3MF

Fingers crossed

I heard some talk today that the last show in Actor's season might be Take Me Out or Urinetown. I'm hoping for the latter; I very much want to see that show.

Back in black

Don i now my black apparel as i once again head back stage to crew a show. This time the show is Morning's At Seven* and the location is Circle Theatre

When i agreed to help out, i knew very little about the show. I remember that the revival was nominated for a Tony award or two a few years back. From the title, I figured it was probably going to be some sort of tragic drama which isn't my favorite type of show to crew. I got ever more worried when i showed up for the run-though and saw that practically the entire cast was over sixty. I had to speak loudly and repeat myself frequently when talking to them. Every once in a while, i'd hear one of them hacking something up. It's not not i hate old people; they just scare me.

I went into the house was the actors began. I took the opportunity to just sit and watch the show, something i don't always get the chance to do when i crew. Quickly i learned that the show was funny. As awkward as the old folks were back stage, they were sharp on stage. Living that long gives you a chance to build up many years of acting experience. The chase scene is hilarious; old people running is always amusing. The actors don't have to work too hard because the script itself is pretty amusing. I think you should check it out if you can.

I don't have a lot to do on the deck. Right now my only real task is to ring a phone ten minutes into act one. I'm also responsible for presetting props and cleaning up. It's really going to be rather boring for me. I think i'm only being kept around because i'm the only crew member on the deck. The sound guy, light board op, and stage manager are all up in the booth. If anything should go wrong, i'm the only person down there to handle it. It's really more like baby-sitting than crewing. I should probably review my CPR book just in case a member of the cast start to see a bright light off stage.

This is my first time back stage at the new Circle space and its taking some time to get used to. There are a lot of doors around and every time i open one i'm still not sure what i'll see on the other side. I'm a bit disappointed with what i've seen so far. It's a really nice building, its just not a great theatre. There are parts of the design that seem clumsy. There are lots of plus around but not where they'd be really helpful. Sightlines are bad thanks to gaps where it's impossible to hang masking. To get to the stage from the dressing room, you have to pass though several hallways without monitors where you loose touch with what's happening on the stage. I suppose that i had really high exceptions seeing as how they had the opportunity to build a dream theatre. All my complaints are from a technical perspective and i doubt it would effect the enjoyment of the audience so no big deal.

So anyway we open this Wednesday and have performances Tue-Sat at 8:00 PM with Sunday matinees at 3:00 PM. The final performance is Sunday, June 20.

* If you're crazy about punctuation like me, you might wonder why the title has an apostrophe. Well, the title comes from a Robert Browning poem where it's the contraction form of "morning is" rather than the possessive construction as i had first incorrectly thought.

Tech support

At work, i now have the privilege of just focusing on programming without having to worry about supporting users when their computers don't work I did quite a bit of that when i first started there but i quickly got sick of telling people to reboot. I'm out of practice at troubleshooting problems with applications that i didn't write so i find myself calling the help desk to find solutions rather than wasting my time with it. However once people know you as a "computer guy," they think you can solve any PC problems.

I got a call today from my old boss at JA, Mr Dieleman. He was the president of the local JA office when i was just a student in the program and he's the one that asked me to come back as a member of the JA staff to run the evening company program. The last time i saw him was about five years ago. He's an brilliant man and i always looked up him. I'm in his debt for the many great opportunities he opened up to me, so when his voice mail asked me to call him back because he was having "major computer troubles" i didn't think twice. I at least had to try to help.

I picked up his troubled machine and took it into the office to see what i could do. He has XP Home edition installed on the computer, but when i turned it on, nothing came up. It wouldn't even start in safe mode. I tried booting from the Windows CD in recovery mode and when i tried to list the files on the c: drive, it came up with absolutely nothing. I tried running the XP install hoping i might be able to do a repair, but the install program informed me that "the partition is either too full, damaged, unformatted, or formatted with an incompatible file system." The only thing it would let me do was format the drive. Before i permanently wiped everything off the drive, i plugged my error message in the goolge search box in a hail mary attempt to save the files on the computer.

I found a page that seems to make these symptoms sound like the result of a virus. Apparently the files may still be recoverable by sticking the hard drive into another working computer in slave mode. Luckily i had some help from the guys at work who are more hardware savvy than i to accomplish this task. We got it all wired into an old retired work box and amazingly enough it worked! I copied over the contents of his "my documents" folder to the hard drive of the surrogate box.

I figured all i had to do now was reinstall Windows XP and i'd be all set. However, i received another surprise. When i returned the hard drive back to its original machine, it initialed some sort of scan disc that it hadn't been able to do before and just started working again. Somewhere in the computer parts juggling act i performed, the bug died.

Most people would be happy with the end result; but these are the kind of things that scare me the most. Now i really have no idea what caused it, exactly what fixed it and how to prevent it from happening again. At least by getting the machine running again i was able to increase my hardcore geek credibility score by a few points. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that the same problem doesn't pop up again any time soon.

An old friend

Have you ever run into a friend that you used to spend a significant amount of time with but now don't see much. You get a little nervous when you see them because you know you just don't have that much in common anymore and that carrying on a conversation will involve coming up with a cleaver answer for the dreaded "what have you been up to" question that doesn't sound too egotistical as well as other meaningless "nice weather" idle chatter. Sometime people though no fault of their own simply become distant.

This is what it's like with me and my TI-89. I bought her back in January. We had an amazing semester together. Our powers combined produced an unstoppable math-problem-solving team. However, now she's sitting on my desk getting a bit dusty. Occasionally i do a bit of adding, but i don't want to insult her by asking her to balance my checkbook. She's better than that. So here we stand.

I am taking a math class next semester called "Communicating In Math." I'm told it will involve writing formal proofs which is something i've never really done before and sounds quite interesting. I'm hoping it will give me and my TI-89 a chance to reconnect. I'd hate to lose her companionship forever.

If they'd only let me

The last part of my busy weekend involved attending a fundraiser for Actors' Theatre. The put on a benefit performance called "If They'd Only Let Me." The idea was that local actors would get the change to sing a song from a musical that they would otherwise never be able to do. Guys sang parts for girls and adults sang songs for kids. It was a fun show. There were some amazing performances and i was exposed to some cool songs i had never hear before. Kelly Carey sang the crap out of Fathers and Songs from Working. Two guys from Bat Boy did a great job playing Siamese twins singing Side Show's Who Will Love Me As I Am. I don't think i'll soon be able to forget seeing Greg Rogers "bump it with a trumpet" to Gotta Have A Gimmick from Gypsy. Even if all the performances had sucked, they served chocolate covered strawberries at the dessert reception after the show so i can't complain.

And if you haven't heard, Actors' announced their 2004-2005 season. It starts with The Exonerated which tells the story of six people who wrongly spent time on death row. During the holiday season you can catch The Rocky Horror Show in all its glory. Next you can see Edward Albee's Tony award winning The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?. After a few years of trying, they got the rights to The Ladies of the Camellias which tells the story of a fictional meeting between two theatre divas in the 1890's. The last show of the season hasn't been announced yet was they are hoping to scoop up a freshly released show.

Sun safety

We carry a new line of hard hats and safety sun-glasses at work. This is what happens when you try out the new product near a co-worker with a camera phone. Thanks Dan.

Back from Houston

I've returned from my trip to Houston. The flight was OK. It was direct from Grand Rapids to Houston on a little express jet. The plane holds fifty people and was quite full both there and back. The twenty or so aisles were configured with two seats on one side and a single seat on the other. A nice surprise was the yummy snacks they served. (The one with the crackers and salami was very tasty.) On the flight down, i got a great view of Chicago; from our height it looked just like a souvenir snow globe on the coast of lake Michigan prominently featuring a tiny Sears Tower.

The rental car was in my name so i did all the driving. Texans like their highways high up in the air. There were a few ramps i went on where i had to repeat to myself "don't look down" so i didn't freak out. After leaving the airport we headed straight to the house of a former Rapidparts employee who cooked us up some delicious chili dogs. When our hosts began to nod off, we headed to the hotel.

The next day, we arrived at MCFA (a bit later than scheduled thanks to my wrong turn) and spent much of the day in meetings. In our breaks, i snuck around to check out the new building. The lobby makes a good first impression. I also wondered around the cubicles looking for names I recognized and introducing myself. I discovered i'm not very good at accurately prediction what people will look like based upon the sound of their voice on the phone.

When we finally returned to GR, i didn't bring back as much i thought i would. We talked for quite a while but we really weren't coming up with new, great ideas as much as working out details of existing projects. No one really wanted to make changes to how the applications i designed worked; they just wanted them to look different. I will gladly leave those details to the designer and return to my other projects.

Texas here i come

I leave for Houston in a few hours. This is by no means a vacation. I'm going down for a business trip to meet with some folks at our parent company. Certain people seem to think that this sounds exciting or fun. I have to disagree. My agenda has me in meetings all day (and i'm really not good in meetings). Then in the evening, as seems to be the custom with our companies, we will go out to dinner with the home team. Finally, i'll retire to some hotel to try to get a good night's sleep.

I've been down a few times before and i always feel out of place. When you spend all day in a foreign office, you have nothing to call your own. I miss my computer and my cubicle. There is no private space to retreat to where I can actually do some work.

I should start packing now. I'd like to get my place in order before i leave as well. I'll let you know how it went upon my return.

Database away

I had been working on a database for about a week for a new project. I set up my tables, views, and stored procedures. Then yesterday, we moved our SQL server onto a new hardware cluster. We copied over all the data to the new, faster boxes. That is, all the data except for my brand new database. Somehow it got lost in the shuffle and completely disappeared. I couldn't find a stray mdf file or even so much as a transaction log for my new friend. Luckliy there was no real data in there yet. Today i started building everything all over again. It's definitely not as much fun the second time around.

Sir Mix-A-Little

They found someone else to run the light board, so i'm just working sound for The Cherry Orchard. The sound board is far more intimidating than the light board. It was may more sliders, dials, knobs, and buttons. When you run lights, you just hit the "go" button when the stage manager says so. With sound, i have to operate the MiniDisc player, adjust the output to the correct speaker, set levels for each cue, and manually bring the volume up and down. There is a much greater opportunity for error with this gig.

I did just fine tonight for the final dress rehearsal. Tomorrow is opening night. If you're coming down, let me warn you that Wealthy is all torn up. You may want to use the parking lot off Sigsbee just behind the theatre if you're not driving some sort of heavy duty SUV like this guy:

Into the orchard

Today i got a call asking if i would crew The Cherry Orchard for Heritage. The show opens this Thursday so i figured they must be pretty desperate. I couldn't think of a reason to say "no" so i agreed to do it. I'll be running the light and sound board. It's funny that T.M. just happened to post a link to a story about a guy pretending to be Anton Chekov, the author of The Cherry Orchard who died in 1904, at a Barnes and Noble. If you want to see what the show is all about, performances are Thur-Sat, this week and next, at the Wealthy Street Theatre.

Database dropdowns

I've spent the most part of the day running the SQL Enterprise Manager to design a new database today for our latest project. One table in particular stores information about lift trucks (go figure) and there's a field to specify what type of power the truck runs off of. A lift truck can run with LP, gas, electric, or dual (LP/gas) configurations. Normally i would set up a table which would store each of these values in a row and assign each one a key (usually a single character or tinyint) and then store the key value in the master table. However i remember reading a weblog post look up tables and the author said this was a horrible way to do things from a database perspective. I found others who agreed.

I never studied database design from an academic perspective. From what i've picked up over the years, I've learned to throw together tables that seem to be logical, have limited duplication of data, and store no calculated values. After reading his comments, what i really have in my table is a domain rather than a relationship. Therefore, i've coded the power source field as a varchar(8) and added the proper check constraint to only accept values of "LP", "Gas", "Electric", or "Dual". As the author suggested, I put together a view to pull the list of possible values which the web application can use to populate drop-down boxes. Because this particular application isn't that demanding, i doubt this style change will have a significant performance improvement but i'm willing to try something new if its supposed to be a "better" way of doing things.

Pretty happy person

Today i got PHP and mySQL up and running on my Mac. This will help because i've been asked to take over the maintenance of the Grand Rapids Civic Theatre web site and the site isn't hosted on a Microsoft box as i'm accustomed to. Now i can play with these new technologies at home to diversify my programming skills. In addition, i'd like to work on a redesign as well and start getting some of that data into a database to serve up some good content without creating a bunch of static pages. Don't expect any big changes anytime soon; i'm kind of busy with other stuff at the moment.

More Mystery TV

At 7:00 today, channel twelve again aired a sit-com. It was called My 11:30. This time it starred Jeff Goldblum. I haven't seen him on TV since the original iMac ads. The story line was based around Jeff's character's visit to a shrink. In a series of flashbacks the audience is introduced to his fast-paced job, crazy neighbor, and broken marriage. The show was written by Paul Reiser and it definitely had a Mad About You vibe. I also recognized Brian Stokes Mitchell in the cast. Actually, i recognized his voice first; he appears on the cast recordings for the musicals Ragtime, Man of La Mancha and Kiss Me Kate. I wonder how may broadway stars dream of breaking into television? I guessed he is willing to give up singing for an audience for more money.

I did some more research on that other sit-come that starred Maccaulay Culkin and Busy Philips and found out that it's called Foster Hall. I found someone that attended the taping of the pilot less than a month ago. Apparently Conan O'Brien's production company is behind the thing.

This week happens to be Kids Week on Jeopardy. They had a whole category devoted to Reading Rainbow and LeVar Burton read all of the answers. The only question i got wrong the whole game was from that category. My perfect sweep was ruined because i couldn't identify Stellaluna from her picture. Who is this crazy bat? My favorite episode of RR ever was the one where James Earl Jones read Bringing the Rain To Kapiti Plain. "Butterfly in the sky...i can go twice as high."

TV sneak peek

The other day i was flipping through the channels and caught a show i didn't recognize so i stopped to see what is was. Yes, it's sad that i watch enough television to see that something doesn't look right in the middle of swift channel flipping. But anyway, it was a sit-com and it had Macaulay Culkin and Joey's slutty roommate from Dawson's Creek as a sister/brother duo. It was a bit crude, but funny. The weirdest part was that is airing in channel twelve, the cable market place channel. You know the one that usually just runs some lame powerpoint-like presentation featuring used cars and new homes? When the show ended it just had one of those television-blue screens with "the end" simply titled in the center. I thought it to be quite odd.

Then today, i was giving the thumb a workout on the channel-up trampoline and when i went passed channel twelve, it said "Cable Preview - 1:28." The time was counting down and i just had to see what would happen when the numbers reached zero. After the screen went dark, yet another unfamiliar show began. The title sequence identified it as "Meduim." It was about this woman who works for the justice department and can talk to dead people. Use uses her gift to help solve crimes and whatnot. It also concluded with same, simple sign off.

I can only guess i stumbled across some sort of test-marketing for pilots of new television programs. I've just never seen anything like it before. I wonder if these shows have a chance to appear in a regular programming line up.

Don't panic

This weekend i read Douglas Adam's A Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Someone lent the book to me last summer, but i got distracted and never quite got around to starting it. Now i have to track down the owner to return it.

Being the geek i am, i probably should have read this years ago. My reading list usually seems to be filled with non-fiction reference books and it's not that often that work my way though a book for purely recreational purposes. I think i shied away from this book in particular after a bad experience with the co-called "classic" Dune by Frank Herbert. Dune was dense and filled with princess crap which turned me off to sci-fi fiction. I barely made a dent in it before bailing. In contrast, The Guide was light, fun and cleaver with plenty of humorous twists. If you haven't already read it, i recommend doing so.

New shoes

Today i purchased a pair of tennis shoes. The last time i did this was probably 1999. You see, i don't often have a need to run or to move excitedly about. A nice pair of casual shoes is capable of getting me from place to place.

I had a hard time find exactly what i wanted. Now, most athletic shoes are so ornate or come with a switches and leavers. I didn't wan to have to read directions to figure out how to put the shoe on. I just wanted a simple pair with just a bit of flair. I finally found some Nike's that met my requirements. The best part? They were on sale.

Boy do they look new. They are gleaming white which is a great contrasts to my old pair whose original color i'm unable to determine without the help of forensic science. The aglets are crisp and intact; the vamp is tightly laced; and the insole is thickly cushioned. When i wear them, it's like i'm walking on a fat guy's ass. These shoes have put an extra spring in my step.