It’s been a little while since my last entry. In part that’s because I haven’t felt like I had any­thing to say and in part that’s because things have been soooooo busy. This week­end along has been pretty manic. To start of with I took the GRE. As you might have read or heard, I’m look­ing to go to grad school and the GRE is the Grad equiv­a­lent of the SAT. My test was admin­is­tered at a test­ing center on com­puter. The thing took just under four hours (bleh!) in a room that was far too warm for me to be wear­ing a sweater. The good part is that I got my scores imme­di­ately back. I didn’t do to badly (1780) but I dis­cov­ered I had for­got­ten some basic math and man­aged to bomb (in my opin­ion at least) the verbal sec­tion of the test. That really infu­ri­ated me. I tend to con­sider that my strongest area. But the $#@^ test man­aged to ask me ques­tions about words that I had never heard of, let alone knew. I’m seri­ously con­sid­er­ing read­ing a dic­tio­nary cover to cover to shore up my vocabulary.

Friday night, Don (my Exect The­atre Co cocon­spir­a­tor) and I took in a play at UofR called Closer. Great set. Nice Block­ing. But as for the play and performances… well… Great set. Nice Block­ing. I can’t rec­om­mend this piece. We couldn’t tell if it was just a bad play or a bad inter­pre­ta­tion. Prob­a­bly a little of both. I ended up going out and get­ting a drink to wash the taste of the play out of my mouth,

Sat­ur­day morn­ing I was up by 6.30am and dri­ving out to the middle of no where. Actu­ally Bath New York to be exact,; about an hour and half drive from Rochester. There, in the middle of woods and farm coun­try, I took part in a all day inten­sive Kali work­shop. Kali is a Fil­ipino weapons based mar­tial art that I have been involved with for years. We were work­ing sticks, knives and other nasty things from 8.30am to 5.30pm. My arms and hand today are a little sore. My right palm has a burst blis­ter pro­tected by a Sesame St Band-​Aid on it (I sorta like the jux­ta­po­si­tion [see GRE people I can cor­rectly use big words!] of it). I got a huge amount out of the day. The work­shop was run­ning for another day (they’re most likely out there doing mate­r­ial as I write this), but I had to get back to town.

As soon as I got back I was out the door again (after a hot shower and change of clothes) to take in my former pro­fes­sor and good friend Peter play­ing as part of a Jazz Quar­tet. They sounded great! As of late Peter had been feel­ing that he might been losing his chops on the Clar­inet. But he, and the folks he was play­ing with were really on. I was a won­der­ful way to cap off the day: sip­ping a good (though expen­sive) red wine, lis­ten­ing to a live per­for­mance of Hon­ey­suckle Rose. In ret­ro­spect, I shouldn’t have had the second glass of wine as I nearly feel asleep during the third set.

This morn­ing I woke up to dis­cover that my ailing com­puter is in worse shape then I thought. As such I’m going to take rad­i­cal steps: format the hard drive and rein­stall every­thing. So if you don’t hear any­thing from me for a few more days, it’s just because I’m trying to get the com­puter up and running.

ders: this is going to be a short one. Both because I have only 5 min­utes to post and because a cer­tain person *chough*tina*cough* at lunch com­mented that I can only write long ram­bling blogs

If anyone in the Rochester area read­ing this has a “Gold #10″ sticker from the Weg­mans con­test, let me know as I’ll be happy to split the $250,000 with you (as I’ve got #’s 7-9). My guess though is all the Gold 10’s ended up in the little known Weg­mans in the middle of Bali.

Other than that, I’ve been sick. Now I’m feel­ing better. I went to Pitts­burgh to see Di and check out CMU’s Inter­ac­tion Design Pro­gram. I’m con­sid­er­ing that or doing their one year HCI pro­gram + the one year inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Social Sci­ences degree at Uni­ver­sity of Chicago (basi­cally two degrees in half the time). That and I acci­dently cut myself demo­ing how to use a but­ter­fly knife (I was bor­row­ing one and the set up on this one was dif­fer­ent than mine) last night at Kung Fu. There you go, every­thing in two paragraphs… :-)

You can’t handle it

It’s been quite the week­end. So let me start off with the weekly apol­ogy to Jenny:

I apol­o­gize in advance for any damage Aaron does to your home (or his).

Yes­ter­day we all went bowl­ing to cel­e­brate Aaron’s birth­day (also Patrik’s and Chuck’s). Any hoo, after fail­ing to secure the Ninja Spi­der­man action figure I had hoped to (side note: How weird is the Ninja Spider con­cept? Basi­cally it’s Spi­der­man, in his Spi­der­man cos­tume, wear­ing a Ninja suit over it. Though that’s nowhere near as strange as the Extreme Sports Hero Spi­der­man.), I had to find another gift. After run­ning out of ideas I thought: “Hey, Aaron could use some mar­tial arts stuff….” While I was wise enough to stay away from the throw­ing stars, I did opt to get him two Ratan sticks that he needed for Kali prac­tice. While that was a good idea… giving them to him in the middle of a bowl­ing alley prob­a­bly wasn’t. Thank­fully, before any per­mi­nant damage was done, Jenny took con­trol and snatched them away, men­tion­ing some­thing about “how these would be per­fect for help­ing her toma­toe plants grow straight….” I don’t think she appre­ci­ated them as much as Aaron. We shall see if he has them at class tonight.

As for the rest of the week­end, Friday I was in pho­tog­ra­pher bliss. The new camera body I bought arrived late last Thurs­day: a Canon Elan II with Infrared focus system. The timing for it couldn’t have been any better. I’ve been shoot­ing my friend Tony (pic­tured above) dj’ing for nearly two years. On Friday Tony got played Red, a big club here in town; his first crack at a large venue. While my old camera (a Rebel 2000) has more focus zones than the Elan, it can’t handle dark rooms. As the clubs usu­ally are not the best-​lit places, I typ­i­cally had to rely on my eyes (which are also sketchy in low light) to focus. The result was a lot of fuzzy pictures/missed shots. Thanks to the Elan II and a 50 mm 1/1.4 lens, I finally got the chance to let auto focus do most of the work. And boy did it get a work out.. I shot about 8 rolls of film doc­u­ment­ing the night. They’re all get­ting devel­oped today… I can’t wait to get back the con­tact sheets. One of these days, when I get my lazy butt in gear, I throw up a gallery on this site.

Finally, I bought crack over the week­end; or the clos­est thing to it: a new game for my Playsta­tion 2. Make that a “new” used game (I refuse to pay full price). It’s a fight­ing game called DOA:Hardcore. I love fight­ing games; it’s the mar­tial artist in me. I’ve been think­ing about get­ting it for a while and finally gave in. Big Mis­take. Basi­cally Sat­ur­day evening and Sunday were lost to it. After get­ting home from my night out last night I decided to play a few rounds. Again, Big Mis­take…. I finally pulled myself away and looked at the clock. Imag­ine my sur­prise when I saw it was almost 1.00am. My name is Matt and I’m an addict…