This weekend I went out to Winchester with Anna, who had an extended family gathering of sorts. We were all going to go to some big Apple Blossom festival (apparently it's a big deal) but the crowds were so bad that we just had a cook-out at Anna's sister's new house.

On the way home today, I saw a guy in full fatigues with a backpack jogging along the side of the road (in the rain). About fifty yards later, I saw an old guy in a blue coat carrying a single fluorescent bulb, about six feet long. Make of that what you will.

Prescription drugs have taken over the commercials on nightly television. "This is Bob" cable commericials notwithstanding, I saw five prescription drug commercials in the space of one hour on Sunday night. The commercials and their messages played so often and ran together so much that it was like a contrapuntal elegy of non-fatal side effects and scabrous limbs.

Evidently there's a new prescription drug for chronic dry eyes. Now, millions of Americans will run to their doctors based on misdiagnosed allergies and hypochondria. I'm sure there's quite a few people out there with legitimate dry eye problems which are severe enough to warrant a trade-up for a risk of heart attack, inverse constipation, and genital blistering, but everyone else should try out some home remedies first, like blinking.

Our company name was finally posted on the front of the building over the weekend, so it can now be seen from the Dulles Toll Road (you could already see the sign on the back of the building, but only from Reston). This is great PR, because we'll now get all the government officials in charge of defense spending who happen to be tooling down the road, fresh from the airport and their taxpayer-covered European vacations. They'll see FGM on the side of the building, think "That sounds like a great place to develop defense software. I could use some defense software today. And maybe a Big Gulp" and then pull into our parking lot and give us a multi-million dollar contract.

This translates directly into a higher salary for me, which means that eventually I can put my own name on the side of a building. I'll start in a simple manner, maybe adding an exclamation point to the official letterhead of the University of Rhode Island, before working my way up through a Music building, a golf course, and a dormitory. Hopefully it'll be a dormitory with a particularly exciting reputation, where college kids not even born yet will say, "All the slutty girls live in URI! tower!" or something similar.

I would much rather get a man-made edifice named after me than any natural phenomena -- it must be exceedingly depressing for scientists to hear that their named insect has become extinct, and I'd never want there to be a URI! Glacier, because who knows whether that'll be around in a hundred years. However, when it comes to buildings, there's always a big fuss when the building is about to be torn down, so hopefully by then people will want to retain my name for posterity's sake and my building will get a brand new renovation out of it.

The remainder of the money not spent on naming buildings will go towards my custom-designed house which will have a secret passage, a two lane bowling alley with a pinsetter, and an indoor miniature golf course with 36 holes.

New LOST tonight!

Audience Participation Day

Caption Contest

This photo was taken at the annual "Baby-cry Sumo" event, held in Tokyo on April 28, 2007. For today's contest, submit a funny caption or dialogue for this picture to the e-mail address at the bottom of this page by Sunday 6:00 PM EST, May 6th. The winner of a popular vote will get a $10 gift certificate to Amazon.com. If your caption is self-explanatory, feel free to mail it as plain text. If it's more complex, you can refer to the characters as left wrestler, left baby, right baby, and right wrestler -- I will create cartoon speech bubbles (or thought bubbles) and add the appropriate words.

For examples of what I'm looking for, take a look at these links:

December 8, 2005: Saddam Hussein caption contest
August 16, 2006: Back of the Bus caption contest
December 27, 2005: Reuters Pictures of the Year 2005
December 27, 2006: Reuters Pictures of the Year 2006

I'm a little despot, short and stout, so (as usual) I have the final say in ties or ballot-stuffing. Even if you think your idea sucks, submit it to provide some healthy competition! Good luck!

Battle Report Day

I have a new Starcraft 2 Beta battle report up at battlereports.com!

List Day: Upcoming Milestones

• Sam & Kristen's Wedding in Richmond.
• Rebecca goes to Peru for two weeks.
• URI! Kitchen Remodeling, starring BU and his dad.
• Job Change from Technical Lead to XML Information Engineer (still at FGM)
• BU finally releases DDMSence 1.8.0 eventually, even though he hasn't had enough uninterrupted time to devote to it.
• Rebecca turns 28.
• Frank & Amanda's Wedding somewhere in the North Carolinan heartlands.
• OBX Week in Corolla at the "Sea Prize".
• Weekend Camping in the Maryland Wilderness
• Rebecca goes back to school.
• BU has birthday steaks.

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Terminator, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Season Two:
This season of TSCC (free on Amazon Prime) suffered from 24-Syndrome: No TV show is interesting enough to stretch a plot over twenty episodes. The first season was a fun throwaway show, but this one dragged on without momentum. One episode about two-thirds of the way through was told completely through dream sequences, and it has been clinically proven that dream sequences always reduce the quality of a TV show by 50% (see also, The Sopranos and LOST). The final episode mixed things up very nicely and provided some interesting hooks for a follow-on season, but the show was thankfully cancelled before it could drag on any further.

Final Grade: C

Legend of Grimrock:
This $11 indy game on Steam is a throwback to grid-based dungeon crawlers like Bard's Tale, with a real-time combat mechanism thrown in. It's a good mix of reflex-based maneuvering and (often difficult) puzzles. I got a solid 10 hours of enjoyment out of it before I got bored -- I only made it to dungeon level 5, but felt like the character progression and skill trees didn't really offer anything exciting to work towards. Then the Diablo 3 beta came out and I stopped playing completely.

Final Grade: C+

Kathleen Madigan: Gone Madigan:
A fun, free hour of stand-up which has aged very well. I used to listen to Madigan on XM all of the time -- it's a good mix of (old) current events, and the usual topics without overdoing it on profanity and raunch.

Final Grade: B

The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness by George Alistair Sanger:
The Fat Man was the music designer for most of computer games in my youth, and though this book has been out of print for years, a version is now available on the Kindle. With the exception of two chapters, the book is barely about working in the game audio industry, and is mostly a collection of stories and tall tales from The Fat Man's life. The content is eclectic and enjoyable, even without much of a nostalgia for the old computer game days, but the Kindle formatting is highly distracting. The layout makes me think the original book had a wacky, artsy look to it, which doesn't translate well on an e-book. Also, some of the text is actually the same color as the background, which means you can't always read every sentence.

Final Grade: B-

Answers Day

the sequel to Questions Day

Is the future basement dweller one of your urizonetian commenters? - Mom

The future basement dweller is Rebecca's younger cousin, who might be attending NOVA after high school, and lives 22 miles deeper into Loudoun County. Living here would reduce her daily commute to NOVA by 19 miles.

Darth Vader vs. zombie horde: GO - Groovymarlin

This really depends upon the nature of the competition between the involved parties.

Is it better to use spray sunscreen or lotion? - Doobie

• Spray sunscreen can be self-applied, while lotion requires you to have, or pretend to have, friends with whom body-touching isn't icky. Otherwise, you'll end up with a burnt, smarting negative-space hand mural between your shoulder blades. We had a guy that this happened to on the 2002 OBX trip, who we called Josh, because that was his name.


• Lotion bottles can be refilled and reused to maintain your green cred. Empty spray bottles accumulate so quickly that you'll quickly bring a landfill to capacity unless you come up with some unnecessary crafts projects, and the world has enough Etsy jewelry.


• The true SPF rating of any lotion sunscreen is (originalSPF - 20) because that's how much time has passed by the time you're done applying it.


• Lotion is much cheaper per application, especially since 5% of the spray bottle is sunscreen while 95% is magic propellant dust.

Evidence-based decision marking shows that spray sunscreen is the clear winner here. Screw the environment. In fact, buy the Coppertone bulk spray sunscreen that comes packaged in an SUV.

Have a good weekend! Start it out right with this cover of Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance".

Scores Day

To note the passing of 15 years since my undergraduate composition recital last week, I put together these two videos of performances synced up with their sheet music.

Some of the notation might be a little off, as I'm now several hundred versions of Finale behind, and I find it amazing that these old files even open anymore, much less render properly.

Memory Day: The Past 10 Years

I think we've put our pre-baby years to pretty good use.

Staycation Day

Rebecca and Maia got on a plane to Oklahoma City last night to visit the Brian and Emily Gillis family for an extended weekend, leaving me and Amber behind for a nice, quiet staycation. Things I did on my first solo night:

• Grilled a rare 1 pound steak on my new grill and ate it while having an Alexandria beer.
• Took a bath and started rereading Wool by Hugh Howey.
• Got to level 49 on my Purifier (a 2-handed ranged character that can both tank and drop bombs) in Grim Dawn.
• Watched 2 episodes of the third season of Colony.

Ian Week #1 Battle Report

Ian is now a week old. Comparatively speaking, he is much easier to placate than Maia was at this age -- no tube feedings or all-nighters yet. He wakes up like clockwork every 1 - 3 hours, has an impressive snack (one that even impressed the lactation consultant) as quickly as possible, and then falls right back to sleep.

He doesn't display much personality yet since he only spends a little time alert and awake each day. When we change his diapers he continuously kicks his lanky legs in a effort to cover his ankles in poo like a Nutella-dipped treat.

I've taken 5 weeks off of work this time around (1 fewer than with Maia, but this time I actually get paid for all of it) and spend the days watching Maia while Rebecca recovers from her surgery. Maia and I even made a trip to the grocery store, her first in-store visit since pre-pandemic. She enjoys Ian as much as a three-year-old can before getting distracted by nearby toys or requisitioning his blankets to put on bunnies.

Memory Day: 20 Years Ago Today

Twenty years ago today, on May 3, 2003, I made my final trip home from Tallahassee, detached forever from the potential academic composition career I might have pursued. The 900 mile trip took about 13 hours total, and I was sharing the road with my parents who came down with the big truck for my largest items of furniture (mostly a massive CRT monitor that weighed fifty pounds). After an overnight stay in a cheap motel, Booty and I did the last six hours of the trip in my 2001 Honda Accord. I let her out of the cat carrier because worrying that she might squeeze under the brake pedal and cause an accident was less of a concern than having to listen to her caterwauling the entire length of I-95. (She just explored the car then fell asleep in the back window).

Moving back to Virginia was a big deal -- it was time for me to stop dicking around with trite MIDI compositions and start earning real money as a software engineer (my starting salary after 3 summers of positive intern experiences was $62,000 per year). I immediately started looking for apartments along the Route 28 corridor to be closer to work. After learning that my college roommate, Anna, was also interested in moving, we combined forces and looked at three or four different places in Centreville.

The most expensive 2 bedroom apartment we saw was in a gated community and cost a whopping $1200 per month. Nowadays that might get you a shared studio apartment in Warrenton. We ultimately picked The Elms at Centreville because it had an average price, no parking permits, and was right at the intersection of 28 and 66 for easy access to all the places I might want to go to (but never went to). Next, I re-acquired a Virginia driver's license and bought all new furniture. I still have the dining room table and sofa today!

We only lived at the Elms for 8 months before I moved permanently to Sterling in February 2004 but it was a pleasant enough spot apart from the tempestuous arguing couple that lived below us. Pictured below are Booty and Kitty enjoying the cool hearthstone during the hot summer, and various Ahlbin/Spellerberg siblings in the days before craft beer was a thing.

Review Day: Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch)

There are no major spoilers in this review.

We purchased this game almost a year ago, and haven't played it in at least 4 months, so I think it's safe to say that we'll never finish it.

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the sequel to Breath of the Wild which I gave a solid C- to. Looking past the hype, the first game was a tedious grind only made bearable by the fact that Maia loved watching me play it and there was nothing else to do during the pandemic.

This game reuses the same engine and takes place in the same world (although the world is so altered that it felt very different right off the bat). Though it has some newness injected, it does very little to fix the underlying flaws that plagued the first game.

First, the good:

• The new abilities and the puzzles that require you to glue things together in oddball ways are very clever and give you a lot of leeway for solving things in unexpected ways.
• The world is three times as large (there are now islands in the sky, the overland itself, and then the Depths underneath), and you spend plenty of time flying through the air as a means of exploration. This mechanism feels much better than it did in Skyward Sword, and is worlds better than the sailing in Wind Waker.

Now, the bad:

• The controls remain unintuitive and frustrating. The number of times I try to do one thing but end up doing something else (like climbing a wall instead of walking through a door) is extremely high in each play session. This is especially frustrating when enemies require lots of precision to beat.
• The "open world" concept still provides no reason to really explore off the beaten path. The world is huge but generic.
• The story is abysmal and repetitive. Because it's an open world game, you can solve the four main dungeons in any order, but they all have identical stories and story beats as a result. The same applies to many of the subquests -- doing something once is interesting, but then having to do it 5 more times is boring.

One day last year, Maia and I felt like we were close to the end and finally decided to beat the game. We had beaten the four main dungeons and traveled to the endgame to defeat the final boss. Only, it turns out there was a fifth leg of the game to deal with and what felt like "95% complete" actually turned out to be "75% complete". This deflated a lot of my urge to finish the game (and I'm a completionist!), and we never picked the game back up seriously after that. With so many other more fun activities to do, the incentive to go the rest of the way just isn't there. Also, Maia has moved on to Pokemon in the interim.

Final Grade: C