Rough Draft

More Winter Activities

I followed up last weekend's cross country skiing with yet even more winter activities this weekend. On Friday, Jeff, Dana, Jacob, Setsuna, Lynn, and I went to the free ice skating at the skating rink on Mayfield. This was the first time I had skated since going to the same thing last year. I really enjoy skating, though I still don't know how hockey players and figure skaters can do it so well. I'm decently good at skating, though. I don't feel like I'm going to fall down, and I can turn around and stop fairly well.

Then last night Angie, Tim, Dana, Chris, Jeff, Phil, Lynn, and I went to the Chalet ice chutes for tobogganing. It was a lot of fun. It cost $8 and we went down 5 or 6 times. Lynn was a little hesitant about doing it, because she really doesn't like the feeling of losing her stomach. Fortunately, you could buy a $3 ticket for one ride and then pay $5 more for unlimited rides. After trying it once, Lynn enjoyed it and upgraded her ticket. I was quite happy about that. After we were done riding the chutes, we went into the warming house and bought slushies.

We had dinner at a nearby restaurant called Mad Cactus. As the name implies, it was a Tex-Mex restaurant/bar. The food was pretty good and decently priced. The best part of the restaurant though was that we got to sit at this large round table in a gazebo-like setting.

Valentine's Weekend

Lynn and I spent Valentine's Weekend with her parents and their friends in Pittsburgh. Lynn's parents had been planning to visit their friends, and then asked Lynn if she and I would like to come. The main plans for the weekend were a contra dance on Friday and cross country skiing on Saturday, neither of which I had done before.

Contra dancing turned out to be pretty fun. Well, technically the dance we went to was contra squares. Normal contra dancing consists of 2 long lines of people dancing rather than the squares of 8 we did. Lynn and her parents showed me some of the standard moves before we went to the dance. At the dance, before a particular dance was done, the caller took everyone through the moves that would be done throughout the song. Overall it was pretty easy to catch on, and after the first couple songs, I felt like I was doing reasonably well. One other fun thing that happened at the dance was during the intermission four women did a very impressive clogging performance.

Saturday we went cross country skiing at Laurel Mountain, which is about an hour and a half east from Pittsburgh. Lynn's parents had brought a pair of skis and ski boots along for me to use. I fell down quite a few times, and my skis came off a couple times, but overall I made out fairly well. The main reason the skis came off was because I had a hard time attaching the boots to the bindings. It involved lining up 3 holes on the bottom of the boot with 3 pegs on the binding very precisely. We skied for several hours before making it back to the warming hut and having sandwiches and hot chocolate.

After dinner (delicious Italian Wedding Soup) we played a game called Ubi. It's a lot like Trivial Pursuit, only its mainly geography oriented, and all answers are found by locating a point on a map. It was an interesting game and pretty fun. After that we played a couple games of 15. I actually picked up a run in one of the hands.

It ended up being a really fun weekend, as I expected, and I managed not to embarrass myself too much trying all these new things.

Rock Star

Freshly Squeezed Software released Rock Star yesterday. It's a fun "Name That Tune" kind of game that uses your entire iTunes Library as its source of songs. My friends and I had some fun playing around with it last night. We all listen to different kinds of music though, so the person who's computer we are playing on has a distinct advantage. Last night I only played with specific playlists, but I'm looking forward to playing using my entire Library because I know there's a ton of stuff in there I haven't listened to in a long time, so it should be interesting to see how well I know that stuff.

Revolution on Canvas

The book, Revoluion on Canvas: Poetry from the Indie Music Scene, that I pre-ordered from Ad Astra Books came yesterday. As the title indicates, it's essentially a book of poems written by members of a large number of the bands I listen to, including Something Corporate, Finch, Midtown, Further Seems Forever, The Starting Line, and many more. Unfortunately, I had a lot of work to do last night, so I've only looked through it a little bit. After I get a chance to sit down and read it, I'll probably post some of the favorite poems I find.

AAA Night

A group of us went to AAA (Asian American Alliance) Night on Saturday. It is a celebration of the Lunar New Year and includes dinner and entertainment. There was plenty of good food to be had, including the delicious Mini-Buns for dessert. The entertainment lasted about 2 hours and included a Fashion Show, dancing, solos, kung fu, and a performance with Chinese Yo-Yos. The entertainment started off with Case in Point (the a capella group Lynn is in) singing the National Anthem.

The two best performances were the Chinese Yo-Yos and the candle dance, which involved multiple people dancing while holding candles and two people had candles on their heads. The whole dance was very impressive. At the end of the show, the president of AAA wanted to recognize the seniors and called them up individually to receive a rose. We assumed this was going to be for members of AAA, but rather it was for people who were part of the entertainment, so Lynn was quite startled when her name was called first.

iTunes/Pepsi Promotion

I won my first free song from the iTunes/Pepsi promotion today. Since I ate breakfast at Fribley with Lynn this morning before going to Music Theory, I decided I'd just hang out in KSL until my Japanese Literature class. On my way to KSL though I decided I'd stop in Thwing and buy a Pepsi with my CWRUcard. This is the first Pepsi I've bought since the iTunes promotion started, so I can't complain about being 1 for 1. There have been several messages to the Mac Users Group mailing list about other people winning a song or two after buying only a couple bottles. I wonder if vending machines on college campuses have a higher number of winning bottles in them, it would kinda make some sense to do that...

New Domain and New Hosting

Several weeks ago I signed up with 1and1's free 3 year hosting deal. I had been hosting this blog on my laptop, but I've been taking my laptop to class most days, so that wasn't acceptable hosting anymore. Last night I finally got around to moving my Movable Type installation over to 1and1. It was actually really easy to do. I just uploaded my blog directory to the server, changed the database settings in MT, exported my database into an sql file and reloaded into the new database. I've also added

RedirectMatch (.*)$ http://jaronmars.com$1

to the .htaccess file in the root of the webserver on my Powerbook which is where the Rough Draft domain still points. Also, once I get around to playing with CSS I'm planning to redesign the layout of this blog.

Goodbye Ed

This Friday marks the final episode of Ed. Though I didn't know this until last week when they said in the previews that there were only 2 episodes left. Does anyone know why it got cancelled? I had the impression that a fair number of people watched it. Of course we can partially blame Phil for it, since every show he has started watching has gotten cancelled (Family Guy, Futurama, Invader Zim).

I just started watching the show last year, and have really enjoyed it. The writing for the show is excellent, each episode is filled with wonderfully witty lines. Ed's best friend Mike is probably my favorite character just because he's so entertaining. Michael Ian Black as Phil Stubbs is also a great character. I really want to see the rest of the episodes from the earlier seasons. Hopefully it will come out on DVD or show up on BitTorrent sometime in the near future. I also hope some of the actors (Tom Cavanaugh, Michael Ian Black, Josh Randall) show up on other shows.

Ohayocon 4

A bunch of us from Case went to Ohayocon at the Hyatt in Columbus from January 23-25. This was the first anime convention I've been to. I've been wanting to get down to Otakon in Baltimore with Mike the last few years, but haven't yet.

We arrived Friday afternoon and went to the J-Rock panel where we heard some samples of J-Rock music and talked some about various J-Rock bands. After that Lynn and I watched the first 5 episodes of Kodocha no Omocha (Child's Toy). Then we went to Who's Line is it Anime? which provided a good bit of entertainment. They had several professional voice actors performing there. I don't watch much dubbed anime, and therefore am not too familiar with the voice actors, except for the DBZ one's that MIke has mentioned to me. Indeed, one of the voice actors there was Scott McNeil, who voiced Piccolo in the DBZ dub. After Who's Line Is It Anime?, we went swimming in the hotel's pool and played some Marco Polo which is something I hadn't actually done before.

On Saturday, Lynn and I got up and went to the Anime Music Video Contest at 11. We got there early enough that we got front row seats, which was cool. There were quite a few good videos, including one done to Yatta. After that we went to the Dealer's Room. There was a lot of interesting stuff there, though I resisted purchasing anything. The main thing I was interested in was a Kenshin wall scroll. After wandering around the Dealer's Room for a while we went back to the room for some lunch and then hung out at the pool for a while.

Saturday evening we went to the Cosplay for bit. The skits were really rather boring, so we didn't stay too long before heading over to the DDR tournament. We got there shortly before the semi-finals started, and wow did we see some amazing players. The best combo we saw was by the person who ended up getting second and it was a 1129 (coincidentally, the same as our room number, weird eh?). All of the semi-finalists racked up 500+ combos several times. That was fun to watch, just because the people playing were so insanely good.

At 10 Lynn and I went to see Millenium Actress which I really enjoyed. It had shown at the Cinematheque last semester, but Jeff, Lynn, and I went to see Bend it Like Beckham instead, so I was glad we got to see it. There was supposed to be a 5 hour dance in the ballroom starting at 11:30, but the live band Blood didn't finish until after that. Lynn and I waited around until about 1 while they were setting up for the dance, but we got tired and just went back to the room. We found out the next day that it didn't end up starting until 2:30, so I'm glad we didn't wait that long.

Besides all the events, there were a lot of people with really good costumes. A huge amount of pictures can be seen here. Lynn dressed up as Jubei Chan on Saturday and 5 people took her picture (3 of them in the span of a few minutes). Her picture can be seen here.

All in all it was a really fun weekend.

RENT

Lynn and I went to see RENT at Playhouse Square Center on January 11. It was a really good show. Lynn has seen it a couple times before and I had heard of it, but didn't really know much about it. Before going Lynn drew up a who's who diagram for me of all the characters which helped me figure out the characters more quickly and follow the story better. I haven't really gone to see many Broadway musicals, but I had a good time seeing RENT so I'm glad Lynn suggested going to see it.

I'm Still Here

My blog posting was extremely sparse in January, not intentionally though. There's been lots of stuff I've been meaning to write about, but I just haven't gotten around to it. I'll be making several posts about stuff that's been going on since I got back to school, and I'll try to keep up with posting more often.