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).