LeRoi Moore 1961-2008

We saw his last show before the accident, down at Nissan. He was as energized as the rest of the band had been. This was to be the most awesome year for the band in a long time. Instead, he’s gone. This sucks.

RIP, LeRoi.

Expanding the theater manager’s repertoire

So, I just got home from Charleston, where I attended the TCG conference titled the same as this blog entry and…

Well, I had 8.5 hours driving back to consider the whirlwind 48 hours there, and I came up with two words to describe it: “Profound” and “Transformational.” And I’m not really given to superlatives when it comes to my professional life.

There were 60+ managers running the gamut of responsibility in professional theater (artistic & managing directors all the way down to interns) participating in four sessions that were absolutely stuffed to the gills with information. Sometimes seminars like these are sales pitches or unguided attempts at sharing information, but this was not that.

I have to synthesize a lot of what I’ve absorbed in Charleston. Some of the synthesis started even while the first session this morning was going on, as folks were discussing the nature, pitfalls and bonuses of change, when I sort of suddenly got a very clear picture of where WMTC is in the grand scheme of things in American theatre.

A couple of hours into the drive home, I realized those two keyword descriptors mentioned above.

Then I took a dump at the McDonalds in Selma, NC. Then I came home.

I may or may not write more about the conference, as I’m not really wont to discuss my professional life on a blog. I just wanted to place a notch at this moment in time, because I genuinely think this is truly a before/after moment.

Sunrise

Seeing the sky change in a million ways within few minutes? Sooo worth the lack of sleeping. This is just one moment from vacation. Click for a larger version.

Bullet points for the time-impaired

Some things I’ve been doing since my more-or-less undomcumented return from California. I may or may not ever write anything more about these particular topics, though I would like to.

Tessitura. If you sell tickets for a living, you’ve probably heard of it. If you’ve gone through a transition to Tessitura, you know how I feel when I say, “Go Live is in 10 days”.

Ubuntu. My experience with personal computing goes back almost a quarter of a century, but when I installed this exceedingly popular Linux distro (as a dual-boot with Vista) a couple of weeks ago, it was the first time I’d used a totally new operating system in over 15 years. I like it, and I don’t.

Oblivion. I’ve played Morrowind for the better part of two years. It is the only game I’ve come across that lets me wander aimlessly through the game without being really task-oriented. Oblivion is the next installment, and while I haven’t spent a whole lot of time with it yet, I like what I see. And I just discovered a mod last night that lets me go back to Morrowind (a far better use of Oblivion’s new gfx engine than the places you get to see in the out-of-the-box edition of the game).

Dave. Went to Nissan 6/28. It was hella hot but was a great show. Saw LeRoi’s last show before the ATV accident, saw the first show they broke out Sledgehammer, the first time they did “The Space Between” in about four years. And the crowd didn’t really piss me off that much. I still detest Nissan as a venue, but I will go back for Dave.

New cell phone. I’ve had a Nokia 6102i since October 2006, and it has functioned completely without incident in that entire span (unlike my two previous Nokias, in which either the screen stopped working, or I stopped being able to hear people though they were able to hear me). The problem I’m having is that the shell these Swedes decided to put on the 6102i is absolute crap. It’s been shedding plastic bits here and there for the past year. It’s now held together by six strategically placed segments of spike tape. It’s coming to the end of the road, however, because now one side of the joint holding the flip-lid in place is starting to give way. And it’s not like I’ve abused this phone. I’ve dropped it, tops, four times in two years. So I’m starting to look at new phones. Right now, this is what is capturing my fancy.

Coming up: I have not one but two business trips scheduled for August. So if there’s anything you want me to pick up for you in Charleston or Nashville, let me know.

By the by, there are all sorts of pictures from the California trip posted on my Flickr page (just two, really), many on Jenn’s flickr page and in Jenn’s photos on FB. If you want to gaze, head thither.

NASA hackled? (UPDATED)

Went digging around on NASA’s site after watching the stuff on the Discovery Channel about the space program tonight. Apparently, either someone at NASA has a bizarre sense of humor, or someone’s been rooting around NASA’s image servers swapping out files. The link to the NASA page in question is here - it’s the third image down, with a caption claiming the photo has something to do with survival training for the Mercury astronauts. In case it gets repaired before you get a chance to see it, a screen shot of what I’m seeing right now is here.

UPDATE (6/29/08): A big Hoot-Hoot to loyal reader Mr. Bird (yes, the Mr. Bird) who pointed out another instance of the suspect photo elsewhere within the Tubes of NASA. I contacted the Public Inquiries section at NASA about the photo, and they assured me that it is real photograph: “Portions of their clothing have been fashioned from parachute material, and all have grown beards from their time in the wilderness.  The purpose of this training was to prepare astronauts in the event of an emergency or faulty landing in a remote area and may be found at http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/ABSTRACTS/GPN-2006-00001.html.”

So there you have it. My budding career as a web watchdog, quashed in its infancy.

Ojai is where they build teh Hot.

I’m sure Ojai is a perfectly lovely town when there aren’t three digits in the temperature at 11:00 in the morning. I’m sad we won’t get to experience that part of Ojai.

I think the word “microclimate” was invented for areas like this. Ojai’s a town about 18 miles north of Ventura, California. Ventura’s on the ocean. Ojai’s in a valley sandwiched between two mountain ranges. On our drive to Ojai on Thursday, the temperature in Ventura was 75 degrees. The temperature when we arrived in Ojai less than half an hour later was 105. Driving down 150 late last night, we would experience temperature swings of up to 8 degrees in less than a quarter of a mile, and for the entire duration of our drive watched the thermometer in the car go from 75, down to 67, up to 83, back down to 64, then finally back at 72. (The course we took was 150 East to a road that runs parallel to 101 (wherever 150 ends, make a right), and eventually back to 101 and then 33 back to Ojai.)

I’m a little concerned about how I’m going to hold up for the first four hours of this wedding in a suit.

Click on the image to see the large version.

Weirdest. Day. Ever.

The hits were coming fast and furious yesterday, in what amounted to one of the strangest days I’ve experienced in a long time.

Folks living here probably won’t forget this particular Friday the 13th in a while. We were all greeted first thing in the morning by a massive blackout that affected the eastern half of downtown, in a rectangle stretching from 3rd St on the east to F St on the south to U St on the north to 13th St on the West. That would be the functional equivalent of 140 square city blocks. That brings to mind a term I learned in Urban Planning 101: Clusterfuck.

Add to that the fact that there was a fire on the tracks at Metro Center (for you non-DC readers, that means the station at the center of the metrorail system) which forced a closure of that station. Add on the closure of the Dupont Circle station which - even though it is outside of the aforementioned rectangle - was nonetheless without power, so they closed the station instead of making people trudge up that Stairway to Heaven 19th Street. Add to that the other fire on the tracks near Metro Center, and you have yourself a textbook boondoggle. (To make my morning commute just that much more fun, there was also an accident a block from my house in the direction I was headed.)

I spent the better part of my work day before noon watching the mess. The excitement from that eventually faded until about 3:45, when I got the call from my mom: “Hey, I just got home from work and NBC just broke in. Tim Russert died.”

I didn’t watch Tim religiously, but I tried to catch him whenever he was on. As much as it can be said I have a routine on Sunday mornings, I tried to watch the Sunday talk shows and C-SPAN, maybe read a paper or, more recently, the stuff that pops up in Google Reader. Tim had that style of delivery that I trust almost implicitly. I don’t know what it is, and most of the media have spent the better part of the last 48 hours trying to define it better than I ever could. Suffice it to say that one of the few true journalists left in America was lost to us on Friday.

Late Friday night, as I was starting to think about turning in for the evening, I hear a bit of commotion from the living room. Jenn then says, “there’s a cat sitting outside the window.”

“What?” I asked, incredulous.

“Tribble was just hissing at the window.”

I went out to the living room, and sure enough there was a beautiful calico sitting on the ledge outside one of the windows. I went outside to see what was going on. This cat immediately approached me, which kind of freaked me out, because feral cats don’t do that. They run on sight of humans.

After determining the cat was just really friendly and not crazed in some fashion, I agonized for several hours about what to do about her. She wanted desperately to come inside the house (as much to visit the cat she’d seen in the window I assume, more than anything else), and she was pretty hungry but not in any way emaciated. She had long hair on her tail that was without a single knot. She looked really well cared for, so it was just odd to see here on the block in the front of the house, where all I ever see are the feral gang.

Jenn and I sat outside with the cat for a while, and the cat was just thrilled about that. She would roll over onto her back and almost fall asleep - decidely not a sign of a cat who was worried about harm we might do to her. The only feasible option (because there are two cats who already reside on the first floor here) seemed to be to leave a little food and water out for her and hope that she belonged to someone who would be letting her back in for the evening soon.

I called the DC Humane Society for a little advice, and after listening to my description of her appearance and demeanor, and after checking to see if there was a cat reported missing in the neighborhood matching her description (there wasn’t), confirmed our opinion that she was probably an indoor/outdoor cat whose owner just let her out for the night and the cat just decided to go exploring. The woman I talked to suggested keeping her inside for a night, then posting signs about a lost cat and such, but that wasn’t really a practical option for us. So I stayed up and hung out with the cat for another hour or so, then went inside. Sleep wasn’t really an option, so I tooled around reading article after article about Russert, and would go out about once every half hour to see if she was still around. A pair of times she was still sitting out on the porch looking in the window, but the other few times she would be somewhere else and show up after a minute or two of me standing outside. I hoped that meant that she was down the street waiting on her own porch for her owner to come home, and she came back when she heard me come out looking for some more attention (which I dutifully provided).

Eventually, 5:15 rolled around, and I was falling asleep sitting out there with her, so I told her to not play in the street, come back if she needed to eat, and stay out of sight if she was going to take a nap (as the feral toughs in the neighborhood would probably have kicked her ass if they saw her). I then went to bed. Getting up at 10:00 this morning, I went outside to see if she were still around. After 5 minutes she did not show. She hasn’t been around all day either, according to Jenn.

If you or someone you know in B’dale lost a calico with markings like the ones seen in these pictures, comment on this entry.

But seriously. Weirdest. Day. Ever.

PS: I’m not even going to mention the thing Riska posted, because that was just overload.

Where did the “Nobama” folks go?

In the last couple of months, I’ve been watching - with the same prurient interest as the aftermath of a traffic accident - the strident, militant pro-Hillary web sites and the vitriol with which they’ve been screaming about a fixed primary process, Obama’s blatant sexism (?), his secret Muslim plan for the nation (?!?), etc. Many of the commenters on these sites have been swearing to all things Holy that they will vote for McCain in November if Hillary did not get the nomination.

I don’t doubt the fervor and passion of her supporters, nor do I begrudge it. In the 2000 primary, Bill Bradley was my choice, and I felt that he’d been smeared unfairly by Gore during the primary debates. But I have to question the reality of these Hillary/McCain people.

I expected a couple of these sites to have the wind taken out of their sails following the RBC last Saturday, then the final primaries on Tuesday, and finally after Hillary’s concession this past Saturday. Indeed, there were a few magnum opuses over the weekend as posters peeled away from the boards in dispersal patterns closely resembling the end of the Hillary speech at the Building Museum and in the days preceding it.

But one thing I haven’t noticed, because I also read these places, is a new influx of people on right-leaning sites saying, “I was a Hillary supporter, but now McCain’s my man.”

Which leads me to believe that much (not all) of these Hillary-cum-McCain supporters were fake, probably part of Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos effort to skew the numbers in the Democratic primary process. There are a few people who I have to believe are firm in their decision to support McCain, for whatever reason. But I am beginning to get the feeling that their numbers are nowhere near as large as their echo chambers led some to believe.

The House, part 2

As I have tended to do in the past few weeks, I came home and took a nap after work. This one was short - only about an hour, because I was woken up by a dream I’ve been wanting to have for quite some time. The details aren’t really important, and now that I’m several hours removed from the dream, the details are also unavailable. (Very much like this xkcd comic.)

The house of my dreams

So, for a very long time - if not as long as I can remember - I’ve had a series of dreams all with the same backdrop: a house.