Tag charlottesweb (12)

almost thanksgiving!
Mood: lazy
Music: NEScover - "Eye of the Tiger"
Posted on 2005-11-22 10:12:00
Tags: todolist charlottesweb links
Words: 316

Ah, one (and a half) more day at work, and then the holidays. That's good stuff!

So after the big push at work last week, now I'm doing very little. Which is relaxing, but it's always tough to adjust from "crazy stressed-out fixing mode" to "do nothing mode". It is a nice change right before the holidays though. Hopefully nothing else major comes up this release.

Just got my video of Charlotte's Web in, so I'll probably show it to my sisters over break.

Had fun at game night/onefishclappin and krikwennavd's receptionish event. That's twice I've played Mario Kart in the last week, which is kinda neat.

Been working on my TODO list some more. I'm learning a lot about XMLHttpRequest, and why Firefox (the 1.0 branch) seems to do weird things with it sometimes. I'm hoping 1.5 will fix these problems (should come out this month or early December).

I know everyone and their dog is posting about this, but give pandora.com a shot - you tell it a group or song you like and it tries to find music like that. The algorithm is based on the Music Genome Project, in which they listened to a bunch of songs and characterized each one (heavy bass line, melodic vocals, etc.). So when it picks a song it thinks you will like, you can see why it thinks that, which is usually pretty interesting. (it's free and all that jazz)

I put these remakes of popular songs on the original Nintendo sound system on my iPod. They're quite fun to listen to!

Fans of Harry Potter might find this celebrity recasting amusing.

I spent a while yesterday reading through the stories of making the Macintosh and other Apple-related things. Interesting stuff!

For those of you experiencing LJ-slowness, maybe this is the problem?

One more: if you've ever lost a button-mashing minigame in Mario Party, check this out!

3 comments

that's my life in a nutshell...
Mood: optimistic
Posted on 2005-10-14 14:35:00
Tags: todolist robolab charlottesweb
Words: 300

Another busy week here - did my first robolab on Wednesday and shadowed interviews at UT on Thursday. Robolab went pretty well - this year I'm working with older kids, which is good, and there are fewer with them (around 6), which is also good. Also, I have some experience, which is good. All sorts of goodness going on there.

The interviews went fine yesterday - doing 8 of them in a day is pretty grueling, though...and I wasn't even doing the talking! I was just observing, and I do feel that I have some idea of how to do it now. When I'll get to do it at Rice is an open question, however.

Go Astros! You can register to be in a lottery for World Series tickets if you hurry - closes at 5 PM (CST) today. Contrary to what I heard, there is no obligation to buy tickets if you win the lottery, so I'm going to sign up right now!

The last Charlotte's Web show is this Sunday, and it's already sold out from what I hear. I'm glad it went so well, and I'm going to miss it (especially the people I've gotten to hang out with), but it will be nice to have my weekends back. I heard that there will in fact be a video, though, so wonderjess and Carrie will get to see it, as well as any of y'all who are interested. :-)

Worked on my todo list app some more - now the notes are saved and you can have newlines in them. I bought a copy of "Getting Things Done" today, so I may improve the todo list with suggestions from there. Or I might get fancy and let you drag and drop entries to reorder them. We'll see :-)

Hope everyone's having a good Friday!

0 comments

Rice trip and other things
Mood: busy
Music: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - "Mike Teavee"
Posted on 2005-09-20 08:43:00
Tags: charlottesweb worldofwarcraft
Words: 376

So the trip down to Rice went well.
The drive down was uneventful in a good way - we watched a Simpsons episode and listened to my iPod. Unfortunately, our hotel was out 290 a ways (hard to find hotel rooms - maybe because of Katrina evacuees?), which meant the next morning we had to get up early and spend like half an hour in traffic to actually get to Rice. And on the way, we saw someone pull over, get out of his truck, and hunch over to pee. That was...interesting.

The day went well - we showed off our demos and had a pretty good presence. I talked to some people who seemed excited about NI - yay! Although the demo I had put together didn't actually work. But that's OK, since it wasn't very exciting anyway (using a camera to count change). Maybe next time!

By the end of the day, we were tired from standing from 10ish-4 (well, most of the time), and we had to pack up all the demos into the van. We got on 59 right at 5, so of course traffic was horrible, and we pulled off at 6 (still in Houston, mind you, just past the beltway) to eat dinner, then we continued on and made it back to NI, unloaded the stuff, and finally I got to go home. Yikes, I was tired!


Charlotte's Web was decent on Sunday - not great because it had been a week, and I forgot to get my hair pinned so it kept coming out of my pig head. Also, my voice was dry for whatever reason, so I had to talk loudly and it didn't sound (or feel) as good as usual. Oh well. Hopefully this weekend will be better, since my parents are coming up to see it! Which I'm excited about. Although they might have to evacuate from Tropical Storm (presumably a hurricane by then) Rita, which would be irritating.

Here are the Celebrity Jeopardy videos from SNL - haven't watched them yet, but I want to. Maybe I'll have time today!

Apparently there's a "plague" spreading in WoW. Very interesting, although I'd imagine it would be annoying to just randomly die. Dunno if I could heal myself fast enough to avoid it...

8 comments

off to houston
Mood: focused
Posted on 2005-09-15 16:23:00
Tags: pictures charlottesweb
Words: 73

So I'm gonna be in Houston tomorrow doing recruiting stuff at Rice for NI - we'll be in Duncan Hall from 10-4ish or so. Come check it out!

Also, Charlotte's Web was reviewed, which is pretty nifty. Only show this weekend is on Sunday, which'll be a nice break.

Gotta run to the van soon, but I'm trying to finish up some work stuff!

Oh, right, and there are new Charlotte's Web pictures up.

4 comments

pictures, rehearsals, and movies! oh my!
Mood: chipper
Posted on 2005-08-27 13:22:00
Tags: pictures charlottesweb
Words: 225

I put pictures from the musical up. Next up, pictures from vacation! And then I'll be caught up. Which will be nice.

So for two consecutive nights, I've almost been in a car accident on the way back from Charlotte's Web rehearsal. This is not good. The first wasn't really my fault, but the second was, sorta (I was passing someone even though I had a feeling that he/she wanted to get over, which turned out to be correct). I really need to be more careful. Hopefully catching up on sleep and relaxing more this weekend will help.

But rehearsal last night went really well - we ran the whole thing in 62 minutes, and we're aiming for about an hour show, so good stuff! I only missed one of my cues (starting Monday, no more lines from the stage manager, which will be interesting...), and I felt pretty good about it even though Ron gave me in particular a lot of notes. And he let us out early!

So I went up to destroyerj's and met djedi there (and wildrice13 showed up later) to watch "Garden State" and "I (Heart) Huckabees". Both weird movies. I liked them, though. Especially Zach Braff. :-) After that, I was so tired I slept way late today, which is why I feel grrrreat!

That's all I got. Thanks for reading!

1 comment

Long week. Also, long next week.
Mood: tired
Music: The Killers - "Mr. Brightside"
Posted on 2005-08-26 14:01:00
Tags: charlottesweb worldofwarcraft
Words: 293

Rehearsals for "Charlotte's Web" are going pretty well, in that I'm surviving them. Actually our runthroughs are getting cleaner (sidenote: it's really annoying not to be able to tell how I'm doing until it's done and Ron tells us how we did. I wish I could know whether things are going well or not (I can guess, but I'm mostly not terribly right) during the show), and I'm 95% there on my lines (mostly now is remembering which goes where, and the occasional missed cue). Having rehearsal every night gets tiring, though. Luckily no rehearsals this weekend, and (I'm big on the HTML tags today, I guess) no rehearsal next Thursday! Hooray! Unfortunately we do have tech rehearsals Saturday and Sunday of next weekend, which is a huge bummer because that weekend is already crazy busy with random stuff. *sigh*

Once rehearsals are done, I'll enjoy WoW more - I'm enjoying it now, but I'm always having to catch up with people, and I'm making djedi take me back through my old quests since I can't solo very well, being a priest and all. I do like the whole guild thing, though.

I tried out Google Talk, and I'm not really impressed, although the sort of integration with Gmail is kinda nice.

Hopefully I'll get rid of my backlog of pictures to post this weekend, including ASMC pictures. But no promises!

Work is going decently well...but since I have 6:30 rehearsals all week, I have to leave a little on the early side to make it there on time (and they're much more strict about getting there on time than ASMC; that is, you will be admonished (that's a word, right? I'm tired...) for being late). So I just need to get more done.

4 comments

quick post
Mood: tired
Music: "The Tick" background music
Posted on 2005-08-23 22:42:00
Tags: pictures charlottesweb
Words: 153

I put up pictures from my family's Father's Day trip to Lake Conroe. Does anyone have problems loading my gallery in Firefox? Because I do (it takes a really long time and sometimes the pictures never load), and I thought it was my webserver, but I just tried it in Konqueror and it worked fine. So maybe it's just on my computer or something. Anyway... (Edit: the weird thing is that it seems to work in Firefox when I click on a link to it - it doesn't when I type in the address directly. *confused*)

Charlotte's Web rehearsals are going pretty well, although they are quite tiring. I mostly know my lines...now I need to learn blocking and whatnot. And work was really stressful today - lots of interruptions and stuff so I never got a good flow going, although I did accomplish a few things. Oh well - I'm sure tomorrow will be better.

3 comments

busy week, fun weekend
Mood: optimistic
Music: Wicked - "Dancing Through Life"
Posted on 2005-08-22 14:11:00
Tags: projecteuler charlottesweb worldofwarcraft
Words: 299

Howdy!

The weekend was good - played a bit of World of Warcraft. I got it working on Windows and Linux (some sort of memory issue - doesn't seem to be isolated to one stick or one slot, but only using two (and maybe keeping it under 1GB?) works great), which was nice.

I'm really getting into World of Warcraft, which is unsurprising because I often throw myself into new things. Having Skype working to chat with people while playing is way cool, too - much more efficient than typing all the time.

I have Charlotte's Web rehearsals M-F this week and next week, so I'm steeling myself for that. Luckily the rehearsals are 6:30-9:30, so I get out at a reasonable time (although I have to eat dinner quickish to make it there), and they work us pretty well so I feel like we're accomplishing something. I'm supposed to be off-book tonight for the first time, and I think I can (mostly) do it.

My other latest thing is Project Euler - it's a bunch of math programming challenges. It's fun because it's a lot less frustrating than the Python Challenge, but there's still definitely some depth to it (and I'm using Python to do them :-) )

A random thought I had at some point - say I remember part of a song, but I don't know what it's called or whatever (this happens to me a lot!). Is there some way for me to hum what I remember, then take that sound file and do some sort of correlation with a bunch of known songs and return the best match? I don't know much (really anything) about signal processing, but it seems like humming it in a different key would make things difficult, as well as faster/slower than the original tune. Just thinking...

12 comments

back home, finally
Mood: tired
Music: some sort of tired music or something
Posted on 2005-08-17 22:26:00
Tags: travel charlottesweb
Words: 1039

I'm back in Austin!


So I left on Friday afternoon to go up north and see my family. Unfortunately my flight out of Austin (to Cincinnati) was delayed an hour or so, but since I was going to have a three hour layover in Cincinnati, no biggie. Ate dinner in what is possibly the most depressing airport concourse in America (Cincinnati terminal 3 concourse C...to be fair, it was under construction, but it was all concrete and harsh lighting. Yuk!), then went on to Burlington (after a 15-minute delay or so). Got in around midnight and made it to Plattsburgh around 1 and promptly fell asleep.

Saturday and Sunday were spent cleaning and packing stuff up. Maybe I should back up. My grandparents (on my mom's side) have lived in Plattsburgh (upstate NY) for 50 years or so, but they're going to move to live in Hanover, NH (in the summer) and Houston (in the winter). There are a number of reasons for this, the most important being that it's getting harder for my grandma to get up stairs (the bedrooms are upstairs), and this way they'll get to be closer to their kids (my Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Barrett live in Hanover). So, this was all planned and stuff - then my grandma fell and had to get pins in her hip. So now she's in a rehab center in Hanover (more on this later). So, us plus Grandpa went to clean and move stuff to Hanover, except that we didn't know what stuff to keep and what to get rid of, etc, since a lot of it is Grandma's.

Anyway, so we drove to Hanover on Sunday via Burlington (dropping my dad off at the airport so he could go home) and Waterbury (where the Ben and Jerry factory is! Mmm...). We visited Grandma before getting to the condo - she's doing quite well, her physical therapy is going well and her spirits seemed relatively high. Then we unloaded and unpacked. Monday and Tuesday we spent visiting Grandma and Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Barrett and their children (our cousins, for those of you keeping score at home) Ethan and Chloe. That was fun.

Then, Tuesday, time to leave. Everyone else's flight left at 2:15ish and mine left at 5:15ish, so I hunkered down for a long stay at the airport - finished a few books and learned some more lines. Then, the flight was delayed two hours (this means six hours at the Burlington airport, which, while not as depressing as the Cleveland concourse, is extremely boring. The only "shop" inside security was a snack cart, from which I bought trail mix and a cinnamon roll), and we finally left. I was told that my Cincinnati-Austin flight was delayed 20 minutes, so I might just make it if things went well. We were a little later getting into Cincinnati than we had predicted, things did not go well, and I spent the night in Cincinnati.

Which, I used to always sort of want to happen, being an adventure and such. But I was really tired by this point, and disoriented (Cincinnati is in the Eastern time zone, fyi), so I didn't enjoy it as much as I could have. Plus, the flight they put me on the next morning was scheduled to leave at 8:53, and they asked me when I checked in what time I wanted to take the shuttle in, and I didn't know if they had breakfast or not so I said 7:00 to be sure I had enough time. Which meant I had to get up at 6:30, and they did in fact have a nice continental breakfast there, waffles included. Oh well. The room was quite nice - it was actually a suite with refrigerator, couch, and 2 TVs (I have pictures!) but I just watched a few episodes of Law & Order, took a sorely needed shower, and went to bed.

Next day! (i.e. today, or at least today when I started this entry...) Got up, was exhausted but made the shuttle no problem. This flight was a "true" Delta flight and not a Delta Connections thing, so I got to go to terminal 3, concourse B which was a very nice concourse. So I walked around it some, then sat down and read and waited for my flight. Unfortunately, it was...wait for it...delayed due to fog. (for the record, all 4 flights I went on, plus the one I was scheduled for and didn't go on, were delayed) Anyway, it left about an hour and 15 minutes late, and destroyerj was nice enough to pick me up (and got a speeding ticket on the way back, for which I felt bad).


So I get home by way of Wendy's (mmm!), and got home. At this point I knew that I had to work the booth at NIWeek from 4-7 and that I had Charlotte's Web rehearsal from 6:30-9:30 (so I would be late to rehearsal, and probably not get dinner in there), so I hurried and tried to find an electric razor so I could shave (there's another story in there, but it's uninteresting), and failed. Then I checked my email: hallelujah, Charlotte's Web rehearsal cancelled! Woohoo!

But I showered and went down to NIWeek, worked the booth which went fine, then came back here by way of NI (drove a coworker there) and Chick-Fil-A. My main task for tonight was to try to install Win98 and WoW (and Skype) so I could be ready with that (since I'm not having much luck making WoW work under Linux). Fiddling around with the hard drives took much longer than I thought, but I eventually got things set up and Win98 partially installed, only to have it reboot when it tries to finish the install. Whee. So now I'm working on XP. This stuff is gonna work, dang it!

This entry is getting long, so I'm gonna wind it down. Which is convenient, because I'm about out of things to say. djedi gets home tmw, which'll be nice. And I'm doing pretty well learning my Charlotte's Web lines, which is good since we're supposed to be off-book by Monday, which means some work is required this weekend.

3 comments

play, WoW frustration, and so on
Mood: frustrated
Music: Barenaked Ladies - "Light Up My Room"
Posted on 2005-08-10 09:58:00
Tags: charlottesweb worldofwarcraft tipping
Words: 377


So rehearsal went pretty well last night. It was sort of weird being there - I felt very much like I didn't exactly know what I was doing, which seems pretty accurate. The cast seems very nice, as does the stage manager. I'm less nervous about learning my lines (but I still need to work on it!) because, well, I'm going to be saying them a lot in rehearsal. Which seems obvious in retrospect...

It was fun, though. Hopefully I'll pick up this whole acting thing as we go. Rehearsal again tonight!


World of Warcraft is frustrating because I can't really get it to work. I'm running it on Linux through Cedega, and it kinda works but crashes every 5 minutes or so. There are like 6 things to try, and so I might just make a list and try all combinations of all of them, or something. Maybe I'll write a script to do each one of them to speed testing. Hmm. Anyway, I'm determined to keep trying until I get tired of trying. That's commitment for you!

A topic that's been making the blog rounds is the practice of tipping. This round of discussion started with the fact that some restaurant in New York is ending tipping and adding a 20% service charge to the bill. Here are some interesting statistics on tipping and why Mr. Pink doesn't tip. Myself, I think it sucks that it's legal to pay waiters less than minimum wage (as low as $1.59/hour in Kansas!). Given that they do, however, I feel guilty not tipping 15% unless the service was quite bad. If I could change the world, though, I'd make restaurants pay waiters minimum wage and make tipping optional. But I've never been in a job subject to tips - anyone who has care to jump in?

A neat trick I saw on the Google Blog is using the * operator to make Google fill in the blank. So, you can do things like Austin is the * capital of the world (live music, obviously!), Pittsburgh is the * capital of the world (steel, peroghi, or robotics), Rochester is the * capital of New York (murder(!) and technology), and Houston is the * capital of the world (energy or oil, depending who you ask). Pretty nifty!

7 comments

over!
Mood: content
Music: 50 Cent vs. Michael Jackson - "In Da Starlight"
Posted on 2005-08-08 11:36:00
Tags: asmc charlottesweb work
Words: 455

Wow...so, crazy weekend.


Friday night was gala night, which was very well attended. The show went pretty well, then I went out and hung out with my family - it was nice to see them again, although I'm going to see them next week on vacation as well :-) Then I was cashier for silent auction people, and then my family and djedi and I headed over to Kerbey Lane Cafe which was good (although the service was quite slow). After that, bed, then we met my family for brunch the next morning at Whole Foods and went back to the theater for two more shows. By this point I was really getting tired - my part is pretty high-energy (stumbling all over stage and whatnot), so it takes a lot out of me. Anyway, after that we went to church and came home and had wildrice13 over for dinner.

Unfortunately, I had some work stuff I was pretty worried about so I went in to work to try to fix stuff while djedi and wildrice13 played some FFX-2. I ended up spending longer than I meant to at work (3.5 hours) but I eventually got in a groove (involving listening to my current music over and over again) and fixed both of my major issues, which I was quite pumped about! Came home, and FFX-2 was passed (including the special 100% cutscene) not too long afterwards. Congrats!

Sunday I slept in a little bit, which was really nice, then back to theater for two more shows, striking the set, and the cast party. We didn't stay too long because we were tired, then we headed up to destroyerj's for a monitor-viewing and games, including a rousing game of Simpsons Clue (Smithers did it!), Snipe Hunt, and a few rounds of Bop It!


So, today is my day between shows, and Charlotte's Web rehearsal starts tomorrow. I need to work more on memorizing my lines. Busy week between gamenight, two rehearsals, and djedi's birthday (happy birthday!). I think I'm done with djedi's code for now - it seems to work and the major source of confusion we had was cleared up...

So I wear a nightguard now when I sleep so I won't grind my teeth (which I apparently do like nobody's business...). The last time I had a nightguard it was for orthodontics work I had, and it hurt every morning when I woke up (presumably because my teeth were trying to shift back or whatever), so I was pleasantly surprised to find that this one doesn't hurt much at all, and it only makes it a little harder to get to sleep (which hasn't been much of an issue so far given how exhausted I've been!). Yay!

2 comments

tired, and ugh
Mood: worried
Posted on 2005-08-01 15:36:00
Tags: asmc charlottesweb
Words: 280


So this weekend was ASMC weekend #1. The show Friday night didn't go very well, but the rest of them (3 on Saturday, 2 on Sunday) went from fine to good. All the shows (except for the friends and family Friday show) sold out, which is quite a difference from last year (perhaps because "Peter Pan" is a better draw than "Fractured Fairies and Tails", which is a little less clear exactly what it is). I had fun, but it really drained my energy so I was both physically and mentally tired by Sunday evening. The kids seemed to enjoy it, though, so that's good.


So I've been stressed this weekend and today about totally different things. Today I'm stressed about work, which I think is a sign that I need to be less invested in my work. Which I'm not good at doing. So, um, we'll see how that goes.

The other thing I've been stressed about (I think this is the big thing) is Charlotte's Web - I started trying to learn my lines during performances and downtime this weekend, because lately I've been almost entirely unable to not do something I consider "productive" during free time. But that's another story. Anyway, I'm really worried about learning all my lines (there are gobs and gobs of them). And I'm having second thoughts about the whole thing (not in the sense of backing out - I've already signed a contract and all that, but whether I would say yes again if I had the chance). It's not like I've ever done any sort of "real" theater before...the acting and stuff was all incidental to the singing.

So, I'm a little down.

7 comments

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