Last week hailed a big news story here in Trickville. That is, the world became aware for the first time, that in my life I had never seen The Goonies. Ever.

I imagine most of you are rocked by this realization as my friends and family were. Thankfully we’ve been able to move past it and in an effort to make things right again I joined K and a group of our friends who went to the movie theatre and watched it on the big screen.

It is my hope that we can, as a community, move past this horrible event and continue on with our daily lives. I would just like to say that, yes I did enjoy the movie, and yes a lot more pop culture references make sense.

If it makes this act any more acceptable let me first say that I did enjoy the movie. Very much. And secondly I think I especially enjoyed it because of seeing it on the big screen and being with the group of friends who were all truly excited for me to see it.

I’d like to wrap this short blog post up with a few closing remarks: truffle shuffle, “thanks for saving me,” and Goonies never say DIE!

I awoke with a start, the room was dark and all was quiet. I heard the TV on in the other room but presumed K had just fallen asleep with it on. I listened and could hear Mattie in her cage, and it struck me that I didn’t take her out before bed. She would be nearing 8 hours without a trip outside. Usually not an issue, but she had eaten since going out. I feared the worst, thinking she had had an accident in the cage.

My sinuses have been clogged and even without that my sense of smell is iffy, so I couldn’t smell anything but I got up and pulled on jeans and a shirt. I retrieved Mattie’s leash and took her out for a quick walk. She did her business and when I got back inside I checked the cage to find it clean - thank goodness.

After putting Mattie back into the cage I crawled back into bed and proceeded to toss and turn for half an hour. Finally I gave up trying to fall asleep and got up. While in bed my brain had been crunching over a few coding issues with a project for ManaNation. I trawled my RSS feeds for anything of interest and I scanned my forums, most hadn’t had any post since I went to bed just 7 hours ago.

I settled in to work on the code and sure enough, the early hour, the quiet email and twitter, and the quiet house allowed me to really dig into the work and lay down some quality progress on the project.

It was extremely refreshing since, when I went to bed last night, I was fuming with frustration over another project. I take coding very personally and if I can’t solve a problem, or if something I do continues to be an issue, I get extremely upset. So to get up and in the early hours knock out two hours of solid progress on a project is a great boost to my morale.

After I left SAK as the house manager I stepped away from improv really. I was burned out and I just didn’t know it. Over the past few weeks K and I have gone to a few shows and then last Saturday I had an audition to join the Tuesday night cast.

The audition, I felt, went fairly well. Even the part where I stepped off the stage and took a fall. Thankfully I’ve been a clutz for over two decades and I was able to catch myself and bounce right back up, however the fall was rather surprising and guaranteed my adrenaline was flowing.

The procedure after the audition was that I would either get a phone call if I was accepted or an email if I wasn’t ready. I’ll admit, I was fairly confident I would get in, but I had the little voice in the back of my mind nagging at me saying that I was rusty, that I wasn’t good enough, etc.

Thankfully I was wrong and the call came not more than 30 minutes ago. And so it is with great joy I proclaim my full return to Improv.

RSS is amazing. It’s the natural progression of information, but it won’t be the end of that path. Until that evolution comes though (or has it?) I’m living the high life using Google Reader with my tweaks.

First, if a feed doesn’t fit my needs, I make it do so. With io9, a gawker sci-fi geek blog, it includes spoiler posts - majorly uncool. I hate spoilers in any form. I rarely watch the peek into next week’s episode of any show I’m watching, even that is too much for me. So what do I do? First I sent them an email suggesting that they offer a feed sans spoiler posts. Then I decide to take the initiative and I use Yahoo Pipes to easily filter the feed with any post which contains the word “spoiler” in its title. This same concept can be done of course with any feed that contains posts you never read.

Secondly, one thing Google Reader does poorly is implement tags. They treat them more as folders in their display rather than tagging. If they want to fix their tags they need to completely overhaul how they are presented, entered and handled. Until they do, it feels more like a non-limited folder system where things can exist in multiple folders. That being said, I’ve today created a new “tag” (folder) called “_Top.” The _ (called an underscore) is used to put the tag at the top of the listing. And this tag is used to mark feeds which I discover myself reading much more frequently than skimming. This way, when I log into Reader and have a large collection of feeds to read, the cream is at the… top.

Thirdly, I implemented a page-to-rss app for Paul Graham’s essay page. He has a link to such a feed maintained by some individual, but since I would rather put my data in the hands of corporations I worked it through a handful of sites to provide a clean and perfect RSS feed from his page.

Fourthly, I’ve begun actively seeking out utility feeds. Things like weather reports, news alerts, etc. The more I can funnel into this channel for information, the better. In addition I am able to rss things like my calendar and reminders (like my instapaper feed.)

Going back to the first example, I need to spin off and discuss Yahoo Pipes some. I think this is a tool which really isn’t getting a fair shake. It’s an easy to comprehend tool to create complex data processing applications, with a heavy emphasis on RSS feeds since they are, by design, best used for this sort of thing.

My day job is actually implementing a solution through Yahoo Pipes. We have software which has a collection of RSS feeds but inexplicably does not offer a unified feed, and so very easily we are able to create a unified feed through Yahoo Pipes. Sure, we could write our own solution, but it would take us 30 minutes of time, where this one will take us 60 seconds.

I began this post a few weeks again as ManaNation was growing, and it was about to outgrow the Godaddy shared hosting. In the process of writing it I hit a money crunch and GoDaddy revamped their shared hostings, upping limits and so I did a small service upgrade which has since allowed us to continue sitting on their server. However, I’m again considering the move, so this post came out of the dust closet and here it is.

» Read the rest of the entry..

“Be nice to Bernice!”

That was written on a sticky note next to the phone when I worked at the college radio station, WREK. Her story changed depending on who was telling it to you, but the consensus was that she was an older woman who lived alone and spent her time in front of the tv. One day she misdialed a number and got the WREK call-in line, discovering a phone number which almost always had someone there to answer she saved the number and began calling it frequently.

I remember clearly the first time I had a call from Bernice. I was playing some beautiful classical music and the phone rang, the latter being quite unusual during my show because I did the morning shift, 6am to 9am. It was quiet and let me play classical music, low stress, nothing big. So when the phone rang, I answered it.

“WREK.”

“Can rats climb up your drain pipes?”

That’s how the conversation opened.  She had an odd question and called WREK for some reason. I realized it was Bernice and so I let the conversation go on, I had another 10 minutes before the music ended.

“I think so… why?”

And off we went through her babbling story telling about finding a rat in her house and how it must of come through the drain pipes, the evils of rats and such. It was an unusual question and I genuinely tried to be helpful in answering it, I did think rats could climb up drain pipes. That story came back to me this morning after sleeping very deeply.

Yesterday K and I were in transit for approximately 13 hours, from Atlanta down I-75 to US-82, which crossed Georgia to drop grand mom off before getting on I-95 and taking it down to Titusville to pick up Mattie from K’s mom, then heading into town to try and pick up a CD for next week’s episode before finally heading home.

K and I had been getting ready for bed, both in the bathroom (which I had used previously when we first arrived home.) I lift the toilet lid to throw away a tissue, and both K and I jump back in surprise as a frog stares up at us from the bowl. I drop the toilet lid again and K and I just stare at each other in surprise.

I don’t know how he got into the toilet. There are a few possibilities:

1. He hopped into the apartment when we were unloading the car and the door was open for periods of time, made his way to the bathroom and leapt into the toilet.
2. He has been in the apartment and found his way to the toilet over the past few days.
3. Teleportation.
4. He came up the pipes somehow.

In any case, the frog was quickly removed from the toilet via a plastic bag and a hand. To be released outside, leaving K and I to laugh about it as we finally called it a night and fell into a deep sleep.

I stand by my answer to Bernice: animals can come up drains.

This weekend was emotionally draining. Though, at the end of it, everyone was smiles. I’ll save a more lengthy write-up for later this week as I just got home an hour ago after 13 hours between leaving my brother’s home and arriving at mine.

I shed many tears and cried a fair bit through the weekend, my mother was an integral part of my life and saying goodbye to her is very difficult. I miss talking to her on the phone, I miss hearing her laugh, I miss her puns and so much more. But many things were said and shared this weekend to remind me of so many good times and good memories.

Also this weekend was an event mom would have dearly loved to be in the middle with the family coming together, playing together ranging from Poker to Charades to Guitar Hero 3.

I should also note that the Jarrett clan is looking for any family brave enough to stand against them in a Charades battle, we welcome any and all challengers. We rocked out with some amazing skills in Charades this weekend, by far some of the most fun we’ve had.

More stories to come.