Saturday, 20th of January, 2001
Went to a the GPML math contest this morning at Flo Valley, and that went really well. Too bad Sandor got sick last night and couldn't make it, we would have kicked butt as a 6-person team, cause the 5-person team got 2nd place in the sweepstates, and 1st place in the team test. Wow. From what I hear (I wasn't at the awards ceremony), I got 1st and 3rd in sprint and target rounds, and other team members also racked up awards.
Tonight we went to Rolla for some Chinese New Year party, and I got sucked into playing a violin solo, but owell, I didn't practice, it sucked, but I enjoyed trying to fool people into thinking I knew what I was doing. The party wasn't all that great, I was thoroughly unimpressed, almost disgusted. I thought grad students had better things to do than attempt to have a talent show for New Years and take people on the stage to sing karaoke on pirated music videos.
Friday, 19th of January, 2001
I worked out today, for the first time in a very long time, and it was quite depressing. I am sooo out of shape, it took me 30 minutes to start sweating. And I had to halve most of my usual weight settings for the machines too. Yuk. I'm going to have to get back into working out.
I went to the YPCO concert tonight, it was so good! They played Phantom, and that brought back so many great memories... like 7th grade All-Suburban. And the arrangement they played was very very poppy, I liked that. I also like their conductor, he's so precise on everything, easy to follow, and I was just in the audience!
Afterwards Andrea and I went to Fitz's, where we met up with Beth, Paige, and Aime for a little Strolling Strings get-together, I guess. It was so much fun, we ate, then went to Starbucks, sat around till past 11.
Thursday, 18th of January, 2001
Hey, I had a dream last night, and I actually remember it! To start, I was writing in my PDA
and I realized I was accidentally writing with my ball-point pen. Then, the pen exploded and ink spilled all over it. Then it leaked into the casing and ruined the LCD screen. So that was depressing. Then I had another dream that we were still at Kansas City for the strolling trip. Our director called us all in and said that we were supposed to play Saturday but that we had to go home early because of a snow storm, and that we were all to come back on Wednesday, February 2nd to finish the conference. I looked at my schedule and I realized that it was finals week (which it wasn't), and I also saw that February 2nd is a Friday
(which, amazingly, it is! How on earth did I know that in my sleep?). That weekend was ALSO the weekend I was supposed to be at All-State Orchestra in Tan-Tar-A (which it isn't, but next week IS finals and All-State week, maybe I'm getting anxiety over that). So I threw a fit and voiced my conflict, and then voiced the fact that Feb. 2nd is a Friday. Our director told me she was sure it was a Wednesday, though, so I assumed it was the Wednesday before All-State, and I could still go to both. So then I decided to relax and I went into the Grand Ballroom and there was this really big stack of beds (kinda like they had beds stored at the Radisson Hotel in Clayton during a stroll once) and I jumped on it and bounced around, and then ended up on my bed. So that was my weird dream. And I'm glad I remembered this much of it, this is a fun addition to my journal.
Wednesday, 17th of January, 2001
Oh, I forgot to mention Friday that I brought home 3 old APS external drives from school. They are Syquest 200MB drives, and they all seem to work. Now I just need to find some media, and since it's SCSI, it can be quite useful.
Tuesday, 16th of January, 2001
I was putzing around with Adobe Imageready 2.0 today, finally got around to it, and it's actually a lot better than I expected. Adobe did a good job. True, the html it generates is not all that hot, in fact, it hardly even works, but you can customize the way it spits out slices so well, including the way it names files and all that stuff. Perfect for what I do, just hand-code, and then use Imageready to do the images, like it should. And it looks just like Photoshop too, I thought it would be some sort of helper app like Animation Shop.
Monday, 15th of January, 2001
I saw Anti-Trust today, it was really really cool! The plot was, I dunno, not all that entertaining nor profound, though the action was awesome! I loved all computer stuff! The only reason I like it so much is because of all the computer stuff involved, really, but that's enough to entertain me. And it was loaded with Handspring. All the PDAs were Handsprings. And the camera work was pretty tight too. There were some aspects of the story line that were thrilling, like the way Nurv frames people in the movie. Definately something I am glad I saw, I felt very much at home, especially at the beginning, where it rolled HTML all over the place. Though, the movie was clearly targeting Microsoft and Bill Gates too, which, I dunno, it's gone out of style. I was unamused.
Sunday, 14th of January, 2001
I kinda went concert-hopping today. I went to my brother's piano recital this afternoon. It was fun! Wow, I haven't been paying attention, and my brother has been practicing, and he's gotten really really good. I'm impressed. And it was a very efficient recital, they managed to get through 24 people in 1 hour. Then I went to the YPSO concert tonight. They were playing Dvorak's New World Symphony. It sounded really nice. I have totally forgotten how hard that piece is! I'm amazed that we played it 3 years ago in high school orchestra, I wonder how we ever managed.