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it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that javax.swing
Hm, I guess I haven't journalled yesterday or today.
So yesterday was work. Work is going sort of well, because they've been giving me Perl and XSLT work all week, and I just love that stuff. I was given the authority at work yesterday to do some major revamping of our web site, so I'll be moving and axing tons of files soon. Yay! Also, we had this amazing lemon bundt cake for a TGIF, which was yummy as heck.
After work Eli and I went food shopping and then came home to make spicy peanut sesame noodles and chicken, which was very good, although we weren't able to eat dinner until like 10:30 as a result. But, it was tasty, that's what counts. We drank sparkling apple cider, but the sweetness of it and the spiciness of the food didn't mix well for me.
I guess we spent the rest of the night playing 5x5 Boggle. We decided to impose a 5-letter minimum instead of 4. I (hello Deanna's ego) totally whomped Eli in most of the rounds. I'm not sure how that happened, except that I found some amazing words (including "romaine" twice)
Today we got up earlyish because I had so much stuff to do.
First we went to Volkwein's. I said, "Here's my euphonium. The slides are stuck." The lady said "Hmm, that sucks. Well, we have our ways of making it slide. I'll be able to work on it Tuesday - if I don't call you Tuesday, call here and find out how it's doing, ok?" So hopefully they won't have to do any major heating/welding/assembly stuff... sigh. After that I talked to one of the instrument sales guys about possibly renting a flute. They have a really sweet rent-to-maybe-buy deal, where if you rent at all, and later decide to buy, all the money you've put into renting goes towards your purchase. It'd be like $35 to rent a flute for four months. That would be sort of cool. I wonder where I could really learn to play it and do some stuff though. If I got a simple flute exercises book I could probably teach myself to read music, and since I already technically know how to play a little bit, it'd mostly be getting melodies and fingerings and all that I'd need to practice.
After Volkwein's we went to the Beaver Valley Mall! I got to play a lot on the DDR 4th mix machine there. w00t! I mostly practiced Korean songs on trick (because I can't practice them at home). I totally nailed Sung Suk and Tell Me Tell Me, but wasn't quite as strong as I thought I'd be on BaKkwo and Wa, and did ok but not great on Bu Dam, and utterly couldn't do Face. So, maybe my strategy of trying to pick Korean songs because I'm better at them will only work partially. Oh, so there's a DDR tournament at Beaver next Saturday, basically, incase I haven't mentioned that yet, and I plan to enter in the Trick category (because let's face it, I am a solid 6-foot player, and an iffy 8-foot player, so Trick is better than Maniac for me).
We got lunch at the mall after DDR (yay Chick-Fil-A) and then came back home so I could go to CMU for the OGS party.
It was a Super Puzzle Fighter 2 / DDR party (heh). I brought SPF2 and let the OGS guys burn a copy, because basically it is totally out of print and they'd have to spend like a hundred bucks to buy a club copy of it. (I don't usually go for copying video games or letting people copy them (I wouldn't let people copy DDR 5th mix, as some of you know), but in this case because it wouldn't make the company any money for them to go get a used copy, I figured what the heck, plus I wouldn't have to show up and stay for the whole time during SPF2 events). So I played a couple people at SPF2 and won every single time (I think people are starting to get scared of playing against me. Although, Justin could have beaten me once if he'd noticed and dropped a breaker properly. I was playing as Chun Li though, which is a big handicap for me). I played some DDR and that was fun too. Then Duggan thought it'd be fun to get Pump it Up, since he has the home version, and Julian whose PSX2 we were using heard that I had Para Para, so... we did a games run, first by Duggan's for PIU and the pads, and by my place for the Para Para controller (Julian had a hacked region-free copy of the game) and by Julian's for the game and for some cables.
So in addition to lots of DDR, I also played some PIU and did a lot of Para Para moves. The Para part was really cool because after we got it set up (and that took a while - the PSX2 was being really futzy with the Gameshark - eventually standing it on its side made it work), usually one person would be playing and then like ten people would be around them, imitating the women in the para para videos on the screen. It was way cool. Ross Higashi took some videos of it, I don't know if I'm in any of them, but it should be cool when he posts them. Oh yeah, so speaking of Ross, he's just such a good DDR/PIU/etc player. Duggan and Bayani were doing Beethoven's Virus (it's sort of like the Paranoia of PIU, one of the hardest songs) on Hard, and barely stumbling through it, and then Ross and Hawaiian Brian both did it and were like doing all of these fancy spins and stuff. It looked SO cool. So, it was a lot of fun. I hope they do another event like it sometime, although I know they're worried about the OGS becoming "the DDR guys" or something. But... hmmm... maybe starting a Bemani club would be fun. If only I had more than one TV, I'd throw bigger Bemani parties and stuff like my 20 November one...
So, of course, after being at the OGS party for like 5 hours and dancing a ton, I came home and showered and changed into nice clothes to... go dancing. Yeah. So I went to Wightman for swing dancing, with Trey and Alisa and Alisa's brother and Alisa's friend whose name I didn't catch. We also met up with Pat Riley and (...Marianne? I forget) and other CMU CS people were there, like Adam from volleyball, and Benoit, and Dave McWherter. So not only did I have a ton of guy-friends (and girl-friends - I like leading) to dance with, but I was actually asked to dance by several strangers! That was really cool. So I danced a ton, and had a great time. It's always fun talking to Dave because we always find out we have random stuff in common, and we were having fun dancing a fake Lindy Hop. And Benoit is a really fun person to dance with in general, and I love dancing with Trey (we got to waltz!!! we also did this great time where we'd quickstep for a while, then switch into swing, then into quickstep, then back... and then I broke out laughing and totally lost it for the rest of the song) and it was really funny to try to lead Barbara because I used to be so good at that but I'm out of practice. Also, Barbara gave me a Christmas present of a Harry Potter bookbag. Ha! It is way cute, although I don't know what I'll actually use it for. Benoit said that of course I should use it for bringing my shoes to swing dancing and that I should go more often. So, we'll see.
What a long day. Now I'll go eat some ice cream and go to sleep or something.
Oh! And I forgot to mention it, but I finished my big baggy loose socks today knitting in the car on the way to and from Beaver. Wheeeeeeeee!
And in other exciting news, I got email randomly from this one cosplayer guy who has been DDR's Rage at a bunch of east coast cons, that I think is totally cool and snagged a bunch of pictures of for my DDR Cosplay page... he was like "hey! your page rocks! I think it's so cool you have all of these pictures of me on there! can I link to you? do you want more pictures?" which is awesome because I keep worrying about someone going "hey, how dare you put this picture of me on your page, I hate you and I'm going to sue you" or something. So, whee! That is so cool.
So yesterday was work. Work is going sort of well, because they've been giving me Perl and XSLT work all week, and I just love that stuff. I was given the authority at work yesterday to do some major revamping of our web site, so I'll be moving and axing tons of files soon. Yay! Also, we had this amazing lemon bundt cake for a TGIF, which was yummy as heck.
After work Eli and I went food shopping and then came home to make spicy peanut sesame noodles and chicken, which was very good, although we weren't able to eat dinner until like 10:30 as a result. But, it was tasty, that's what counts. We drank sparkling apple cider, but the sweetness of it and the spiciness of the food didn't mix well for me.
I guess we spent the rest of the night playing 5x5 Boggle. We decided to impose a 5-letter minimum instead of 4. I (hello Deanna's ego) totally whomped Eli in most of the rounds. I'm not sure how that happened, except that I found some amazing words (including "romaine" twice)
Today we got up earlyish because I had so much stuff to do.
First we went to Volkwein's. I said, "Here's my euphonium. The slides are stuck." The lady said "Hmm, that sucks. Well, we have our ways of making it slide. I'll be able to work on it Tuesday - if I don't call you Tuesday, call here and find out how it's doing, ok?" So hopefully they won't have to do any major heating/welding/assembly stuff... sigh. After that I talked to one of the instrument sales guys about possibly renting a flute. They have a really sweet rent-to-maybe-buy deal, where if you rent at all, and later decide to buy, all the money you've put into renting goes towards your purchase. It'd be like $35 to rent a flute for four months. That would be sort of cool. I wonder where I could really learn to play it and do some stuff though. If I got a simple flute exercises book I could probably teach myself to read music, and since I already technically know how to play a little bit, it'd mostly be getting melodies and fingerings and all that I'd need to practice.
After Volkwein's we went to the Beaver Valley Mall! I got to play a lot on the DDR 4th mix machine there. w00t! I mostly practiced Korean songs on trick (because I can't practice them at home). I totally nailed Sung Suk and Tell Me Tell Me, but wasn't quite as strong as I thought I'd be on BaKkwo and Wa, and did ok but not great on Bu Dam, and utterly couldn't do Face. So, maybe my strategy of trying to pick Korean songs because I'm better at them will only work partially. Oh, so there's a DDR tournament at Beaver next Saturday, basically, incase I haven't mentioned that yet, and I plan to enter in the Trick category (because let's face it, I am a solid 6-foot player, and an iffy 8-foot player, so Trick is better than Maniac for me).
We got lunch at the mall after DDR (yay Chick-Fil-A) and then came back home so I could go to CMU for the OGS party.
It was a Super Puzzle Fighter 2 / DDR party (heh). I brought SPF2 and let the OGS guys burn a copy, because basically it is totally out of print and they'd have to spend like a hundred bucks to buy a club copy of it. (I don't usually go for copying video games or letting people copy them (I wouldn't let people copy DDR 5th mix, as some of you know), but in this case because it wouldn't make the company any money for them to go get a used copy, I figured what the heck, plus I wouldn't have to show up and stay for the whole time during SPF2 events). So I played a couple people at SPF2 and won every single time (I think people are starting to get scared of playing against me. Although, Justin could have beaten me once if he'd noticed and dropped a breaker properly. I was playing as Chun Li though, which is a big handicap for me). I played some DDR and that was fun too. Then Duggan thought it'd be fun to get Pump it Up, since he has the home version, and Julian whose PSX2 we were using heard that I had Para Para, so... we did a games run, first by Duggan's for PIU and the pads, and by my place for the Para Para controller (Julian had a hacked region-free copy of the game) and by Julian's for the game and for some cables.
So in addition to lots of DDR, I also played some PIU and did a lot of Para Para moves. The Para part was really cool because after we got it set up (and that took a while - the PSX2 was being really futzy with the Gameshark - eventually standing it on its side made it work), usually one person would be playing and then like ten people would be around them, imitating the women in the para para videos on the screen. It was way cool. Ross Higashi took some videos of it, I don't know if I'm in any of them, but it should be cool when he posts them. Oh yeah, so speaking of Ross, he's just such a good DDR/PIU/etc player. Duggan and Bayani were doing Beethoven's Virus (it's sort of like the Paranoia of PIU, one of the hardest songs) on Hard, and barely stumbling through it, and then Ross and Hawaiian Brian both did it and were like doing all of these fancy spins and stuff. It looked SO cool. So, it was a lot of fun. I hope they do another event like it sometime, although I know they're worried about the OGS becoming "the DDR guys" or something. But... hmmm... maybe starting a Bemani club would be fun. If only I had more than one TV, I'd throw bigger Bemani parties and stuff like my 20 November one...
So, of course, after being at the OGS party for like 5 hours and dancing a ton, I came home and showered and changed into nice clothes to... go dancing. Yeah. So I went to Wightman for swing dancing, with Trey and Alisa and Alisa's brother and Alisa's friend whose name I didn't catch. We also met up with Pat Riley and (...Marianne? I forget) and other CMU CS people were there, like Adam from volleyball, and Benoit, and Dave McWherter. So not only did I have a ton of guy-friends (and girl-friends - I like leading) to dance with, but I was actually asked to dance by several strangers! That was really cool. So I danced a ton, and had a great time. It's always fun talking to Dave because we always find out we have random stuff in common, and we were having fun dancing a fake Lindy Hop. And Benoit is a really fun person to dance with in general, and I love dancing with Trey (we got to waltz!!! we also did this great time where we'd quickstep for a while, then switch into swing, then into quickstep, then back... and then I broke out laughing and totally lost it for the rest of the song) and it was really funny to try to lead Barbara because I used to be so good at that but I'm out of practice. Also, Barbara gave me a Christmas present of a Harry Potter bookbag. Ha! It is way cute, although I don't know what I'll actually use it for. Benoit said that of course I should use it for bringing my shoes to swing dancing and that I should go more often. So, we'll see.
What a long day. Now I'll go eat some ice cream and go to sleep or something.
Oh! And I forgot to mention it, but I finished my big baggy loose socks today knitting in the car on the way to and from Beaver. Wheeeeeeeee!
And in other exciting news, I got email randomly from this one cosplayer guy who has been DDR's Rage at a bunch of east coast cons, that I think is totally cool and snagged a bunch of pictures of for my DDR Cosplay page... he was like "hey! your page rocks! I think it's so cool you have all of these pictures of me on there! can I link to you? do you want more pictures?" which is awesome because I keep worrying about someone going "hey, how dare you put this picture of me on your page, I hate you and I'm going to sue you" or something. So, whee! That is so cool.
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