DaveWells.us

Well, I think I’ve worked out most of the bugs in this new design. Please let me know if you run across any­thing weird or non-functional. Either e-mail me  (davedav­ewellsus)   or just post a com­ment to this entry.
Along with the new look, I’va added a cou­ple of new fea­tures in the side­bar. The first of these is the Ran­dom Image. This will pull an image at (some­thing approach­ing) ran­dom from my photo gal­leries. It’s set to take images from all gal­leries, so you never know if you’ll end up with a red­dish egret, some brown­ish water, or a bluish bas­soon­ist. Below the ran­dom image, the name of the gallery in which it resides is given. You can click the gallery name to see that gallery as a whole, or click the thumb­nail to see a larger ver­sion of the image itself.
Directly below the Ran­dom Image is a sec­tion called My del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a site that’s described as ‘social book­mark­ing.’ There’s quite a bit you can do with it, so check it out if you’re inter­ested. Any­way, I’ll tell you what I’m doing with it. Often, I’ll see some­thing online that I think is inter­est­ing or funny. Except in rare cir­cum­stances, I don’t bother mak­ing blog posts to pass on links. It would be time con­sum­ing, and I rarely have any­thing to say other than sim­ply “check this out.” I’ve incor­po­rated a script into my side­bar that will dis­play the last 10 things I’ve book­marked with del.icio.us. It’s updated dynam­i­cally, and I can book­mark pages from any net-connected com­puter. So, the links should change fairly often.
Well, I hope that you enjoy the new design of my site, and will take advan­tage of the new procrastinator-friendly fea­tures I’ve added. Oh, one other thing. I’ve added a link at the bot­tom of my side­bar to Fire­fox. Fire­fox is a won­der­ful web browser that works bet­ter than Inter­net Explorer, has more fea­tures than IE, is far more cus­tomiz­able than IE, blocks pop-ups and mal­ware bet­ter than IE, and is far more secure than IE. It’s com­pletely free, and I urge PC users to switch if at all pos­si­ble. On this sub­ject, some of the cool lay­out fea­tures of this new design (the bas­soon guy in par­tic­u­lar) require some jury-rigging to get to work in IE. So, my site works much bet­ter in Fire­fox (or Safari) than in IE.
I’ll stop rant­ing now.

Sim­ple typo­graph­i­cal error, or encroach­ment of Ebon­ics into for­mal cor­re­spon­dence? You decide.

And now, a fea­ture bor­rowed from Ani­ma­ni­acs:
Good Idea: Going to see the new Harry Pot­ter movie. It’s quite good — very cohe­sive and with­out some of the gaps that the last movie or two had. The writ­ers and direc­tor did a very good job of turn­ing J.K. Rowling’s sprawl­ing 752-page book into a lean, mean, two-and-a-half-hour movie.
Bad Idea: Going to see said movie at 12:01 Fri­day morn­ing, when you have to be at school at 8 am.
Good Idea: Buy­ing movie tick­ets for a mid­night pre­meire a week or two in advance.
Bad Idea: Not buy­ing the tick­ets at the same time as the peo­ple you’re going with. You might end up with tick­ets for dif­fer­ent the­aters, which the good peo­ple at AMC will strictly mon­i­tor.
Good Idea: Run­ning a covert op so that you can get into a dif­fer­ent the­ater and sit with your friends. Thanks, Cameron!
Bad Idea: No, that was pretty much just a good idea.

Today, reduced to numer­i­cal sim­plic­ity:
Flu Shots, Admin­is­tered Al Fresco by Nurs­ing Stu­dents: 1
Miles Dri­ven: 486.3
Money Spent on Gas: $44.55
Miles per Gal­lon: ≈30
Hours Spent Dri­ving: 7.25
Hours Spent Rehears­ing with the Mobile Sym­phony: 2.5
Hours Until Next MSO Rehearsal: 57
Quarts of Choco­late Milk Con­sumed: 1
Quarts of Coca-Cola Con­sumed: 1
Bed­time: 3:15 a.m
Alarm Set For: 6:45 a.m

Let’s cre­ate a purely imag­i­nary sit­u­a­tion, for use in a purely intel­lec­tual excer­cise. Say that a per­son pur­chases a song from the iTunes Music Store. For argument’s sake, let’s say that it’s not a song, per se, but Samuel Barber’s Over­ture to The School for Scan­dal, as per­formed by the Atlanta Sym­phony Orches­tra under the baton of Yoel Levi. A few min­utes later, our imag­i­nary sub­ject dis­cov­ers that the work is already present on his com­puter. Not only that, but it is the exact same record­ing as the one just down­loaded. Would this imply that our sub­ject has too much music on his com­puter? Discuss.

Hello, my name is Dave and I have a book buy­ing prob­lem. Bor­ders, Barnes and Noble, and other big-box stores aren’t really a prob­lem. My weak­ness stems from the small non-chain pur­vey­ors of well-loved and many-times-read vol­umes. It’s very hard for me to walk into a used book­store and walk out with­out at least one new-old book.
This week­end I was in Mobile for another con­cert. I had some time to kill on Sat­ur­day, so I decided to wan­der around the down­town area. When I got there, it was rainy, so I waited out the storm with a small pot of Dar­jeel­ing at Spot of Tea. Once the skies had cleared some­what, I headed towards a book­store I’d found online. Bienville Books is a small shop, but they have a ton of books crammed into what space they have. Their books are also fairly cheap, which allowed me to walk out with four new-old books with­out break­ing my bud­get.
It’s not that I’m short of read­ing mate­r­ial. Before my new acqui­si­tions, my to-be-read shelf con­tained at least 20 vol­umes. My par­ents peri­od­i­cally send me books, and I trade books with a cou­ple of friends. I just can’t seem to resist the lure of used books — espe­cially the smell and feel of old hard­cov­ers. At my cur­rent ratio of read­ing to acqui­si­tion, I’ll never catch up. I can’t seem to check the inflow of books, so I’ll just have to read them faster. Now, if I can just fig­ure out how to get by on 2 hours of sleep a night, I’ll be all set.

As I was sit­ting down with my sin­gle with cheese, plain, in Wendy’s a lit­tle while ago, a very scraggly-looking older black man asked me, “Hey brother, are you in col­lege?” Upon my affir­ma­tive replay he next asked what I was study­ing. “Music,” I told him. His eyes lit up, and he started into what I (cor­rectly, as it turns out) pre­dicted would be a long mono­logue. I had noth­ing else to do for awhile, so I just smiled and gave peri­odic nods while lis­ten­ing and eat­ing.
I could only under­stand maybe half the words this guy said, due to an extremely strong south­ern accent, numer­ous miss­ing teeth, and the sort of scratchy voice that seems to often accom­pany home­less­ness. He started talk­ing about how won­der­ful music is and that it’s much bet­ter to pur­sue some­thing you love than to pur­sue some­thing for the love of money. From there, I could only pick up bits and pieces of what he was say­ing. Jesus, God, and Elvis (who he seemed to equate to the first two) were very promi­nent in his solil­o­quy. Abra­ham Lin­coln showed up peri­od­i­cally, and var­i­ous other pres­i­dents, from Wash­ing­ton to Dubya were men­tioned as well. At one point he got on the sub­ject of air­planes, seem­ing to think that they’re evil, dan­ger­ous, or both. He blamed JFK’s assas­si­na­tion on the fact that he’d just flown into Dal­las on a plane. Or maybe he really meant JFK Jr., who did die in a plane crash. I’m not really sure. I wish that I’d under­stood bet­ter the topic involved when he started talk­ing about Andy Grif­fith and Gomer Pyle, but it was lost on me. I’m sure that had I been able to under­stand every­thing he was say­ing, more gems would have emerged. The only time he stopped talk­ing was to watch a shapely young lady bus her table and leave the restau­rant.
He prob­a­bly would have talked to me all day if I’d been inclined to stay, but I finally gave him a cou­ple of bucks and headed out the door. I wouldn’t be sur­prised if he’s still there, talk­ing to some other solo diner.

Some­times, there’s just noth­ing as sat­is­fy­ing as a hard day’s work. Today was the first day of my new (rest-of-the-) sum­mer job paint­ing apart­ments. The work isn’t glam­orous or incred­i­bly stim­u­lat­ing, but it pays pretty well. The only really bad part is lug­ging full 5-gallon paint buck­ets up and down stairs. I came home sore and paint-covered after 8+ hours of paint­ing, but it felt good to have worked a full day.
The apart­ments we painted today were suite-style stu­dent apart­metns — 4 bed­rooms with a com­mon living/dining/kitchen area. The rooms are rented sep­a­rately, so there were still peo­ple liv­ing in some of the suites in which we ere paint­ing. Of the four rooms my 3-person team painted today, one was espe­cially dis­gust­ing. There were four or five large holes in the walls, not to men­tion a num­ber of smaller ones. There was trash all over the floor, mold in the minifridge, stains all over the walls, extreme quati­ties of dust on every sur­face, and hair all over the bath­room — even on the wall over the door. I’ve been in some pretty dis­gust­ing and torn up dorm rooms and apart­ments, so I wasn’t overly sur­prised (although still quite dis­gusted) at first. Then, based on var­i­ous items of detri­tus and a sign on the door of one of the other bed­rooms, we fig­ured out that this was a girl’s apart­ment. That threw me for a loop. I’ve not met many girls who would put up with that kind of squalor, let alone cre­ate it them­selves. The next bed­room we painted was a guy’s, and it was immac­u­late. Go figure.

Ira Fla­tow and Panel

Yes­ter­day dur­ing a meet­ing at the Bas­soon Stu­dio Annex, Pro­fes­sor Keesecker men­tioned that NPR’s Talk of the Nation Sci­ence Fri­day would be broad­cast­ing from FSU that after­noon. Not only that, but he was going and had an extra ticket. Being the science/NPR nerd that I am, I jumped at the chance to go to the show. They were broad­cast­ing from a the­ater in the FSU School of Dance — an incred­i­bly nice build­ing that’s recently been ren­o­vated. For non-listeners, the show is two hours long, with one topic and dis­cussino panel for each hour. The host, Ira Fla­tow, dis­cusses each topic with the panel of experts and mod­er­ates ques­tions from the audi­ence and via phone and e-mail. For this show, the two top­ics were Terri Schi­avo and End-of-Life Issues in hour one and Aging in hour two. While both four-member pan­els were extremely intel­li­gent, knowl­edge­able, and well-spoken, the first topic def­i­nitely fos­tered a more dynamic dis­cus­sion. It was inter­est­ing to see how the show is run (all the callers were screened and prepped else­where — prob­a­bly at the show’s head­quar­ters in New York) as well as to finally match a per­son to a radio voice I hear often.

Today’s quote of the day is cour­tesy of Brad:

“If I could go back in time and do one thing, I’d take Karl Marx to Wal-Mart.”