Invader from an Alternate Dimension

I got tired of shaving my whole face this week, so the evil look is
starting to take shape.

Funny thing is, I carved out the shape of the Van Dyke (goatees are
chin only; no mustache) Tuesday. Thursday morning, as Brandi and I got
ready for work, she turned to me and said, "When did you start growing
THAT?" We'd been hanging out for a day and a half already. I think my
baby needs new glasses.

New Term Friday

It's Friday, and, not necessarily apropros to the day, I would like to coin a new term I'm finding a lot more in my job: a Vystery. This is the error that happens in Windows Vista that happens once, or perhaps over and over, and which has no obvious or search-friendly reason or solution. It just happens. It's happening to me, now, on a new tablet, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why this particular Fujitsu freaked out on me when I went into tablet mode, then refused to give me the Task Manager when I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL.

"Logon process has failed to create the security options dialog," is about as friendly as it got, which wasn't very.

Yet after restarting the little beast, everything was nearly hunky-dory, as though, in the locked room Agatha Christie mystery, the lights went out and the body just disappeared. Still, as your faithful computer Poirot, it's my job to see where that body went and who did it. And I'm looking at you, Captain Fellswarth. Your sordid history with Windows DLLs means it's entirely likely you kidnapped C:\Windows\system32\dbgeng.dll and stashed her in your secret cove, only to have her washed away with the reboot tide. Your days are numbered, Fellswarth.

Get Curious!

The weekend before last, Brandi and I gleefully took a few days off and headed out west to Portland, Oregon, to see Bob and Stacey. A bit of backstory on those two: Bob and I started working together years ago... a number perhaps measuring as high as a decade... when we both took classes at the Annoyance Theatre. Bob later joined the cast of my children's show, "Kid Mystery," which alarmed director Fred Mowery and I due to the fact that after we had cast him as the insatiable eater Tad Huff, he revealed he was a diabetic and shot up insulin three times a day. He also said it was okay, and that he wouldn't eat before a show, which in retrospect should have shown me just how dedicated Bob was to the art of performance.

Later on, I would have the pleasure of performing with Bob on iO's longform improv team, "Space Mountain," in ComedySportz, and forcing him to both sing and dance in my other children's show, "The Paper Spaceship," during which time he took his first tentative steps towards a relationship with his now-fiancée, Stacey.

Much to my regret, I would not have a chance to hang out with Stacey much until the formation of the movie making group, Monday Pictures. Time wasted! Stacey has a rich history in theatre, improvisation, animation, film making, production, and, oddly, credit history. She gave me good advice on everything. Stacey also performed with Bob's Playground improv group, International Stinger, and with the all-ladies group Firecracker. A woman of talent, Stacey had an extraordinary dream:

TO BUILD A THEATRE

So when Brandi and I went off to Portland, we felt a bit of trepidation as to what we would find. Would we have to "ooh" and "ah" after some two-bit shopfront operation, knowing that our amazing friends would some day turn it into a viable operation? Or would it be some seedy establishment, the burned out husk of a former porno theatre, abandoned after a developer's halfhearted stab at condo renovation? Or would there be nothing at all, an abandoned hobo's hat on the ground next to a cloth where seven wannabes performed their interpretation of Julius Caesar via an hour-long game of Freeze Tag?

I'm happy to say we saw none of those things. Curious Productions is going to be amazing.

The theatre space is enormous, as you cannot tell from this picture of Brandi with Bob, exposed steel studs behind them forming what will eventually be the coat room and part of the bar. With seating for 120 people, perhaps more with the balcony, the buildout has so far taken months and the time and efforts of many talented volunteers, all coordinated by Bob and Stacey, and all of which you can watch from the safety of the web, here. When we saw it, everything was wood studs and exposed drywall, but Stacey, who somehow holds all of this more or less in her head, hauled the architectural renderings out for us to show us how the footprint of the finished product would look. At the time when we first looked at it, we hadn't seen the space, so the stage looked a bit small to us, so we just nodded and smiled. Then we saw the space. The stage is normal sized, with a few steps up and a foldout handicapped ramp to accomodate wheeled humans and heavy sets. There's a classroom on the second story, a restaurant space, Men's and Women's handicapped bathrooms, a coat room, and additional bathrooms and showers in the back to accomodate bicyclists, of which there are many in Portland. In front, a water flows across a peaceful rock garden. It's THAT classy.

All of this would be meaningless without productions to put inside of it, which, to Bob and Stacey's credit, are numerous. There will be a sketch show, a musical, improvisation, and much, much more. Bob and Stacey are nearly tearing their hair out getting everything done, and yet they flattered us with not just their presence, but their company and conversation. It was one of those trips where I felt slightly guilty relaxing with (and occasionally without, as when Brandi and I took a short trip to the Portland zoo) my friends because I could tell there was always something MORE to do.

(By the way, the photos above are from a fancy restaurant Stacey took us to that, true to most fancy-schmancy restaurants, served amazing food with portions large enough to please a small cat. Brandi and Stacey had the tortellini with flavored foam. FOAM! I ordered and then gulped down glorified spaghetti with meat sauce, and Bob had the monkfish, which you can recognize because they shave their heads and live in oceanic cloisters. Afterwards, we went out to Ground Kontrol to play video games and try to talk amidst the general chaos of a Rock Band party, then over to Hobos, where we met friends and more or less ate dinner again. It was an amazing time.)

I can't wait to see what Bob and Stacey put together, because if it's half as good as what we saw in the pictures, it will be a million times better than anything we could have anticipated. We look forward to helping with that, as much as we can, stuck in this podunk Chicago neighborhood. It's going to be awesome.

If you would like to donate to the theatre, and I suggest you do, click here.

All-You-Can-Think

It's been my shame over the last four years to have worked for a university and not taken advantage of the free tuition they offer as part of my job benefits. In recent months, as chances of any significant pay raise changed from "slim" to "none," it became a kind of mission for me to squeeze the brain juice out of this State-run behemoth. And, yes, when I'm tired, I use big words. Litigate me.

Being a state-run institution, the University of Illinois runs atop an enormous bureaucracy that, if given the chance, would grind you underneath a mountain of its paperwork wheels. I should know. Two and a half years ago, I switched with a co-worker to the Alumni office, noticing as I did a small pile of equipment to surplus. The University requires us to follow certain procedures before we get rid of computer parts, so it took me a few months to determine the proper forms, their recipients, machine labeling and Babylonian deity and its preferred sacrificial meat. Still, the equipment sat. I stacked everything into a small wall atop the filing cabinets that for some reason took up a wall in the tech office and contacted my bosses in Urbana to let them know that their lackey in Chicago awaited their word on surplus. Nothing. They took away the filing cabinets shortly before we replaced more equipment. I re-stacked the equipment and waited. And waited. To this day: nothing. The air grows close in the confines of this office. Tell my wife I love her...

...at any rate, I had low expectations for any answers I had about taking classes, but it turns out that if you determine you want to do something here that does not involve a lot of heavy lifting and cross-campus coordination, and you go about it like an Agatha Christie inspector unraveling a locked room mystery ("SOMEONE here has the proper forms for a Graduate Student, Non-Degree Seeking, and none of us are leaving until I get it!"), you can shoehorn yourself into classes. Unfortunately, by the time I had lined up all my scholastic ducks, the easy class I wanted to take, Spanish, was irredeemably filled. I settled for something I knew would complement my job: CS 102, Introduction to Programming.

I like the class and writing Java input with things like the Scanner method (import java.util.Scanner; Scanner keyboard = new Scanner(System.in); userInput = keyboard.nextInt();) really rocks my world. Seriously, I'm courting obsession here. Studying has become something like a videogame, especially since the intructor uses a homework-tracking and programming site called CodeLab. There, you complete assignments, and if you've done it wrong, it marks it in red and gives you a chance to correct it. Once done properly, you get a little green box and move on. In class, someone asked a question several assignments ahead. I'm about a week behind in the reading and a week ahead in CodeLab because I WANT TO WIN.

It is funny to sit in class with people almost twenty years younger than me and compare our experiences. We took programming in middle school, writing BASIC or LOGO on Commodore 64s. Rich people owned computers with tape drives, or 5.25" floppies. My freshman year of college, my dad bought me a Mac with no hard drive, just two 3.5" floppies, and it was great. Yeah, and I walked six miles to class, uphill, both ways. These people grew up with the Internet. They take Open Source for granted. They think A-ha is retro. (They're wrong. Analogue came out in 2005.)

I also find myself going through all of the same anxieties that going to school used to bring out in me. Can I get to class on time? Will the teacher notice? Am I even in the right classroom? Laugh if you will, but I've already attended the wrong lab for the ENTIRE LAB. I also went to what I thought was the right lecture hall and started to get out my books when I realized that all the students around me HAD THE WRONG BOOK. Lucky me, I figured that one out in time.

I spent half of Monday morning running back and forth to the professor's office trying to log in to the University UNIX system, something I had not done because I'd foolishly taken two vacation days after Labor Day (for an awesome trip to Portland and my awesomer friends Bob and Stacey, and another trip-within-a-trip to Seattle to see equally-awesome friends Darrah and Jason; it was so awesome, I'm probably going to need a new adjective soon).

Sweat poured off of me as people approached me in the office, for my job, saying innocent things like, "Can you take a look at something weird that happened to my computer?"

"NO! I mean... can I come back? I've got another issue to attend to at the moment."

In the end, I find I sympathize more with those who juggle education with jobs, family, taxes and all of the 1,001 distractions of modern life. I hope I pass this class and, if not, at least acquit myself with dignity as I debug my dodgy code.