' now" note Wednesday morning, and then i can write updates from the rode. in the meanwhile, if you know my cell phone number then you can call me, and if you don't know my cell phone number then i don't want to hear from you anyway.

Sunday, 09/01/02
did some more planning today, went to church, came back & packed some, planned more, messed around, etc. i probably have a lot of catching up to do tomorrow. but hooray for three-day weekends.

the place i'll be staying in ~San Diego is right across the highway from the main UCSD campus... should make for some good dog-walking, at least. perhaps i can see if there's any kids there thinking of starting a Christian a cappella group that would want all kinds of tips from a crusty has-been. or not. i've got this big long list of things i want to do while i'm out there, and of course it's another one of these "where does one find the time to do all that" situations.

Saturday, 08/31/02
well, i have decided that going out to San Diego is the right thing to do, as far as i know, so i'll be going unless something stops me. if you were praying for me, thanks. so now i can switch from careful, tentative planning & preparation to panicked, certain-doom scrambling (actually, it's not that bad. i've got lists made, and lists always make things better, right?).

got another nice call from Becky & Derek last night. Becky's compiling a list of the various MIT Cross Products over the years, so we did a little stroll down memory lane, trying to come up w/ names. it's funny, the things you do & don't remember.

hmmm... i think i'll post my (running) list of stuff i'm taking out to San Diego, so that all my devoted fans [read: parents] can tell me if i'm forgetting anything.

okay, i've posted a link below [updated: the link is here]. note that the list will be changing ~constantly, as i think of things. note also that i'll be packing Sunday & Monday and loading the van late Tuesday (leaving early (!) Wednesday), so you have a (very) little bit of time to think about it. best suggestion wins a shiny new five-dollar bill and a handshake. just kidding.

note: i had the dates wrong (above), and now they are correct. departure on Wednesday 9/4.

Friday, 08/30/02
i'm trying to nail down all the logistics of getting out to San Diego, but i'm also trying to find out whether it is really the right thing for me to do. i was getting a little ahead of things there, since i felt i had to figure so many logistical things out (so i focused on logistics instead of the greater question of whether i should even be going). i'm not sure when i'll know by. if you're praying for me, keep it up, please. i'll let you know when i get an answer.

that being said, i am still working on the logistics, and they are looking pretty good (as in, things appear to be working out and to be within my ability to manage). knowing that it's do-able definitely takes the pressure off (i'm not exactly good at managing & planning stuff) and lets me focus on whether i should be going.

related bit: do you know any good churches around La Jolla, California (near San Diego, that is, not in Orange County). please email me at this address (bottom of the page) if you do. i've found one or two leads, but i'd like more.

i had a neat idea the other day, based on Ryan Lee's journal: Ryan regularly writes sermon notes/outlines in his journal, from whatever sermon he's hearing... probably at CBCGB. so i was thinking i might start doing the same for the sermons broadcast on Grace to You. it's just an idea. it would definitely be different: new message ~every day, readers could actually hear the message (they are available online), and it might be a little hard to maintain continuity (because of the way that multi-day studies are organized for the radio broadcast). anyway, i might give it a shot and see if it's (1) possible and (2) useful.

Wednesday, 08/28/02
oops, that last update was actually from (late) last night, labeled as Wednesday, when it was really a Tuesday thing. oh well. guess i'm going a little overboard with the updates here. well, i've made it really easy to write these things, and i know some people are actually reading them regularly, so why not? guess i should generate the datestamp automatically (and add a timestamp), Ryan Lee-style, rather than just typing it by hand (i'm just too old-school... Ryan's all cutting-edge and everything, don't you know).

every time i add something to this site (including writing updates), i am reminded of this story from The Onion (they even registered a domain name and built a web site to go with the story).

Wednesday, 08/28/02
still listening to the new MIT Cross Products album. i can't believe how cool these arrangements are. i'm particularly impressed at how the voices are orchestrated. orchestration is basically the step(s) in the arrangement process where you decide which voices should carry what parts of the chord. it's the part where you really have to try and figure out what it will sound like when people are actually singing your arrangement, and it's tough, because an a cappella arrangement played on the piano (for example) sounds completely different than when it's sung. it's almost exactly like taking a piano song (or whatever) and arranging it for an orchestra. you have so many different "tone colors" to choose from, and you really have to know what things will actually sound like and what you're shooting for.

guess i didn't mention that the Cross Products are a Christian a cappella group. in case that wasn't obvious. i'll nag them to put some sound clips on their albums page, so you can get a sample of this album that i keep saying is so good.

since my work with the music-cataloging stuff is progressing pretty well, i'm going to start consolidating some of the related material (once i write them, that is). and, in typical Matt fashion, i don't start by actually writing the material, i start by goofing around w/ the cosmetic stuff and creating a graphical look & feel for the project pages. kind of stupid, i know, but it seems to help me get excited & creative about the project when i flip things around like this. i also enjoy picking project names before i really know what the project is about... "muscat" seemed like a good one.

Tuesday, 08/27/02
back into "crunch" mode again... over the next one and a half days, we're pulling together the "deliverable" (that is, the finished product we'll deliver to the client) for the project i'm on. shouldn't be too hard, but i just need to make sure that wrapping up this project doesn't interfere w/ planning for the next project (and associated travails... oops, travels, that is), and vice versa. so i have to switch into the "using lists of things to do" mode, which isn't my natural state of being.

my natural state of being is one of clutter, actually. in many different ways, i'm not very organized, and i hang on to a lot of things, and i flip from one thing to another a lot. so it's clutter and "noise". well, i'm jotting this point down here so that i can come back to it later (try, one week from now) and think about it, and maybe write about it.

i ripped the new MIT Cross Products album to MP3, so now i can listen to it ~all the time. but it's so good that i can't really do anything else besides listen intently while it's playing. so i can't use it as "listen while you work" music, for now, but it sure will make a good "drive from Chicago to San Diego" album. seriously, i probably won't play any other music on the drive out (except perhaps as a sorbet). i'm gonna have that puppy memorized.

ok, gotta work.

Monday, 08/26/02
[well, it's technically Tuesday now.]

i'm back from what is probably the last trip to Detroit for quite a while. i got the new MIT Cross Products album today, so i'm sitting here listening to that and finishing up some leftover work. Mom & Jenn, there are copies on their way to you (slowly). you will love it, because it's really, really good. i'm so proud of those guys.

i was riding to Detroit Metro Airport today in a rickety old cab (with a rather colorful driver), and one of the tires blew. it was kind of interesting... got some love from the Michigan State Police and the Michigan Highway Courtesy Patrol, and i had plenty of time to catch my flight, so it was just a short diversion rather than a major annoyance.

man, this album sure is good (plug plug plug). i wouldn't mind doing a study on it (doing analyses of the arrangements and of the performance & mixing). quality.

Sunday, 08/25/02
now i'm listening to re-runs of A Prairie Home Companion while i work on stuff. mostly i'm just going through and listening to the "News from Lake Wobegon" sections, but i hit the Jan. 5 '02 show from Honolulu, Hawaii and couldn't help listening to the whole show. i need to buy some slack key guitar music.

i got the "details" button on the "now playing" thinger working now. the detailed information it's showing is coming from a database. and, of course, the default detailed information that shows up at this point is pretty much junk (for now), because i haven't been able to make edits to the information... that's the point of getting this "details" feature (and the "edit" feature) up & running, so i can start tweaking the information about the songs to which i'm listening.

Saturday, 08/24/02
at the moment, i happen to be listening to The Annoying Music Show. ouch. mercifully, the show is only about ten minutes long. today, it featured one Florence Foster Jenkins trying to sing the "Queen of the Night Aria" from the Magic Flute (click the link to hear for yourself). let's just say she didn't have the range. or the tone. or the enunciation. but such feeling. well, no, she didn't really have the feeling either. again, ouch.

my big concern right now is figuring out the details & logistics of (potentially) moving out to San Diego for the next n months {for 3 months < n < 7 months}, con los greyhounds. so that means packing lists, travel maps, budgets, worries about cargo volume, etc. well, it is sort of interesing, and driving out sure would be fun. the temptation is to follow Route 66, since it literally starts on the street where i live (Adams), and since it's got such a hip, swinging tune that can be hummed for the duration of the journey. but it's more likely that we (the dogs & i) will pass up the chance to "Get Your Kicks on Route 66" and instead choose to "Skip That Jive with Route Two-Three-Five" (with a little "Catchin' the Scene on Ol' I-15" thrown in for good measure). dunno. first we have to see which set of alternative lyrics the dogs can learn the easiest.

Friday, 08/23/02
okay, i skipped a day. yesterday was kind of weird, beginning with a torrential downpour and ending with a ~2-hour bike ride until midnight, with all kinds of oddities in between.

it's now very possible that i will be going on an extended project (a few months) in San Diego. in a way, it's kind of crazy, because business travel has been really rough on me for the last six months or so (any time i had to do it, that is, not that i was traveling for six months straight). but now, if i'm going to dive in to this more-serious / longer-term travel-based project, then i will be taking a couple more-drastic steps to work out some of the logistics (and then hopefully the issues i'm having now will go away or be less problematic). so we'll see. i have about a week to work things out.

i think i'm going to completely skip any hobby-oriented programming / nerding until i get some of my personal stuff in order. probably at some point this weekend i can make the switch back to doing enjoyable things, but i need to crunch for a bit, first. and think about whether to rent a minivan and drive out to San Diego w/ the greyhounds.

Wednesday, 08/21/02
i'm writing this from Detroit (for now... will probably finish the update when i return home tonight).

today is my seventh anniversary of working @ Sapient. whoopity-doo. in dog years, that's about half a century, and it definitely feels that way.

Tuesday, 08/20/02
just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water... i'll be flying out to Detroit tomorrow morning (early!), spending the day there, and then flying back in the early evening. we'll see if these day-trip things actually work or not. i might have to turn right around and do the very same thing the very next day, which would stink, but it's just an outside possiblity. and it's better than the alternative, either way.

there is a really cute update on the Phillips family web site (a la sister Jenn).

i've almost finished the first phase of the online music catalog program (i got frustrated w/ the project management program over the weekend and switched projects). all the "tracks" information from one of my machines is uploaded (and the other one appears to have a hosed hard drive... yikes!), so now i just need to write a quick online viewer (and editor), and then voila, the "details" button on the "now playing" feature will start working (and i can start recording little bits of useful information about my music, like "oh, this MP3 has a data corruption in it", or "blech, i hate this song, never play it again (unless i'm in a particular mood)"... and i can start keeping centralized statistical data about the songs i listen to, to see if there's any patterns. and i can start writing loudness detectors, and corruption detectors, and genre detectors, and so forth. basically, once you've got your data centralized, it opens up a lot of opportunity for spin-off applications.

ugh... i've still got a fair number of personal chores & errands to take care of. i need to get to a good stopping point on this music project thing (tonight), put it all aside, do this day-trip thing, and then come back and take care of bidness.

Monday, 08/19/02
i took Piper & Ella to the clinic, and except for Piper having an ear infection (no surprise there) and needing his teeth cleaned, they're both in pretty good shape.

i didn't get as much personal work done yesterday as i had hoped, because work loomed its ugly head and i spent the late afternoon and all evening finishing up some documentation. but the positive side is that i'm effectively done with that whole project. the next project is just a two-week gig (starting today), so will see how that goes. it will require a little bit of travel, but i'm going to see if i can come up with some clever way to minimize the impact... maybe just day-trips or something.

Sunday, 08/18/02
i've made some more progress on the project-management thing, but (as usual) i'm getting caught on the details. argh. frustrating. well, this is one of the sort of things that a project management tool will help me handle (by helping me keep track of what i should really be working on when i start getting bogged down in details).

i'm probably going to go ahead and add a "music details-editing" feature to this site, so that i can start capturing some of my raw "music opinion" data... there's a lot to capture, so the sooner i get that started that better.

i washed my sleeping bag today, and it's air-drying out on the balcony. while momentarily sitting out there with Ella, i decided that i'd probably make a little fort out there today so that the dogs & i can plop in the sun (it's a _really_ nice day out) and i can still keep nerding away (typically the LCD screen on my laptop gets washed out by all the sunlight, so the fort will give some shade). i'm sure the dogs will love it, at least. and we can watch all the airplanes flying by (it sounds like the air show is still going on).

[two hours later] yes, i must say that the balcony fort is quite a success. Ella & i are lounging out here, sipping iced tea, watching cars, and writing code. Piper isn't much of a balcony dog, so he tried it out and then bailed. oh well... more room for me & Ella.

Saturday, 08/17/02
ahh, a full, ~regular night of sleep, and waking to the warming glow of sunlight, the gentle chirping of birds, and the lyrical whining of greyhounds.

i really like Saturday mornings because, whether it's realistic or not, i usually wake up and think "here's all these great things that i'm going to do today". so today i (delusionally) think i'm going to (1) get the project server prototype up & running, (2) get a "project material dumping ground" idea fleshed out (so that i can get some material to Dave Blagg), and maybe (3) take a whack at re-organizing my projects (using the tool). plus take the dogs on a nice long walk or two. hmm, and maybe go grocery shopping. plus catch up on some radio shows (GTY, PHC) while i'm doing it all (or at least the indoors parts). oh, and i really want to throw together a quick, rudimentary "idea tracker server", so i can start writing random ideas directly to the server instead of scribbling them down on little yellow stickies. and i want to start looking at / thinking about some ideas that Derek brought up recently. plus i need to do some organizing (and paying) of bills and such.

well, let's just see how well that-all holds up. scorecards & grade reports will be filled out at the end of the day.

i was just watching (briefly) an archived video broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion (a two-hour radio show that's on every Saturday, usually broadcast live). they did a live video broadcast (from their web site, of course) of the season finale, and it sounded like maybe they'd be doing it for upcoming shows.

dunno... it's nice to see what's going on on-stage (and with actual motion... although the "three still images updated every fifteen seconds" thing they've broadcast up until now has worked fine), but having something to watch (instead of just listen to) definitely changes it from "radio" to "television". with old-style PHC, i'd always do something else (usually useful, mindless work) while listenting to it, and my imagination would fill in the visual blanks nicely. when they started broadcasting still images (live), that sort of burst the "imagination bubble". and now that they're (apparently) broadcasting live video, it basically becomes something that you have to sit & watch for two hours. i'll probably stick w/ the old-school "listen only" mode.

there is, apparently, an air show in Chicago this weekend. yesterday the Blue Angels were out practicing (and i'm sure they'll be out again today). it's pretty cool to step out on the balcony and see F/A-18 fighters flying formations right outside your window, running laps around the Sears Tower. and the noise is tremendous, with all these streets & tall buildings to make echoes. you get this terrific ripping sound as each jet goes shooting by. so it's pretty hard to keep working.

hmmm... if these "update" things are going to be so long (every so often, at least), then i'll probably move them off to a separate page and just put the first paragraph or so at the top of the home page. yet another nerdly task to be done.

Friday, 08/16/02
Day Five (or maybe it's Day Four) of this particular crunch. i'm sleeping about three hours at a time, one to two times a day. so i guess i'm getting about 4.5 hours of sleep each day, which isn't too bad. the best thing is that the end (of this project) is in sight.

blech... i'm pretty much too tired to think.

[time passes, naps are taken]

well, i'm feeling a little better now, taking a breather from the work (there's only one relatively straight-forward piece left, so i might as well procrastinate for a bit, right? gack). so now i'm finishing up (?) some of that online project-management tool stuff, and then i've got a big list of stuff i want to look into & organize (not really nerd-related, either).

hmmm... one of my projects is a "personal prayer server", to keep track of prayer requests. so, in a spasm of lightheartedness, i just realized that you could have a little "now praying" update on your website that publishes what stuff you're praying about (perhaps at that very moment). i dunno. the prayer server thing is kind of hard to conceptualize, plus it may be sacriligeous.

[scans sky for approaching thunderclouds.]

Thursday, 08/15/02
we're wrapping up a project at work, and so i've been working pretty much continuously since Monday night. i think i've gotten maybe eight hours of sleep in total since then (not sure... i've lost track). it's literally a miracle that i've been decently lucid & effective for most of the time.

Derek & Becky called the other night. boy, was that nice. i haven't talked to them in ages. they're definitely some of my favorite people on the planet, too. it's funny, because i'll often refer to them ("oh yeah, Becky always says this" or "Derek once did that") when i'm talking to my family, and yet i don't actually get in touch w/ B&D that much at all. definitely a case of acute friend-neglect.

that's one of the strongest pieces of my personality. whatever else may be there, i am ~above all else a neglecter. it's not on purpose, and it's happens because of some very specific traits & habits (and so it's not really a genuine characteristic, in and of itself), but it's still a fact and it's still very nasty. [sounds of self-slapping, flogging, and hair shirts being put on.]

Monday, 08/12/02
not much to say... maybe i'll write something a little later.

well, i'm working on the "project tool" thing, coding some Java libraries. it's working out pretty well, and i should be to the point of throwing together some kind of web-based front end for it within a couple of days. so it'll be a tool to let me know what to work on next, and it will also publish what i'm working on (and what i should be working on next, and maybe some of the dependencies & priorities) to this web page... kind of like the "projects" section listed below (in fact, this publishing thing will probably take over for that section).

poor Piper (one of my greyhounds)... one of his ears is really bothering him, to the point that he starts crying & yelping if you try to take a look at it. it has gotten worse over the last few days, apparently, so we'll be going to the vet real soon.

Sunday, 08/11/02
i am NOT flying out to Detroit tonight. hooray! hopefully that's the end of the traveling for a while. it was sucking my will to live (if you couldn't tell).

i just put the ~finishing touches on a simple web-based tool to let me write these updates without having to actually log in to the web server. hopefully that will increase the frequency of these updates (and decrease their size?) which should help increase timeliness & quality. we'll see. and, in the course of playing around with that-all, i inadvertantly figured out how to fix some of the formatting problems that the "now playing" gizmo was having. so it's a little better, and closer to fitness for public consumption.

Dave Blagg the Great ended an around-the-world tour by visiting Chicago, so i got to go out & about with him and some of his old college buds. Blagg has to be one of my favorite people in the world; i've enjoyed literally every chance to hang out with him, and Friday was no exception. kudos to Dave for being so nifty.

Wednesday, 08/07/02
just about another missing week. at least this is the last week of travel (knocks on wood).

guess i haven't written a real plug for John MacArthur yet. he is a really good preacher. he absolutely pours over passages of the Bible, literally word by word, pulling in all kinds of other passages & contextual cross-references; and yet he does it in an extremely engaging, often fascinating way. you'd really have to hear him to know what i'm talking about. and what's cool is that his daily radio show (Grace to You) can be heard online, and they have archives of the past ~month's shows. and i think it's cool that you can usually do a little URL-hacking and get at the next few days' shows before they're actually broadcast on radio. nerd power, baby! here's the show for tomorrow (8/8).

now if only they'd fix that navigation bar on the GTY home page. maybe i'll try to debug it and send a fix / suggestion into them (ah, charitable nerding... perhaps i can get a tax deduction).

well, i have to get some sleep now. it will be a busy / long / tiresome day tomorrow, and i have been very strung out this week.

Thursday, 08/01/02
well, that whole week just blew by. needless to say, i actually haven't made much more progress on the "personal project management" tool, or i would've babbled about it in an update... all my updates seem to be related to progress made in nerdly pursuits, apparently.

well, i was going to try to change pace and philosophize a little, but i'm really not feeling pontifical enough (for the moment)... give me, hmm, about three minutes to return to full-on "arrogant windbag" mode.

Friday, 07/26/02
i'm really starting to move on this "personal project management" thing... right now it's mostly just listing & prioritizing of projects, but that's pretty valuable for me (since i have a hard time keeping track of them or remembering which one is really the most important at any given moment). we'll see what happens over the weekend.

what else? nothing much. it's pretty hard to focus on anything but work when you're traveling so much. i think business travel and "workaholism" are roughly the same thing... workaholism is, in one sense, the complete neglect of your life outside of work, and business travel is basically the practical elimination of life outside of work. so they're effectively synonymous.

Monday, 07/22/02
and now i'm back on the road again... excitement. you can certainly look forward to this weekend's update, when i'll be, you guessed it, at home again. be still your beating heart.

in other news, i got the beginning of a project-management tool put together (for tracking various personal projects and deciding which ones i should work on next). for now, here's an MS Excel version of the tool that i threw together; i'll use this Excel thing to get the concept fleshed out (hooray for conditional formatting!), and then i'll probably write some kind of web-enabled app for this (hey, i gotta make use of the few work-related skills that i've actually picked up over the years).

Friday, 07/19/02
i am back in town now, but it's definitely going to be one of those "whirlwind weekends", heading right back out Sunday night... i guess that's just one more joy of business travel that i forgot to list.

on a whim, i'm throwing together a quick genetic algorithm that solves the old ~math problem "what's the fewest number of coins with which all 'change for a dollar' (1-99 cents) can be given". it's certainly not an interesting problem, nor is it particularly appropriate for genetic algorithms (i.e., you can prove an exact answer, easily)... i'm doing it more to get a working (trivial) GA up & running, since i'd like to employ GAs in some of my other projects and i need to start somewhere.

i might also mess around with the "teach a computer to play Minesweeper" thing, probably using an "expert system" approach instead of any kind of neural network. but probably not, since it has obviously been done. and it's pretty much a dead-end project, with no intended follow-on projects or spinoffs... so it's probably a waste of time. boy, i should really work on that time-management / project-management thing i've been meaning to do (for years now). that and get a PostgreSQL instance up & running.

Tuesday, 07/16/02
oh, the joys of business travel. such excitement. it basically boils down to your job taking literally 100% of your day, not to mention the sheer pleasure of flights, airports, long cab rides, living out of a suitcase, and putting all kinds of ridiculous charges on your credit card (for eventual reimbursement, allegedly). at least my hotel room has some kind of broadband internet access. and it's just for a couple more weeks, too.

Saturday, 07/13/02
just kind of messing around today. i'm trying to get organized and to create some useful way to manage my time (i'm not exactly good at the time-management skills). maybe something worthwhile will come of it... if so, i'll write up some materials about it for this site (that's probably one of the best ways for me to remember / practice it).

i've been thinking about one (brief) conversation i had with Bryan Bilyeu while he was visiting last weekend: the idea of personal web sites as a "personal inventory". i think that's definitely one of the motivators behind my working on this site, but i'm not really sure what i get out of it. it's sort of like a journal (at least this "update" part is), but the rest of the site is, strictly speaking, just a personal inventory, like a catalog of accomplishments that are sitting in my pantry and a shopping list of interests that i'm pursuing ("accomplishments to be bought at the grocery store", so to speak). kind of strange. which reminds me that i'd still like to take a crack at studying the "personalities of personal web sites" thing one of these days (the preliminary hypothesis is, of course, that the style of a person's web site will (subconsiously) reflect some aspects of their personality).

i've been messing around with creating an "MP3 server" for my stereo system at home here. basically, it's an old Pentium desktop machine (bought very cheap from work... hooray for layoffs, eh?) with an audio cable running directly to the stereo system (which sounds way better than computer speakers) and with MP3s stored in the hard drive (5.5 gigabytes (for now), which is actually not that much... it's about 100 albums' worth, but it sure beats the five-disc limit of the CD player).

so it's kind of cool (in that nerdy "not-really-necessary" sort of way): i'm sitting here in the next room, hacking away, with all my music playing (on shuffle) one room over. i stay logged in to the MP3 server (hooray for PuTTY), and if something comes on that i don't like, i just tap a couple keys and the next song comes up.

for now, i'm just using the "mp3blaster" software that came w/ Linux, but i'll probably write some sort of servlet application to handle the song-playing part of things, and then i'll integrate it with the "intelligent jukebox / DJ" software that i've been wanting to create for some time now (one of these days...). and, of course, i need to get all of this integrated with the wonderful "now-playing" feature of which i'm sure you're so horribly fond.

Monday, 07/06/02
how about that "now playing" thing there? how's that for a geeky site feature, as promised? for now, the behind-the-scenes workings of it are just kind of slapped together (a "kludge", as we in the prestigious software development industry like to call it), but it gets the job done. i'll probably create a more robust way of handling things (and publish my solution to the masses), once the WinAmp folks get their v3 scripting / SDK nailed down. Bryan Bilyeu is visiting (in town for the wedding of one of the Dirksen boys, in nearby Indianapolis). maybe i can take advantage of his time here to pester him about getting a real web page up (since we all know web pages are just so very important). he's a confirmed nerd and was definitely into the whole web page thing back in college, so who knows.

and then ~right after Bryan leaves, my parents will be back in town on the second (shorter) part of their visit. and thus will end the great visitations of early summer '02 (i've had a lot of guests). once it's all over, i'll try to get cracking on some of the stuff i've needed / wanted to do but have been putting off. getting the "now playing" thing working was just the easiest item on my list of to-dos.

well, having just pestered Bryan, it appears that he actually does have a more-substantial web site, with lots of leftovers from college days and with a couple of cool recent additions. well, at least my pestering led to the idea that maybe Bryan could get his own IP address (if he switches DSL providers) so that he can host his site from home and do all kinds of snazzy things (like run his own "now playing" feature! everybody needs one!).

Monday, 06/17/02
it's alive! i finally figured out how to host this site from home (it was definitely one of those "duh, it's only right under your nose" kind of things). so goodbye, GeoCities. hello, all kinds of geeky site features (a full re-write using PHP will definitely being the first step).

Thursday, 06/13/02
i'm finishing up on a project at work, with no new project lined up immediately, so i should have more spare time to waste on this site and some other pursuits.

i'm going to look into hosting this site at home (which will allow me to PHP-ify it, among other things). i might write a cheesy little plugin for WinAmp that posts the title/album/artist of the song i'm currently listening to (on the site)... a "what's playing" kind of thing, i guess. and i'll probably clean up some of the content. nothing too big, since i don't want this site to be a major hassle... i've pretty much gotten over the whole "excitement of building a web site" thing, about seven years ago.

i'm probably going to play around with JOONE a bit, too... it's another OpenSource project from the AI Foundry, and i'm interested to see what-all they've developed.

Friday, 05/24/02
2+ weeks is probably long enough to go without an update. but just think how much bigger of an update you get for all that waiting.

15.983 is wrapping up, so now i should have a little more time to go back and really pour over the interesting stuff i didn't have time to "weed-dive" on during the course. and it's really neat to have all the lectures on CD (for reference as i forget things in the coming years).

i have greatly improved the web-safe color swatches page, to the point where it actually serves as a useful resource for some of my other projects. one such project has been a revamp of the Amygdala web site... it's still a work in progress (and probably will remain so, in perpetuity), but the foundation is layed, and i'm reasonably happy with it. i'm using PHP for the first time, too, and yes it's just "yet another scripting language", but this is actually the first time i've ever scripted one of my "amateur extracurricular sites"... so the result is that it's disgustingly easy to make updates to the site (despite its rather complicated layout), and that's definitely cool.

and i'm adding a "tidbits" section to this site, so that i can throw random new features and stuff in there. for example, i'm starting a [defunct]"Pullit Surprises" page[defunct] (more on that later), if only so i can have a place to write down examples of the same as they occur to me (and perhaps to take submissions from others... i know sister Jen has tried to keep track of PS's in the past, too, probably to no avail).

lots of visitors coming through soon. Ryan Lee is visiting Chicago this weekend (probably here already, actually). and then my parents will be here around the end of June. so that's nice. i'm normally such a hermit that i'll probably have to brush up on some social skills, in preparation.

Wednesday, 05/01/02
it appears that Catbutt is now minorly famous... the usage statistics for this page show that the most popular search by which visitors arrive at this site (35.78% of them) is "obese cat pictures". how very lurid.

Sunday, 04/21/02
not much to report in the way of developments this week... everything is pretty much as it was before. including the weather... we've got reruns from winter (just above freezing, and rainy), or the kind of weather you'd expect in March, anyway.

they're finally tearing down the old restaurant/bar just across the street (making way for a new office building of some sort... goodbye, view), so i got to watch some wrecking ball action in the last couple of mornings. they don't really swing the wrecking ball so much as drop it, to collapse the building down on itself (rather than sending it flying out into the street).

the part that was really fun to watch was when the crane/shovel thing started taking big bites out of the building... the operator would lower the bucket-thing down onto some wall, orient it just so, and then <chomp> bricks go tumbling. very cool. the construction workers right next door (laying the foundation for a new skyscraper) were even stopping to watch.

Sunday, 04/14/02 (late)
it looks like i'll be dabbling in some OpenSource development now (or trying to, anyway)... i was about to get back into developing a (Java) library for simulating pulsed neural networks (w/ dynamic synapses), but first i had the good sense to check out SourceForge and see if anyone had started working on something similar since i last checked (around January of last year). and, lo and behold, there are these two guys working on something almost identical (and they're a good bit further along, and they actually sort of know what they're doing). the project is called Amygdala, and it promises to be pretty cool.

so now i'm streching out the old C++ muscles (that's what Amygdala is written in) and getting the old Linux box up & running again (that's what Amygdala is running on). argh... re-installing SuSE Linux for the umpteenth time... not my idea of fun.

and i'm starting to get the home-computing network built out. bought a nice little router, and a cheap network card for the Linux box. soon i will realize my lifelong dreams of jukeboxing MP3's to the stereo and spy-camming on the dogs from work. oh, rapture!

on the dog front, i also picked up two new "stuffed friends" for the greyhounds to chew on. one of them is a boxy little hedgehog (we have a hedgehog theme going here) that makes little grunting noises... and Ella's just crazy about it. i left the new toys w/ the dogs (the hedgehog and a little squeaky non-descript rodent/sheep of some sort) and took a nice long shower, and when i came back Ella was still happily grunting away on the hedgehog. very cute.

Sunday, 04/07/02 (early)
must write... tool to... simplify... edits to site... (argh); probably some utility that lets me edit on my local machine and then re-compiles the pages and uploads them en masse to the web server. just think, once that's up and running, you can look forward to fresh updates every day (now, don't get too excited all at once... calm down and carefully consider the right name for your mlibby fan club before you register its domain name).

sister Jen has notified me of the Phillips folks' updated web site... yipee! baby pictures! John Phillips (Sousa) has skipped a couple months of growth since i last saw pictures of him, so i have some catching up to do. it's nice to get some "wit & wisdom of Jen" again, too (sorry, "wit & wisdom" sounds like an appropriate label for The Tao of Poo, i.e. something that's unfunny and somewhat pretentious, whereas Jen is neither... hooray for Jen).