Pretty easy once I realized that I had hidden the xfn relational section in my links editor >_<.   Set up reciprocating rel=”me” links on my blog and google profile, force a google re-crawl at https://sgapi-recrawl.appspot.com, and voila!

Thanks to Dave for the info.

Permalink: Google Buzz test

—–

I recently recommended a bunch of iphone games as a twitter response so I thought I’d post a more thorough entry here.

Games I’ve got loaded:

• Lux Touch – Risk style game; this is the free version which is good enough for when I get that urge.
• Quordy – Boggle style game; has multiplayer challenges; I should play more, but there’s so many other games.
• Fieldrunners – tower defense;  my favorite of the many many TD games that I’ve tried on the iPhone.
• Mecho Wars – turn based strategy game, similar to Advance Wars;  I like the art style.
• Tiki Towers – physics puzzler, similar to world of goo, but not as polished.
• Civilization Revolution – port from xbox live.  It’s not quite as detailed as the pc version, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
• iBlast Moki – physics puzzler.  It’s my new favorite game.  I love the art style and the game theme plus level design is fantastic.
• Secret of Monkey Island – classic adventure game
• 2 across – crosswords
• Flight Control – finger drawing / time management game
• Robocalypse – RTS game.  ported from nintendo DS
• Uniwar – turn based strategy
• Tris – tetris clone

Games I’ve got an eye on:

• Romance of the Three Kingdoms – koei port!
• Hybrid: Eternal Whisper – action/rpg
• Zenonia – zelda look-a-like
• Catan – official Settlers game, but currently looking clunky

Permalink: iPhone Games

Update: looks like I’ll just be doing one per post. Haha.

First one I highly recommend is the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. It’s epic, it’s got great characterization, and it’s got some very well thought out magic systems. As I was going through it, everything felt well planned as if driving towards an ultimate goal. I’ve been reading his annotations online at his website and it’s very clear that he’s spent a lot of time working through things to give the maximum impact to the reader.

He’s taken some familiar fantasy tropes and given them some twists. He has created a world where the archetypal fantasy hero has failed (think if frodo had kept the ring) and turned into an evil emperor. There’s some of the other usual fantasy fare like prophecies and magic, but nothing plays out like you would expect at first sight. It just feels logical once you’re done reading.

That logic even touches the several magic systems in play in the book. The main one we’re introduced to is “allomancy”, in which, certain individuals have the ability to “burn” small amounts of ingested metal to give themselves physical abilities. Different metals give different powers like a video game mana system. The actual powers aren’t outlandish, but I was pleased with how he mostly follows the laws of physics and comes up with very creative uses to achieve the feeling of superpowers. The other two systems of magic tie in together quite well as slightly different ways to achieve the same level of powers.

I can’t say enough good things about the series. It kept up a quick pace, never bogging down, but felt complete at the end. The characters changed / progressed. It’s a fairly serious story, but there’s enough jokes to keep things from getting too out of hand. In short, it’s awesome. Read it!

Ok, this was more of a review than I was originally planning. Maybe I’ll get to writing about the other series later.

Permalink: Series Recommendation – Mistborn trilogy

The most important (and only hard) part of the pizza is making the dough for the crust.  So I found a thin-crust recipe that we used.  I think it turned out ok for our first attempt, but there’s much room for improvement. We didn’t have a pizza stone so we used a cookie sheet.  We also tried just putting the pizza directly on the rack to char the bottom after it was on the cookie sheet long enough to firm up.

So we followed all the directions for making the dough and thought we were on the right track.  We even got our dough to be a “smooth and silky” ball like in the recipe photo.  When I went to split it and shape half of it into a crust, it was way too dry/hard though   In the end, I had to use a makeshift rolling pin (saran wrapped wine bottle) just to get it into a pizza-like shape.  Sadly, by doing so it also was incredibly thin (I believe thinner than it should have been).  It did semi-char nicely on the bottom though, but due to the thinness, it also vaguely tasted like a water cracker.  There weren’t any air bubbles and it was definitely not chewy.

For our second pizza we went with prosciutto, sauteed mushrooms, and caramelized onions.  The crust for this one is quite “rustic” looking as I again had issues shaping it, but didn’t use a rolling pin so the crust was a little thicker.  This one had more of a pizza-like crust due to a couple factors I think.  Besides being thicker, we also let the dough sit while we topped/cooked/ate the cheese pizza.  I think that helped contribute to the air bubbles.  Btw, if you read the recipe we used, the instructions never mentioned letting the dough sit to rise, but maybe we should have known?  shrug.  If we try this recipe again, we’ll definitely let the dough sit next time.  I did run across a no-knead recipe that uses a slow rise in the fridge that sounds promising.  So I think that’s also on the agenda.

Just in case we failed miserably, as backup, we got a pre-made dough from trader joe’s.  Here’s a couple pics of that one being constructed.  It was much wetter than our doughs, so that’s also something I will experiment with in the future.  It wasn’t as tasty, nor fun though!!

It was a good experiment and I’m definitely interested in figuring out how to improve on our crust.  More internet research!  Moar!

Permalink: Pizza Pizza – first try

Permalink: Smugmug Integration to a Degree

I seem to be more interested in setting my blog up to do cool things, than actually writing about said cool things.  One of the plugins I’ve found is called WP-Touch.  When it detects the user agent from an iphone or ipod touch, it sends a version of your blog that’s formatted for the iphone.  There’s also an option for the visitor to see your blog with the original formatting if they so choose.  I’ve included a couple screenshots I snagged while writing this post.

Permalink: iPhone Wordpress plugin and theme

Permalink: twitter autocreation test

Also installed a twitter plugin for wordpress that should automatically create a tweet when I create a blog post. (thanks laura and jed)

Permalink: Iphone posting test

It’s got a sweet new ajax’d interface, account creation is super quick, and there aren’t the annoying ads / hoops that you have to jump through to use it (unlike evite). It’s clearly still in beta so there’s little things that they’re working on (like better privacy controls), but I think the overall package is worth dealing with the little issues.

Oh, when you add the location, it will add the google maps link automatically and when you click on the link, it’ll dynamically place it on the main page. It also has options for adding the event directly to your google calendar via openauth.

It facilitates migration from evite as well with some pretty nifty tools for bringing over guest lists. Also, it has super cute icons!

So, I hope we all switch from evite. woot.

Permalink: New Invite Webapp Anyvite

I’ve managed to import all of my posts from vox (every post dated prior to this one), but boy does sixapart make it difficult and annoying. There’s no export function in vox (which sucks) and after some research, their rss feeds only show 10 entries unless you specify the page number. So I had to pull 10 posts from the rss feed, import to wordpress, repeat, until I was finally done. Then I realized that the vox posts still required a lot of editing by hand to remove vox specific code.

MEH.

Those posts are staying private until they’re presentable.

Permalink: Redirection of my blog

Anyway, thanks to becca for the preview. As my tweet said, the first two story arcs were hilarious while I found the last act lacking. I think it just felt like they ran out of jokes and decided to shoehorn an action sequence onto the movie to wrap things up.

I did super appreciate the little touches and object placement. Two that stood out were the footprints poster in James Franco's place and the bartles & james bottles in red's bathroom.

Sigh, I was trying to post this from my iphone, but I can't figure out how to scroll a textbox up/down.  Meh.

Anyway, it's worth seeing for the buddy/weed jokes.

Permalink: pineapple

Permalink: Internet Memes Timeline

Permalink: booourns

I want to make out with my phone, it's so awesome.  So, anyone have some reccomended apps?

I've already installed:

smugshot (for viewing smugmug galleries of my photos)
city guide (created by wapo and ties into all their reviews)
remote
google
all the google apps
flashlight / mylite (turns it into an expensive flashlight)
sportstap (sports scores)
shazam (music recog)
yelp (restaurant reviews)
boxoffice (movies)
labyrinth LE (game)
tap tap revenge (game)

Permalink: I can haz Iphone 3g!

Permalink: End of an era

December the 16th is Beethoven’s birthday if you didn’t know (I mean who doesn’t know that?!).  So if you’re in the DC area, you can tune to wgms (104.1 or wgms.com with live feeds) to hear a lot of him mixed in with the traditional holiday crap.

He’s definitely one of my favorite composers and it’s probably a toss up between him and Chopin for most stuff I’ve played.  His stuff is so much fun to play, if sort of a pain in the ass to learn.  My favorites are all “named” sonatas (do I like them because they’re famous or are they famous because they’re awesome?).  I usually tell people that I’d pick what I’d want to learn by whether it’d let me show off or not.  And all of these fit squarely within that category – flashy, technical pieces that everyone loves.  In the order that I learned them:

• Tempest – This was the first one that I played.  I forget how young I was, but I remember not liking it at the time, but I think I’ve changed my mind.
• Pathetique – I love the opening movement.  It’s such a shock as the first note slams into you and then goes super quiet before going loud again.  Imagine me as a youngish teenager getting to basically play with as much force and contrast as I was capable before suddenly cutting into a quick tempo
• Moonlight – Everyone, and I mean everyone, has heard the first movement:  it’s beautiful, haunting, blahblahblah.  It’s boring as shit to play.  On the other hand, no one knows the 3rd movement which is set at a presto! tempo and consists primarily of long runs of arpeggios.  This was the first piece where my hands were actually tired after playing.  The 3rd movement was also the piece that got me into learning Beethoven in the first place.  I was really little when I heard someone perform this at one of the recitals that our piano teacher would hold for all her students and wanted to play it ever since.
• Waldstein – The opening 2 bars are a perfect example of Beethoven’s ability to make music out of a very simple arrangement of 4 notes.  It opens with a repeated staccato of chords with no melody!  He keeps at it somehow creating a melody out of that mess.  Wonderful piece to play, but again your wrists are so tired at the end.  The 3rd movement has a beautiful melody and it’s one of my favorite pieces to play.  Feature of note is that on your right hand, you’ve got a continuous trill in your thumb and forefinger while the melody moves through the rest of the fingers and even sometimes into the trill fingers.  Try keeping that going fast without dropping the trill!
• Appassionata – I’d always wanted to play this piece when I was younger, but it was still out of my ability level.  I lost to some dorky russian kid who played this at a competition when I was playing the Pathetique.  My consolation was that I didn’t practice 8 hours a day like he did or wear girly gloves before the competition so his hands would stay warm.  I still hate him.  This is the only piece that I’ve got an mp3 recording of me playing the first movement.  Although writing this reminds me that I should get around to converting all the tapes of me playing when I was a kid to digital audio.  Anyway, if you’ve gotten this far, here’s my recording (if you’ve known me after college, you’ve heard this before). Vox is generating an error when I try to upload it so you just get a link (also it’s really really quiet and I probably need to adjust the volume setting next time when I upload it).

Permalink: Beethoven’s Birthday

We won!!!! 24-7!  Unranked vt blew up #10 clemson!

Talk about a simple game plan.

• Stop their running backs and force their shaky qb (will proctor) to throw – check
• Run the ball with Brandon Ore – check
• Don't fuck up – half check

Before this game, clemson rb's averaged 185 yds per game and their offense led the nation in scoring at 42 ppg.  We held them to 80 yards rushing and 7 points.   Brandon Ore had 37 carries for 203 yards and almost broke a tech record for most carries in a game.  Our o-line and d-line played fantastic games!  In fact, the only thing that went wrong was sean glennon doing his michael vick impression and fumbling the ball in the 3rd quarter.

I bitch and moan about the playcalling of our offensive coordinator all the time, but last night was definitely one of his better nights.  He did a great job setting up all the big plays.  The sequence that stands out in my mind was 2 handoffs to ore to the right side, one quick out to clowney on the right, and finally the playaction pass to wheeler that went deep down the right sideline.  You could see clemson safety on that side position himself closer and closer to the line each play and then see him totally bite on the playfake.  The only reason the pass didn't go for a td was that wheeler is a big, slow tight end.  Basically the whole

night, everything that stinespring called worked perfectly.

Anyway, I posted a flickr set that has more pics!  I'm not sure how to get access to all the flickr pics in that set as adding photos to vox doesn't seem to grab all of them for me to choose from, nor does it give me multiple page options on the flickr tab.

(for those of you unfamiliar with college football, we're called the virginia tech hokies.  So after the 3rd quarter, the tuba's all line up and play the hokie pokie while people do the dance)

Permalink: vt / clemson aftermath

Right now, it’s pretty safe to say that clemson is the cream of the crop in the ACC.  They’re #1 or #2 in every offensive/defensive category in the conference.  They have the most experienced (3 sr), talented, and nfl ready (avg 6′5″ 320lbs) offensive line that tech will see all year.  I’ve been reading comparisons of their two running backs, cj spiller and james davis, to reggie bush and lendale white.  And actually, for the most part, everything I’ve read or seen about clemson bodes ill for tech.  On the plus side, they’ve been bitten by a couple big injuries.  Lost 2 of their starting lb’s for the year.  Their #1 wr was out for a couple weeks with an ankle injury and did not play in the big GT game saturday, so I’m hopign that he won’t be ready for tomorrow.  But both their offensive and defensive lines are fully healthy… and that’s where tech is the weakest.  It’s going to be a long night if our lines continue to get pushed around.

However, there’s a couple intangibles that look to be in tech’s favor.  First thing I have hope for is that clemson perenially finds ways to lose games that they should win, specifically on the road.  They’re also 1-5 on thursday nights (espn games).  And finally, tech hasn’t been an underdog at home very often – the last time that happened, miami came in 2003 and got blown out 31-7.

So, with all that, I can’t pick against clemson.  The talent on paper looks ridiculous and tech’s got so many problems (not enough room in this post to document, maybe another post).  Anyway, if the cameras are on me, I should be easy to pick out.  I’ll still be wearing the dumb sling.

Permalink: virginia tech vs clemson

It’s been pretty quiet so far.  Not sure a lot of people know I’m back yet since I haven’t been wandering the halls or anything.  Followup with the doc happens in a couple hours and I’m hoping he’ll be like “look at that amazing recovery, you won’t have to wear the sling much longer.  Certainly not the 6 weeks we originally expected.”

Stupid fucking sling.

Permalink: first day back

*if you define free use as anything that doesn’t require me to put a strain on the shoulder that could potentially pop it out.

** This assumes I can easily get the pictures off my camera.  Stupid xp+sp2 seems to trigger some retarded microsoft camera/scanner program that doesn’t interface with the camera correctly instead of just mounting the camera as a removable drive.  Dumb dumb dumb.  Guess I need to buy a card reader after all.

Permalink: AHHHHHH

Do you play any musical instruments?

After 20+ years of taking lessons, I hope to god that I can play something.  Only ones of note are piano and clarinet.  I’ve been playing piano for 20+ odd years now.  Although, having not seriously touched a piano since college, I’m not sure I can count some of those years.  Clarinet was only for like 6 years (although that definitely felt like it was longer).  One of these days I’ll get around to writing up all the stories and memories from the piano competitions and band trips.  Everyone needs more navel gazing.  Or reading about my navel gazing.

There’s a bunch of other stuff that I can “play”.  I played the marimba for high school marching band and I can remember most of the technique from there so I suppose that counts.  Band director vetoed my request to just play the pieces on a keyboard hooked to an amp.  2 mallets per hand was pretty challenging and it also built callouses in some strange places on your hands.  Due to the similarity with clarinet (and hanging out with a bunch of saxamaphone players), at one point I was passable with alto sax.  I took a pipe organ class for a semester in high school – never any good at it.  I didn’t like having to slide my butt around on the organ bench while “walking” the pedals.  You really look like an idiot doing it and that’s not something my ego was comfortable with.  And a couple years ago, I wanted to be able to play a pop instrument so I attempted to learn guitar a couple years ago (failing miserably due to lack of motivation.  It also hurt my hands).

All within the classical genre.  The world of jazz improv frightens and confuses me (I’m awful at being creative).  So don’t ask me to play jazz.  Also, I don’t play billy joel’s ‘piano man’.  I wish I’d gotten around to learning how to play the violin as it’s such a beautiful and expressive instrument.  I think that’d overload my asian quota of musical instruments though.  I also wish I had learned how to sing.  (no, it’s not just for karaoke you bastards).  I think that covers everything.

Permalink: QotD: Strike Up The Band

October 11th is when I’ll be getting my shoulder fixed.  After ely’s wedding, but 15 days before the clemson game so I can have enough time to recover and still go!

The guy that’ll be fixing me is Dr. Ray Thal, the team doctor for the Redskins, so that’s sorta cool.  His office has a wall covered with signed pics of the players.  I’m not sure of the time yet as that’ll be determined by the assistant, but according to him, I’ll be able to type (yay world of warcraft!) just a couple days after the surgery.

What’s wrong with my shoulder?  Well, it dislocates if I look at it funny.  Once in my shoulder, he’ll be tightening up some things.  Also, according to the MRI, there’s a tear in the labrum that connects the ball to the socket.  Soooo, that’s what he’ll be repairing.  It’s an arthroscopic procedure so there’ll just be a couple holes in the shoulder.  The way the tear is, he’ll be using these little anchors that attach to the bone to hold it on there.  The picture he showed me makes them look like drywall anchors.  seriously.  I have the little pamphlet at home so I’ll upload the pics later.

Permalink: tis but a flesh wound

• Looks like Glennon has a pretty good grasp of the offense, answered most of my questions.  I’m still a bit skeptical of his arm strength and his ability to look-off the defensive backs and disguise where he’s throwing the ball.
• Wow our offensive line has a shitton of work to do.  Gogo freshman decision making!  Saw Render looking so lost and leaving Brown alone to block 2 guys more times than I wanted to count.  And of course there were some injuries that’ll really hurt the already thin depth (mcgrath and frye).
• It’s the return of the fullback!  I saw at least 3 passes to the fb
  which is 3 more than that position got all of last year.  Guess they
  really don’t have faith in the TE yet.  Not that I blame them as Boone
  whiffed on his first catch and bobbled his second.
• Wide receivers all look great.  Harper looks like a beast.  Royal just got hurt.  Clowney still has stone hands sometimes.
• Ore and Bell looked ok, but their final numbers won’t impress anyone.  Didn’t really need to use them.  Also, all the OL issues didn’t help.

Msgboard note:  Someone posted that there was sign on gameday that read: “Brady Quinn’s sister likes the D” (his sister is married to Aj Hawk, rookie LB with Green Bay) hahahaha gotta love Notre Dame bashing.  (sorry robert).   Hate all the media slobbering over ND.  Makes me want to punch someone.

• Kam Chancellor looks fantastic for a freshman.  Had an interception overturned on replay that was a crazy good 1-hand grab.
• Adibi otoh looks like he’s going to be running laps and doing a ton of pushups at 6am at practice due to 2 almost back-to-back personal fouls.  The defense as a whole definitely looks good though.
• Special teams looked pretty good til the end when they put in the kickoff kicker to try a fieldgoal.
• Hm, Victor Harris looks like he’s playing tecmo bowl trying to run circles around people while returning kicks.  Note:  You’re not barry sanders, it doesn’t work, and you look like a retard.
• Got their first blocked kick of the year!  Go beamerball!

Ok that’s all for now.  Back to work.

Permalink: VT vs. Northeastern

What else, but Virginia Tech football!  The college football season starts this thursday and tech’s game is on saturday 1:30pm against mighty Div1-AA power Northeastern (cookie if you even know where the school is).  hahaha.  So yeah, it’s like a preseason game as tech gets ready for UNC.  I don’t think it’ll be on tv.  I’m not even sure there’s a line set for the game, but I’d probably take the over at 40…

Someone at the party asked me how the team looks this year so my quick recap:  defense will be strong like always, offense will struggle.  We’re extremely short on depth at offensive line, running back, corner back, and linebacker.  We’ll be starting 6 true freshman on the team.  Our qb has taken snaps in all of like 5 games previously.  And yet, we’ll still beat UVA

I won’t promise that I’ll be posting less tech stuff on this blog than I have previously on lj, but I’ll try to keep it toned down since there’s no lj-cut.

Permalink: Season Opener!

Who’s the most famous (at least in your opinion) person that you’ve met? What was the experience like?

The most famous that immediately comes to mind is Dave Brubeck.

I was in governor’s school for the arts at the time and we were able to do a piano masterclass with him for most of the day (I still have the autograph somewhere).  It was awesome and then later that night, he performed for the whole school with some of his buddies that were also helping out with masterclasses for other instruments.

Permalink: QotD: Brush with Celebrity