3MF

Spellbound

I saw a wonderful movie today called Spellbound. It's a documentary that follows eight kids in their quest to win the National Spelling Bee title. The filmmakers first introduce you to each "speller." You get to meet them and their families and hear how they came to participate in the competition. The second half of the film takes place at the national competition where you are constantly guessing who will win. You get to watch the contestant's faces squirm as their brain desperately tried to decipher the letters of each word they are given. The fear, doubt, anticipation, and relief of each round is as easy to see as the glasses on their faces.

It got me wondering how in the world our society developed to have a place for competitive spelling? It seems like such an absurd sport. My guess is that it comes for each persons need to feel that they are the best at something; that there is one thing they can do better than another person. Competition is part of the American culture. If you can't win at something, just start your own sport. Do we really need to know who is the best grocery bagger, the best tax accountant, or the fastest cup stacker in the country?

I do think the flick is worth a watch. Maybe you can even watch it with seven friends and you can each "pick your pony" and place bets on who you think will win. Just don't lose.

Crafty queries

I've had some interesting SQL feats to perform this week and i thought i would share.

At work, we've come up with a way show sales progress by "bowling" on the intranet. Each day we earn a score based upon what percent of the daily sales goal we achieved. Scores range from strike to gutter ball. We store a numerical representation of the score for each business day in a table. The problem was we wanted to be able to label certain days as "doubles" or "turkeys" if we got a series of strikes. This involved comparing a day's score with the two previous business days. I wanted a query that could grab those values. Table in our SQL Server looks like this: BowlingScore(dt_score datetime, score tinyint). The SQL i wrote will return a value for any given @SalesDate

SELECT
S1.score today_score, S1.dt_score today_date,
S2.score yesterday_score, S2.dt_score yesterday_date,
S3.score daybefore_score, S3.dt_score daybefore_date
FROM BowlingScore S1
JOIN BowlingScore S2 ON S2.dt_score=
(SELECT TOP 1 S2D.dt_score FROM BowlingScore S2D WHERE
dt_score<S1.dt_score ORDER BY S2D.dt_score DESC)
JOIN BowlingScore S3 ON S3.dt_score=
(SELECT TOP 1 S3D.dt_score FROM BowlingScore S3D WHERE
dt_score<S2.dt_score ORDER BY S3D.dt_score DESC)
WHERE S1.dt_score=@SalesDate

Another interesting challenge involved a list of users, a list of websites they can log into, and a record of each time they logged into any give site. Simplified versions of the respective tables are Users(user_id int, user_name varchar, customerlocation_id int); Sites(site_id int, site_name varchar); LogInLog(login_id int[auto], user_id, site_id, dt_login). I needed to grab a list of users from a particular customer location along with the last date they logged into a site as well as the name of that site. I came up with this:

SELECT USR.user_id USR.user_name, LIL.dt_login, SITE.site_name
FROM Users USR
LEFT OUTER JOIN LogInLog LIL ON LIL.login_id=
(SELECT TOP 1 login_id FROM LogInLog LOK
WHERE LOK.user_id=USR.user_id
ORDER BY dt_login DESC)
LEFT OUTER JOIN Sites SITE on SITE.site_id = LIL.site_id
WHERE customerlocation_id=@customerlocation_id
ORDER BY user_name

I had tried other variations, but will 3000+ users and a login log with hundreds of thousands of records it seemed to perform the best. I'm not sure what would have happened if i hadn't had the synthetic "login_id" key. The dt_login doesn't go into seconds so some users login to two sites within the same period (same dt_login value).

I'd be curious if others developed similar queries with different techniques.

Web Inspiration

CSS Vault and The Daily Standards are two sites i've been regularly enjoying. If there not in your aggregator, i strongly recommend adding them. Both serve up a generous dose of inspirational CSS/XHTML based sites. Most of these sites are remarkable because of great design rather than the means in which they were made. As the "Man In Blue" points out, soon web designers will be as comfortable with CSS based layouts as they are were with table based ones. We are constantly learning new ways to make what ever we can dream. It really just comes down to having a great idea.

Happy Birthday Alan

had never seen an episode of M.A.S.H. before my recent trip to visit my friends in Seattle. I had a bit of down time out there and it seemed every time i would flip on the TV, there it was. My first instinct was to flip away, but Katie mentioned how much she enjoyed the show, so we watched. I liked. There was another episode on afterward and we watched again. I got to see quite a bit of the show while i was there. When i came home, i wasn't able to find it on any of the twelve or so channels that come with my cheep cable plan so i've been going through withdrawal.

Katie called today to let me know that it's Alan Alda's birthday today. I guess i'll just have to catch him on Scientific American Frontiers on my local PBS station for now.

G, that sounds nice

I think i can now say that i can play Bach's Minuet in G [MIDI: 4k]. It's just been what my sheet music book has been opened up to the past few weeks. I usually play for a bit when i'm avoiding doing something i *should* be doing, which has been happning a lot lately. I'll probably compose my own symphony before i actually do my taxes.

Rent is paid for

Rent tickets went on sale today at noon. I got tickets for me as well as tickets for my sister who's birtday is in April so it will make a good gift. Yeah!

Ghost light

After the show, the stage manager is responsible for making sure everyone is out of the theatre, the doors are locked, the alarm is set, and all the lights are off; that is, all of the lights except one. The ghost light is a part of the theatre tradition, it's always left on when the theatre is empty.

It's amazing to sit in the house when the theatre is empty. There's a restless silence in the air. The large open space still manages to feel full of energy. The history of the space is almost tangible. It's really calming and comforting to be there all by yourself. It's a shame not everyone can have that experience.

Tonight is closing night of Dearly Departed. We've managed to make each night entertaining but i'm glad that the end is here. Who knows what the next theatre adventure will be.

It's alive

We launched our new corporate web site today. It's well loved by the W3C HTML and CSS validator. I spent quite a bit of time testing it in Mozilla 6, IE 6 and Safari. I didn’t' have earlier versions of IE readily available so it’s not as well tested as it should be, but I’ll probably be tweaking the style sheets for weeks to come. We tried out the site on a PocketPC with wireless access and it rendered all the content un-styled and the site was still usable so I’m really happy about that.

It’s been a while since we made a site that was open to the public. We decided to commemorate the event by putting in our own little easter egg, or secret page. I’ll let you find it, but I’ll give you a clue. The four of us who put the site together called ourselves the "Creative Site Squad" (or "CSS" for short). Hmmm, very sneaky!

Loyal subjects

One of my biggest email pet-peeves is when folks don't put a meaningful subject line on their correspondence, or when they put something like "Here You Go." It could be my own fault for being an email pack rat, but when i look through my old email, i should hope to have a good idea of what's in the letter without opening it. It also bugs me to just get an attachment and nothing else. Is it that hard to just type something like "Here is the 2003 sales report you requested?" There are plenty of resources for e-mail etiquette on the web; I just hope they are teaching this stuff in school nowadays.

Add 'em up

A week or so before school began, i got a bit stressed out. I did as any well trained member of a capitalistic society is supposed to, and went shopping to feel better. Girls usually buy shoes; this geek buys calculators.

After much deliberation, I picked up a TI-89. I already have a TI-85 and TI-92 but i wanted a new one to start a new semester. The TI-89 is runs basically the same software as the TI-92, but its a lot smaller. I also considered the TI-83 Special Edition because its fun looking, but in the end i couldn't live without "pretty print". Its the feature that makes what you put in the calculator look like what you actually write on the paper and it works with variables rather than just numbers. I do the work on my own, but it helps me to check my answers and find any errors before i get too frustrated.

Of course, as soon i i bout mine, Texas Instruments announces two new calculators: the TI-84 Plus and TI-89 Titanium. They now have a direct UBS about rather than requireing a special cable to hook up to your computer. They also have a new form factor which i'm not all that thrilled about. I'm still happy with my purchase.

I have no idea why i love calculators so much. I guess i just respect them for the work they do. Because they are smart, it makes me look smart.

A week's work

This week we've been working on finishing up our new corporate web site for work. We tried to redo everything with XHTML and CSS. Actually i had the-new-guy™ do most of the work. I've just been going over everything and trying to clean up the CSS by taking out as many classes and unnecessary markup as i can. We had to make a few more "compromises" than i would have liked to get it look as requested; but i'm still playing with it. This is also the first time we're using a design from someone that really has no idea about the HTML behind the page so we've been going back and forth on some of the details. It should be up in the next week or so.

Latin Lover

Anybody who chooses to spend their time studding a dead language such as Latin has to have a sense of humor. I took four years of it myself in high school. Just take a look at some of the books published in Latin: Winnie Ille Pooh (Winnie The Pooh), Cattus Petasatus (The Cat In The Hat), and Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. You can even sing Baby Got Back in Latin.

I have two favorite Latin phrases. The first I heard at this Latin festival of sorts where a group of students performed a short, funny sketch. One of the lines was "quid in Hades summus?" which means "where in the Hell are we?" The other was taught to me by my uncle: "ubi dubi exflagelatto” which means "when in doubt, whip it out."

Pee-C

Will a urinal replace a mouse as the primary input device of the future? I doubt it; but just in case some folks at the MIT Media Labs have a working, urine-driven input device.

Bloggers suck

This guy hates personal weblogs. He's posted a cynical, cude essay to tell the world why. While not necessarily scientific, it does make some interesting comments on the medium. For example, do any of these reasons why some people blog ring a bell?

Another show opens

Opening night of Dearly Departed is finally over. Everything pretty much went off without a hitch (at least i didn't screw up). They played to a theatre about half full, but the crowd graciously showed their appreciation with lots of laughs. Opening night crows tend to be more theatre savvy and catch more of the subtle humor.

We're getting pretty good back stage. We're running around most of act one thanks to all the scene changes and props; then when act two comes around, we just sit around. Our fun stage manager, Mary Jo, is preparing a crew competition each night and the winner will receive one of the extra prop Dilly Bars. I lost tonight challenge because i went apparently as up on my GR Civic Theatre trivia as the rest of the bunch.

The week of rehearsals leaning up today has been killing me. For example, today i got up, went to work, then school, finally the show, and then i return home sixteen hours after i left. I just run out of time to do the dishes in my sick, to clean all the dirty laundry, and to buy some groceries. I can't wait for the weekend; i'm looking forward to chores.

Prepositions

My friend Katie just called me. She was sitting at a bar in Seattle apparently having a discussion about parts of speech. The person she was chatting with was saying that prepositions are just adverbs and the names are interchangable. She disagreed and called me to use as a life-line to corroborate her opinion. I'd have to agree, prepositions are different from adverbs in the sense that they introduce prepositional phrases which can then act as either adverbs or adjectives. I remember in grade school we had to memorize a big list of prepositions but i'm pretty sure the list of adverbs is much longer.

Pencils up

The worst part of my first day of Calc 2 was getting there. It was like i was tunneling though a marshmellow. There was snow blowing everywhere. At times the roads were really bad; it felt like i was suggesting a route rather than actually steering my vehicle.

I was a bit freaked out a first about class because i started to look over the homework and i didn't recognize any of it. As soon as class started at 4:00 we jumped right in doing six or so derivative problems and then proceeded right into integrals, specifically the substitution method for solving them. Amazingly it all came back to me. It was like falling in love all over again. I still have a lot of work to do reviewing the first six chapters that we are skipping, but at least i know it can still be fun.

Say no more

The folks at Lake Superior State University take it upon themselves each year to trim and prune the English language of overused or misused words and phrases. Check out the 2004 list of banished words to make sure you are not guily of language abuse.

Where's the snooze button

I can't believe my alarm clock is going to go off tomorrow morning. I've gone about fifteen days without its morning chirping and i guess i was getting pretty spoiled. Vacation can't last forever. If it did, it probably wouldn't be called vacation; i guess it would just be life.

Hell Sunday froze over

Back in the theatre today, this time with actors. Everything went rather smoothly. For most of the cast, this is there first production at Civic so its taking some people some time to get adjusted to the stage. The show itself is a southern redneck comedy about a family coming together to bury their father. Sometime the play relies to heavily on exploiting stereotypes rather than creating more interesting situational humor. Nevertheless, once we get an audience in there i'm sure they'll have a good time.

I feel sorry for Rosalie who plays Delightful in the show. Her character has a total of three lines with a total of three words spoken. Her character is on stage quite a bit, but rather than talking, she's eating. We make her eat so much food on stage. Each night we have corn dogs, french fries, Oreos, gum, marshmallows, popcorn, Diet Verners, and Dilly Bars. After weeks of rehearsal, she was able to perfect a wonderful on-demand belch that must he heard to be believed. I had no idea girls were capable of making such noises.

Thursday is opening night and we close January 24. Get your tickets today!

Nearly arrived

I spent most of the day down at Civic preparing for Dearly Departed. We had a dry tech which is a rehearsal without the actors. I've been assigned to the stage-left side where i'll be responsible for setting and moving the rather large kitchen wagon. This should be an easy set piece to move except for the fact that at one point during the show it spins. After two unsuccessful attempts, the picture i posted shows them working on plan three to make that happen smoothly. It looks like we finally found a winner but if you see the show and something goes horrible wrong with a large moving kitchen, it's going to be my fault.