life: March 2006 Archives

I'm a bit excited about this, I'm doing another musical with Springfield High School Drama Club (Holland, Ohio).  They're doing Guys & Dolls, and this will be the first time I've done the show too.  I'm excited because I haven't played in a show in over year, the last one was also with Springfield (Damn Yankees).  This is my third show with them and they always do a great job!  They have a great director, I first worked with Joe Barton on Waterville Playshop's production of Titanic and it was fantastic!  I do miss playing in these shows though, since most of the shows I played were in the Toledo area it makes it difficult to get down there now from Ann Arbor.  I've given myself at limit of a 50 miles drive for shows now, Holland falls just under that, that does leave out Waterville Playshop shows (unless I spend a week with my dad or something).  Since I'm not involved with Maumee Community Band anymore, I don't get called for as many shows either.  I need a new network in Ann Arbor!

If anybody enjoys going to High School musical productions the show dates are April 7, 8, and 9, 2006.  Springfield High School is about 45 miles south of Ann Arbor, right off of US-23 in Ohio. 

technorati tags: sphs drama club, guys and dolls, musical, pit orchestra

I was diligently working on my web project for class last week, the finished product is here.  Well pseudo finished, I've submitted it for my grade already but once I get my grade I'll try to change it around some.  The reason why I want to change it is because the site seems seriously hacked together to me, I did the entire site in HTML tables.  There's a couple of reason why I did it this way, the first is that we could not use an editor for the assignment, we had to do everything in notepad (bleh).  I thought about adding an internal style sheet to avoid the tables, but I have a love/hate relationship with CSS, I love the way it makes life easy (after you've set it up of course), I hate the lack of cross-browser support with everything I do, when I first start a site in CSS it usually takes forever for me to figure out how I want it to look, whether it's going work in Firefox and IE, not only does an editor help with this, I just thought it wasn't worth the time for a web project for an intro class where we didn't even go over CSS to begin with.  I really don't prefer to code all the time with crazy CSS hacks, and I'm only self-taught with CSS so my site becomes what looks alright in different browsers and what's easy enough to do with minimal hacks.  I'll save my limited CSS skills for my client based web design course or something.

I was thinking of keeping this site active while I'm at WSU though.  I like the way it's setup and I would like to outline my projects and papers in the coursework section (under resume right now but I'm going to pop that out in the main nav after I get my grade).  Now that it's set up I think that it'll make a good showcase site if anybody is curious what coursework I'm taking, or my resume and experience.  It was a fun project though.

technorati tags: life, wsu, information technology, lis 6080, web project, wayne state

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the website, The Grocery Game, or not, but I've been using this service for probably a little over a month or two now, and I've realized that it is really a great example of how technology can change our habits in some of the most basic ways.

First of all, I saw the founder of this website on a couple different television programs, including NBC's Today Show. I was fascinated by it from the beginning. She took a mother of a typical family, who probably spends about $200 or more a week (or month? I don't know, I'm not a typical mother of a family of 4 so I'm clueless on the average grocery bill), and managed to get her grocery bill to something like $20 or $40! I couldn't believe it, the same amount of groceries for that amount of money is absolutely amazing to me.

I got my car back this afternoon! It's quite a bit happier and so am I because I paid absolutely nothing to get it fixed. It turns out that a recall notice that I got in the mail last week had everything to do with what's been wrong with it. It had something to do with the spark plugs so the engine was misfiring or something. I knew about the recall but I honestly didn't connect that the notice and my car problems were in any way related. The recall came up when I took it in to the dealer to get it fixed though, and once they fixed everything it's working much better.

Unfortunately they also found a list of 4 other problems that will cost me a lot of money. I declined to get them fixed for the time being though, since this is a new dealer I want to get a second opinion from our "old dealer". Actually we still go to our old dealer so they're not really old, they're just 45 minutes from our apartment now. Alex usually gets his oil changes and stuff done when I work on a Saturday, he just drives me to work then he hangs out at the library when he's done, the old dealer is only about 15 minutes from my work.

It would be nice to get a new car and all, but in a year or so my car will be paid off. Not only will it be paid off, but the balance on my loan has been lower than the blue book value of my car since the day I bought it. It's not that much of a difference, but it's nice to actually see your car as an asset and not a constantly depreciating piece of metal. I only have 140,000 miles on it, which sounds like a lot, but for a Honda it means that I could put another 50,000, maybe more, with little problem. I sold my last Honda at 170,000, I even sold it with bad brakes. I can't remember what we got for my last Honda because my dad took a huge cut from that, but I think it was around $1000 or so. I often wonder if that car ever made it to 200,000 or not...I would consider it an achievement to be able to get my current car to that. We do have Alex's 2003 Civic that we'll probably eventually buy out of the lease...Alex wants an Accord and he has an automatic; I only like to drive manual now...plus I don't prefer his model either so I would much rather keep my 10 year old Honda than inherit his 3 year old one. The only real reason to buy a new car would be because I want one and not because I need one, and that doesn't seem a compelling enough reason for me.

Technorati : car, car problems, car repair, civic, honda, honda civic

I barely got started on my way to work this morning when my check engine light came on. "This can't be good", I thought as I did a complete (probably illegal) U-Turn in the middle of Michigan Ave. as I headed back to my apartment. I'm blessed with vehicles that don't break down much, and I'm hoping that the fact that I'm a month overdue with my oil change is not a factor. Normally I'm pretty good about the oil changes, but I also don't worry about it because the Honda recommended is much higher than the normal 3,000 miles that they normally recommend. Lately though it's been weird in cold and rainy weather. I almost never warm up my car, and it's never been a problem before, but the past month or two, if my engine is cold, it will jerk a little as I'm driving, until it's warmed up to normal. It was doing this again this morning when the light came on.

So I've made an appointment at a Honda dealer. It's not our normal place because our normal place is in Monroe, but hopefully they're as good as our normal place. One thing I hate about being in a new city is that you have to find new normal places. This dealer is right down the road from us though, so at least they're close.

In the meantime I can't make it out to work. My appointment is tomorrow morning and luckily I don't work again until Wednesday, but I have two days to pitter around I guess. I already changed into my flannel pants (it's raining and gray, I think I deserve it), and I'm going to finish the symphony website today. I might start my class website too but I just got an email that our student webservers are down. I have a movie to watch ("In Good Company"), and I think I got "Dinner for Five" from Netflix around here somewhere. Might as well make the most of my time off. :)

Technorati : car, car problems, check engine, check engine light