Deep in the trenches

Ronald Reagan HS 2003 - Beyond Perimeters (link)



I am definitely in the scratching phase of designing right now... thought I would share.

Back to Pyware.

Dominance

Found this on my friend Pat Erwin's Facebook page.



Bela Fleck is just ridiculously talented.

Amazing.

(link) for those of you on Facebook.

For all you creative-types...

It's always a good day when I find a story, or a book, or a film, or whatever, that teaches me something new or deepens my understanding of something I already have learned. I found this essay through the blog of John Maeda (President of the Rhode Island School of Design) and was quite simply blown away.

Edgar Allen Poe, to me, is a guy who wrote spooky poetry (best read by Vincent Price) and died under questionable circumstances. Now I come to find him also a literary critic, as well as a very astute commentator on the creative process. Check out this excerpt:

There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a story. Either history affords a thesis--or one is suggested by an incident of the day--or, at best, the author sets himself to work in the combination of striking events to form merely the basis of his narrative--designing, generally, to fill in with description, dialogue, or autorial comment, whatever crevices of fact, or action, may, from page to page, render themselves apparent.


I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view--for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest--I say to myself, in the first place, "Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?" Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone--whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone--afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.

Yes, it's full of statements that on their surface appear to only address writing and literature. The ideas in the essay, however, encompass a much larger world if you apply them globally.

Seriously - read it!

Brilliant

But also a very accurate description of how relationships work...



Happy Friday the 13th!

Oh My God...

Too long in coming, if you ask me...

http://princessbridegame.com/

And for those of you more familiar with the movie, a related clip:



Link to above.

That is all - good night.

Once More to the Breach, Good Men...

Tomorrow ends my sixth year as a classroom teacher. They have been six years packed with learning, experimenting, failing, flailing, and - often as not - successes.

Tuesday begins my second summer as "director of bands"... which adds quite a bit of responsibility to my plate, some numbers to my paycheck, and about a month to my "at-school" time.

Thursday Sarah and I celebrate our second year of knowing each other - appropriately at Mark's American Cuisine (where I took her back before we were officially dating to celebrate my first UIL as head director - regardless of outcome... as well as try to impress her a little). Rolled into that will be attending the premier of "A Doll's House"... which I am pretty excited about, since it is abstract, modern, and based on manga. Good stuff.