This toast is a little nerdy, so you’ll have to excuse me.

Groans and laughs of expectation

There’s an old saying that goes “May your house always be too small to hold all your friends.”

Aww.

Now as we know from thermodynamics:

Laughter

Given a constant volume…

I gesture to the living room…

and a growing number of friends…

…which is absolutely filled with people.

The only way to keep the pressure down is to keep the temperature down.

So I say:

“May your house never explode by knowing only cool people”

The half of the room that gets it immediately laughs. The other half soon follows.

To Mari and Evelyn!

Cheers.

( The best response, moments later, came from Patrick:

Barak, that was absolute zero.

Laughs and groans )

Saw the incoming freshman from GV to Cal this weekend. That made me feel old; along with all the festivities surrounding graduation. Next year I graduate. This scares me.

The past week has been a mixed bag with regard to dancing. Last Thursday was awesome. This Thursday was a totally off night for me. Saturday wasn’t bad at all. Sunday (in Sac) was kinda off again. Le sigh. I start running LoS on Saturday for the summer. And then I move. All while looking for a job.

It should all work out okay. I’d feel better if I were on a more even-keel with dancing, and less worrisome in general. Staying at home actually doesn’t help that much, because I feel kinda powerless. My life is a screen session, and I’m currently detached. I’d be happier (and more stressed) if I were back in the driver’s seat.

One of my side projects is bringing back to Berkeley all of my old highschool photography, so as to scan it up in Soda. Hell, I haven’t shot film SINCE, almost.

We’ll see how it all goes. I’m going home to Berkeley in less than 24, so I’ll be back soon enough.

SwingCal finale tonight. Small event, but three separate follows (with large amounts of dance-cred) complimented me on my leading, which makes me feel warm and fuzzy. I’ve only been serious about dancing since January, but it’s amazing what I’ve accomplished in the intervening time. A major part of that can be attributed to the last two months or so in particular, social dancing in more general, public environments, clubs and whatnot, in Seattle and here in the Bay. Practice. Adaptation. Refining. Learning. Saturday morning, after Lindy at Night, I went to LoS for a few minutes pre-laundry and danced a few. It was then that I first noticed that with well-practiced follows (Movement is what struck me at the time, but it applies more generally) my swing-outs had become actually fluid. It felt better. It felt right. And what’s more is that I wasn’t getting dizzy; usually I do after more than a couple, but when it works, I could just about go the whole song and not mind. My first swing-outs were choppy — as James made an analogy, a slowly-sampled version of what should be a continuous sine wave (signals nerds will understand this comment). I’d also get dizzy after two or three. What’s more, I was merely going through the motions. Now I actually take the lead. This from a few months work.

Classes are wrapping up. Signals courses are going into special topics — namely, the same special topic (wavelets and image compression) which I have of late become a localized expert in, for an undergrad anyway, thanks to my project. Which I also spent some time this week fully understanding; a few days ago it was “oh, this is how I think it works” and now it’s “oh, this is how the code should be written” — which is considerably better.

yawn

Sleep. Sleep is good.

Lindy on Sproul is still lots of fun. I have ~ 2.5 gigs of swing music now, which is quite awesome. Note that this is only ~ 500 songs because I’m a nut for quality where I can get it (192+) — I’ve even gone so far as to get FLAC albums in some cases

It’s been almost overwhelmingly WARM in Berkeley — my handy internet thermometer suggests that it was 77 degrees earlier — and with a higher humidity than I get up in GV. Blah. At least b33r tastes even better now.

And apparently a troupe of LoS people are out to find a swimming hole after dancing tomorrow, which I am so in the mood for.

Running a LoS movie night (courtesy of the CSUA) in 306 Soda on Monday…. yay Swing Kids.

UU stuff on Monday too.

And I can write a simple lexer in 38 lines of Python, including comments and whitespace? Who’s the man?

And then darch and I want to write what seems to be a gstreamer-based mpd/mserv replacement in Python — which is totally doable and would be bunches of fun — mainly because it scratches a mutual itch in terms of music serving.

Looking for work, as always — considering Google SoC and research and whatnot.

Next minor project is to finally SVN my interesting homedir stuff (the theory being I can sit down at a fresh machine and go “svn co Homedirstuff” and have my shell work as it should) and possibly reinstall/fully-move-into a copy of Feisty Fawn, which I dunno why I haven’t et myself do — for some reason, my brain calls it temporary when I want it to be more permanent. Likewise, it’d be very nice to put FF extensions and configs into SVN for total cross-platform ‘lovin.

That and update my blogroll to also include blogs of people who a) are not Karen and b) are not on LJ. LJ is for legacy connections — and besides, that’s what my friendslist is for.

In short, what AREN’T I doing these days?

I built the playlist the night before — good thing too; making selections on the fly is hard. Heck, I still was changing the order every few songs or so.

My DJ cred is rising — I did it wholly from the swing collection I’ve been building for weeks from torrents and whatnot — I ripped one of the standard CDs just in case, but ended up not using it.

However, these formed the majority of the playlist. The real cred came from putting some of my own spin in — my hits and misses that weren’t “standard” swing songs. And I had more hits than misses, so I have something of an ear for it.

The breakdown:

Hits:

• Little Richard – Tutti Frutti — People were surprised, but excited, the dancing worked well and it was generally fun
• Queen – Crazy Little Thing Called Love — Everyone knew the song; It just happens to work well for swing
• The Beach Boys – Fun Fun Fun — There was a general excited cheer and it turned into a swingin’ beach party for two minutes
• Van Morrison – Brown-Eyed Girl — I was a little shy about this one (after a miss or two) but after encouragement by onlookers, I played it, and it totally rocked. Totally worked for swing too.

Misses:

• Blondie – Sunday Girl — It’s a swaying sort of song, thought it would work — it was only mediocre though, so it counts as a miss
• Norman Greenbaum – Spirit In The Sky — Too blues-y. Awesome song though, so it passed, but only just. Another near-miss
• The Seatbelts – Car 24 — James called it “Elevator Music” – and he’s totally right, it didn’t work at all. Full booch on my part

I didn’t get to try The New Pornographers – All For Swinging You Around because I opted against it. May try later, or may discover that it’s just a bad idea.

Overarching lesson: Go with standard swing tracks or danceable classic rock that people know, and it’s hard to go wrong.

Overall, the general energy of the day was high, which was good. The peaks in energy were on my hits though, so that rocked.

If I do it again next week, I’ll do a similar list, mixed differently, change up the energy levels, and pick some more personal flavor with a better understanding of what really works.

DJ Barak in the hizzouse.

Totally reversing the gender roles. Go on and lead a guy around. You’ll both be out of your usual patterns and it’s kind of hilarious. It’s also fun to take a moment and switch in the middle of a song. With salsa, it’s even easier, because the basic step is the same, just 180 degrees out of phase — just restart your counting.

I went to confirm this with Lin. Sure enough, my statement was correct. And as we talked more about dancing in general…

Lin: when you dance live » like not in class » do you actually like put together combos you learned in class and have names for » or do you just like do random permutations Me: random permutations, mostly » it’s also bad » that i think of dance moves » as a FSM Lin: no » dude » i do that too » and you have only some actions that work » to move the state » but thats way smart » most pattern dancers can’t do that » they dont understand that Me: lol Lin: we’re a leg up Me: rofl Lin: no serious! » come on » its way more imaginative » i hate how these dancers from classw we go to salsa to » if u start into a pattern we learned in clas » and then i’m like eh » lets do a cbl inestead of a right turn » and they are like WTF WTF » and i’m like follow already

Like I told Lin, Nerd training FTW. See, this is what happens to you in engineering school — they get inside your brain and you start seeing the same things everywhere. It’s hilarious, useful, and maddening all at once.