So clarinet is all good.

Jessica and I have been together 10 months and we celebrated that today.

I had a nice relaxing day.

GAH! The clarinet studio people won't give me a damn e-mail to tell me if I can be in that shit this semester or not. So if not I need to take another mother fucking class... so I hear about this other class I might want to take that involves building an electronic music system for children with disabilities, sounds like something I could do and good experience and stuff, and it's supposedly got open spots left, but it doesn't have open spots left. SO maybe I'll have to wait and see about clarinet and if not then start ECE 390 2 weeks late.

Outside of academics, I'm enjoying life tremendously. I think I'm going to do some Time Cube chalking on the quad tonight. Hey, it sure beats all the bullshit Greek system crap that's written there now.

And yeah, OMG the football team matched last season's win total this week at one. Next week they'll be going for their first win over a I-A team since 2002. Me, I'm hoping that we match last year's accomplishment of getting more Nobel Prizes than football wins. But next week's game is University Library Day, and we all know the whole community rallies around the football team and gets fired up for University Library day. So maybe the footballers can pull off another win.

I ran 800s this morning. Only 4. In 2:40. I'm in worse shape than I thought. Maybe I won't run under 17 next Sunday. Oh well.

OK, time for some homework.

I had an amazingly fun night last night with someone. But that's not the point of this post. I keep a reasonable separation of webjourno and romance here. Not enough separation not to mention that I baked some pretty hilarious looking cookies last night that will be pictured here in the future.

OK, so in Music History class today I was just continually reminded of how fucked-up ancient religion was and how it really is like that today too... I'm short on time, so just one example, we're in the 4th-9th centuries now (not much happened musically then because the church supressed people trying to do anything interesting), and in the Mass of that time there's a section called Credo. Which is Latin for "I believe". A section whose exact text was debated among scholars and then made immutable for the rest of time. And this is the section of the mass with the fewest different tunes to it, apparently because its text is the most immutable.

In ancient times ideas almost never survived to today on their merits, but rather on the military strength of those pushing them. Sometimes ideas conducive to military strength, and thus survival/spreading could go on. Now ideas often survive based on their commercial applicability or in politics on their ability to be made popular... which people as a whole at least have some control over. It doesn't always produce the best, most enlightened ideas, and often creates frustrating ones, but in perspective, it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be.

I woke up at 8:00 in the morning. Took a shower, ate some breakfast. Went to ECE440 (Semiconductors). Talked about valence bands, conduction bands, and the forbidding gap. Went to Econ 103 (Macro). Talked about society like the point of it was to produce goods and if it didn't do that it was failing. Went home. Ate some lunch. A crunchy soynut butter and jelly sandwich. And some spinach. Turned on C-Span. Barbara Bush was on. Turned it off. Went with Matt and Kyle to voice a few complaints to our landlady. Jumped to Music History (antiquity for now). Returned a book, bought another one (both on signal processing). Bought 3 Power Bars, ate 1. Did a bit of homework. Went to DSP class. Talked about... DSP... came home, changed, went running with Jason Razo. It was fast. Stretched, iced my ankle. Went to the fridge, grabbed my box o'spinach, and turned on C-Span. Barbara Bush was still on. Turned it off. Showered, ate some Carribean corn chowder. And the second Power Bar. Went to Engineering Career Services meeting. Learned Power Verbs for my resume. Didn't learn where to put the accent marks. Went to an improv comedy show. Left (it was over).

... So last night I got really drunk in my sleep and PARTYED HARD, and I'm so clever that to remind my future morning self of what I'd done, I took all the bottles from the 10 Corona Extras I downed and put them in my bicycle basket.

I must have been so drunk I didn't even remember to be hungover!

(That or some dipshit just used my bike basket as a garbage can. Least s/he didn't use it as a toilet.)

And then of course riding down the bike path on Wright street trying to get to class I nailed someone who walked right out in front of me without looking. It's not all *that* hard to be alert, and it's not like I'm flying around campus on my circa 1930 2-speed Schwinn.

Lots of things are happening and I don't really care to write about any of them.

Today walking home I heard some frat boys chanting, "One... Two... Three... Four... Five... Six... Seven... Eight... Nine... Ten... Eleven... Twelve... Thirteen... Fourteen... Fifteen!"

Their mothers must be proud they can count so high.

I crashed my bike. On those damn old railroad tracks that are completely dismantled except for the portion that crosses First street. There are just rails crossing the street in the middle of randomness, and my front tire went into the groove, which carried me into the curb, which threw me off the bike.

On the plus side, I got to work on my mean baseball swing yesterday; center field bleachers, watch out! Or maybe not so much "center field bleachers" as "little kids playing on the playground beyond the field". And by field, I mean a tiny backstop at a tiny park 4 blocks from my house. And they should watch out for the tennis ball that I'm smacking around with my surprisingly well-constructed wiffle ball bat. I never managed to get it to the playground (that woulda been a deep drive to the power alley in left), but I hit the sled hill (a home run to the short porch in right) and my brother hit three cars (watch out for foul balls). For all those who are familiar with the greater west side of Elmhurst area, the park was Ben Allison. The park that spans about one suburban block when it's feeling mighty. But yay for tennis ball batting practice.

The rest of today will consist of packing the rest of my schtuff to go back to college. Will be glad to be away from "home" and back to a place that really feels like home.

Finallly got my knee surgery scheduled, December 20th. Which means that if the typical four-months-before-running thing holds for me (and I assume it will), River to River will be four days too early. Damn.

Turned over the left ankle playing frisbee. Does it never end?

At least the wrists are better. As long as I don't type too much. Doctor says I have a ganglian cyst, and I'll have it removed after I'm back walking after the knee surgerey, in the forseeable but not immediate future.

At least the shoulders and elbows are working.

Well the ankle is swelling up, so it must be time to take an advil and go to bed.

So driving to a laundromat there was a store going out of business and for some reason the sign was apocalyptic. It looked like it was an Evangelical Christian bookstore advertising the end-times as the real reason that they'd soon be out of business. Can't remember the wording of the black-on-yellow signs, or it'd be repeated here.

And then on each of the the quadruple-load commercial washers was a panel labeled, "More buttons". Except that it was actually "Mode buttons". D looks like R.

The Who do a lot of plagal cadences, yup.

Work has been exceptionally boring.

All I do is go on /.

On the rare occasions that my "hey, is there anything for me to do?" questions are *responded* to, I do something that takes me 15 minutes.

Then I send of another e-mail requesting work.

Then I'm back on /.

I am your tax dollars at work, damnit.

And if I could only waste them at home where I can at least be productive to myself... (well I suppose that's what I'll be doing once school starts up again, so... yeah...)

Playing today was really good... I think I'm starting to get it together in terms of stringing phrases together with continuity.

I've been working on the second movement of the Mozart Concerto (it's in nice easy keys; I want to get my fingers back under me before doing "hard" stuff). The middle of that movement is just fucking beautiful, and there's so much you can do with it.

Other than that, life is ok. Work has been OK, running has been OK, frisbee has been OK. When I see Jessica I've been happy. I wish our situation this summer was such that we could be together for more of the other things we enjoy, since we don't exactly *do* a lot of the same things. We do somewhat similar things, and we do them in similar ways. Once we get back to school and our time together isn't at such a premium, I think it'll be a lot easier.

My mom got a letter in the mail today "from John Kerry". Among other things it mentioned his "grass-roots" campaign... which just cracks me up. If, say, Howard Dean called his campaign grass-roots, I'd maybe almost buy that a little bit. If Dennis Kucinich called his campaign grass-roots I'd say, "what campaign?" (Kucinich is one of my favorite politicians, and I'm glad he's in Congress, but I don't think he'd make a great president, and apparently everyone voting in the primaries agrees). But John Kerry is an establishment candidate in an establishment party who gets his money from big corporations and big labor, appears to have gained power by appealing to the party elite (rather than directly to the people), and gets his publicity through all the traditional means. He believes in his party. I read the big Time Magazine story on "WTF is this John Kerry anyway?", and he seems from that to have some qualities that I appreciate in my leaders. He supposedly is intense and studies things independently. But he hasn't seemed to do that very much recently in the Senate. He goes by the party line and was elected in the primaries for his electability. He could be many things, but not "grass-roots".

allright, time to get crackin' on the LFS system.

  - 41

I practiced th'ol'clarinet today... for the first time all summer. Feels pretty good.

Music can be very rewarding, of course, only after practicing for long enough to play well.

Tone was allright, technique is kinda off (but better than I expected), and my endurance is shot, no surprises there.

Had a couple hours of frisbee earlier. I think we're going towards a stable equilibrium as far as rules go.

Apparently, based on frisbee experiences today, I seem to hold much authority in those rare occasions when I raise my voice. Maybe it's a supply/demand thing. They all want my brilliant wisdom, I don't let much of it out, so it's overvalued.

OK, I'm done.

boring boring day of work.

argh.

i keep getting teh e-mail.

and it's repeatedly something like "some people just had a baby". or "increase in virus-infected e-mail". or "eat spaghettios!"

needed something to do, so i'm writing something. la dee dah.

As bad as XML is, I would be the first to admit it is possible to create a worse language for representing nested property lists. In fact, I encountered one in actual, operational use in my travels as a migrant information worker and NASA contractor.

The name of this atrocity is Object Definition Language, and it is a standard format for metadata that NASA attaches to many of its major remote sensing imagery products, as well as data from planetary probe missions.

You should really look at the PDF linked above to get the true flavor of this stuff, but I can give you a quick taste right here. S-expressions, XML, and ODL all are syntaxes for representing nested property lists.

S-expressions are what you get if you ask John McCarthy.

XML is what you get when you ask people who know and love HTML/SGML

ODL is what you get when you ask people who know and love FORTRAN.

I'm serious! The simple S-expression

(foo "bar")

would be this in XML:

<foo>bar</foo>

and this in ODL:

object = foo
  value = "bar"
end_object = foo

I got to know about this stuff as part of several tool-writing exercises where we were trying to make complex, deeply nested ODL intelligible to its scientist users. The "solution" we came up with involved parsing the ODL, translating it into XML, then hosing the XML through different XSLT translators to generate pretty HTML.

As a result of those projects, I now know more about ODL, XSLT, and DHTML than I really want to.