3MF

Comedy of Errors auditions

Heritage Theatre will be holding auditions for Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors on Saturday August 7th from 12-5pm and Sunday August 8th from 12-3pm. They will be held in Spectrum Theatre's second floor rehearsal hall. They are looking for 4 women and 8 men 20-40 years old as well as 1 woman and 2 men over fifty. The show is full of twins so if you happen to look like someone, bring them with you.

Sheri Beth, the director, told me i should audition for the show when i was crewing for Morning's At Seven (which she was in). She said she wants to have a lot of physical comedy in the show and needed people who are willing to go there. At first it sounded like a lot of fun to me, but now i'm not sure i have the time to commit to the play. If i did get in, it would overlap a bit with Lady's Not For Burning and my class at GVSU which starts this semester. It's hard to do much of anything else when you're in a show and two back-to-back is quite overwhelming. I'll probably at least go to auditions because i'm one of the crazy few who actually like cold readings. We'll see what happens from there.

Two week's notice

Today is two weeks from opening night of production. We've been keeping very busy. This was the first rehearsal where we had to be complete off book. Everyone is doing a much better job with the lines. From here on out we have a few nights to work necessary scenes sprinkled amongst run-throughs. As we become more familiar with the lines, it fun to watch fellow actors start working more on their characters. There's something new every night to enjoy. Normally this would be the part of rehearsals where i get bored and restless, but this show is different. I'm not sure if it's because my part is well spread throughout the play so i don't have as much down time or if i'm just learning to better appreciate the process a play goes through to get ready for production.

And now, a few more of my favorite lines.

Working hard(ly) for his money

I got watch Ken Jenning's thirty-eighth win yesterday. It was the last new episode of the Jeopardy season so there will be a few weeks of reruns before we see him return to continue his streak. On that show, he set the highest single day winning amount with his score of $75,000 bringing his total winnings to over $1.3 million dollars. Each day this man is bringing home some serious cash. In just thirty minutes, he adds more money to his income than most people make working all year. In fact, i found a listing of average incomes by job so i could judge his daily success by identifying the career whose average annual salary corresponds to his winning total.

On July 2, he won the yearly take home for a bartender. On June 28, he was a file clerk. The week of June 7, he earned the income of a household that consisted of an iron worker, disc jockey, medical secretary, insurance underwriter, and computer service technician. He could easily hire and pay for his own construction crew thanks to June 2's sheet metal worker, June 4's plasterer, June 16's truck driver, July 15's forklift operator, and July 20's construction worker. Friday's win puts him at the level of software engineer, which, coincidentally, is his actual occupation. Imagine going into work for half-an-hour and taking the rest of the year off.

Practice, practice, practice

We've been in rehearsal for two weeks now and not once as the whole cast been in the same room at the same time. It's quite difficult work work a scene when two of out the five people in it are missing. Paul, our director, has played up to three characters at a time so we can run lines and review blocking.

The play is shaping up nicely. Everyone is slowing getting off book. I have a lot of work to do on my British accent; right now it sounds dreadful. We're going to do it as it was written, in three acts, each about forty minutes, with two ten minute intermissions (because we care about the audience). My biggest concern at this point is my costume which i've been told will consist of tights and little else. Damn period pieces.

Opening night is Thursday, August 12. In the meantime, here are some of my favorite lines from the sections we went over today.

Scripting for hotties

As i previously mentioned, i had some difficulty installing the LWP perl module, but i was finally able to get that done before i went to bed yesterday. I wanted to get that done because i had a reason to write a perl script from scratch for the first time. So far, the only ones i've tried to run are those I copied out of a book. It's the first time that i had a problem that perl seemed like the perfect tool for.

Here's what i was doing. I was going through the Civic Theatre web site logs, and i noticed an unusual number of referrals from the domain pickthehottie.com. I checked out the site and it's one of those sites where you can post your picture to see how "hot" you are by putting your face next to someone else's and where the casual web surfer can cast his opinion as to who is more attractive. The limited reporting options available from the GRCT site was unable to point me to the picture responsible for this traffic. I clicked around for a bit to see if i could stumble across it; but after spending more time than i should have on it, i determined this method was ineffective. I needed a way to automate the process. I choose perl.

Perl makes it very easy to grab the HTML from a web server via the LWP::Simple module. I just call get() function with something similar to "$html = get($pageURL);" and i'm ready to extract information. If you enter a particular picture code, the site will show you who that picture recently lost or won to. I grabbed one of those pages, and via the magic of regular expressions, extracted the URL to each competing image as well as its corresponding picture code. I stored picture codes that i came across in a hash and "pushed" a link to its own results page to an array. I then "shifted" through each of the values in the array to determine which page to crawl next. I used another regular expression to check each image URL i came across to see if it contained the "grct.org" domain. When i found one that did, the script would quit and show me the corresponding picture code.

It took me a bit of tinkering to get my script up and running. (My biggest source of mistakes seemed to be semicolon related.) When i finally got something that worked, i went to the site, grabbed a picture code from the home page to start with, and let it run. Surprisingly, it took about seven hops, and came back with my answer. It worked like a charm.

Admittedly, this was probably a silly thing to use perl for, but it's nice to know i can add a few more tricks to my bag in case a more important task should arise. Oh yeah - the guilty party? Laurie. He he he.

[Update -7/22/04] I went ahead and added the script to my code lab.

Scary install

I was trying to write a perl script when i discovered that the module i needed to use was not installed with my copy of Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar (LWP::Simple). I took me quite a bit of poking around to figure out how to install CPAN modules. Eventually, in the terminal, i ran sudo perl -MCPAN -eshell. I then entered the command install Bundle::LWP. I was then presented with a slew of questions that apparently would configure the way the script would interact with CPAN. I read each question but had no idea what it was taling about most of the time and accepted the default responses. A great many lines of wierd characters then flew by. Somewhere in the process, it decided to download and install the latest version of perl (5.8.5). This time it asked me even more questions which i was even less able to decipher. Again i pressed enter as often as possible to accept the default values and hope it doesn't screw anything up. The only thing i had to do was add a \usr\local\bin directory which it was looking for and couldn't find.

As i sit here, two hours after deciding to "quick download LWP," the damn install is still running. Truth is, i haven't a damn clue what it's doing. I don't remember the last time installing something was ever so scary. I'm sure part of the problem is that i'm still not that comfortable on a *nix command prompt. Typically i can do everything i want with the "pretty" part of my OS. I know where Windows applications choose to stick their files and how they work, but i really have no idea where everything is going. It keeps finding new "dependency" packages to download. Every time it asks, it runs a million tests that take forever to complete. Hopefully it will finish up successfully soon.

I hope this stuff gets easier over time.

[Update] I finally got the process to quit the next time it asked me if i wanted to add "these selected modules to the queue." When it got me back to the cpan> prompt, I typed force install Bundle::LWP. It seems with out the "force" open, OS 10.2 will bomb out on some Berkly DB tests it runs which trip up the whole install.

New to the desk

I saw these new Post-it note pads on today's trip to Office Depot. I just had to buy them. I need to stay out of that store.

Heavy reading

Perhaps one of the most beneficial things i walked away from my recent lunch with Jack, was a renewed enthusiasm for reading tech books. When i first started programming web stuff, i read them all the time. I bought a lot of books that gave me a good foundation for what i was getting into and i still use many of them as references today. After a while i began to buy fewer because i found out that i knew all i needed to fulfill the development requests i was being presented with and those books were getting darn expensive at around fifty bucks a pop.

I realized that the lack of new ideas may be the reason i was feeling my programming was getting a bit stale. First, i had my manager order up some books so we could expense them as training materials. That's how Code Complete arrived on my desk. Jack recommended it and they just released an updated version. I'm about two thirds through that one. Next, while surfing around for some code to help out a project i was working on, i came across a perl script that did just what i wanted. I thought i would try to port some of its ideas to VBScript but to do that i had to understand what it was doing. A co-worker happened to have the "camel book" in his collection so i've been reading through that as well. Maybe someday i can find an excuse to write a perl script of my one. I'm also about sixty percent through that one. Just yesterday i picked up PHP and MySQL Development to get me started on the Civic site redesign. While there are many good guides online, i always like something to flip though in front of me. (I hope the newly released PHP 5.0 isn't too much different.) Next i have two VB.NET books that i got a while ago but now have the desire to tackle more aggressively. Finally i have my script which can't get lost in the shuffle.

All together, that totals about 3800 pages of stuff that i want to get into my brain. I wish there were more hours on the day.

Read-through

Yesterday the cast of The Lady's Not For Burning got together for the first time. (Well, those that were able to make it and those for the parts that have been cast at least...ugh). We did a read-through, where we sat around a table and each read our parts. Thusly we kick off five weeks of rehearsals. We will be meeting Sunday though Thursday with a possible Friday if we fall behind. We will be working on blocking this week and need to be off book next week.

In fact, Spectrum Theatre was jumping with activity. Midsummer was rehearsing in the room next door and Richard II was tech-ing downstairs on the stage. If anyone should happen to blow up that building, they would take nearly all of the local acting talent along with it. At least those not in La Cage at Circle which opens this week. I got an e-mail asking me to crew that show as well but had to decline because of my prior commitment.

As i sit trying to commit my lines to memory, I keep thinking about the improv show i saw this weekend in Kalamazoo. One of my old Part Of A Complete Breakfast buddies, Dann, has his own team down there. They go by the name Crawlspace Eviction. I miss the days when five minutes of preparation were required before a show rather than five weeks. They even played some of the old games we did. Ah well, back to the memorization.

Link Dump

I've been setting aside interesting links for a while and i thought i should share my list just incase you haven't checked them out yet.

• Curveball - i can't stop playing this flash game
• Spiderman 2 - Lego style - large quicktime flick (a smaller one is available as well)
• How To Pick A Lock - incase you loose your keys
• The Blunder Years - when people use their Photoshop skills for evil
• Common errors in English - watch for common mistakes (this mistake drives me nuts)
• How Websites Learn - interesting perspective focusing on what happens to sites after they are "finished"
• Cornstarch and water [4MB wmv] - far more interesting than it sounds
• John Stewart's Commencement Address - here's the speech he gave to this year's William and Mary graduates
• Music Plasma - enter in an artists and discover related artists via and interesting graphical representation
• Pencil carvings - it's far more interesting than just chewing on your #2
• Dictionary of playground slang - incase you have no idea what your little cousins are saying (they also have games, songs and rhymes)

Dopamine

Jack's not the only one watching some movies this weekend. I went to Blockbuster and picked up a copy of Dopamine. Here's the clip from the back of the box:

As a computer programmer and a kindergarten teacher explore their attraction, they must decide if it's really love or just a chemical attraction.

I thought it touched on some interesting ideas; but that's all it did. It didn't explore them fully enough to be interesting. Nevertheless it's always nice to see a movie where a geek winds up with the girl without being given a makeover; especially when the girl is Sabrina Lloyd. I've had a thing for her ever since Sports Night. Overall i'm glad i watched it.

Change of plans

When i left work on Friday i had my whole weekend planned out. I could tell you where i would be for any given hour. But of course, when i go to such an effort, the universe goes out of its way to put me in my place. Things got rearranged or canceled because of circumstances out of my control I'm not necessarily complaining; some of my most enjoyable activities from the weekend were unplanned. It just reminds me that i should maybe change my Outlook password just incase the universe was logging in to see what i had planned. I don't want to make it easy for that omnipresent consciousness to screw with me.

Bring me a bucket

I was doing some work today updating a web site, and i just about threw up doing it. The HTML code had Frontpage 97 written all over it and the use of font tags and extraneous markup literally made me feel sick. It reminded me of when my parent's dog got sick and left an awful mess on the floor and i was the only on there to clean it up. In that situation, I tried to keep my eyes from looking directly at the mess taking full advantage of my less detailed peripheral vision. I took a break every now and then so the smell wouldn't trigger a vomit reflex. I used the exact same strategy with this website clean up. I had to walk away from my computer because i couldn't stand it any more. I deleted a bunch of lines but the page isn't exactly perfect. I decided to leave a tables and some crazy text formatting because the worst of it was out of there and i just couldn't look at it any more. I'll come back to it at some point to get rid of the rest just like i got rid of any trace of brown discoloration on my parent's white carpet.