I got the most AMAZING seats to see Hamlet. (and for $5!)

Thursday last week I went to see Hamlet at the pioneer memorial theater. The performance was quite good and I think so was the editing of the play. I have long been quite the fan of the play Hamlet. I have read the play more than once and gave serious effort to memorizing it at one point (I actually managed to memorize the first scene in the first act before I gave up). Until a week ago I had only seen it performed via recordings. But Last Thursday I got to see it live and much to my good fortune not only did I get to see it live but I got to see it from an EXCELLENT seat. Jenna went to the theater ahead of me and purchased the tickets a little less than 30 minutes before the show started and then when I arrived she nonchalantly led me to the best seats in the house. Two seats on the very front row and at the dead center of the very front row! The theater has a program where U students can buy tickets to get the best seats still available 30 minutes before the performance for $5 a seat. Apparently the people with the season tickets who normally would have occupied that space had canceled. For any play this would have made me happy but that this happened for HAMLET!! it is just so amazing. The last time Hamlet was performed at the PMT was in the 80's and no doubt will not be performed again for a decade or two more. To give a perspective on how difficult such seats are to obtain a conversation with our neighbors revealed that they had season tickets and had been sitting in the same seats for 30 years! Furthermore the people who normally sat in the seats we were occupying had also been sitting there for many years (though how many years exactly I alas did not ask).

Is Hinchliffes Rule True?

This paper actually got published in 1995 and Title, Author Name, and Abstract make up the entire paper. I must say I thoroughly approve.

The Poo From Hell

I recently moved in to a new apartment I have up until this point been reasonably happy with having a new apartment. I really like having a kitchen and bathroom of my own instead of sharing them with strangers as I have been doing up until this time.

I found it endlessly annoying that I couldn't keep a roll of toilet paper in the bathroom and finish it off myself because I was at the house so much less than the other people using the bathroom and invariably someone else would use my toilet paper. At the last house I lived at I bought around 30 rolls of toilet paper to put in the bathroom. Of those rolls that I put into the bathroom I myself used the last few sheets only 2 times. Which gives a rough estimate that other people were using more than 90% of my toilet paper. Eventually I started taking rolls of toilet paper in to the bathroom from my room with me and using whatever was there if I forgot.

I must say that at my new apartment I was quite enjoying having my own bathroom (I am enjoying having my own kitchen much more but that is another rant entirely). The ability to shower whenever I want to without waiting for some one else and, better, not having to wait for someone to finish their shower when I need to go to the bathroom is very nice.

I never thought of it as an advantage that when I found a great big nasty dump sitting unflushed in the toilet I at least had people to blame for it. I had thought (silly me!) that when I had my own toilet I would never have to encounter such a situation again. But beginning about a week ago little floating turds started showing up in my toilet bowl. They are very hard to flush because they are so buoyant so at first I assumed that they belonged to my very own bowels and had simply been left behind when I flushed since they were so very floaty. I don't generally check to make sure that everything that went down when I flushed doesn't come back up a few seconds later. So I must have flushed and not noticed when these things remained behind. However something of an entirely different magnitude has been happening. When I came back from school Monday night I was immediately greeted by a horrible eye burning stench permeating my apartment. I thought that something in the garbage must be going rotten and perhaps the dishes in the sink had been allowed to sit for too long etc etc. After a quick cleaning of the kitchen and turning on the air conditioning to help diffuse the smell it became less by a little bit.

The smell was ebbing away only very slowly with this treatment and so when it cooled down somewhat outside I opened up the door to my balcony and went to turn off the air conditioning. But this time when I passed by the bathroom the stench became extremely strong and I realized suddenly that something rotten in the kitchen was not the culprit at all but instead it was something rotten in the toilet. I flicked on the light and saw a disgusting poo soup floating in the toilet bowl. The soup was complete with disgusting brown/orange colored water and several extremely buoyant logs of brown sludge. After flushing a few times I finally got it all to go away and immediately my apartment began to smell much better.

After finding such a thing waiting in my toilet for me to discover I couldn't help but wonder if someone had come into my apartment while I was away and had intentionally left this there for me to discover. I wasn't sure if I had locked the door or not and it was possible that someone had just come in and decided to help themselves to my restroom fascilities. I hoped that the problem was temporary and had been caused perhaps by a plumbing problem in an adjacent apartment.

But today when I came home from school again for the second day in a row I was greeted by a foul eye burning stench and then shortly thereafter by a floating mess in my toilet bowl. This time however the poo is even more buoyant and no matter how many times I flush the toilet some of it comes floating back to taunt me. It as if someone ate a life preserver and a whole bunch of rotting meat to make the most persistent and foul smelling poo imaginable, and then they took a nice long dump in my toilet while I was away.

Today I am certain that I locked the door when I left which fact combined with its regularity means that most likely this problem is a plumbing problem of some sort. Though I must say it also has to be related to the extraordinary buoyancy of the poo involved and perhaps someone in one of the other apartments has a secret passion for spaghetti made with foam pool noodles.

LD #18, maybe another time....

I never really got started on the game for this competition. I haven't made a post about my abject failure to do anything of note because between school and moving in to a new apartment I have had very very little time. For the competition I decided I wanted to do something with sound and very quickly came to the conclusion that I should make enemies sounds and in order to defeat them you had to cancel their sound out. The sounds you could make would be limited by the monsters you had defeated. I hadn't really figured out how to make the game interesting or fun but the idea seemed original and I have long wanted to learn to manipulate sound via programming. However the choice to use sound was my undoing. I near instantly discovered that my desktop has some issue with using sound in pygame... after reinstalling the module I just sort of gave up. The theme was basically my least favorite out of all the possible themes (even the joke theme double zombie rainbow) the inability to even run the simplest sound programs in the programming language of my choice pretty much drowned my remaining enthusiasm and I figured I would just play video games for the weekend instead of make them.

However I still feel that game might be fun to write at some future point so... maybe I will actually code it someday (I give it odds of about 40 to 1 against)