Behind These Eyes

Arby's Commercial

2006-03-09T10:36:00.000-05:00

We saw a rather disturbing Arby's commercial the other day. It said something like, "Our chicken sandwiches are now made with 100% all natural chicken!"

That kind of makes you wonder. What were their chicken sandwiches made with before??

Internet jukebox

2006-02-17T14:04:00.000-05:00

So there's this bar we like to go to in Verona called the Rivertowne Inn. We like it because it has good food, good beer (lots of micros on tap), and this cool NTN trivia game that we like to play. And they have a jukebox that's hooked up to the internet. The idea is that instead of having a standard jukebox with a fixed number of CDs, the internet jukebox can download songs from a much larger database. You'd think this would mean the music selection would be awesome. That you could just walk up to the thing, pop in your credit card (yes, it takes credit cards), and play songs from whatever artists your little heart desires. But you would be wrong.

Oddly enough, the selection of the jukebox is so limited that it takes longer to find a song to play than it does for the box to actually play the song! It's a very weird mix of stuff. A lot of the hugely overplayed mass-market artists are in there of course, but there seems to be a few key well-known artists missing (like Tool). And then there's also a whole pile of folks I'm sure no one has ever heard of before. Once you do find an artist to play, chances are the box will be missing all the best (and most well-known) albums by that artist, and will instead have some weird remix album of some song that was never really that good in the first place.

The really ironic part about it is the website for the company that makes this jukebox. The company is called BMI Gaming and on their website they have a Q&A type of thing:

Q: Why choose a eCast powered jukebox over other music competitors or CD jukeboxes?
A: Vast Music Selection

HAH!!

Actually, the company that's really responsible for the (lack of) music selection is Ecast. They supply the music that the BMI Gaming jukeboxes play. Not sure what the problem is with Ecast, but they seem to have their heads up their butts about the music thing. They're all proud of the fact that they have license agreements with the 4 major record labels. Whooptie doo. Lets hear something else for a change, eh?

Babble

2006-02-07T11:55:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted in a while, so you'd think I would have a lot to write. I don't really. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that I have so much I could write that it's overwhelming and ridiculous to even try to talk about all of it. So I'll just babble on about inconsequensial things instead. That's what blogs are all about anyway, right?

This weekend WRCT is doing its annual Massive Music Weekend. This is where a different band or artist is featured every half hour, and only their music gets played for that half hour. We don't read any promos or public service announcements, and do only the minium required to satisfy FCC regulations. Other than that, it's just music, music, and more music. All weekend long from noon on Friday until midnight Sunday night. I'm going to be doing 2 bands: Ozric Tentacles at 5:30pm on Sunday, and Fila Brazillia at 6:00pm on Sunday. Hopefully, they'll have a link to the whole schedule up on the web site soon!

The superbowl was cool, of course. Especially since the Steelers won (though they didn't play as masterfully as they have been for the past few games, it was enough to get the job done). Afterwards we went outside and could hear people cheering and horns honking over on the parkway, and see fireworks down at the stadium. Whee! It's kind of bittersweet though since now the season is basically over (pro bowl, schmo bowl!). I was surprised at the number of totally lame commercials though. You'd think for that kind of money, you'd at least try to make it memorable. If you're interested, Google has them all up online (including some that didn't get aired for one reason or another).

Holy Bowl Games, Batman!

2006-01-06T10:04:00.000-05:00

Some excellent bowl games this week. Penn State squeezed out a win in the Orange Bowl (it took them 3 overtime periods to do it though). The announcers made such a big deal about the coaches being 79 and 76 years old that we started calling it the Geezer Bowl! And Texas put an end to USC's dominating winning streak. Now someone else needs to come along and do the same to them. :)

I tend to watch the NFL much more than college football, unless Penn State is involved. I had several people tell me they prefer college ball because it's more exciting. After watching the bowl games (and a couple of the Penn State games this year), I think I know why. It's because nobody in college has a defense! And it's particularly obvious on special teams. Every punt return I've seen seems to go for at least 10-15 yards (and often more), which makes the field that much shorter for the offense. That, combined with wimpy-assed defenses makes for some very high scoring games that can flip back and forth numerous times.

However, one thing I do like about college ball that's missing in the NFL is the bands and the field shows. I was SO disappointed when we went to the Steelers vs. Bears game earlier this season and the halftime show was nothing more than a small high school chorus standing in the middle of the field singing some songs. No interesting costumes, no dancing or marching around to make neat-looking patterns, no twirling or waving flags... Blah. How boring.

The stupid thing about college football though is that there's no playoffs. Although I know there must be some method for picking who gets to play in what bowl game, they all end up seeming very random to me anyway. Texas can now claim to be the number 1 team in the country, but they only had to play one really hard team to do it.

But maybe I'm just bitter because football season is almost over. *sigh*

Pittsburgh Radio Will Never Be the Same...

2005-12-14T10:26:00.000-05:00

Ever since Sunday morning (Dec 11th), WRCT has been on random schedule, which means that the regular program schedule is suspended and DJs just sign up for air time whenever they can. They do this because the university is currently having final exams (so all the regular class schedules are messed up), and after that the university will be on winter break. The good thing is that this finally gives me a chance to grab some time in the studio for myself, which I haven't been able to do since I passed my air test just before Thanksgiving. The station will be on random schedule until Jan 22, at which time there will be a new schedule for the spring semester (and I'll get to have a regular show).

So on Monday, I grabbed a 2 hour time slot from 2-4pm, and it was a blast! I was pretty nervous, and made a couple of mistakes, but overall it went quite well. I think only one of the mistakes was noticable anyway (a song came on too loud and I slid the volume down just a little too fast). A couple of times I played two songs from the same CD (due to hitting the wrong button) instead of playing the song from the next CD I had cued up. But I don't think anyone noticed. I did get some nice compliments on the show, especially from the DJ who came in after me.

My plan is to try to grab as much air time as I can handle (and have time for) over the next month while the students are gone. By the time I was done with my show on Monday I was totally exhausted. My brain felt like it had turned to jelly because it took so much concentration to handle everything! But I figure it will get easier the more I do it, and random schedule is the perfect opportunity to get lots of practice time in.

So I signed up for another 2 hour slot from 2-4pm on Friday. On Monday I played some nice mellow downtempo stuff, but friday always feels like a happy-its-almost-the-weekend kind of day. I plan to do a more rockin' upbeat danceable set as a nice lead-in to the weekend!

Go Steelers!

2005-12-12T10:07:00.000-05:00

So late last week Eric managed to score us some tickets to the Steelers game against Chicago on Sunday. Whee! It was the first NFL game I'd ever been to, and even though it was cold and snowy, it was awesome (especially because the Steelers kicked Chicago's butt)! I thought I might have trouble figuring out where the first down line was without the helpful yellow line they have on TV, but it turned out to be no problem. It was pretty easy to tell by just looking at the marker on the sideline. I guess they need the yellow line on TV because the camera angle doesn't always give you a good view of the sideline markers. It took me a little time to be able to follow the ball, since I didn't have the camera guy to do that for me, but I was fine with that by the 3rd Q or so.

After the game we spent a little time in a local bar (Finnigan's Wake I think it was - we just picked one at random that looked good). We met a bunch of guys who drive down from Canada for one Steelers game each year. One of the first things they asked us was, "so when are you moving to Canada?" The amusing thing was that we've often talked about that jokingly since we're so disgusted with many of the things the current administration has been doing. It was interesting to get their point of view on the war in Iraq, etc. Pretty much what I expected. The rest of the world is looking at us and just kind of shaking it's head in confusion and disbelief.

But, at least the Steelers won. :)

Disaster Strikes!

2005-12-06T13:04:00.000-05:00

So yesterday morning I came in to work to find that a large (8 inch) domestic water pipe that was in a closet behind our machine room had burst and was spewing water all over everything. It was estimated that there was about 1000 gallons of water per minute gushing out of the broken pipe! It took them about 4.5 hours to find the correct valve to shut it off, and by then there was almost a foot of water on the floor (well, under the floor, since it's all raised flooring in the machine rooms). The force of the water was strong enough to break open a metal fire door and move 3 shelves/racks full of computers! When the building manager first opened the door to the machine room, one computer came floating out on the resulting rush of water...

Here are some pictures:

This is a view of the machine room looking in from the hallway. The door to the closet where the pipe was can be seen in the back of the picture.

Here is a picture of the pipe that burst. The curved part is the section that cracked. At the bottom of the picture you can see that there's a metal rod holding up the replacement piece. I don't know about you, but it doesn't look very sound to me... From what I was told by the facilities management guys, it probably burst just because it was kind of old, and the building may have shifted slightly (as buildings tend to do over time), which put enough stress on it to make it crack.

The water in the closet where the pipe was probably got up to about 8-9 feet before the door burst open. Here you can see some cardboard and other packing materials that got floated up to the top of the cabinets that were in there.

This is a view looking from the closet out into the machine room (the opposite direction from the first picture). The force of the water was so strong that it pushed all these racks of machines over toward the corner of the room (they were in a straight line before)!

World's Worst Job?

2005-11-23T13:06:00.000-05:00

Here's a job I would definitely not want: fire alarm tester.

They're testing the fire alarms in the building I work in all day long today. I sat there for 10 minutes and just couldn't take it any more. Thank god for laptops!

YAY!!!

2005-11-22T18:04:00.000-05:00

I passed my air test!! :)

Air Test

2005-11-17T11:03:00.000-05:00

So the final step to becoming a real air-cleared radio DJ is the air test. After you've spent some time training with another DJ, you take over an hour of their show by yourself for your air test. You have to fill out all the logs, meet all the requirements, record the whole thing on a cassette tape, and turn it into the training director to be graded.

However, the thing about the air test is that it's designed to be much harder than an other normal hour of broadcasting would be, just to make sure you really know your stuff and can still put out a good product even under pressure, and also to make sure you can handle anything that might come up while you're on the air.

There are certain requirements the station has that the DJs have to meet, some of which are also mandated by the FCC. The FCC rules include things like, not allowing the 7 "dirty words" to be broadcast on the air, not having more than 5 seconds of dead air time, giving the legal station ID ("WRCT Pittsburgh", in our case) within 3 minutes of the top of each hour, keeping proper logs of what is being broadcast and who is currently responsible for that broadcast, etc.

Our station also requires that each DJ play or read at least two "promos" per hour (short announcements of other shows), and read or play at least two public service announcements (PSAs) per hour totalling at least 60 seconds. DJs also have to play at least 3 pieces of new music every hour (called "bin cuts" because they are stored in the air studio in a place called the bin). And behind the scenes, you have to log all of this: type your playlist into the computer so it shows up on the internet, write down when you did the station id and what PSAs and promos you played at what times. You also need to make a record of the current readouts on the transmitter (volts and amps) every even hour and also when the station is turned on or off. This is so engineering can notice any potential problems with the transmitter before they become serious.

In the air studio there is also the "EAS" box, which stands for "Emergency Alert System". This is the thing that periodically sends annoying beeps over the air and then tells you there's nothing to worry about. For the most part, DJs don't have to do anything about this - it just happens at random times and preempts whatever is currently going out over the air. The system sends a short test every week (just a couple of beeps with no explanation) and a much longer test that includes an explanation once per month. When it does that, it prints out a piece of paper that has to get stapled to the log for that day.

So now, about the air test. Regardless of when you actually do the air test, you have to pretend (as much as possible) that you are taking over for another DJ at 11:30pm and will be shutting down the transmitter at 12:30am (but you don't actually shut it down, you just log it that way). Furthermore, you have to assume that the DJ before you did none of the hourly requirements for the 11:00 hour (3 bin cuts, 2 PSAs, 2 promos) so you have to do them all in the first half hour of your air test. Not only that, but you also have to do another full hour's worth of requirements in the second half hour too (3 more bin cuts, 2 more PSAs, and 2 more promos). And, you have to do the station id at "midnight", take a transmitter reading then and also at 12:30 when you are supposed to shut down the station. Also at 12:05 you're supposed to read the radio calendar, which is a list of local events that are happening around town. And, sometime during your air test, you have to push the "weekly test" button on the EAS box and staple the printout to the log. Now of course, you're not going to do this to the normal station log, since it would get all messed up. So for the air test, you actually have to keep two sets of logs - the normal station log and another set of logs for the air test.

So yesterday I walked in to my training session with Dan and he said, "hey you know how to do all this stuff, why don't you take your air test today?" Well, I had prepared my usual hour's worth of music, but only had 3 bin cuts picked out instead of 6. But I figured yeah, what the hell, I'll try it. Since next week is Thanksgiving, the station will be on "random schedule" which means that any air-cleared DJ can sign up to take over shows for DJs who won't be around. If I could pass the air test before then, I could sign up for a show!

Dan went and grabbed the log sheets I would need for my air test, and the chaos began. And it was definitely chaos; I was busy the entire time - non stop! It's not easy to squeeze in an hours worth of requirements in half an hour, and then another hour's worth in the next half hour too. I was really flying by the seat of my pants, especially with having to pick out bin cuts to play on the fly that would match the other music I was playing (acid jazz). Fortunately, Dan didn't have me actually read the radio calendar (but I had to show him I knew how to do it).

But the really interesting thing that happened was that during my air test, the EAS box suddenly decided it was going to broadcast its monthly test. Good timing, eh? So there we are and all of the sudden the thing starts printing out paper and then takes over the air signal... Of course, since I was doing an air test, I still had to press the weekly test button, which sent another couple of beeps over the air too. So there was quite a bit of beeping...

And then the logs... whew! I ended up just logging everything using the real times on the real log, and then transferring it over to the test log when I was done. Otherwise, with all of the other chaos going on, I'm sure I would've messed up something. The test logs were also harder than usual because they start a new log at midnight every day. So you have to put the first half hour's worth of stuff on one log sheet, and the second half on the other sheet. What a mess.

But anyway, I got it done. I probably won't find out whether or not I passed until sometime over the weekend (or maybe Monday). Keep your fingers crossed... :)

Cheese Monsters

2005-11-11T22:49:00.000-05:00

I just went into our fridge and noticed that we have seven different kinds of cheese. Mozzarella, Provolone, Swiss, Sharp Cheddar, Colby, American, and Parmesan. Sheesh!

More Radio Foo

2005-11-10T10:56:00.000-05:00

No posts for a while for me. I've been keeping myself pretty busy at the radio station (on top of my regular full-time job too).

For my show this week, I put together a really cool mix. We recently got an excellent CD of very creative breakbeats by a guy called Bassnectar. One of the tracks is a collection of interviews and sound clips that talks about a recent FCC ruling that allowed large corporations to own a greater percentage of the media in this country. As a result, 90% of the media (television, radio, newspapers, etc.) is now owned by only 6 companies -- down from 50 companies several years ago. Although the FCC held hearings about this before they did it, very few people found out about it because all the news is controlled by the companies who wanted it to go through... Anyway, the only problem with this track was that it had no music to it, and without music, it got kind of boring even though the message was important. So I found the perfect music to put with it - a track by a group called The Higher Intelligence Agency (which is kind of ironic in itself). I practiced playing the 2 together several times to get the timing just right so it would sound really good when I did it on the air.

But then the other thing I had to think about was what to play before and after that mix. I needed 2 CD players to do the mix itself, but fortunately, the air studio has 3 CD players, so I could just use the 3rd one to take care of the music before and after the mix... or so I thought! When I stopped by the station on Monday evening to try out the mix in the studio I found out that one of the CD players was no longer working! Eek! Now what?!?

Vinyl, that's what. The station also has a nice collection of vinyl and some very good Technics record players (the industry standard for professional DJs). The problem was that I hadn't really listened to much of the vinyl in the library and had no idea what was there and what would go with my show. So on Tuesday afternoon I spent a couple of hours looking through the vinyl and listening to ones that might work. I did manage to find 2 vinyl records that I could use before and after the Bassnectar vs. HIA mix.

The funny thing about the vinyl in the library is that most of it doesn't tell you whether it should get played at 33 rpm or 45. And in fact, some of it sounds quite good either way! The cool thing is that if you don't like a song, you can try it on the other speed and it's almost like hearing something completely different. For my show, I ended up playing a Drum 'n Bass record on 33 instead of 45. I'm not a huge fan of Drum 'n Bass (in spite of the fact that I love good drums and good bass in the songs I listen to - but the name kind of belies the nature of the music), but on the slower speed the song sounded awesome. In fact, it didn't sound like Drum 'n Bass at all! Actually, I wonder if that's how that genre got started! Some DJ played a record on 45 that should've been played on 33 and voila -- Drum 'n Bass!

Anyway, after all of that, the whole set worked out perfectly - very smooth. My on-air speaking skills are even getting a little better too as I gain more confidence. Here's my playlist:

1. Electric Skychurch - Heaven (vinyl)
2. Bassnectar vs. Higher Intelligence Agency
Bassnectar - Mesmerizing the Ultra - Inspire the Empathic +
The Higher Intelligence Agency - Freefloater - Thirteen
3. Parallax - Constellations (vinyl)
4. Various Artists - Smooth Chill (compilation) - Space Safari - Smoke
5. Pitch Black - Ape to Angel - Big Trouble Upstairs
6. Children of the Bong - Sirius Sounds - Life on Planet Earth
7. Ozric Tentacles - Pyramidion - Pyramidion
8. Various Artists - Ancient Alien (compilation) - Pentatonik - Devotion
9. Eat Static - Implant - Abnormal Interference

Guild Wars

2005-11-01T10:07:00.000-05:00

So, I just have to say that Guild Wars is an awesome computer game. Everyone raves about Halo and various other popular games, but none of them can beat Guild Wars. GW is an online adventure game (MMORPG they call it, which stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), and unlike other online games, there is no monthly fee. That's right. You just buy it once for $50 or so, and can play as much as you want, whenever you want.

But the cool thing about Guild Wars is that they keep adding content and various other improvements to the game. So even if you do all the quests, not only can you go back and do them again with a completely different character, but they're also likely to add more quests later for your characters to work on. But the new quests aren't even the coolest thing.

The REALLY cool thing about Guild Wars is that they can (and do) add holiday specific content! For instance, this halloween they added a whole bunch of halloween decorations to several of the towns in the game, and one town in particular got some really sweet updates. There used to be a fountain in the middle of it, which got changed into a giant witch's cauldron. The moon in the sky got a scary face on it. The ocean turned green, there were ghosts walking around, and wraiths and bats flying about overhead. And, some apocalyptic horsemen arrived to announce the coming of the Mad King!

In anticipation of the Mad King's arrival, you could trade in some collectable items found out in the wilderness for some cool halloween stuff: "witches brew", which makes the world look fuzzy, "ghost in a box" which would make a ghost pop up next to you and say "boo", "squash serum", which would turn your head into a pumpkin for a few seconds, and "asbinthe", which makes you drunk I think (haven't tried that one yet). Also, several of the NPCs (Non Player Characters - the townsfolk) in town got transformed by the Mad King into various things, and would walk around bemoaning their new state as a skeleton ("I'm so cold! I never realized how useful flesh could be!"), or a wherewolf ("How embarrasing! Someone threw a bone and I couldn't help myself from chasing after it! But the marrow sure was good..."), or a ghost ("I feel so insubstantial now. It's kind of freeing, actually.") And one was even turned into a corpse, which you could stand, walk, or dance on. And as you did, it would make comments to you, using your character name! "This may seem like fun to you Opal Firefly, but getting walked on isn't my idea of a good time." "Excuse me Opal Firefly, that's my hand you're stepping on." "Opal Firefly, as long as you're just standing there, could you at least chase away some of these flies?" "Watch where you're walking Opal Firefly - it's not as if I can get out of the way." "What's that awful smell? Oh, I guess it's me. How embarrassing!" etc.

There was also a circle set up next to the big cauldron, marked by green glowing things, which is where the Mad King was supposed to appear (on halloween, of course). The perimeter had 5 Mad King's Guards, which looked like piles of candy corn. The funny part was that you could add them to your group and take them out adventuring with you. They fight rather well, for a silly-looking pile of candy corns!

And then the Mad King comes... Once every 3 hours. If you're there, he makes you play silly games with him. When he tells a joke (lame joke, of course), you have to laugh. When he tells you to dance, you have to dance. And he picks out random people in the crowd and makes them play "rock, paper, scissors" with him. If you don't comply, you find yourself flat on the ground, dead (but then he raises you back to life again right away in time to play the next game). He even plays a version of Simon Says ("Mad King Says"). There are special commands in the game (called "emotes") that you can type to do what he asks, and if you do, he gives you a little gift, which is one of the 4 special halloween items I mentioned before. He plays with you for about 10-20 minutes and then leaves, but just before he goes, he gives everyone one more special gift: a pumpkin head to wear! It doesn't give you any protection like a normal helmet would, but it looks really funny.

I'm extremely impressed with the humor and creativity shown by the Guild Wars programming team. The game started out awesome, and just keeps getting better and better!

Using Your Money Un-wisely

2005-10-27T00:34:00.000-04:00

I am looking at the 2005 Christmas Hammacher Schlemmer catalog, which includes all sorts of items for people who have too much money. They provide a valuable service by offering a convenient way to get rid of money you don't need by spending it on ridiculous items. To wit:

On page 84 of this esteemed catalog we find "The Perfect Wind Watch Rotator." The description reads: "This compact device rotates your automatic watch, ensuring the mechanism stays wound, and eliminating the need to re-set your automatic watch if you haven't worn it in a while." The price of keeping your watch wound while you're not wearing it? $299.95. Not including shipping and handling, of course.

So, if you had an extra $300 just sitting around that you were tired of looking at, wouldn't you just use it to go buy a nice new watch that doesn't need to be wound?!?? They make them you know. Nice ones too.

Hey, maybe this could be the next Guinness commercial:
...
"Beer in a bottle? Brilliant! So, what else ya been workin' on?"
"Well, I've come up with a watch that doesn't need to be wound!"
"What?!? A watch that doesn't need to be wound? Brilliant!"

More Notes From the Air Studio

2005-10-26T14:53:00.000-04:00

This morning: 3rd on-air training session. Whee! I basically got to "take over" the station for a little over an hour this time, playing all the music, doing all the talking, playing all the pre-recorded public service announcements and promos, logging everything, etc. It took a lot of concentration to handle it all - a bit like a juggling act - but I loved every minute of it! I've got the basics down now, but I need more practice time to work out my own rhythm and way of doing things. It seems like there's always at least 2 ways to do anything, and a lot of little things to keep track of along the way, so I need to develop some sort of system. I plan to bring a cassette tape with me next time to record myself, which should be a good way to figure out what I need to work on.

In any case, my playlist for this week is below. I tried to find some St. Germain, but the station didn't have any in their library, and unfortunately I don't either. This time Dan was playing some ambient stuff when I walked in, so I threw in an ambient track at the beginning on the fly (instead of the more upbeat thing I had originally picked out). It all worked out quite nicely... I love it when a plan comes together!

(artist - album - track)
1. Pitch Black - Ape to Angel - Flex
2. Ben Cox - multi threaded - 95% Solution
3. Laurent Garnier - Unreasonable Behaviour - The Man with the Red Face
4. Thievery Corporation - The Cosmic Game - Holographic Universe
5. Dzihan & Kamien - Freaks & Icons - After
6. Karma - Modifications - Modifications part 2
7. dissent - Primal Deconstruction - Elementaire
8. Mr. Scruff - Mrs. Cruff - Night Time
9. Tosca - Chocolate Elvis Dubs - Bullitnuts version 1

Snow Already!?!

2005-10-25T10:18:00.000-04:00

I'm not ready for snow. In fact, I wasn't even ready for summer to be over, and now winter is knocking on the door. Sheesh! But there it was this morning when I woke up. Snow. Fortunately, it didn't stick to anything so we can all just forget it ever happened, right?

Oh yeah. I can just hear you New Englanders laughing now. But this is Pittsburgh! There are some laws here that need to be followed. Like, you have to slow down in the tunnel, even if there's absolutely no reason to. And you have to call it pop and not soda. And it's not allowed to snow before mid-November!

Don't get me wrong, I like snow, at the proper time. Snow is good for all kinds of fun and entertainment. But, I like all the seasons. I think they should all get a fair chance. Equal opportunity seasoning.

On the Air!

2005-10-19T15:24:00.000-04:00

I can't tell you how excited and happy I am about the opportunity to train as an on-air DJ on WRCT. Whee! I just had my 2nd in-studio training session today, and I've been walking around with a big smile on my face ever since. Last week, my "training guru" showed me around the control room, taught me how to fill in the online playlist and some of the logs, etc. For this week, he suggested that I pick out 30-45 minutes worth of music that I'd like to play. So I did. I agonized over it a lot - probably more than I really needed to, but that's the way I am. And this week, he let me play it, work the controls, read some announcements over the air, and all kinds of fun stuff! So, if you missed it, here's my portion of the playlist (artist - album - track name):

Particle - Launchpad - Launchpad
Ozric Tentacles - Strangitude - Sploosh
Propellerheads - Decksanddrumsandrockandroll - Spybreak
The Crystal Method - Legion of Boom - Bound Too Long
Various Artists - Matrix Reloaded - Fluke: Zion
Project Pitchfork - Kaskade - Schall Und Rauch
Aphrodite - Aphrodite - Rincing Quince

You can see the entire playlist for today's show (and previous shows) on the Consolidation web page.

Stay tuned next week for more... and if you have any suggestions or requests, feel free to post them in the comments. :)

Go Steelers!!!

2005-10-11T12:21:00.000-04:00

I really love watching the Pittsburgh Steelers play, especially now that they finally seem to have a good offensive coordinator. There was one point late in the game against the Chargers last night where they had been running the ball a lot since they were on top. Then the Chargers put together a nice drive (with a little help from the refs, IMHO), and scored a field goal. Well, the Steelers came back and threw 3-4 quick passes and just like that they were in the end zone! It seemed to really catch the San Diego defense off guard since they had been mostly running the ball on the previous drive. Very nice play calling! YAY! Go Steelers!

The Making of a DJ, Part 2

2005-10-10T11:11:00.000-04:00

Well, it took a little longer than I wanted, but I've finally been scheduled to train with an on-air DJ on WRCT! You can check out the first part of this saga here, if you missed it.

I originally took the written test near the end of the summer, but since very few people were around on campus then, and it was pretty chaotic once everyone came back, and then I had my wedding and honeymoon, it all got delayed until now.

But anyway, I'm going to start training with the station's RPM director himself (RPM is the College Music Journal's jargon for electronic music) this week! His show is called Consolidation and airs on Wednesdays from 9am-noon Pittsburgh time. If you want to listen, you can tune in over the internet by going to wrct.org.

Hawai'i

2005-10-04T10:50:00.000-04:00

Well, it seems a bit difficult to summarize a two-week honeymoon in Hawaii without creating an excessively long blog posting... but I'll see what I can do.

We had a fantastic time! (I guess I could end it there, but that seems like such a cop-out... )

The first week we were on Maui. On our second day there, we got up at 1:45am (which wasn't as hard as it sounds since we were still on Pittsburgh time) to go watch the sun rise from the top of a volcano (Haleakela). Wow! Then we rode down the volcano on some mountain bikes we had rented from a local shop. They gave us a ride to the top as part of the deal, so it was a pure downhill fun experience! The bikes were heavier than a huffy, but that was ok since we were riding on the road the whole way and had very little pedaling to do. Along the way, we stopped for a yummy breakfast at a beautiful restaurant about halfway down the hill that overlooked the valley -- definitely one of the best restaurants I've ever been to for food and ambience!

That afternoon we drove on the Road to Hana, which is an event in itself since the road is very narrow (one lane much of the time) and winds along the mountain-side on the northeast part of the island. It takes about 2-3 hours to go 40 miles or so... but that's partly because of all the beautiful spots you can stop for pictures. Once we were near Hana, we visited a lava tube (very cool), and then drove back on an equally crazy road on the south side of the island. By the time we got back, we were totally wiped out!

We took it relatively easy for the rest of the week. Our condo was on a little bay that had awesome snorkeling and a nice beach, so we did some of that. We also took a trip in a speedboat raft-like thing to see some sea caves on the water. They're called compression caves and are formed when lava flows into the sea and is rapidly cooled by the water. Our boat captain was quite a compentent boat handler and was able to back us all the way into a couple of the caves, even though the surf was crashing into them. Not recommended for timid folk, for sure!

Maui has plenty of beach parks that also have grills and picnic tables, so one night we made up some burgers and had a cookout on the beach while watching the sunset. It doesn't get any more romantic than that! :) We also had dinner at the local brewpub, called The Fish and Game Brewing Company. The beer was fantastic, and so was the food! That seems to be a fairly rare combination with brewpubs, unfortunately.

We visited the big island for the second week, and had a fantastic time there too. It was a little more relaxed since we didn't plan as many activities. On one day we drove over to Volcanoes National Park to see Kilauea, which is Hawaii's active volcano. We couldn't get that close to where the lava was flowing (it was about a mile away) because the ground was so unstable, but we still got to see a lot of really amazing things. Craters. Rainforest. Another lava tube. Fantastic views, interesting crevices and rifts in the ground, etc. At times we felt like we were on the moon!

The snorkeling on the big island was amazing! There were 2 extremely good spots we went to - one was only about 3 feet deep and it felt like we were snorkeling in a fish tank! We saw plenty of green sea turtles, lots of beautiful tropical fish, an octopus and a couple of eels. We got great pictures of all of it too.

We also visited the Kona Brewing Company on the big island, and discovered another brewpub that had both good beer and good food (this time it was pizza - some of the best we've tasted, and we're damn picky about our pizza)!

And, a coffee lover like me couldn't visit Kona without going to a coffee plantation... so we took a tour of the Kona Joe coffee farm, whose coffee is currently #1 in the world! We bought some of it, at $20 per pound. Yes, it IS really that good... We learned some interesting coffee facts while we were there too. For instance, roasting the beans longer removes more caffene, so darker roasts actually have less caffene than lighter roasts.

On the last day, we found this place called Kanaka Kava and got blissed out on Kava for most of the afternoon while we waited for our flight. It was the perfect conclusion to a wonderful honeymoon!

Particle!

2005-09-14T13:27:00.000-04:00

So even though we have our wedding coming up this weekend, when we found out that Particle was in town last night, we just had to go see them... and we're so glad we did! It was a totally awesome show.

The opener was a girl from CA called Gabby La La. The best way I can think of to describe her and her music is to say that she's someone who could teach us all a thing or two about finding our "inner child". Very different from Particle, but somehow she fits into the show anyway.

Particle has a very energetic and upbeat live show. They draw the crowd in partly because of the good music, but also because they really get totally absorbed into the music themselves. They have a knack for taking a song and running with it, shaping it, twisting it, and jamming with it for 10 minutes or more!

They played a few songs from their "Launchpad" CD (including "Launchpad", & "Sun March 11"), but there was also a fair amount of new music, and 3 excellent covers. The covers are part of their "on tour" trademark - they do different ones for each show, so all the shows are unique in that way. And, of course, they do them in Particle "funky space rock" style while still preserving the core goodness of the original song. At this concert, they played a Grateful Dead tune, one by Guns & Roses, and their encore was a song by Lenny Kravitz.

One nice thing about the show is that they record the whole thing and then you can buy the CDs to take home with you at the end (which we did). The band also comes down into the audience afterwards for a meet and greet kind of thing, so we got to talk to them a little bit too, and they graciously signed our copy of the concert CD. I love it when a nationally known band is still human enough to come hang out with their fans!

Ahh, September

2005-09-12T10:55:00.000-04:00

What beautiful weather we have here in Pittsburgh right now! Eric and I went for a nice relaxing bike ride on the rail-trail on Sunday. It was so great to get outside. And the Steelers kicked butt too. Overall, a very excellent weekend.

September has always had a special place in my heart since my birthday is this month. It is about to become even more special because Eric and I are getting married next weekend. Whee! So I probably won't be posting anything for a while....

Greensburg coffee

2005-08-16T11:58:00.000-04:00

Yesterday Eric and I were in Greensburg, PA, which is a cute, quiet little town just east of Pittsburgh. While we were there, we found this really cool coffee shop across the street from the courthouse that only charged $1.25 for a cup of java. Not only that, but they also gave you unlimited free refills! Whee! :)

The Making of a DJ

2005-08-10T12:21:00.000-04:00

I've always been a music lover. And I've always loved sharing music I think is really cool with other people. A lot of times people will come over to my house and I just have to play them the latest artist or album or song I've discovered. I spend gobs of time listening to music and discovering new artists that I like. I subscribe to Yahoo's LaunchCast and Sirius satellite sadio for my car. I also listen to the free internet radio stations (through shoutcast), go to music festivals, etc. So one way to share music with people is to become a DJ!

Well, it turns out that CMU has a student-run free-form non-commercial radio station called WRCT. Anyone in the community can go there and get involved - become a DJ, or a talk show host, or whatever. So I've decided to train to be a DJ!

The first step is to take (and ace) their written test. I just took it last night, and am now waiting to hear back from the training director. The next thing would be to sit in with a current DJ and start learning how to run a show. Whee!

One really cool thing about it is that I get to be exposed to even more music! They have gobs of new CDs coming in every week - stuff that you'll never hear anywhere else. I have a feeling I'm going to be spending quite a bit of time there listening to music... :)

Memory and Recall

2005-07-19T11:35:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned in my All Good Music Festival post, there were actually two separate stages at the fest, but both of them were in the same area. This was a fantastic idea, since there didn't have to be a lag in music while next band was setting up on the main stage. The concert area is rather fasinating late at night too. One of the vendors they have there sells all kinds of neon light things that you can twirl around, or wear in your hair, or juggle, or whatever. The vendor is pretty clever too. He's got a huge lighted neon string going up into the sky that is being held there by a few helium balloons. So you look around and everyone's got this cool neon stuff and you know exactly where you can go to get some for yourself. And it's really easy to find in the dark too!

So as we were sitting there waiting for Particle to come on at 3am or so, there was a band getting ready to go on at the second stage. Next to it, there was this white hut (canvas) that was lighted from the inside. We started calling it the electric white hut, since it kept drawing our attention.

In fact, the electric white hut became a kind of memory key. Now all either of us has to do is say, "Remember the electric white hut?" and the entire concert scene, with the glowing neon things, and Pedro the Plantain that Particle had, and all the mud, and the fact that we were really uncomfortable cuz we were sitting on the hard ground and it was wet and muddy, but we didn't care cuz the music was so good, etc... will all come back to us. All that pseudo-related information is stored under one key in our minds! Pretty cool.

(Actually, my habitually caffinated blogger-buddy knows a lot more about that brain stuff than I do. Which means she gets to appreciate it on a whole other level that would probably fry my circuits. Go Phishhen!)

It's All Good

2005-07-18T10:23:00.000-04:00

We just got back from the All Good Music Fest in Masontown, WV. Three days of fun people, awesome music, yummy food, and very little sleep! This is our second All Good festival and there were WAY more people there this year than last year. We estimated about 30,000 people! (Last year I think it was around 10-15 thousand.)

But about the MUSIC! We got to see Particle: a very late-night set - it was supposed to be from 2-4 am but everything was running late due to rain earlier in the day. So it ended up being from 4-6 am. A sunrise set! :) They did this weird WWF thing in the middle of the set where they had Pedro the Plantain and his buddies fighting against the Swarm from Outer Space. And then the Evil Dr. Cube came along and they eventually kicked his butt too. Very weird. I kept losing track of the plot, but Eric assured me that was ok, since there really wasn't a plot to keep track of. Anyway, the music was awesome!

We also got to see a little bit of Lotus, but the bastards cut their set short (again because everything was a bit behind schedule) in favor of a band we didn't care for at all called Carbon Leaf. But, the band right after that, Ozomatli, was way cool. There was also a band that performed on the second stage (they had 2 stages this year to keep the music flowing - excellent idea!) called Jonah Smith that we really liked. We intended to come back later in the evening and catch another couple of bands after taking a nap, but the nap turned into a full 8 hours of sleep...

But the good thing was that we were nice and awake to catch all of the bands on Sunday, and every single one we saw was awesome! They were: Dumpstaphunk, Benevento/Russo, Victor Wooten, and Pencilgrass. We'll definitely have to pick up their CDs!

Making the Transition

2005-07-12T11:56:00.000-04:00

I'm happy to report that last week on Thursday's ride I made the transition to middle ring.

For those who aren't intimately familiar with a mountain bike, it's got 3 gears (rings) in front and usually 9 in the back. The 3 in front are usually called little (easy, or "granny"), middle, and big (hard). When you start out mountain biking and you don't have much leg strength, you tend to spend all your time in the little ring, except on flat roads where the rolling resistance is a little less. Then after a while (for me it has taken about 2 years), you start to notice that you're consistently in a much higher (harder) gear in the back, and you're still pedalling faster than you really want to be. So you start shifting into middle ring every once in a while, even while on trail.

And then, at some point, you take the leap and make the transition. You ride in middle ring by default and only switch into granny gear when you really need to. This takes a bit of courage, since there could be times when you get stuck in too hard a gear and are unable to downshift in time. So you have to get off your bike and walk and make a goof out of yourself in front of all your friends. But if they're real friends, you just tell them that you recently made the transition, and they'll pat you on the back and say, "good job!"

Legislative Salaries

2005-07-11T18:31:00.000-04:00

So the Pennsylvania state legislators recently voted themselves a pay increase. Now they make a minimum of $81,000 per year (not including benefits and perks), which is the second-highest state legislator salary in the nation (aside from California).

Federal legislators make around $162,000 (not including benefits, perks, etc.).

It seems odd to me that we tax people who are barely able to make ends meet (and even tax those who can't make ends meet), in order to give nice cushy salaries to government officials. Sure, it's a job, and they deserve to be paid. But what would happen if their pay was tied to the average salary of all Americans, adjusted for cost of living? Then if they wanted a pay raise, they'd have to find a way to either help low income Americans make more, or lower the cost of living. It's kind of like tying the salary of a CEO to the company's financial health, which has become a very popular idea recently.

Work

2005-07-05T16:14:00.000-04:00

Hmm. If I enjoyed my work, I would be more focused on it and probably do a better job. But if I do a good job at work, someone might think I enjoy it. If they think I enjoy it, they might give me more of it. Which would be a good thing, if I enjoyed it. Which I don't. But I could, I suppose. Some days I do. And on those days, I get a lot done. Or maybe it's the other way around. I enjoy my job when I get a lot done. But getting a lot done feels so... goodie goodie... or something. I can't quite put my finger on it. Like when I was growing up and my mom would tell me I had to do something I didn't like to do. I would put up a fight, but would finally end up doing it, because she was the boss. But when I did it, I always felt like I'd been had. Like I'd lost a battle. And the worst part was, she'd thank me afterwards in a very polite kind of way, which always left a sour taste in my mouth.

Brewing beer

2005-07-05T10:43:00.000-04:00

Whew, what a weekend! On Saturday we got our beer ingredients and brewed a batch of the brown ale that is supposed to be ready in 10-14 days. We decided to call it "Brian's Brunette" for our buddy who likes brown ales (and brunettes). The nice thing about brewing beer is that it pretty much just takes care of itself. You spend about 3-4 hours in the kitchen making the wort, but once the yeast goes in, it just sits there and brews itself! Now if only we could get the lawn to mow itself, and the laundry to do itself, and the house to clean itself, etc.

So while our beer was brewing, we played a lot of Guild Wars, and went for an almost-epic bike ride on Sunday. I think an epic ride is something like 4 hours and/or 15-20 miles. Ours was about 3 and a half hours and 14 miles. But it was a blast! We both had a really great ride and totally kicked butt on this super loggy technical trail that we like to ride once in a while. It's got sections where there are 3 6-8" logs right in a row (with no little sticks piled up to make them into an easy little hill). Sometimes you can kinda cheat on a log and even if you don't come over it cleanly, you can still say you cleared the thing, though you may have ended up off the side of the trail on the landing, or whatever. But with these logs, there's no cheatin'! If you don't totally come over the first one just right, your line will be off and you'll miss the second and third for sure! There's 2 spots on the trail like that, and I'm happy to say I cleared them both. :)

And, the best part was that our beer was busy brewing itself the whole time!

Biking, beer, and bad decisions...

2005-07-01T11:34:00.000-04:00

So yesterday I hosed a perfectly good wireless access point / router / print server by trying to download new firmware to it. *sigh* And I even had a feeling that was the wrong thing to do since it was working just fine, but I went ahead and did it anyway. Now it's unrecoverable and currently resides in it's new home: the trash can. Fortunately this wasn't the one we usually use for our day-to-day network happiness, but it did have a print server on it, which would've been nice to use. Unforutunately, it's such an old model that it's no longer supported by the vendor. Oh well.

I went biking twice this week. On tuesday I tried a faster ride than our usual thursday stroll and got my ass kicked. I wiped out 5 times in the first half hour, mostly from my tire sliding out from underneath me, but reducing my air pressure didn't seem to help. So I called it quits, especially since it started to rain and the trails were about to get quite a bit muddier. Last night I had a much better ride - not that much slower but with people I know better. I rode the whole 2+ hours without crashing once, and we even did the exact same trails in the exact same park. And, I discovered something cool. I've always had trouble climbing hills - I tend to get pooped about halfway up and really struggle to get to the top. Well, I figured out that it's easier if I focus on relaxing my upper body as much as possible. Not sure why this is, but it seemed to help.

And about the beer -- this weekend we'll be picking up ingredients for our next 3 batches of homebrewed beer. We're brewing a brown ale that is ready in 10-14 days (most beers take 4-6 weeks, and sometimes more), an imperial stout, and an "anything goes" porter called Goat Scrotum. The recipe for that last one is flexible enough that you can add any extra ingredients you want. Some of their suggestions include: ginger root, black licorice, chocolate, and pieces from your backyard spruce tree! But I'm going to use it to brew my very first coffee porter ... YUM!

Back on the Mountain Bike

2005-06-20T10:34:00.000-04:00

I haven't been posting much lately. My friends and I are all spending oodles of time playing this new game called Guild Wars. Lots of fun to be had by all! :)

We went mountain biking at Deer Lakes park last Thursday and at Boyce yesterday. It's nice to get the treads back on the bike after our 150 mile road trek up to lake Erie. I had a kind of slow and painful start on Thursday since my body still hadn't quite recovered from the MS-150. But after the first trail (on which I seemed to do everything wrong: wrong gear, too much braking here, too little braking there, etc.), I got into the groove of it again and had a wonderful ride. That was important, since the last several times I've been to Deer Lakes (in fact, every time before this one!), I've had an awful ride - bad crashes, mechanicals, ugly hills that make me too tired to enjoy the good stuff at the top, etc. It was definitely about time for a good Deer Lakes ride. In fact, there was one stretch where I was totally kicking butt - keeping up with the pack, clearing all the technical stuff, whee! I even got a few compliments from some of the more experienced riders in our group.

Yesterday Eric and I had a nice ride at Boyce. I noticed that I always seem to come over log piles off-balance, and usually go careening into the bushes along the side of the trail, or fall over, or something. I talked to Eric about it and he gave me a wonderful tip that made a huge difference. He pointed out that my weight may be too far back as I come back down over the log on the other side. I'm doing a good job of shifting my weight back and pulling the wheel up to get the front tire over, but then I need to stand up on the pedals and kind of throw my weight forward to get the back tire over it. I tried that, and it worked like a charm! I even cleared a couple of logs I've never been able to do before. :)

150 miles!

2005-06-01T10:30:00.000-04:00

Eric and I are now in Full Training Mode for the MS-150, which is a 150 mile charity ride from Pittsburgh to lake Erie on June 11-12. We do it to raise money for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

So, we're now riding every other day (and sometimes 2 days in a row), and doing a lot of endurance riding. Over the weekend we did a 30 mile ride on the rail trail, and another road ride that included some hills around a course we mapped out last year. We're riding the road course again tonight, and then doing a mountain bike ride tomorrow, and we're planning another long-distance rail-trail ride (probably 50 miles) over the weekend. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'll have my new bike in time for the ride, but a full-suspension rig on a road ride probably wouldn't be the best thing anyway. Unless there's lots of potholes!

Anyway, just in case anyone reading my blog wants to help me out and give me a pledge (I need to raise at least $200 to participate), you can sponsor me online with a credit card at my MS-150 web page. Thanks!

Handling Unknowns

2005-06-01T09:15:00.000-04:00

I kind of had an epiphany today. A lot of times I get stuck on things and put them off because there's some kind of unknown wrapped up in it that's bothering me. For instance, I don't know how to do some piece of it, or I don't know where to get some hunk of information I need, or I don't know how it will turn out, or I don't know how to make the best choice among several options, etc.

I can tell when there's an unknown hiding in a project because I feel fear, apprehension, and stress whenever I think about it. I have an almost uncontrollable urge to procrastinate and lose myself in some other activity that has nothing to do with the task at hand. Hours and days pass and the task seems bigger and more ominous every time I put my attention on it. So I ignore it with even more gusto, and it gets bigger and scarier, and on and on.

Until, one day, I just have to do it, usually because of an external deadline. And I almost always end up feeling sort of sheepish because this task that seemed so monumental actually turned out to be no big deal at all. Piece of cake. In fact, I can't even remember the last time a project ended up being as nasty as I thought it would be.

So why does this happen? Neale Donald Walsch, and many other wise folk, have pointed out that what you resist persists, and what you look at clearly (in a face the music kind of way) disappears. In fact, that which you resist often gets bigger. Resistance is a form of attention, and anything you put attention on (positive or negative) increases. Great. So in the past I've tried to do some fancy trick of feeling how it feels to not want to do a project, or I've tried to convince myself to just do it (in a Nike sort of way), or whatever. But none of those seem to make much difference.

Today I hit upon the answer. I need to acknowledge (and stop resisting) the unknown itself. Not wanting to do the project is really just a reaction to the unknown. Trying to handle my resistance to the project without dealing with the unknown itself is useless.

So to put all this in more concrete real-world terms, that means that I need to first acknowledge to myself (or another person) that an unknown exists: there is something I don't know about this and it's making me uneasy. Then, if I can, I have to state the actual unknown in as much detail as possible. After that, it's out in the open, and I (or we, if I'm working with someone else) can figure out how to solve it. But until it's expressed, it just quietly sits there and sabotages all my progress.

I did this twice today. Once when I was programming I didn't know how the piece of code I was writing was ever going to get accessed. So I just wrote a little comment there that said exactly that. Then when I was done writing it, I went poking through the rest of the code and figured it out pretty easily. By just writing down what I didn't know, I was able to move on and finish the other stuff without getting stuck on that one thing. In another instance, I was talking to a collegue about an upcoming project that I'm dreading. I mentioned to him that the thing that was really bothering me about it was that I had no idea how we were going to collect the data we would need for testing the system. And right after I said that, I felt so much better about the whole project. Even though I didn't have an answer, just shining a light on the unknown that was bothering me was a big help!

Grocery Store Wars!

2005-05-24T11:46:00.000-04:00

Check it out... this is just too funny!!

http://www.storewars.org/flash/index.html

Bike Woes

2005-05-17T11:13:00.000-04:00

Well, it's time for a new bike. It's actually been time for a new bike for a while now, but I've been reluctant to plunk down serious dough on something I haven't had a chance to test ride on real trail with real hills, roots, rocks, ruts, logs, mud, etc. A ride around the parking lot just doesn't cut it. Someone suggested I try a bike shop east of here called SpeedGoat, since they have demo bikes.

Last Wednesday when I was riding at Boyce, I did something to my wheel that put it seriously out of true. Fortunately, one of my riding buddies had a spoke wrench and fixed it up enough for me to continue riding, but it was still not very good. Then over the weekend I took a 20 mile rail-trail ride on the Yough River Trail starting at the Boston trailhead in McKeesport, PA. I love that one since you can ride for 10 miles to Sutersville and you're rewarded with a little ice cream shop there... :) Anyway, something was buzzing in the back the whole way, which could've had something to do with my messed up wheel, but I think I remember hearing the buzzing before I did that.

So I took my wheel in to Gatto on Penn Ave. to get it trued last night. It was the first time I'd been there and it was a delightful experience - well, except for the bad news. I expected to have to beg and plead in order to get my wheel back by Thursday, but the guy just trued it up right then while I waited! But he did point out that I definitely need a new wheel since all the spokes are already either really loose or really tight. And my tire has a suspicious bulge in it that will probably result in a blowout the next time I ride. I'm glad he caught it when he did! When he was done I asked him how much I owed, and he just looked at me and said, "Don't worry about it - save your money for a new wheel." Nice.

Anyway, I'm going for a full suspension rig this time, and someone suggested I look at the Trek Fuel. One of the problems I'm having with my current bike is that the geometry isn't quite right. It feels like I'm not getting enough power through the pedals, but when I try to raise my seat, I'm so far off the ground that I can't touch with my toe (and I end up hyper-extending my knees - very bad!). I think I need a configuration that will let me move the seat back a little farther, or something. Apparently Trek is good at making bikes for women. I've heard they have a wide variety of sizes, and they actually make different geometries specifically for women, rather than just making the men's bikes smaller. We'll see.

Graffiti

2005-05-11T10:15:00.000-04:00

Last weekend we were in State College, PA at a bar called Zino's. There was some graffiti on the bathroom wall that is now stuck in my head.

Someone had written a little story that started out: "A black man with a gun walked into the bar and started shooting people ..." (or something like that).

Well, someone else had come along and crossed out "black man" and wrote over top of it, "gangsta". An arrow pointing to it gave the explanation: "It's culture, not color, jackass!"

Well put, I thought.

Mountain Bike Heaven

2005-05-10T11:08:00.000-04:00

We had another awesome ride last night at Boyce park. This is the time of year to ride it - after the early spring rains have passed and before the summer storms start. The park is mostly clay, so when it rains the water just sits on top and takes forever to dry. For many months out of the year it can stay pretty wet and muddy, but still good riding. Right now when it's dry though, it's like being in heaven! Miles upon miles of flowing singletrack... whee!

Last night I was definitely riding faster. Getting the knack of looking ahead farther has given me the confidence to push the envelope in other ways. I'm clearing more obstacles and atttempting things I wouldn't even have bothered with before. I'm also learning to corner better - that's been a real problem for me. I still don't have it completely down, but it has something to do with how I'm balanced on the bike, and of course, where I'm looking. Sometimes I tend to look at the outside edge of the turn as I'm going through it to see if I'm going to make it, and that just totally messes me up. When I look past the turn, farther down the trail, I do much better. It also seems to help when I get up off my seat so I can shift my weight around relative to the bike (push the bike one way and my body the other way, or something like that).

Learning to ride with clipless pedals (which I did last summer) has definitely helped with a lot of things. I started off with Time Z's, which is a combination platform and clipless pedal. That way I could use them as normal platform pedals through the scarier stuff and clip in whenever I felt more confident. It was a nice way to make the transition, and now I ride clipped in all the time. Having the clipless pedals allows me to get off my seat and shift my weight around more. I can also go a little faster through bumpy sections without having to worry about my feet flying off the pedals. And, I've noticed that when I do fall, I seem to fall more gently and hurt myself less when I'm clipped in. That was an unexpected bonus!

Full Steam Ahead

2005-05-06T11:46:00.000-04:00

It seems like over the last many months (even back to last fall) I've been in a kind of rut with my mountain biking. In spite of improvements in my physical fitness, I haven't been getting much better technically. I always seem to ride way slower than most of the folks I usually ride with - poking along at the back of the pack. And there are lots of obstacles that I feel like I should be able to handle, but just can't seem to manage.

I decided the first thing I wanted to work on was my speed, so I could keep up with my fellow riders. I started looking around for tips on the internet, and the advice of the day was, "look farther ahead". Well, I tried that the last couple of weeks I went riding and it didn't seem to help any. In fact, it just made my eyes tired. Then earlier this week I started reading a great mountain biking tips book called Mountain Bike Magazine's Complete Guide To Mountain Biking Skills. One of the early articles in that book is about looking farther ahead, "reading" the trail, and planning your line to efficiently tackle obstacles. After I read this, everything just clicked into place!

The problem was that I had my eyes farther ahead, but I wasn't really looking for anything in particular, and wasn't noticing the important stuff. But yesterday when we took a ride over at Boyce, instead of just looking ahead, I actively tried to "read" the trail. To help stay focused, I kept a running dialog in my head - something like, "ok, where's the trail? oh, there it goes to the left, that looks like a sharp corner followed by a little hill, I'd better not slow down too much around the corner so I can make the hill, and that looks like a log at the top, so I'd better be in the right gear..." And it worked!

It actually helped in several ways. First of all, I was able to ride faster, especially through sections of trail that didn't have any obstacles, because I didn't worry as much about something sneaking up on me that I wasn't ready for. Riding faster will also help with my fitness, and once I'm more fit, I'll be able to ride for longer stretches of time without resting, etc. Another way it helped me was that I was ready for the obstacles that came along. A lot of times when I try to go over a log, unless it's a really tiny one, I don't quite have enough momentum (speed) to make it all the way over. So I have to stop and "duck walk" my back wheel over the log, or fall over and have to waste time picking myself up, or just get off and walk my bike over the log. But since I was able to anticipate the logs better, I was in the gear I needed to be in, and had the speed to clear them. This also helped me keep up since I wasn't wasting time struggling with logs that everyone else clears with no problems, and I still had some momentum left to continue on to the next part of the trail.

So really, learning to look ahead in the right way solved 2 of my problems at once. I'm able to ride faster, and riding faster gives me the momentum to clear the obstacles I always messed up on before! Whee!

Desert Island 5: CDs

2005-05-05T10:37:00.000-04:00

So recently I've been thinking off and on about the desert island 5 concept. Basically, if you were stranded on a desert island, and you happened to have 5 CDs with you (and, of course, a CD player, headphones, and some kind of solar power source), which CDs would you want them to be?

They'd have to be CDs I could listen to over and over again without getting sick of them. CDs that have no songs I don't like on them (or at least not more than one), since it would suck to have to be constantly skipping over one or more of the songs. It helps if the music on the CD has some variety to it. There are some artists which are good, but have such a specific, recognizable sound that it almost wearies the ear to listen to it over and over again. For instance, although I enjoy Sting, Enya, Morcheeba, and Zero 7, they would never make my desert island 5 list because all their stuff starts to sound the same to me after a while. That's not a bad thing in general since you can usually mix the music up with other stuff. But it gets harder to do that when you only have 5 CDs to work with.

I've tried to pick some musical variety here, and music that has some depth to it. The kind of music that, the more I listen to it, the more I hear, rather than the other way around.

So here's mine (in no particular order):

Propellerheads: Decksanddrumsandrockandroll

The Crystal Method: Vegas

Blue Six: Beautiful Tomorrow

Ozric Tentacles: The Hidden Step - This was a particularly difficult choice. The Ozrics have so many fantastic CDs, it was hard to pick just one. What I'd really like to do is put several of my absolute favorite Ozric songs on a CD and take that...

Dave Brubeck: Time Out - A little jazz never hurts, and this one's a classic!

It was hard to settle on just 5, and there may be a CD that I've overlooked. But if so, I'll just update the list. Being able to edit blog posts is great for that sort of thing. :)

What's your 5?

Blog Stress

2005-04-30T10:15:00.000-04:00

My blog has been awfully quiet lately. I've noticed that when I don't post for a while, stuff happens in my life that I'd like to post about and all the potential blog posts start piling up on each other until it gets overwhelming. I'm not sure why I feel the need to keep a continuous life record here in the blog. There's really no reason to do that or to get myself stressed out over it.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago Eric and I went to Cancun, Mexico with our friend Brian and his girlfriend. It wasn't the best place we've ever been, but after Hawaii and St. Martin, we're kind of spoiled. :)

But, we did have some good times there. Our resort was an all-inclusive, meaning that all our food and drinks (yes, alcohol too) were included in the price. This would've been a good deal, except that we like to go out and explore a place when we visit. As it was, we didn't get to try any local restaurants or anything, which was a bummer.

We took a tour to a nearby island called Isla Mujeres (the island of women) on a sailboat. The best part was getting to ride the spinnaker on the way back. This was a sail that attached to the top of the main mast with a swing on the bottom. You got on the swing and then the wind would grab the sail and take you for an unforgettable ride!

Another cool thing was a cenote we got to visit. The Yucatan peninsula is mostly limestone and has a whole network of underground rivers and streams running through it. Sometimes the ground above a river or stream sinks in to form a very deep lake or pond that is fed by a stream at the bottom. These "sinkholes" are called cenotes, and many of them have very interesting cave formations inside them. The one we visited was inside a little cave. The owner had installed lighting in the cave and under the water so it was easy to see, and they let us borrow snorkel masks so we could dive down and look at the rock formations under the water. It was one of the coolest things I've seen in a while!

So I think that's enough writing to relieve my blog stress for now...

Wisdom Flash

2005-04-06T11:16:00.000-04:00

Hey, check out the cool new web site I found. It's called WisdomFlash.

Ozric Tentacles

2005-03-29T09:58:00.000-05:00

Last Friday night Eric and I went to see our favorite band, Ozric Tentacles, at the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland. We arranged our schedule so that we could arrive right at 7pm when the doors were supposed to open. I had ordered the tickets online for Eric’s birthday and read that the place doesn’t have its own parking lot, so you have to find a spot on the street. At 6:55 when we pulled up to the curb across from the ballroom, there were only 2-3 cars parked on the whole street. Everything was dark and quiet – no people, no cars going by – and the place didn’t even look open. Uh oh, did we get the date wrong?

To kill some time, we wandered down to the gas station on the corner and bought some breath mints. On our way back, we noticed that the door to the ballroom was ajar, although there still weren’t any lights in the windows. We decided to check it out and opened the doors to find ourselves in a small, dimly-lit lobby. There was a table there that looked like it was for a ticket-person, but no one was around. A door to our right led into a bar, and we could hear the muffled sounds of a band warming up from somewhere beyond a set of double doors in front of us. With some uncertainty, we stepped through the doors in front of us into a long hallway. There were some tables set up here along the wall and a couple people were putting out merchandise for the opening band, Lotus. One of the doors at the end of the hall was open, showing a glimse of a stage and some guys playing with a sound board. We expected someone to stop us, but no one said anything as we walked down the hall toward the ballroom.

As we stepped inside the ballroom we happily noticed that the band warming up on stage was Ozric Tentacles! What an unexpected treat! We quietly made our way over to a wall so we could watch without being in the way. The ballroom itself was about the size of a high school gymnasium. There were no seats – just a stage at the front, the sound board station toward the back, and hardwood floors in between. And it was loud. On either side of the stage were two giant speakers; each one was easily bigger than a phone booth. It seemed a little excessive for the size of the place, actually. Unfortunately, we didn’t have our earplugs with us, so we had to stuff toilet paper in our ears to keep them from hurting.

After watching the Ozrics warm up for about an hour (it took them a while to get the monitors adjusted the way they wanted them), a woman came over to chase us back out to the lobby. By that time there was a guy at the table and a line of people in front of it. We gave him our tickets, got a hand stamp, and went into the bar to wait.

It was after 8:30 by the time they let us back into the ballroom. All the musicians had gone backstage somewhere, and there was some cool trance/chill/ambient music coming out of the speakers. We worked our way up near the stage and danced to the house music for a while. The opening band, Lotus, appeared on the stage at around 9:15. We had never heard them before and were impressed! They have a funky, jazzy, ambient, danceable kind of sound that put us in a very upbeat mood. I love it when the opening band makes it worth coming to a concert all by themselves!

And then... Ozric Tentacles. Lotus was awesome, but Ozric Tentacles blew them away with the first notes they played! By this time there were a lot more people in the room, but we had worked our way up so that there were only a couple of people between us and the stage. The Beachland is an intimate place, with no barrier or security guards between the crowd and the stage. As people shifted, we slowly worked our way forward until we were finally leaning right against the stage itself. And so, we got to listen to at least half of the concert through the band’s monitors and amps rather than the house speaker stacks! It was cool to be able to see the expressions on their faces as they played.

John Egan plays the flute (and all kinds of other woodwinds) and we noticed that he likes to dance around the stage and play even though he’s nowhere near the microphone (and his instruments, at least most of them, don’t seem to have mics in them). Every once in a while he’ll dance over to the microphone to play a little something, and then he’s off again. I wonder what it would sound like to hear everything he’s playing while he’s dancing around! They also had a new keyboard player this time (Brandi Wynne?), who was just as excited about the music as the crowd was, or maybe more so. At times, it almost looked like she was having an orgasm right on stage! Ed was there, of course, next to his stack of keyboards (4 of them I think) with his guitar. Some of the sounds he makes with his guitar are positively unreal. At times it seemed like Brandi was doing some special effects processing through her setup on the other side of the stage to create some of the odd guitar sounds. They played one song we’d never heard before, but other than that it was all mostly familiar. Familiar, but new too, because they play it slightly differently when it’s live.

At the end of the concert once the band had left, the guy next to me pulled himself halfway up onto the stage and grabbed John’s playlist. I got to take a peek at it, but it would’ve been a really sweet thing to have. Ah well. Maybe next time!

Caving

2005-03-17T10:43:00.000-05:00

Last weekend Eric and I went on a caving trip with Venture Outdoors to Laurel Caverns in southwestern PA. Laurel Caverns is unique in that it offers both commercial tours in a lighted portion of the cave, as well as guided caving expeditions into the "natural" unlighted part. We took the 3-hour caving adventure down into the rough, undeveloped depths of the cave.

Laurel Caverns is one of the longest caves in Pennsylvania at just over 3 miles long (the longest is Harlansburg Cave in Lawrence county at 4.1 miles). We saw about 2 miles of it on our trip.

Although I've always been fascinated by caves, geology, rocks & minerals, etc. (perhaps because I'm an earth sign?) , I've never done more than visit lighted commercial caves, so this trip was a new experience for me. The trip leaders warned us to wear old clothes because we'd get very dirty, and boy were they right! The entire cave was covered in a layer of very fine dirt, and there were portions where we crawled through small streams (though the "wet crawls" were all optional since there was often more than one way to go). By the end of it, I was covered with dirt and mud from head to toe!

Other required equipment included a helmet, hiking boots (or some kind of shoe with good tread and ankle support), and at least 3 sources of light. Laurel Caverns has helmets they can loan you (for free), but Eric and I decided to bring our mountain bike helmets instead since we have really good bright lights that attach to them so we can ride at night. In fact, our lights were the brightest and lasted the longest of anyone's in the group, but the trade-off was that we had to lug around a 2lb battery in our backpacks. We also each brought another flashlight and a lighter for backup. The bike helmets weren't quite as good as the real caving helmets because the light goes on the top instead of on the front, and we had to be very careful not to bump it too hard on the rocks. Although the light is very sturdy and made to withstand high speed impacts from mountain bike falls, the fact that it was on top of the helmet instead of on the front meant that we had to duck our heads further when going through low-ceilinged areas. We also brought our camelbaks since they made it easy to carry water, our extra lights, and our batteries. That probably wasn't the most practical arrangement since the wire from the helmet light goes down into the pack, making it difficult to take off (you're still "attached" to it). Fortunately, we didn't get into any spots that were so tight we needed to remove the pack to get through. But it was close a couple of times since the pack was so bulky. I was very glad to have the extra water though as the dust made me very thirsty.

The caving was very strenuous since it involved crawling, crouching, climbing up over large boulders, and sliding down steep narrow passageways. I was very thankful I had gloves on since the rocks were cold and rough, and I was also thankful that I had a helmet light because I definitely needed both hands to hang on through most places. There were some in our group that had neither gloves nor helmet lights; I'm not sure how they did it! Caving is definitely a full body sport; they have a "three points of contact" mantra that is a very good idea. It means that you should try to have at least 3 parts of your body touching the rocks at all times. 2 feet and a hand, or a shoulder, butt-cheek, whatever you can do. The more of you touching the rocks, walls, and ceiling, the better! And in fact, that's often the only way to scramble through some of the difficult sections. There were even some steep passageways where I had to just slide down on my butt!

Judging from the soreness I felt over the next couple of days, I definitely used lots of muscles that hadn't been used in a while. The worst was my quads (from climbing and descending steep sections and crouching through low ceilinged passageways), and the muscles in my arms and shoulders got a good workout from pulling myself up over rocks and lowering myself down the sides of big boulders. All the steep narrow passageways I slid down on my way in had to be climbed on the way back out! They were kind of like chimneys, so I could use the walls to help pull myself up.

But the soreness was definitely worth it! The cave was beautiful, in an earthy kind of way. The clearest little stream babbled down through the whole thing (that's what formed the cave in the first place, actually), and some of the rock formations were stunning! Laurel Caverns is not much of a "drip cave" since there's no moisture coming down from above, so it doesn't have the stalactites and stalagmites that are often seen in other caves. There's not much color down there either - all the rocks are a brownish gray color. However, it is amazing that a tiny little stream could've carved out such large passageways (though it took thousands of years!), and it often left some really fascinating architecture behind!

This is the kind of experience that makes me glad I'm alive on this earth, and I'd definitely like to explore more caves in the future!

Minimum Wage

2005-03-08T11:15:00.000-05:00

Although my political views tend to match those of the democrats more than the republicans, one thing I feel very strongly about is the minimum wage. Fortunately, an attempt to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 was voted down in congress this week.

I am against any minimum wage hikes because I do not trust companies to do the right thing. Raising the minimum wage would mean that every company that employs minimum wage workers (factories, grocery stores, food companies, etc.) would suddenly see a major increase in their costs. But instead of absorbing that cost, what will they do? Pass it on to the consumer!

Raising the minimum wage is the fastest way to create inflation that I've ever heard of. And the people that are going to be hurt the most are those who are making minimum wage!

Everyone has to buy groceries and other basic goods and services, even folks who make minimum wage. Raise the minimum, and now all the groceries are going to be more expensive. This won't be a problem for middle-high income earners, but the minimum wage earners are definitely going to notice.

I think it's important to have some guarantee that people who work make enough money to live without having to spend all of their waking moments on the job. But raising the minimum wage all by itself is definitely not the answer. There has to be a better way.

Compassion

2005-03-04T09:45:00.000-05:00

How do you think the world would be different in 20-30 years if all our school children were taught to do the Compassion Exercise every day right after the Pledge of Allegiance?

Weekend in the Mountains

2005-03-02T10:55:00.000-05:00

This past weekend was pretty interesting for us. We went to visit a "long lost cousin" of Eric's whom he hadn't seen in ages. We spent the night on friday at his (and his wife's) house near Allentown, then drove up to their cabin in the mountains of eastern PA on Saturday.

We arrived at the cabin around 2pm in the afternoon to find that the temperature inside was about 25 degrees. They explained to us that since the cabin is only used on the weekends, they leave the heat and electricity off during the week. So the first thing they did was turn on the propane "wood stove" to warm the place up. We got some entertainment from watching the thermometer slowly rise as the heat spread throughout the cabin, with happy cheers whenever the temperature passed a milestone: 30 ... 40 ... 50 ... 60.

But we didn't just stay inside all afternoon. Eric and I had rented snowshoes from Venture Outdoors and our new friends were avid cross country skiiers. There was no point in sitting around in a cabin that wasn't much warmer than the outside, so we strapped on our snowshoes and skiis and went exploring. The cabin is next to a lake on top of a mountain, and the community is adjacent to a huge state park and gamelands. There is an old stone house there that was restored by the lake association, and lots of trails to choose from. The snow was also abundant: 10-12 inches would be my guess. This was the first time Eric and I had used snowshoes and it seemed to me to be more effort than it was worth, but I suspect that we weren't using them quite right. I've heard that they're great for wandering around in deep powder, but we were walking along on trails that had been packed down by snowmobiles and cross country skiiers.

After a couple hours of that, we came back to the cabin to relax for a bit and check on the heat. Another consequence of leaving the heat off during the winter is that the pipes have to be drained in order to keep them from freezing. Because of that, the cabin had no running water, and we only brought enough water (plus antifreeze) to flush the toilet twice. Toilet paper had to go into a plastic trash bag to be thrown out separately, and "major" toilet usage required a special trip down the mountain to the convenience store! But in spite of all this, Eric and I found the cabin to be quite charming. We've done a fair amount of camping before, so the rustic conditions didn't really bother us.

That evening we went to dinner at a local inn, and the temperature in the cabin was a comfortable 65 degrees by the time we went to bed.

The next day we did more hiking/skiing in the snow and then took the car for a drive around the lake. The road was only partially plowed but the snow was packed down enough by snowmobiles that we had no trouble driving around... until we tried to pull into a little driveway next to a hiking trail. It took us about 20 minutes to push the car out after it got stuck, but the feeling was more of a fun, upbeat, oh-well-that's-what-happens-this-time-of-year kind of thing.
After a short hike there, it was time to pack up and go home.

I love that kind of weekend - getting outdoors in nature, hanging out with fun people, exploring a new place. It's the kind of thing that really makes me feel alive!

Enjoy Your House

2005-02-20T16:30:00.000-05:00

The other day I was thinking about how a lot of people make major improvements to their houses just so they can sell them. That seems rather silly - spending all that money and not even getting to enjoy it. So I decided that the thing to do is to sit down every year or so and figure out what you'd have to do to your house in order to sell it right then, even if you have no plans to do so. Then do those things now so you can enjoy them!

Reiki

2005-02-14T10:24:00.000-05:00

Eric and I just had a wonderful weekend taking a Reiki I/II class together. We took it with a teacher who is licensed by the International Center for Reiki Training. I've had Reiki training before up to the III/Master level and originally took I&II from the center in 1995. However, they've discovered a lot of interesting new techniques since then so I wanted to go back and get the new information. This was Eric's first real Reiki class, though I gave him the level I attunement informally over a year ago.

One interesting thing about the class was the number of men that were there. Most of these kinds of things have way more women than men (if there are even any men at all!), but for this one we had 5 women and 4 men the first day, and 3 of each the second day.

We both enjoyed the class so much that we've decided to create a Reiki practice. We're going to get started by offering treatments to friends and family and go from there. It's definitely an exciting new direction for us!

Yay Sirius!

2005-02-10T14:33:00.000-05:00

I recently purchased the Sirius satellite radio system for my car and I feel like I've been given a set of wings! When it comes to music, I'm a bit too picky to enjoy most of the stations here in Pittsburgh. CMU's WRCT sometimes has a decent electronic DJ on the air, but their schedule changes every semester so you can't really count on it long term. The jazz on WDUQ is okay, but they have an indecent number of lame talk and news programs filling up their timeslots. It was rather depressing to wake up to the Daily Death Count on NPR every morning. "Eleven people were killed in Iraq today when a car bomb exploded..." Sigh.

So, enter Sirius. Over 100 channels of commercial-free music and talk radio. Whee! I've recently been listening to the BBC news channel and it's so refreshing to hear an entire hour of news with no mention of violence or death. This morning, the top headlines were about Prince Charles' wedding to Camilla Parker Bowles, the Pope recovering from a throat illness, and elections in Syria. It is encouraging to hear that so much attention is being focused on a positive thing like a wedding, rather than all the negative, violent crud the American news outlets are partial to. Go BBC! Yay Sirius!

I Love this Quote

2005-02-07T11:52:00.000-05:00

I recently read a quote by Andy Rooney that I'd like to share:

For most of life, nothing wonderful happens. If you don't enjoy getting up and working and finishing your work and sitting down to a meal with family or friends, then the chances are that you're not going to be very happy. If someone bases his happiness or unhappiness on major events like a great new job, huge amounts of money, a flawlessly happy marriage or a trip to Paris, that person isn't going to be happy much of the time. If, on the other hand, happiness depends on a good breakfast, flowers in the yard, a drink or a nap, then we are more likely to live with quite a bit of happiness. - Andy Rooney

Wow... what an awesome description of happiness!

Inspirational Humanity

2005-02-03T10:35:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week I went for a walk and had the chance to witness an inspiring exchange. I was crossing the street at a busy corner near a center that cares for the blind, and crossing just in front of me there was a blind man with a cane. As we got to the other side, I noticed that there was a public bus waiting at the light. The driver had the door open, and as the blind man approached, he yelled out the name of the bus, "61A!" The man shook his head no, and the bus took off.

It was a little thing, but it made me happy to see it. The bus driver could have ignored the blind guy, or even not noticed him in the first place. But instead, he was aware of what was happening around him and chose to be of service. This kind of compassionate connection with each other only happens when we have our attention out on others instead of focused on our own little world. It's ironic that just before this incident, I passed a guy who was walking along with his nose in a book. What a contrast! He was missing out on everything that's going on around him, including any opportunities he might be given to connect with and help others.

For the rest of my walk that day, I made an extra effort to connect with all the people I saw - sharing a smile or a "hello" or just appreciating those who were lost in thought. I am naturally shy, so this was somewhat of a challenge for me. I realized that I, too, am often in my own little world - pretending to think about something of utmost importance perhaps - in order to avoid looking at or connecting with others. I'm not sure why this is; some kind of fear perhaps. But it helped to think of everyone I saw as a good friend I haven't seen in a while. Although it was difficult at first, after a while I felt a barrier coming down inside me, and a feeling of resistance that I hadn't even noticed before began to lessen. Hmmm.

Goodbye Abracadabra

2005-01-29T10:30:00.000-05:00

Abracadabra (Abby) was a magical cat. The kind of cat that could win over a non-cat person. After 13 beautiful, furry years, Abby has left this world. May the world rest in peace.

Abby was a very quiet cat. She only spoke to a special few, and even then, her meow was more of a high-pitched grunt. It was a treat to hear her say "mra-mra" as she looked up at you with her cute round eyes.

She was known as the heat-seeking cat. If you wanted to know where the warmest place in the house was at any given moment, just go find Abby. We knew we had the heating vents adjusted the way we wanted them when she started spending her time in our bedroom instead of the basement!

We also called her Abby Razorclaw since she faithfully used her scratching post at least once a day. If our house were a Federation cruiser, she would definitely be the weapons officer! However, she was always pleasant to humans and never intentionally used her sharp claws to hurt anyone.

Abby was a shy, gentle cat. She would let you pick her up and hold her, and would often stay on your lap for a while if you put her there, but she wasn't the kind of cat that would aggressively seek attention. When she wanted some, she had this magical way of appearing in a spot that made it very convenient to pet her.

If she were somehow given an IQ test, I'm certain she'd be invited to join Mensa. She loved to play with little toy mice and would intentionally get them stuck under things just to have the challenge of getting them back out again. In addition to responding to her name, she also knew the word "mouse" and her ears would perk up any time anyone said it. We used to ask her, "Abby, where's your mouse?" There was at least one time when she would seem to think about that for a moment, and then run off only to return a few minutes later with a mouse in her mouth!

Her fur was unusually soft and thick, making it a pleasure to touch. She would purr readily, loved to be brushed, and would suffer through the clipping of claws with little fuss.

Goodbye Abby. You will be missed.

Daydreaming

2005-01-26T11:57:00.000-05:00

Yesterday as I went for a walk, I began to think about daydreaming. I used to spend most of my idle time daydreaming, although for some reason I haven't really daydreamed at all for about 3 years now (since I bought my house, actually). It was almost an addiction for me - I found it hard to stop doing it even though it was having a detrimental effect on my life. I would daydream myself to sleep at night, but would often get so caught up in my fantasy that I ended up keeping myself awake, and then I would be groggy the next day. I would daydream whenever I had a few moments to myself: as I was walking from my car to the office, or from my apartment to the coffee shop, or whatever. My daydreams were always much more interesting than real life. I would get so caught up in them that I would occaisionally receive a phone call from a friend or family member and think I had something exciting to tell them, only to realize that it was just in my fantasy life.

I feel kind of sad when I look back on that period of my life. Why was I so determined to be out of touch with reality? A big part of it was boredom with life. But the difficult thing was that it kind of fed on itself. As long as I lived in my daydreams instead of in the real world, the real world would, of course, be boring since I wasn't creating anything interesting in it. All of my creative energies were going into creating exciting things in my fantasy life instead of my real one! It became a kind of self-feeding spiral. That also explains why I haven't daydreamed in years. The excitement of buying my first house was enough to drag me out of the cycle - I was finally creating something interesting for myself in real life! And ever since then, I've been able to keep myself focused on reality enough to keep creating interesting things.

As I look back on some of my favorite fantasy creations, I find I can also learn some things about myself and my beliefs. For instance, I used to wish that I could "download" information and skills from a cosmic database and instantly be able to do anything I chose: be a virtuoso pianist, write best-selling books, be an expert skiier. But since I'm daydreaming about those things, that means I have a belief that I can't actually acheive them. Also, wanting to instantly acheive mastery in various areas means that I probably have some limiting beliefs about the process of learning. After considering this more closely, I realized that I have the following beliefs:

Whatever skill I have in something is not enough. (There's a recipe for dissatisfaction right there!)

Learning is a difficult, slow, and tedious process.

I need outside validation (public acclaim, awards, etc.) to feel that my accomplishments are worthwhile.

Identifying those beliefs was kind of an ah-ha moment for me, and gave me a feeling of relief. I can change them or let them go if I choose, and give myself a different experience of learning!

One interesting thing about daydreaming is that there were times it actually helped me. For instance, if I was working on a tough problem at work or dealing with a difficult situation in my life, I could use my daydreaming to help solve it. I would just imagine that in some future time I was talking to someone (a reporter or something) who was impressed with the way I had handled the problem and asked how I solved it. I would proceed to tell them... and then I'd have my answer!

Squeaky Snow

2005-01-18T15:50:00.000-05:00

Skiing, sailing, and flying airplanes were three of my dad's favorite hobbies, so it's no surprise that he kept a close eye on the weather and knew quite a bit about it. One time we were skiing together and he pointed out that the snow was squeaking because it was very cold out. "Dad," I said, "I don't need to hear the snow squeaking to know that it's cold!"

Today I went for a walk and noticed that the snow was squeaking. I smiled to myself as I remembered all the good times my dad and I spent together. He was a great friend.

Receivers are the true givers

2005-01-03T10:12:00.000-05:00

I love the holidays. I celebrate Christmas not because I am a Christian (although I was brought up that way), but because I think it's a great idea to have one day a year devoted to giving -- and getting! Some folks prefer the giving, and others the receiving. It is sad that the receivers are often called greedy, selfish, needy, and other negative labels. In fact, most folks feel the need to hide the receiver part of themselves to avoid criticism. We have been told that "it is better to give than to receive." But who is the quarterback going to throw the ball to if there are no receivers? Givers give because they enjoy it. Receivers provide an opportunity for givers to give. They fulfill just as important a role as the givers and deserve just as much respect. If no one needed or wanted anything, no one would get to experience the joy of giving.

I'm definitely guilty of being resistant to receiving. I was taught to be independent and take care of myself, and so I find it difficult to ask for and accept help even when I really need it. But by doing that, am I just denying a potential giver the opportunity to give?

I've always enjoyed giving gifts at Christmas and tend to go a little overboard. This year I got a few too many presents for my nephew and had to save some of them for his birthday. In addition to family, I widened my giving circle by giving some money to a homeless guy on the street and a shoebox filled with goodies to someone at the local women's shelter. All of that giving was kind of like a drug for me and put me on a happiness high. It occurred to me that giving may not be as unselfish and altruistic as people tend to think it is. Giving brings me joy and happiness, maybe even more so than the receiver.

So with this in mind, I want to send out a great big thank you to all those who have provided me with the opportunity to give. I thank the homeless guy for standing on the corner and holding up his sign every day. I honor the women at the women's shelter for receiving my gifts. And all the people affected by the tsunami -- they have provided the world with a reason to give and allowed us to remember that it is our true nature to help each other. Receivers are the true givers.

Lessons from a Christmas Tree

2004-12-06T10:51:00.000-05:00

This weekend Eric and I picked out our first christmas tree together. The experience reminded me of my childhood growing up on an 80 acre farm. Every year around early December my dad would grab the tractor, hook up the trailer, and throw in some tools. We would all hop in the back and he'd drive us across the road to the forest. Our destination was a stand of tall pine trees on top of the hill. They were probably 30-40 feet tall, but I was a kid so they looked more like a 100 feet to me. When we got there, we all hopped out and spent the next half hour craning our necks to see the tops of the trees and debating the relative merits of one or the other. Finally we would make a decision and dad would climb up there to lop the top off of it. It was fun to watch it fall down to the ground when he cut it off.

Since the trees were just random pine trees growing in a forest, they hadn't been excessively pruned and perfectly shaped like the trees you get from a tree farm. Once we got it back to the house and wrestled it into the living room, we would always spend several minutes turning it this way and that to try to hide the goofiest looking bits against the wall. The limbs on the tree would also be farther apart than those on a pruned tree-farm tree. So the first thing that went on the tree was some velvet pointsettas that got wired to the trunk to provide some color on the inside. In spite of the fact that the tree would stick out in odd directions and was kind of sparse in the middle, I don't ever remember my dad getting out some clippers to try to prune it. We always enjoyed it just as it was.

As Eric and I picked out our perfectly-pruned tree-farm tree, I realized I missed the goofy kinds of christmas trees I grew up with. They had character. In fact, they were lovable because they were not perfect! As I thought about this, it occurred to me that if trees are lovable because they're not perfect, what about me? I try so hard to be perfect sometimes, but what if it's really my imperfections that make me lovable?

2am

2004-12-01T13:01:00.000-05:00

Last night around 10:00 I was really tired and decided to go to bed early. Eric wanted to play with legos (we're judging the First Lego League robot competition on Saturday and he's all psyched about it) but he wanted to be with me too, so he brought some legos up from the basement so he could sit in bed and play with them. Well, I figured that 10pm was a little too early for bed, so I decided to read for a bit. I'm reading this fascinating book called The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz and after I put it down I was so wide awake that it took me until 2am to settle down and go to sleep. I love books that inspire me like that!

Random Thoughts

2004-11-19T11:32:00.000-05:00

I felt like posting something today so here it is.

Last night we had a fantastic bike ride in Frick park with Venture Outdoors / PORC. I fell a couple of times, but only because it was wet and my wheel couldn't hold on. Those kinds of falls tend to be much more gentle (as long as you're not going too fast) than the endo kinds of falls where you flip all the way over the handlebars. And both were on steep technical downhills so I was just happy with myself that I worked up the courage to try them in the first place! I think it's good to fall gently. It takes the fear out of falling and makes me more willing to try stuff. And you don't get better unless you try stuff, so gentle falls are good!

I've also started taking a walk in the middle of the afternoon. I have a nice route that I enjoy and it includes a stop by the Starbucks on the corner for a coffee of some kind. So it's been a real treat to do that, and the exercise is good for me too!

This weekend Eric and I are helping to lead a beer tasting hike with Venture Outdoors. We were just given the beer last night and there's some really awesome stuff on it. Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA (my favorite beer of all time I think!), Red Seal Pale Ale, White Hawk IPA, something from Flying Dog, Stoudt's Fat Dog Stout, Lion Stout (a beer from Sri Lanka!), and a few others. 9 beers in all, and we have 27 people (or so). Each person gets a 4oz taste of each beer, which works out to 3 beers per person. I don't know how we did it, but somehow we got 81 beers in our fridge last night. Whew!

What the Bleep?

2004-11-15T10:35:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend we got to see the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? and I have to say that it was the best 2 hours I've ever spent in a movie theatre! It's not playing very many places, so if it's near you, don't miss it!

The movie interweaves a story about a young woman's life with a documentary-style selection of interviews with various experts on quantum physics, human biology, brain science, and psychology. The question is, why do we keep having the same experiences over and over again, and what can we do about it? The movie presents various answers to that question in a very moving and inspiring way. More information about the movie, including theatres showing it, can be found at www.whatthebleep.com.

Help for America

2004-11-06T15:08:00.000-05:00

So Bush won the election. Ugh. I, like many others, spent more than a few moments feeling helpless and depressed. But then I realized that all is not lost and I began to think of ways we can help move America in the right direction in spite of this year's election results. The result of my brainstorm is a new blog entitled Help For America: 10 Ways We Can Help America Survive 4 More Years of George W. Bush. Check it out!

A Very Smart Cat

2004-11-02T10:02:00.000-05:00

Last Sunday as I watched the Steelers kick New England's butt on TV, Eric wasn't around to celebrate with me for every score. So poor Van Gogh kitty had to put up with me jumping around and yelling and picking him up for a hug at random moments. What a good cat.

It was also halloween evening and toward the end of the game the trick-or-treating started. I was downstairs in the basement where the TV is, so every time the doorbell would ring, I would go running up the stairs to get the door. Van Gogh always likes to be where the action is, so he was running up and down the stairs right beside me. After a couple of times of this, he started to leap up and run for the stairs when the doorbell rang before I even knew what was happening! I think maybe HE should be the one bringing home the paychecks...

Adobe Musicshop?

2004-10-26T10:15:00.000-04:00

This morning I was listening to a mix CD I just got (Tosca - Chocolate Elvis Dubs) and I started thinking about Photoshop. In Photoshop, you can take a picture and select just about any piece of it using the nifty selection tools they have. And if all else fails, you can always zoom in and select it pixel-by-pixel.

So why can't we do that with music recordings? I only know just enough about how remixing is done to look like a fool, but from what I understand, the original artist records each instrument (or "voice") on a separate track. Then mixing engineers (and anyone else who can get a hold of the tracks) can do what they will with them. But it's very difficult (and almost impossible in some cases) to pull a single sound out of a complete song - just the bass line, for instance. It would be neat if there were an application like Photoshop that had nifty music selection tools that would allow the user to isolate sounds from a song and use them.

And what about the other senses: smell, touch, and taste? I guess the difference there is that we don't (can't?) really record that kind of information to be experienced and manipulated at a later time. Hmm.

Good Sleep

2004-10-20T09:24:00.000-04:00

It's amazing to me how much difference a good night's sleep makes! Last night I managed to get to bed about an hour earlier than I usually do, and it was a relief this morning not to feel that foggy, headachy tiredness that I've felt every morning for the past few days. I was much more patient and less irritable during my drive in to work, and now I feel much more focused and motivated to get something done. Yay sleep!

How to get the flu

2004-10-18T10:21:00.000-04:00

This morning I heard on our local radio station that people were bringing out lawn chairs and sleeping bags at 4:30am to wait outside for one of the local flu shot clinics to open. We were scheduled to have a low temperature of 36 degrees last night, so it was probably pretty cold. Oh, the irony! These people are setting themselves up to get sick just so they can be first in line to get their flu shot.

2004-10-07T13:05:00.000-04:00

It may not look like it, but this is the tastiest burrito on the planet! If you've got nowhere else to put it, why not use your shoe? Burrito consumed at the All Good Music Festival, July 2004.

Monster Chrysanthemum

2004-10-06T15:17:00.000-04:00

I figured out how to post pictures to this thing. Check out the size of that chrysanthemum. It's going to take over the yard!!

Leaning not to be a Perfectionist

2004-10-05T14:56:00.000-04:00

This morning I attended the first session of a two-session class called Fireworks Fundamentals, which is an introduction to the Fireworks image editing software from Macromedia. Two weeks ago, I took a similar class on the Dreamweaver web page application. These classes are part of an effort to branch out from my unix-centered world. Most of my difficulty has been with learning to work with the user interfaces efficiently. I am a well-trained command-line user who finds menus and buttons slow and unweildly (and the hotkeys are different too)! It takes a certain amount of humility to spend time in an environment that makes one feel like a dork.

When I took the Dreamweaver class, I was pleased (but not surprised) to find out that it makes creating web pages much easier. I was particularly impressed with how easy it was to create image maps! I have created web pages many times before, but always by typing in the html code by hand. The other interesting thing was that the class was taught on the macintosh. I haven't used a mac in ages (not since MacOS 7 or so). I had heard that Apple started using a unix kernel, but I was surprised that I could bring up a terminal window and start typing unix commands into the thing! Cool! It's like they've combined that best of both worlds.

The Fireworks class this morning was definitely a learning opportunity, in that I learned several things that are probably already obvious to most computer users. I've always been rather slow when working with graphics, mostly, I think, due to my perfectionism. This morning I was using the lasso tool (freehand selection tool) to select the outline of a butterfly in a picture. At first, I kept having problems because my mouse would bump something, and then I'd have to start the whole selection process over. Grrr. After a few tries, I discovered that if I zoom the picture out a little, the image becomes smaller and I don't have to move my mouse as much. Fortunately, Fireworks gives you the ability to tweak the selection once you've made it. The other thing I learned with the freehand tool is that it's easier to be accurate if I move my hand more quickly. I was trying to move very slowly to do the best job I could, but that actually made it worse!

I think the next time I do anything with images or drawing I will intentionally try to do a less-than-perfect job. In fact, it would be interesting to see what would happen if I intentionally did the quickest, sloppiest job possible! I wonder if it would really be that much worse than my usual? I am starting to suspect that I have been sabotaging myself with my perfectionism!

Reality Internet

2004-09-28T10:40:00.000-04:00

My Blog has been rather quiet lately. Too quiet. I wonder if it's up to something sinister?

I like to keep an eye on the blog of a fellow Pittsburgher, mountain biker, coffee drinker, and beer lover. I feel a sense of camraderie when she talks about places I recognize, Pittsburgh traffic, biking in the fall, etc. Her blog mostly consists of musings about whatever happens to be going on in her life at the moment, with an occasional inspirational make-you-think-about-yourself post. Some people like Reality TV, but I'll take Reality Internet!

Speaking of blogging, I have a confession to make. Every day I load up my blog and read it as if it's not mine. I have this tiny little hope in the back of my mind that maybe someone else put a post there (not a comment, but an actual post). Weird, huh? But that gives me an idea. It would be cool to write a blogger bot that pokes around the internet and finds interesting little tidbits to post to a blog every day.

Hello, my name is: Multisyllabic

2004-09-23T13:38:00.000-04:00

Last night Eric commented that his name didn't seem to fit his occupation as a sawmill owner/operator. When I asked why, he pointed out that most of the people he works with have one syllable names (e.g. Rob, Ron, Tim, etc.), but his name is two syllables. In fact, he could only think of one person he's interacted with through his sawmill business that has a name with more than one syllable!

I've also noticed that several people I know who have advanced degrees tend to prefer the longer variant of their first name: Peter instead of Pete, Michael instead of Mike, David instead of Dave, etc.

So we started to wonder... Is there any correlation between the number of syllables in a person's first name and his/her amount of formal education? Do people in blue collar professions have first names with less syllables than people in white collar professions? Do people with advanced degrees tend to use a form of their name that has more syllables? Is it gender specific?

Should we consider this phenomenon when we choose names for our kids?

Hurricane George

2004-09-22T17:25:00.000-04:00

For some reason I am fascinated by weather. I just spent some time reading the excellent NOAA faq on hurricanes (or "tropical cyclones" as they are officially called). My favorite part comes from the section on naming:

"... the first use of a proper name for a tropical cyclone was by an Australian forecaster early in this century. He gave tropical cyclone names "after political figures whom he disliked. By properly naming a hurricane, the weatherman could publicly describe a politician (who perhaps was not too generous with weather-bureau appropriations) as 'causing great distress' or 'wandering aimlessly about the Pacific.'" (Perhaps this should be brought back into use ;-)"

Hurricane George, anyone?

The Weather Channel web site also has some nice colorized satellite pictures.

Crispy Crunch

2004-09-22T13:30:00.000-04:00

Happy Fall Equinox! I love fall. The colors. The earthy smell. The crispy crunch I hear when I walk in the woods. The cool air temperatures and bright blue skies. YAY fall!

The Smell of Clean

2004-09-20T10:31:00.000-04:00

As I was cleaning the bathroom this weekend I started to think about the smell of the cleaning products. I wonder if the smell affects our sense of how clean something is? Which bathroom would seem cleaner: one that smelled clean but wasn't, or one that was clean but didn't smell like it?

Writer's Block

2004-09-17T14:02:00.000-04:00

It occured to me the other day that writer's block (or any creative block, actually) might just be a form of fixed attention. Attention is the energy of creation, and when it is fixed on something, the creative process grinds to a halt. Free attention enables creativity.

Avatar's Releasing Fixed Attention exercise would be a good remedy, as would the Baby Eyes exercise from the Attention Mini Course.

Recognition

2004-09-13T16:51:00.000-04:00

My intention for today is: Recognize myself in others. I suspect that this may take more than just one day, so it's really an intention for this week, or this month. I'll let you know how it goes.

The Universe is a Cucumber Patch

2004-09-10T13:13:00.000-04:00

At one point Eric and I were talking about how the really important things in life do not diminish when we give them away or share them with another. Hugs. Compliments. Laughter. Knowledge, ideas, inspiration. Language. Honesty. Music. Friends.

In fact, many times sharing these things with others will actually increase my supply of them!

I was reflecting on this the other day and began to think of other things that do not diminish when they are shared, but they were things that I would not normally consider "important" in a good way. Disease. Negativity. Gossip. Violence, anger, hate. Dishonesty. Criticism.

In fact, many times sharing these things with others will actually increase my supply of them!

I began to wonder, what is real the difference between things that do not diminish when they are shared and things that do? Some examples of things that do diminish in supply when they are shared or given to others are: Money, Time, Land, Food, Water, Clothes, Space, Jobs, Customers.

One obvious difference is that the things that do diminish are more "physical" than those that do not. Sharing the things that do not diminish will often cause those things to be reflected back to me in greater quantity, increasing my supply. But when the physical things that do diminish are shared, more is not readily available. Or so I have been led to believe.

It's really a matter of viewpoint. If I have a cucumber patch and pick some cucumbers to give away, more will grow in their place. If I do not pick them, more will not grow. In fact, eventually they will rot on the vine and I will have no cucumbers. But the more I pick, the more I will have.

What if that's true of everything in the universe? Am I limiting my supply of money, time, land, food, water, clothes, space, jobs, customers, etc. by hoarding and keeping these things to myself? On the other hand, can I decrease the amount of disease, negativity, gossip, violence, anger, hate, dishonesty, and criticism by not sharing those things? Let them wither on the vine?

Maybe the universe is just a giant cucumber patch.

Intentions and Wins

2004-09-09T12:04:00.000-04:00

Intentions

I have recently started writing down at least one intention for each day when I get up in the morning. Sometimes this takes the form of a to-do list, but I also try to create intentions that interest and excite me. Why am I getting out of bed this morning anyway? One day last week I wrote, "Today I will be open to insights about what motivates me and why I often procrastinate." As I was working, whenever I had a thought about that subject, I wrote it down. By the end of the day, I had discovered what is behind my tendency to procrastinate. Maybe I'll blog that someday.

I have found that, done correctly, writing a daily intention is a very powerful thing to do. It clarifies my thoughts and focuses my attention like a lens. For instance, last Thursday I wrote, "I intend to have a bike ride that is challenging but fun and still within my ability." And that's exactly what I had. It was one of the best bike rides I've had recently!

Writing down an intention is a powerful process, but it's not a magic spell. A few times I found myself writing down an intention and hoping it would come true. That doesn't seem to work very well. An intention has to be something I create; a willful decision I make, rather than a wish. I am in charge, and this is how it's going to be. When I find myself writing down wishes instead of intentions, I realize that there is often a hidden intention that I am reluctant to express. I might write down, "I will be productive at work today," but if my real hidden intention is to do as little as possible to still get paid, then the intention I wrote down is unlikely to manifest.

When it seems like an intention has not happened, I take a second look to see if it really did manifest in some clever way I was not expecting. I also look inside myself for a hidden intention that might be clogging up the works. This has been a valuable way to discover what really makes me tick.

I've been writing down intentions on a daily level, but it's also fascinating to play with intentions on different time scales. What is my intention for this month? This year? This lifetime? When I have a conversation with someone, what is my real intention? I try to create fun, juicy intentions. Every day is a blank slate! One day I wrote, "Do everything today with a sense of playfulness." Another day, "Give myself a special treat."

Wins

Just before I go to bed at the end of each day, I write down my wins for that day. Wins are anything that went well during the day. I write down insights I had about life during the day, things I learn, and anything else I'm proud of - large or small. A good piano practice, having a productive day at work, meeting a new and interesting person, eating at my favorite restaurant. Writing wins keeps me focused on the positive. Count your blessings.

Jumping On the Blogwagon

2004-09-08T13:52:00.000-04:00

Eric started a Blog. It looked cool, so here's mine. I write a lot of thoughts down anyway, so I might as well publish them, eh?

Here's what I was pondering in the middle of the night last night...

Let's suppose for a minute that you read some new-fangled thing about string theory and were struck with an epiphany about how the physical universe works. The application of your insight allowed you to effortlessly morph matter into anything you wished (money, cars, curtains for the living room, etc). You could also instantly modify your brain patterns to pick up new skills, information, and abilities.

Wow, that would be fun, wouldn't it? I started instantly re-decorating my house; removing the limits of time and money can create interior design miracles! Then I was playing all the piano songs I wanted, and doing all the other things I've dreamed of doing but never had the skill or time to do.

My dreams and imaginary accomplishments got bigger and bigger, and the universe got smaller and smaller until finally... I was bored. Hmmm. I can do anything. Now what?

Limitations create challenge, and challenge keeps life interesting. When I'm bored, maybe I should try creating some deliberate limitations and see what happens? Or, step out of my box and play a new game.