DCI Quarterfinals on Thursday

I'm taking off work this Thursday to watch the DCI Quarterfinals in theaters - the first time I've seen them live since I aged out.

With scores for the top 4 so close this weekend, this next week should be interesting. If other in the area are going to watch - let me know!

Mario Kart Wii

We've had a copy of MarioKart Wii for a few weeks, and it's a lot of fun. I passed the 50cc and 100cc races without too much trouble, and now I'm starting to work on the 150's.

The real fun is racing online though - we have a few friends that we have raced with so far, but it would be great to find our other friends that own the game. Send an email to let me know!

Tom Dowdy

When browsing through some of my blog links the other day, I ran across a post that said Tom Dowdy passed away recently. I didn't really know Tom, so I'll point you to better descriptions than I can give:

• JAV's Weblog


• Pablo Fernicola's Blog

Tom was one of the first people I ever met at WWDC. Travis and I came out with student scholarships back in 1998 when the program started. There were tons of great sessions and experiences during the week, but the student sessions really stood out. Tom was there talking about Apple, SimpleText, and other things I can't remember anymore. It was pretty easy to spot the really tall guy with long hair during the rest of the conference, and he was always happy to stop and have a conversation. His enthusiasm helped create one of the most inspirational weeks of my life.

I don't think I ever spoke to Tom since then (our paths never directly crossed), but I'm saddened to hear the news. If anyone else has other experiences, please post them or link to them from the comments.

This explains it

While Daisie and others have teased me in the past about getting "huggy", I now know it's out of my control. I blame my heritage:

Swedes are habitual huggers

I would normally make fun of studies like this, but in this case I am happy that they have helped me better understand myself.

DCI Finals Broadcast Changes

I saw this the other day, and I have struggled to find the right words to say:

dci.org: Drum Corps International places ESPN2 airing of World Championships on hiatus
(originally found from drumlineblog.com, which is a great source for other marching info)

I am really disappointed that I will not be able to watch these going forward, and it saddens me to know that there are many others that will not have the opportunity to see drum corps at all as a result of this.

Even though I try to make it to as many drum corps shows as possible during the summer, I still look forward to the ESPN2 (and formerly PBS) broadcast every year. I still have the recording from this year sitting on our DVR in case I get the urge to watch it for a 4th time.

I have always had a love/hate reaction to the broadcast. Overall, I loved that it existed. Having marched a number of years I always found the "special interest" segments to be really cheesy, but they are necessary for people that are not familiar with the drum corps activity. I really dislike how they cut down the show times to make everything fit in two hours. With the special segments and commercials I do not think they showed an entire performance for any of the groups. Some were trimmed only a few minutes, but for some of the corps they only showed a 30 second clip (out of an 11 minute show).

There probably is not very much money in the drum corps business overall, so I understand that it can be hard for DCI to fund everything. I have heard that the costs for hosting a show are rising as well, making it difficult for organizers to make a profit. With all of this, I hope that DCI is not using this to drive people to their paid video content. While it may help finances in the short term, I worry about it changing the 'soul' of DCI.

I am sure this kind of discussion (or whining :) happens up every time a free service goes away, but this one hits close to home for me.

Leopard Dock/Finder tip

There's a cool thing that I discovered you can do in Leopard:

1. start out without any Finder windows open


2. drag an item from the desktop onto the dock icon for the Finder (don't let go!)


3. press space - and a new Finder window appears!


4. you can then drag the file to the desired location as you normally would

(it's possible that this worked on Tiger, but I don't have an easy way to check)

Twitter

This isn't really news, but I have a twitter account that I've been posting to for a while:

http://twitter.com/cflake

If you have no idea what twitter is, well… your best bet is to check the links off that page.

I do all of my posting from Twitterific, which just released a new version a couple of days ago (I still need to try it).

In general, if I want to post something to the web quickly I will tend to do it on twitter, as long as it can fit (they only allow up to 140 characters). Ideally I would have posted this message over there, but well, you see the problem.

That is all.