journal for 2002-06-28
andy’s amazing aluminum go board
What’s so amazing about Andy’s Amazing Aluminum Go Board? Well, for one thing, it’s aluminum. For another, it will soon be mine!
A few months ago—around December 2001—I’d asked my co-worker Andy if I could commission him to make an aluminum go board for me—I’d gotten to thinking that it would look really, really cool. He said that if I helped him with some flowcharts in Visio, he would do it for free. What a deal!
Well, months passed, but I was patient; he’s our only machinist, and is always wicked busy. Anyway, I can wait for something free! So, he sprung on me, this morning, that he’d made a prototype. It’s not perfect and not entirely completed, but it’s absolutely gorgeous. I will take pictures later today.
I’m really excited about the prospect of having this board built, finished, and playable! Andy will be my new hero.
complt wks of wm shkspr (abridged)
Gloria and I went to the theatre last night. The show was pretty good, and just going to the theatre at all was really good. We haven’t been to see a play since Marcelo’s production of Jesus Christ Mega-Star, so it was a nice change of pace. The show (which, incidentally, I first heard of through L) was The Complt Wks of Wm Shkspr (abridged), a comedy that, at least notionally, attempts to summarize all of the Bard’s works. They roll all of the comedies up into a single summary so that they can stick to the real comedic gems: the tragedies.
The show had its problems; chief among them was its propensity for allusion to pop culture jokes. Doctor and Scott Evil’s “shhh” routine was pretty funny in Austin Powers. In the sequel, it wasn’t. In the Complt Wks, it was actually kind of sad. There were other stolen jokes, too. I think the director thought that they were trying to in some way identify with the audience by using jokes that the audience knew, but instead they were just using old jokes. The best comedy was the original comedy, and that’s what we were there to see.
They did an oldskool rap interpretation of Othello, Titus Andronicus as a cooking show, and a thirty second backwards rendition of Hamlet. The only real tragedy in the show, I suppose, was the lack of attention to Shakespeare’s language. When they used his text verbatim, it was often thrown away. Only the serious presentation of Hamlet’s “what a piece of work is man” speech reminded the audience what a great writer Shakespeare was. It would have been great to see a show that did what they did, but used the original text when possible, to show the power of the words—at least when they’re funny. I can imagine that it’s not easy to get laughs out of a good delivery of “to be or not to be.”
After the show, we went to Golden Gate for some cake and pie. I had a really nice, moist slice of marble cake. If I wasn’t tired and wary of eating too much cake, I would’ve had at least a second slice. Golden Gate’s cake is almost always great.
programming
I made some major changes to debug yesterday, making it capable of handling multiple entries per day, including entries of multiple types, as per the developing Cobalt specs. Now I just need to write a script that conveniently files my entries for me…