Halloween Costumes - A Recap in Action

(Small note: Refresh the page to reload a stylesheet I updated.)

Well, it's that time of year again, and I'm not feeling creative. I won't be dressing as Freakazoid, fun as that was the first   time. I recycled the costume the next year, and I remember Leah calling me on it at Fools Play. Or somewhere. Point being, I won't be reviving the costume again this year.

I won't dig back into the Odlaw costume either, because I'll just leave that in its state of past perfection. I mean, with Aaron as Waldo, there was no better day at OHS than when we went into the hall, crowded at break, and I continuously shouted "Marco!" with Aaron following up, following me - "Polo!" And off we'd scamper, in a two-man train around the crowds.

Kaga-San, that I did senior year (or junior?), was fun, but bloody hot. And dancing in the gloves of the Iron Chef stadium head was particularly difficult - to the point of silliness, when Ali danced with her respective gloves on as well. Traction measured zilch.

My lack of creativity for this year, though, is reviving the costume that came before all those — or at least, the theme.

El Jimbo!

Alex!

So

what's shakin' dude

I've been trying to think of what to be for Halloween.

how about pie (pi?)

I won't bring Freakazoid out of non-retirement, because that'd be the 3rd year in a row.

I don't know what to do for a costume for that.

forgot about that

Actually

I intend to wear something that will be:

1.)

Good for Fools Play the Saturday before Halloween.

2.)

Good for dancing the Tuesday after Halloween.

I'm slowly coming to the conclusion

That my fishnets have seen too much of The Drawer.

Frankfurter?

from rocky horror?

Eh, I was thinking more a schoolgirl skirt.  I don't like the big schlong-schtickle.

lol

that's awesome

Except, I have to get the skirt.  That's the only thing.

The white garter for the black fishnets, I've got covered.

dude, there has to be a plaid skirt around Olympia somewhere

Heh, shouldn't be a problem.  I just have to go out and get one...hmm, Goodwill perhaps?

take Ashley with you to help pick one out

There has got to be some lewd whistle to go with that sentence, but it just won't leap out at me.

oh, c'mon, you can't think of anything?

I need to trill my tongue.  If not for incapabilities, I'd have the whizthle in hand...so to speak.

yeah, but you shouldn't have you whistle in your hand too much, you're right.

Ah, damnit Jim, I miss you.

That plan came to fruition Friday night, and the costume saw daylight (er, stagelight) at Fools Play Saturday; more on that later.

I had some technical gripes in getting this chatlog online. If you don't find the phrase "XSLT 2.0" a turn off, and if your JavaScript isn't disabled — or if you want to see some penis banter — then do click the next <img /> to see what kept this chatlog from coming online a week ago.

For the rest of you, here's some pumpkin pi.

— from Worth1000.com's Jack-O'Lantern Challenge 4, entry by spinnerhead (links: contest, this pumpkin)

A wonderful thing about Adium is how it formats its chat logs. With the exception of how it handles line breaks, everything is done in an XHTML-conformant manner. Here's an excerpt of the raw log I extracted this conversation from:

legofarley03 (2005|10|17).html

...
<div class="send"><span class="timestamp">10:21:15 PM</span> <span class="sender">louporange: </span><pre class="message">That my fishnets have seen too much of The Drawer.</pre></div>
<div class="receive"><span class="timestamp">10:21:26 PM</span> <span class="sender">legofarley03: </span><pre class="message">Frankfurter?</pre></div>
<div class="receive"><span class="timestamp">10:21:42 PM</span> <span class="sender">legofarley03: </span><pre class="message">from rocky horror?</pre></div>
<div class="send"><span class="timestamp">10:22:08 PM</span> <span class="sender">louporange: </span><pre class="message">Eh, I was thinking more a schoolgirl skirt.  I don't like the big schlong-schtickle.</pre></div>
<div class="receive"><span class="timestamp">10:22:17 PM</span> <span class="sender">legofarley03: </span><pre class="message">lol</pre></div>
...

I suspect Adium is a cool-enough piece of software that it has actually implemented some CSS selectors more advanced than what current web browsers have to offer. This is what the Adium chat interface looks like:

Note that the Penny Arcade link is highlighted. This is my first use of the <map> element.

(Don't ask.)

The neat effects: While each <div> row in the chatlog has a child "sender," only the first is displayed in the chatlog - and pretty boldly, with a rounded-corner background and everything. I'd guess its done with a :first-child selector rule overriding a general "hide-the-.sender" rule. However, Firefox and IE don't support :first-child yet, so I took a somewhat more drastic measure and turned to XSLT.

The goal was to simply create a wrapper for each group of send or receive rows. I use the term "group" there because XSLT 2.0 has an element called <xsl:for-each-group>, which does precisely the grouping I was looking for.

The blocker: MSXML3.dll thinks this element can't be a child of <xsl:template>. That is wrong. (Citation: The last code gray code block here, from the W3C Recomendation.) In the Unix command line, xsltproc doesn't support XSLT 2.0. PHP returns the error "non-XSL instruction;" in short, I'd probably have to buy an XSLT processor to get this done mechanically. XSLT 2.0 seems to be too new a standard.

I finally broke down and did the transformation by hand Saturday morning. This is why I didn't get the log published yet. In the end, though, the result remains the same: I'm bedecked in a frilly bottom for Halloween! And thus ends the technical point of this entry.

Happy Halloween. "Political-Career-Sinking"-grade pictures to come after Tuesday.

Three Performances

Saturday was OCO's first concert of the year. It could've went a lot better.

That performance was probably the worst to date I've had on stage (considering strictly my own contributions), including compared with my first SOGO performance where I hadn't managed to find any time to practice for three months. So, I don't feel too great thinking about that. Beethoven's Ninth had better be good to be a good pick-me-up, but there's a crapload of hard parts in there, and we have one less rehearsal this time around. I only hope. It'll be my last performance with OCO for a while, for unrelated reasons — I want to take a Data Analysis course, and need more hours in the week.

If the performance goes well, I'll probably be back with them after finishing Data Analysis. If the performance doesn't, then I'll get my Probability Theory course in. Simple as that. Olympia Symphony will surely sate my performance desires on its own in the meanwhile.

I had my second business trip to Portland today. I never got around to revising my post about the first trip (I wrote too much about data for some reason), but suffice it to sum up as this:

From September 9: Spent the day and night in Portland, whipping up and finalizing a spiffy web system. It's currently IE-centric, unfortunately, but this can be revised into Firefox. It'll have to be, because it'll be a site open to the public, and it'd be nice to let Linux and Mac users in on the fun. Had dinner at Stanford's Bar & Grill, a fine portobello mushroom burger (veggie burger). Was up 'til midnight coding with Pete, while Joe wrote down some table sketches, and didn't write down some other table sketches.

To this day, Joe swears we had another table sketched out that night at the hotel. We all know if we did have it, it never left the room — I'd contend that it never left Joe's dream, though. I'm still pretty sure he didn't draw it out.

Today's trip to Portland was different. 2 hours down, 4 hours in town, 2 hours back. The 4 in town were split between a meeting, lunch, and screwing up my ankle. I missed the last step coming out of the Multnomah County Courthouse, and stomped onto the pavement in a dress shoe that let my foot slide a critical centimeter. I felt fine, up until I'd been off it for ten minutes.

Then I couldn't walk. We arrived at about a hundred feet from a restaurant on the water (literally, on a dock), and my foot just seized up. I hobbled to a bench, where we all scratched our heads at what was causing my foot to hurt. Joe reminded me about the courthouse misstep, which I ignored due to thinking I handled it well and didn't need to think about it. Sure showed me, as I now had to debate between which was less dignified: Hopping down to the restaurant, down either a ramp or stairs; or getting a piggyback ride from Pete.

I find hopping demeaning.

Pete set me down at the restaurant door. I figured out a non-painful gait as we made our way to a table. The foot felt fine after the drive back from Portland and working for an hour. I scheduled a physical for tomorrow afternoon anyway, so this is a stroke of twisted luck. I just won't be dancing on my night off from chamber orchestra tomorrow.

Tonight, I called my student and asked him what he'd like to study tonight, as he hadn't written me with a request of topics the night before, like I requested. He said asymptotes and algorithms. I said, "Oh boy, algorithms! Right up my alley! I'll see you in ten." -Click-

Unfortunately, I had expected with such specific topics in mind, he was doing some in class and already had an idea of what he wanted to look at. Turns out, he didn't. So, after we went over a few asymptote items, he asked me what I'd like to teach him in algorithms.

Well, this'll probably show you how well I think "On my feet," in teaching: I showed him the Sieve of Eratasthones, a prime number finder. The initial display of that algorithm wasn't hard, as it just involved this:

And so on. This got him happy; then, somehow the topic of coding it came up. So I wrote most of the Sieve of Eratasthones for him in Java, walking through the code-creation process. I probably bent his mind a little out of shape, as he dropped his church's C++ class before getting to for loops.

Well, I found introducing him to the practice of vigorously commenting code important, at least. And he got to see PuTTY in action, too, so hey.

Next week, I'm gonna show him Haskell. No, I don't learn.

And on an unrelated note: I started posting this because I wanted to write down, finally, that I'd been to Portland, thanks to Ali's post. I also wanted to note that yes, I'll see Serenity, but only after I see Firefly. I finally ordered the series Saturday (thirty bucks on Amazon, down from fifty, couldn't resist). By the time I finish watching the series, Serenity should be out on DVD. I'm just that quick to get to a TV show.

Another thing I bought: A pack of my most favorite-smelling things in the world. Magic Cards. I'm pretty sure there's no non-nerdy way to ever write about acquiring a pack of those — especially not my way, buying a pair of decks in Gamestop with Final Fantasy Anthologies and RvB Season 3. But, Damian felt like playing again after a decade of leaving the game be, and hey, I actually find it fun. They turned out to be pre-made decks, though; I still want to, at some point, just buy two decks of completely random cards and play a round against someone. There's nothing like the excitement of suspecting that for the rest of a game, your draw pile could be pure shit, and you'd never know the better.

My entertainment's probably set through Thanksgiving. I only hope this'll be a relaxed month - not likely, as I need to scramble to get The Ninth learned. And now I'm off, to write another day.

Yesterday, et Aujourd'Hui

The Washington Center feels pretty impressive when it's stuffed to the brim. I saw six empty seats, way in the back of the nosebleed section.

Has anybody ever noticed that the nosebleed section in the WCPA has sneeze guards? Pun was indeed intended. I think that's the only level with the guards, too. (I doubt they're actually intended for sneeze-catching, instead being there for an unobtrustive view...but still.)

The concert went fairly well. Shames was wonderful in the Brahms, though I wish I could've heard his part more in the third movement. The lid of the piano and mezzo-forte briskness of his part kept it quiet for poor ol' me in the back of the violas. I was mightily impressed with the brass at the start of Beethoven's Fifth's fourth movement. They had apparently been holding back during rehearsals. Quite a lot of power came out.

I loved playing during the concert, up until the third movement of the Beethoven. Dress rehearsal ran about two hours, and the concert ran about the same time. That was murder on the left arm - I talked with one of the violinists after the concert, and she said it was just as bad as playing an opera. This is an art of stamina.

And the next concert has ten pieces. Oh boy...oh boy.

And now, for something complètement different — an exercise in ze French.

Aujourd'hui est l'anniversaire de mon père. A dix-neufs heures, mon oncle l'a appelé, et c'est ce moment, quand ma père disait, "Yep, I'm eligible for Social Security now," que Damian et moi ont realisé, "Oh. Today would be the Seventeenth." Avec une voix, nous l'avons dit, une phrase qui notait, Oui, rater beaucoup est facile pour nous. Trop facile. Nous conducteons 'Appy Birthday, et chanteons avec demi-coeur.

On the way to work, sometimes I name French verb conjugations. I can remember ten — their names, that is. I remember how to use most of them. Past perfect isn't one that I could recall easily, though. That's what I intended the "-eons" to be, an action that happened in the past, in a continual manner like the imperfect, but definitely not continuing to happen now like the imperfect.

At least, I think that's what past perfect is, if it's a tense. Don't ask me, I wrote Turing Machines in college.

First OS Concert

The program:

Brahms - Piano Concerto in D Minor, soloist Jonathan Shames
Beethoven - Fifth Symphony

Performing tonight. Huw's happy note on the board during yesterday's rehearsal:

Oly' SO: We are SOLD OUT!!

Eeeexcellent.