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We got fifth place at the Greenfield tournament yesterday.  It was an awesome day.  Very tiring, but very fun.

I just got back from Sin Nombre at Amherst Cinema.  It was really good, but extremely scary.  I would not recommend it to anyone who can’t stomach violence.  That said, I didn’t find the violence to be gratuitous.  I dislike movies where the violence is for no purpose other than to sell, and I didn’t feel that way at all about this one.  It was a scary story, and one that needed to be told in the way it was.  I think I will write a longer review of it soon when I have more time.  Tonight I need to finish a paper for school tomorrow.

Also, I now am the owner of a megaphone.  Very useful.

I have discovered how to make floating tooltips appear over a block of text.  Or over anything, I suppose.  The possibilities are endless.

I suppose this is a rather simple concept, but somehow I’ve never run across it before.  I am PSYCHED!  There is so much I can do with this!  I will probably start implementing it very soon on this site.  I will have to think about cool content to put there to keep people looking.

It’s been a while since I wrote.  I have been very busy and very tired.

The NMH tournament was awesome.  We got destroyed (we were 0 and 5), but we won the Spirit of the Game award, with an unprecedented-at-that-tournament perfect score of 50/50, receiving a 10/10 from each of the five teams we played.  We got a nice plaque, and everything.  After the tournament, me and some friends, including one from NMH, went for a quick dip in the river.

That night I went to a late show at the Iron Horse, Gokh-Bi System.  They are a sort of funk/hip-hop/fusion sort of band, with members from around here, and Senegal.  They were great.  They had three frontmen from Senegal, who would rap, sing, drum and also dance.  They also had this sort of designated dancer dude who would come up onto the stage at certain times and do incredible dances.  We danced a lot in the audience, and people were coming up on stage all the time to dance with the band, and throw money all over them.  It was fabulous.  I think I may buy some of their music from iTunes, now that it is DRM-free.

Sunday I went to see that same friend from NMH’s senior honors recital, which was also fabulous.  He played two pieces with piano accompaniment (on violin and viola), and played viola in the string quartet he wrote.  This was the first time that piece had been performed, and it was really good.  He wrote it mostly this winter, immediately following the unexpected death of a friend from leukemia.

Two other students played at the recital, one on drums, and one on piano.  Both were excellent, and after the show there was a reception with those sort of round wafers with chocolate filling in the middle, and strawberries.  Also there was confectioners’ sugar to dip the strawberries in, which I had never done before, but which was great.

I have been getting very little sleep in the past few nights because of mounds of homework, which will continue tonight.  With that in mind, I will say that Arlen Specter is a very brave soul.

RIP, Frankie Manning.  We will miss you.

I am working on a pretty excellent shell script that resets a Mac OS X computer back to factory defaults.  This is useful for when I do a clean install at work and then need to install after-market software.  I create an initial user account, install the software, and then run the script to remove the user, leaving the installed software in place and ready to use when a new account is created.  As it is right now, the script does what it’s supposed to do.  I think I will give it a few more features and make it a little prettier, and then put up a link to it here, as it could be pretty useful.

We have an ultimate tournament on Saturday at NMH.  We are in the A division, which is cool because it will be really competitive and awesome, but not cool because a lot of our newer players will not get much playing time.  That is a bummer.  I went to the Y tonight and am going again tomorrow, so I will be in excellent shape on Saturday.  I think it is important that I have been exercising regularly when the tournament comes around, so it is not a shock to my muscles to suddenly be doing work.  I had an awesome workout tonight and am looking forward to another tomorrow.  And now, sleep beckons.

I set up my Brown email address!  It redirects to my Gmail account, and I can send mail as it from there.  This is awesome.

Tomorrow I am going to be at Brown for the day at a program for admitted students.  I will get to meet people, see cool presentations, and such.  I am also planning to spend a bunch of time in Providence and just generally browsing the campus to get a feel for it.  This will be the first time I have visited since I was admitted, and I am looking forward to it.

Sleep is now my highest priority.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today has arrived.  Vinyl is fabulous.  I highly recommend this album.

I didn’t get home until about three in the morning, so I took the day off from school today to sleep and catch up on work.

The concert was amazing.  The orchestra itself was really cool; a blend of people from all different countries.  The conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, was incredibly fun to watch.  He had more expression than almost anyone I’ve ever seen before.

Four ten-thousand-watt (I think) projectors covered the entire ceiling and back wall of the stage of Carnegie Hall.  Before each piece, they would show maps of where the composer lived, as well as periodically showing videos about select performers from the orchestra, compilations of audition videos during intermission, and some really cool multimedia stuff during a few pieces.  During John Cage’s Renga and Aria, for instance, they projected the shapes and syllables he used to notate the piece, which is pretty cool sounding.  Will and I got a look at the control room for all of the video, and it was intense.  There were racks and racks of complicated audio-video and computer equipment, and all sorts of things we didn’t understand at all.

The orchestra also played Ride of the Valkyries, which is pretty much the most epic piece of music ever.

For me, the two highlights of the performance were the Internet Symphony No. 1, Eroica, composed and guest-conducted by Tan Dun in its world premier, and a piece they did with Mason Bates, a really awesome electronic DJ.  He played with the full orchestra.  Dun’s piece had a part for car rims which were played with ball-peen hammers.

The irony of wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt in a concert hall named after Andrew Carnegie did not escape me, and I think it was responsible for my being rejected by an interviewer from the BBC, who I guess was looking for people more well-dressed than us.  We were a rather odd-looking group.

We hung out in Times Square for a while beforehand, got some excellent food from a street vendor, bought some hip-hop (which we listened to on the way home), and almost purchased some Obama condoms (“Michelle approved, ladies and gentlemen”, and “Create your very own stimulus package”), but they were $5, which was not practical.

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra is a historic event, but not for the reasons I had originally been thinking of.  In terms of the formation of musical groups, the real democratizer was the recording process.  In that respect, this is really no different.  But it does really represent the way that classical music, and, indeed, the idea of collaborative music in general, is changing in response to this type of technology.  It opens up new ground for the way music can be composed, put together, and performed.  I am excited to see where it goes from here, and I am proud to have witnessed this event.

Also, this post has more categories than any I have ever written before, I think.  It is just that awesome.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about how society is going to change as the effects of global warming play out and we run out of fossil fuels.  We have a lot of thinking to do about how we want to restructure to avoid starving people.  It is going to get a lot harder to feed people.

I think the solution is to start centralizing the population around farming areas, with efficient public transportation to allow people and goods to be efficiently moved within relatively small areas.  Importing food from long distances is a luxury we cannot afford.  Areas of the world that cannot be used efficiently for farming should become centers for power generation (by nuclear fusion ideally), and research into such techniques.  That way, any safety concerns associated with running power plants will be removed from the population, and the land will be put to good use.

The current model of people living far-flung, away from distribution centers, and having to drive to get their food, is completely unsustainable.  We need to create small, localized, microeconomies that are self-sufficient in terms of food.  Electric power can be transported over long distances by the use of high-voltage lines, so it is no problem to create that thousands of miles away.  But goods such as food can no longer be shipped long distances, because that is the source of most of the energy expenditure associated with them.

We also need to scale back on our use of commodities; we need to consume less.  Some products require special facilities to be manufactured, and if we go through them too fast, we will waste energy getting them from place to place.

On the other hand, if we have enough clean energy, that won’t really be a problem.  Nuclear fusion has the potential to produce an immense amount of energy with almost no harmful byproducts.  If we harness more efficient electrical engines to power our machinery, we should be able to live comfortably without having a negative impact on the planet.  That balance is the key.

There is no intrinsic disadvantage to modernization.  The problem arises when we ignore the natural order of things, when we forget that as the dominant species, we are in a unique position to screw ourselves and everything else over with our tremendous influence on the planet.  That influence is both our greatest asset and our greatest liability, and we must tread carefully around it.

Our plans changed rather suddenly this evening.  We were not able to go to the rabbi’s house for dinner, so I instead went to our synagogue’s community Seder.  And this was no ordinary seder.  Deval Patrick himself, the governor of Massachusetts, arrived, and ate with us.  I managed to corner him before he left, and talked to him about charter schools.  I had heard that he opposed them (which I doubted, as it is an oversimplification), and he vigorously denied it as I had thought he would.  He did make the very interesting point that what Massachusetts has not done such a good job of is using charter schools as “laboratories”, as he put it, and applying what we learn from these schools to the district system.  Building off of this, I would say that the reason people are often angry about charter schools is because they don’t see any benefit to having them.  If we look at charter schools as a government investment that allows a new perspective on public education, we see an immediate benefit, as long as those perspectives are used constructively.  I don’t know what specific legal steps Patrick plans to take to make this more of a reality, but I appreciate the clarity of his goals, and his willingness to communicate them.

I got a photo with him, but I was using my mom’s celphone camera, and did not save it properly, so it is gone forever.  So it goes.

I just purchased the MacHeist bundle.  I am not using all of the apps in it, but just for the ones I am using, $39 is a fabulous price.  As Wil Wheaton said, I really hope that BoinxTV gets unlocked.  Anyone who has a Mac should by this package, save a bunch of money, help charity, and get awesome apps.