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Below are the 18 most recent journal entries recorded in
zmgmeister's LiveJournal:
| Saturday, September 9th, 2006 | | 11:46 am |
Swing City
Swing City was f---ing awesome last night. | | Saturday, August 5th, 2006 | | 12:17 pm |
Swing, salsa, tango update
Beginner-friendly follows in tango I thought over the tango thing, Boston vs, LA, and realized that in LA i was out a lot more and knew who the beginner-friendly follows were. That makes a huge difference. Here, i havent been out enough to know who's who. It's not a brand-new beginner follow i necessarily want, but a follow with some experience who can fill in the blanks if i dont lead every weight change exactly so. The other thing was, before i had much more patience starting out. If i got one dance with someone, it was progress. Or, id be content to watch if i was scouting out a new place. Now, if i dont get the full set with someone, i think it's a step back. Salsa I've been going to Supershag-at-Ryles on Saturday nights, where they do salsa, swing, cha-cha, hustle, and others. Im impressed by how easily the experienced dancers mix with the newbies. For instance, there is a beginner lesson at the beginning of the night, but almost everybody participates. And then the night keeps going, and its a real night out clubbing. So i'll be coming back to that place. Swing Went to Swing City last night, and that was pretty awesome, that was the best night id had there in a long time. I got the partners i wanted and they were happy with me, and definitely couple of them i'll make it a point to dance with next week. i dont know what it was last night, maybe that there were more girls or that the hot weather was over. Then around 11:00 things felt empty, like i'd already burned through all possible dance partners. Some folks had left early or went out to take a walk and cool off. It felt like the episode of Seinfeld when Kramer had the "kevorka" ( the "lure of the animal" ) and then got rid of it by wearing garlic around his neck, so i decided to leave on a high note. | | Sunday, July 23rd, 2006 | | 10:26 am |
There is too much sitting around in tango
When i was in LA, i used to go to a lot of Argentine tango events. I never got fancy at it, but i did the basic moves and i went to a lot of these milongas. It was the first kind of dancing i ever did that was in a club setting, so i welcomed that you could just sit and watch, or decide to do n number of dances with your partner. Here in Boston, we also have a tango scene, but it never clicked with me the way it did in L.A. I also started going to swing and (recently) salsa events, which seemed to get my attention much quicker. And i think one of the big differences is, that i can be much more active at the other events. Let me explain for those who've never been to a milonga before. They're relatively formal events, usually with a lot of little tables for small groups to sit. Often there is a floor show or raffle in the middle of the event, and these factors tend to introduce a "spectator" kind of atmosphere. In most swing or salsa places, there is much less seating, and there is much less watching. Most of the people will be on the floor, and those who aren't are usually eating, drinking, or gabbing. Tango music is usually played in sets of four songs. If you're a lead and you want to dance two songs with somebody, you wait until two songs go by and then ask. Here's where we get into trouble. That only works if there's a lot more girls then guys. Otherwise, all the willing follows get snapped up by the first song. And you have to wait 15+ minutes for the next set. But then if you ask at the first song, a lot of the women wont dance a full set with a beginner lead or with someone they don't know. So you do a couple of songs and are midway through without a partner. Again if there's a surplus of willing partners you might not care but it is not the smoothest situation to cut the set short. Contrast that to salsa, or especially swing, where you only do one or maybe two songs and are constantly swapping partners. Argentine tango puts some extra demands on the lead that a lot of the other dances don't. The lead has to lead every weight change. Everything is improvised, and there is little reliance on scripted ballroom-type steps. Most other dances on the other hand are more difficult for the follow, who is always spinning around or walking backwards in heels. In tango the lead is supposed to make the follow look good, and, since everyone is watching, this is why many follows will only dance with experienced leads. | | Sunday, July 16th, 2006 | | 2:07 pm |
Wikipedia Peeves
I love Wikipedia, but there are a few things that have been getting to me about it. Since im mainly interested in factual topics that are either so or not so, ive been spared quite a bit. But theres still a few peeves left over. - Arguing with British schoolboys Often an article will start out US-centric. Maybe it was written by an American who simply didnt have information for Britain or Australia. And thats fine, a biased article is often better than no article. And hopefully information is added to make it internationally relevant. But often someone will dump in tons of text in excruciating detail; often it looks like a school essay. ( do any schools give credit for contributing to the Wiki? ) Its typically all dumped in at once rather than collaboratively written up from a stub. The problem is, nobody wants to take out the post because it might be useful to somebody. In the meantime the article has this gigantic section on New Zealand that's bigger than all the other sections put together, and nobody knows what to do with it. - Citation mania Some people evidently want every single clause footnoted, and ive seen articles that just about do. Hey, i like to see sources too but only if its an obscure or duputed fact. If you can Google something and get 10,000 hits, its general knowledge. If its something discussed in freshman psychology class, its general knowledge. A close cousin of this is the person who goes around and tags articles as "unsourced", rather than asking that a certain clause be cited. - Link mania You often see in an article, say, on fire hydrants or octopi or some topic, a reference to how its done in different countries "this kind of fish is found off the coast of [[France]]". But why must they link to the [[France]] article instead of just saying "France"? Do they think people dont know where France is? I see this a lot with years too. "In [[1948]] this kind of baboon was discovered" Why must they link to the year 1948? Does that contribute anything? - Red link mania Worse than link mania is red link mania. For those that dont know, a red link is a link to an article that doesnt exist (yet). Once in a while i find an article that has tons and tons of red links. While its nice to hope someone will create an article, i dont understand the mentality of creating a dozen or more of these links. | | Sunday, April 23rd, 2006 | | 1:33 pm |
If you've been friended out of the blue
If ive just friended you out of the blue, its probably because either: 1. You say smart things in forums. or 2. You post things in your journal about things im interested in. Especially if its things happening in Boston, or if its geek-oriented current events. So, i might go on a kick of friending interesting posters. If you do or dont friend me, thats fine. Im mostly interested in things happening in the world than private thoughts. Maybe click on my journal and see if theres anything you can use. Though, im not much of a diary type. I mostly use the forums, but off and on post interesting things i find here. | | 12:59 pm |
The new Swing City in Newton
So, i went to the new Swing City in Newton. This time, i just worked late and came right from work rather than go home to the city and back out to the burbs again. Its a litte different. It's in a community center gym, basketball hoops and all. Its like being in 8th grade again, and it would be amusing if they could get guys/girls all lined up on opposite walls. But, people got used to it and made the usual oval around the dancefloor. In the old Swing City, all the different groups used to have their own little areas. There was a pretty large anteroom leading to the dance floor, where a lot of people would watch videos, eat candy, etc. On the dancefloor, going around the clock ( with 6:00 being the doorway and 11:00-1:00 being the stage ) you'd have at 10:00 the most experienced dancers in one corner, at 9:00 some quiet groups, like couples and relatives. At 7/8:00 you'd have the bar, mostly guys lined up here. At 6:00 people mingling in the doorway. 4/5:00 would have a lot of younger groups, mostly girls, coming in foursies and fivesies. Sometimes an older crowd up around 3:00. Here, there really was just a tiny vestibule, and i definitely got the vibe that people standing around that area were wondering where the anteroom went. People hadnt found their favorite places to stake out yet ;) I hadnt been in weeks. Not just because the event was on hiatus, but id been very busy. Oh, and having all my shoes resoled because they had had it. Like usual it took a few dances to get my "sea legs" back. I got to dance with some of the regulars who i like :) There were some new people id never seen before. Plus a lot of people who i just couldnt place. People who lived closer to Newton who maybe didnt get out to Cambridge that often but who i'll likely be seeing more of. Such was one girl i'd like to see again. I cant explain it, just the way her face lit up and these almond eyes she had. She was rather tired toward the end of the night and i was helping her find her keys. And she found them right where i guessed they were, so maybe i get points for being Batman ;) There were slightly more couples, and more people in their 30s, than there usually are. Also now its within walking distance from B.C. where before it wasnt within walking distance of anything, so the demographics may change accordingly. | | Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 | | 7:04 pm |
Yahoo Finance has RSS feeds by ticker symbol
Yahoo now has RSS feeds of the news headlines you see whenever you look up a particular stock. This is pretty good for keeping up with companies that you own stock in, or just those you do business with. | | 6:31 pm |
Checked out Zillow.com - site shows estimated home values
This site is interesting. It lets you zoom down on a satellite photo with superimposed street map and see home values. By both zip code and by individual homes.(!). This is a pretty decent tool for checking out a neighborhood, and i'd been waiting for something like this to come along where you could just browse real estate stats, but this is well above the level of detail i expected. You can just go on and surf; there's no need to sign in or anything like that. Even with the photos its pretty easy on bandwidth. It does require Flash to be enabled. | | Sunday, January 22nd, 2006 | | 6:50 pm |
| | Saturday, January 21st, 2006 | | 10:37 am |
| | Sunday, January 8th, 2006 | | 5:32 pm |
I like Tristana Reader
I'd been looking for a new RSS reader for a while, and i kind of dig this one. It's similar to SharpReader, but leaner. I tend to favor standalone programs like this, as opposed to something built into a web browser, or an online portal that you have to log into. Especially like three-pane browsing where you can skim long lists of headlines. Actually, this is a four-pane browser, if you count the window at the bottom that downloads podcasts. There are still some features that i miss from SharpReader. The big one is, in SharpReader you can click on a folder and sort the headlines of all its component feeds. Which is pretty awesome if you work with a lot of low-volume feeds, like blogs. ( On Sharpreader, i would segregate out high-volume feeds like newspapers and aggregators, as well as anything which wasn't properly date-stamped, into separate folders. ) Im wondering if i should post a list of my favorite free programs. Not the really famous ones like Firefox and Outlook Express, but the ones i had to go out and look for. i think we all have our own personal favorites. | | Thursday, January 5th, 2006 | | 11:31 pm |
So, i can't browse TitanTV anymore
A while ago, i'd started going to this site for TV listings. One thing that's pretty cool about it, is that you can add a mix of random stations to your profile, say if you get one or two unexpected out of town stations. Most online TV listings, for broadcast, lump you into one particular market area and those are your stations, you can't add any more. Titan can, plus it has digital TV listings and lets you have broadcast, cable, and satellite provider all on the same account. But you used to be able to, without signing up, just punch in a ZIP code and it would tell you what's on. And i miss this for several reasons... one less password to remember, easy to demonstrate to people, see what's on in other towns... So, it's still my top pick but i miss being able to browse it as a guest. | | Monday, December 26th, 2005 | | 2:05 pm |
When reading some journals, why day-by-day?
Why is it that when reading some journals, when you click on "past 20", "past 20", to read the old entries, sometimes all of the sudden the link changes to "previous day", and you have to keep clicking back day-by-day? | | Friday, December 23rd, 2005 | | 8:18 am |
Music in dreams?
Does anyone else have music in their dreams? This morning i dreamed i was looking for something in the Cambridge Public Library. There was this blond, bully kind of kid who said he wanted books on Iran and Palestine, but he was serious, and i saw something by a popular military author. I was assuring him that it would just fly by, like playing a video game. Then i looked inside the book and it turned out to be just a strategy guide for some video game. On the other side of the reference section there were these girls on top of the stacks handing out candy ( yes, candy ) to the patrons. There were big boxes and i was browsing for a chocolate bar or something when this older, scholarly-looking guy said "do you want a chocolate _brain_", and it was something very much like Chocolate Oranges except it looked like a brain. He seemed disappointed when i said i only wanted to try a piece. Then the dream ended with a clip of "If I can't have you" from Saturday Night Fever. Which was an interesting close from a dream about browsing for stuff. Another interesting point is that i'd never been inside that library, but for some reason my head came up with a pretty detailed description. Perhaps there should be another post on dream imagery from places you've never seen. Or why it is that some dreams get "captioned", not literally but how it is you _know_ you're in a certain place esp. when you've never been there. Hmm, and there were a few other unrelated scenes before the library that are coming back to me. Football drag queen: There was something feeling like i was back in high school, and this football kind of kid changed his hair and started wearing lipstick, and i didnt recognize him at first. Perhaps he was trying out a new lifestyle. Kitchens and Bathrooms: There was something about me hearing that some high-end refrigerators had just been banned by the EPA because the light bulb inside stayed on continuously even when the door was closed, and being very disappointed by this. I went to the latrine where instead of a , fixture, there was a glass floor and several tubes leading to tanks in the basement. This had to have been brought on from going to this bar last night for a work party. They had a display of all these liquor bottles under glass hooked up like they were serving cocktails on tap. Oh, and there was something about returning home from a family vacation, by car, and realizing that this was sudden and i hadnt packed anything. Current Music: "If I can't have you" by Yvonne Elliman | | Wednesday, November 16th, 2005 | | 8:06 pm |
No, i do not need "Urinal Buddies"
This is an actual conversation had standing in the men's room at my work: "So, how you doing?" Me: "Oh, i'm doing pretty good" "Are you making progress?" Me: Well actually yeah, i am. Some guys just don't have that unwritten code ingrained in their minds. For most of us, the adjacent urinal is the place of last resort, often chosen after a long wistful look at the sink. But for some of us, apparently not. On the other hand, when i went to Jacksonville a few months ago, they had the most impeccable urinal etiquette on display at the airport. all along the wall, 1,3,5,7,9,11,... Urinal etiquette even has its own, hilarious, web page. Check out icbe.org, the International Center for Bathroom Etiquette. http://www.icbe.org/icbe.shtml ( not for work ) So what do you think? No, this isnt some kind of repressed-bisexual thing, its more like, if the other guy wasn't right there, i'd be standing much further back. You gentlemen know what i'm talking about.... | | Wednesday, September 14th, 2005 | | 9:52 pm |
So, Google has a blog seach engine now
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch/advanced_blog_searchI'd been wishing they'd create one for a while, and here it is. One thing i do wish they had, is a "location" search like Google News has. Where you can specify to only search sources in, say, Massachusetts. A lot of blogs are in or about a particular place. I love my local Boston message boards and wish there was a way to search them all at once. That might require a lot of work, because i went to their "about" page and a lot of the feeds come from sites that list blogs, and don't typically include a location. Google News on the other hand adds and categorizes news sources one-by-one. It would be really powerful to have that in a search, because i like blogs as news sources for stories that are just too small to get picked up by the media. What i'm not interested in though is finding lots and lots of opinion pieces, thought thats what most blogs are. Looks like I will be having a good time with this search tool. | | Tuesday, June 7th, 2005 | | 9:50 pm |
Why can't i multiply two words together? Hypernyms and Homonyms.
When i was young i learned about numbers. That you can add, subtract, multiply, and divide them. ( extreme geekdom is on its way. hold onto your seats! ) I also learned that numbers have opposites just like words do. -3 is the opposite of 3. I definitely had a passing idea that it would be cool to be able to do that with words, just like pushing buttons on a calculator. But, i didnt give it much thought, and this was before i knew much about grammar or logic or even how arithmetic really worked. Well i was reading this, http://www.wordiq.com/definition/WordNet, and it got me thinking. Learned some new words: hypernym, hyponym, holonym, and meronym. A hypernym is a word that is less specific. Like "dog" is a hypernym for "poodle". A hyponym is a word that is more specific. Like "dog" is a hyponym for "animal". Holonym and meronym are similar, and have to do with whther something is a part of something else. You could imagine something like - ( hot ) -> cold ( opposites ) dog ^ fluffy -> poodle ( take hyponyms of first word, use second word to choose one ) &dog -> mammal ( take most-likely hypernym ) dog * frog -> animal ( take least-common hyponym of both ) dog * bear -> mammal dog * cat -> house_pet and create all different operations based on all the different relations between words. opposites, synonyms, etc plus different modifications to the word ( tenses/plurals/cases/conjugations ) could even make up cool symbols for the different operations. be creative. use Unicode. see if there are any glyphs of the old APL symbols. though it would be done by criss-crossing a dictionary and not by arithmetic. unless of course there was some magic way to change words into numbers and back, coded in such a way that doing math on the numbers makes sense when they're turned back into words. Current Mood:  pensiveCurrent Music: "Everything Counts" by Depeche Mode | | Saturday, May 21st, 2005 | | 10:41 pm |
Swing Night
So i went out swing dancing last night. The first swing club i've been to actually. The weekend before, i went out, and met someone new. She was primarily into swing, and we hit it off and did emails. So after a couple emails i was going. My experience with swing was limited to a couple of Lindy lessons in a big college group which i can barely remember, and the triple-step from ballroom. Well, they didnt do any triple-step that night. They did a lot of stuff based on single-step. And they had the arch turns and loop turns, but it was more going back and forth in a slot, like in salsa, than making an 'L' shape like in triple-swing. No crazy acrobatics though. I also got some pointers about timing. Some of the girls i danced with were talking about 6 vs 8 count, and how i should take an extra back step when we were doing 8-count. So even though i just sort of watched in the beginning, i learned a bit. In the beginning i wondered if i'd be able to fit in. There wasnt really a place you could sit back by the tables and just cooly watch. There were no tables, just a single row of chairs along the walls. And there were more guys at the beginning, guys were rotating for partners during the lesson. But more people came. A _lot_ of people. There was a live band that night and the place was packed. You could barely sit in that single row of chairs without being mobbed. More girls too, and they weren't shy. Even when i was still watching at the beginning i was getting asked. Current Mood:  cheerfulCurrent Music: Sing, Sing, Sing |
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