Posts Tagged ‘improv’

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The cost of getting things done

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

I guess there wasn’t a lot of note that happened in February, seeing as I didn’t manage an update all month long. I’ve been busy, but not with any one thing in particular. I also haven’t been sleeping well. It’s a Sunday afternoon and I could easily go back to sleep now for another few hours except that I have places to be all too soon.

Work is good overall; progress is slow but definite. The other people on my team are busy putting out fires on other projects, so I don’t see or hear very much from them. I flew to San José for some meetings over a couple of days back in February, a routine I am getting used to, although I still dislike flying. I think I am doing some good stuff behind-the-scenes on this project that will be very appreciated when the spotlight is back on me and what I’ve been up to.

In the meantime, construction has continued on my condo and it’s been nice to see some progress being made. There is actual siding on one of the buildings now and I’ve had three of my windows replaced with new ones (the remaining should be done this coming week). It’s annoying because of all of the noise early in the morning, and I’ve had to remove all of my blinds and deal with construction workers coming inside from time to time, but that’s clearly the cost of getting things done. We have our annual homeowner’s association meeting coming up this week and while I usually dread it, it will be interesting to hear the state of the union as far as the construction project goes.

Next weekend should be interesting. It’s the Emerald City Comicon and as a result of affiliations between Theatresports friends of mine and the guy running the event, I will be performing there as a part of “NERDprov”: improv themed around nerdy subjects from TV, movies, comics and wherever else popular sub-culture takes us. I’m also doing a special Saturday Theatresports with two of the Internet-celebrities from The Guild (and before you ask, no, it’s not Felicia Day, it’s Zaboo and Vork, both of whom have excellent improv backgrounds and should be fun to play with). Today I am going to a “research party” of sorts with the rest of the cast where we will be boning up on our geekdom in preparation for the two events.

Also coming up in a couple of weeks is the wedding of two friends, for which Elizabeth and I will be flying out to North Carolina. While there we’re going to drop in on my parents who are vacationing in Hilton Head. It’s a long way to travel for just a few days, but you gotta take the opportunities you can get, I suppose.

We’ve been having some insanely nice spring weather, with sunny, bright skies and mild temperatures hovering around the fifties (that’s the tens for you Celsius folk). I don’t know if it’s global warming or just random spurts, but it’s been very welcome.

Dan.

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Token male

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Last week was kind of hectic. I got to have lunch with a couple of friends, which was nice, and perform in a couple of shows, which was also nice. On Thursday I went to see the preview of Tacoma Musical Playhouse’s production of Rent, in part because it’s one of the few (and least expensive) opportunities I had to see it, but also because one of the leads (who was also the lead when I did Damn Yankees back there in 2007) was going to propose to his girlfriend (also a lead in the show) during the curtain call. There was a pretty respectable cross-section of people in the theatre community who came to see the event, and it was adorable to watch. I’m not personally close to either of them (I’ve only done one show with the guy and had never met his now-fiancée), but the theatre community is small and with at least half a dozen people on that stage whom I knew and far more in the audience, I think it felt like a family affair for everyone.

Friday’s SecondStory show was nothing remarkable, but Saturday was my first Theatresports performance since December and I was both anxious and excited to get back on that stage. I was on a team with one apprentice and two veterans, all three of whom were women (I was a bit disappointed we didn’t go with the team name “Token Male” one of them had proposed). It was a really fun combination of strong performers I don’t often get to play with, and when you are, in fact, the token male on the team it means you get to play just about every guy role that comes up. We ended the first half with a five-point deficit but managed to come back from it and win by three points, which means we’ll get to play again next weekend. We had a good audience and I felt like I had a pretty solid show overall, with the opportunity to do some respectable scenework, which is what usually concerns me the most when I’m in Theatresports, so that felt good.

I bit the bullet and finally joined Netflix over the weekend. Technically I started a month-long free trial but I know I lack the willpower to quit something like that once I start it, and at $9/month it doesn’t exactly break the bank. The catalyst was getting this fancy new Internet-enabled television that hooks directly up to your account and lets you stream movies and television shows directly over the Internet. You see, I know I’m not enough of a moviephile to ever make a traditional, mail-based Netflix account worth the money, and in fact am likely to find it more onerous than just renting DVDs from a retail shop because I will worry about whether I am watching them and sending them back soon and often enough in order to make it worth my investment.

The Internet streaming is something new and very cool, though. So far I’ve watched a few episodes of the first season of Weeds on it and am surprised by how good the quality is. You can tell it’s been compressed and every now and then it jumps a single frame or so (almost unnoticeable), but by and large it looks almost as good as an actual DVD and doesn’t stutter or stammer like I’d expected it would.

The downside is that while there are a lot of streamable titles on Netflix, only a small percentage of their total library is accessible through this feature. So I am still trapped with the DVD-by-mail conundrum, even more so as I now need to work to keep my DVD “queue” full, but many of the things I want to watch are available by streaming, so it takes a lot more browsing to find things to put in the mail queue.

Netflix apparently has a “friends” feature, so if you use Netflix you should befriend me and share your ideas for what I should watch!

Dan.

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A legitimate world of their own

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

My new TV arrived yesterday! It is a Vizio VF552XVT, and at 55 glorious inches it’s a considerable upgrade from my previous 37″ Vizio. In fact, it fills the space of my living room quite nicely:

New TV

I’ve notably invested in a wall mount from Monoprice. This was both scary and difficult to install, especially seeing as the poorly-written instructions from China caused me to break one of the lag bolts off in the stud (I soon found better advice from the people who had rated the item on the website). But at the end of the day I got it up there and it seems pretty sturdy, and it’s super-convenient and easy to pull the TV away from the wall when I need to mess with the cables, or tilt it in any direction I please. Plus it frees up the top of the cabinet that my previous TV called its home.

Some things that are neat about it:

  • It refreshes at 240 Hz. I don’t personally put much stock in the difference between 240 Hz and 120 Hz, but compared to my previous 60 Hz television there’s a definite difference in the fluidity of motion, to the point where it almost actually lowers the cinematic quality by making the people seem too real and alive… it’s a lot more like they’re actually there, which I suppose is the idea, but it suddenly makes them look like performers on a set instead of characters in a legitimate world of their own.
  • At 55″, you really notice the difference between 480 (standard def), 720 (high-def), and 1080 (super-high-def?) resolutions. In fact, most TVs smaller than 42″ or so that support 1080 signals actually downscale them to 720, because you typically can’t tell anyway at that size. I didn’t realize all cable “high-def” broadcasts were only at 720, which on this TV is visibly blurrier than the 1080 signal from, say, a Blu-ray disc.
  • This is an LED TV, which supposedly provides better black levels than traditional compact-florescent back-lighting (because they can dim the LEDs selectively when parts of the screen are darker). This isn’t the kind of thing I normally notice or complained about on any of my previous LCD televisions, so we’ll have to wait and see if it makes an actual difference to me.
  • I waited for this model to come out because (at the same price as the previous-generation model) it has Internet connectivity to it. In fact, the remote control has a slide-out keyboard (which is absolutely terrible) and is Bluetooth instead of IR (which is extremely nice since I don’t ever have to aim it at the TV). The Internet features are (unsurprisingly) poorly designed and implemented in terms of user interface, but the advantage of it being software is they can keep pushing updates to me as it improves.

My plan of attack continues to be to run an Ethernet networking cable under the condo crawl space and into the living room, so all of my devices can be hooked up to the Internet without the encumbrances of wireless. I’m also hoping to run an HDMI cable so that I can plug my computer directly into the television, so I can watch anything can be downloaded to the computer directly on the big screen. Hopefully when the cable guy comes in a couple of weeks to reroute the cable I can make my changes as well.

In other news, my grandmother has been doing much better. She’s no longer in the ICU and is in a private hospital room where they are attempting to ween her off oxygen and build up enough strength for her to be discharged. Don’t know how long that will take, but it appears she is out of the woods for the moment, which is a tremendous relief to everyone.

I’ve been doing more of the improv performances at SecondStory this round, and while they are smaller shows than Theatresports at Unexpected they’re also more intimate… plus I’ve had some good friends in attendance and it’s been a swell opportunity to keep in practice. This weekend I’ll be doing both of them respectively on Friday and Saturday; Saturday will be my first Theatresports performance of the new year and I’m looking forward to getting back to it.

Dan.

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Surviving the Dumbass Decade

Saturday, December 19th, 2009

Today is the milestone day, turning the big three-oh. I am spending it in my housecoat at home, and then quite possibly later on going to someone else’s birthday party as well as a reunion party for the Cannibal cast.

I’m kind of caught between wanting to downplay the morbid significance of the occasion and embracing the landmark that it is. I don’t feel remarkably older, and most people are spinning the positive side of it… I think my favourite comment I’ve received over the Internet is from improv legend Joe Bill, who I’m not especially close to but I’ve taken several classes with and was kind enough to drop me a note saying “congrats on surviving the Dumbass Decade”.

The theme for this week was, coincidentally, “survival”… I had a stomach bug early on which took a lot out of me, and then got passed on to my girlfriend and took even more out of her, so much so that I had to take her to the E.R. on Wednesday, causing us to miss both the holiday party at Unexpected Productions (which I was totally psyched for) and a holiday show that our friends had set aside an extra Wednesday performance just so those of us with heavy schedules could make it. We are both much better now, but it took a pretty significant toll.

Not so fortunate, however, is my poor laptop, a MacBook Pro that I co-purchased with my then-employer back in 2007. It has been having trouble playing DVDs since, well, forever. I got the DVD drive replaced several months ago but surprisingly the troubles quickly came back. Still under AppleCare, I took it back a second time when I had a DVD that I could consistently reproduce the problem on within the first ten seconds of it playing. I left the DVD with them while they ordered and replaced the drive for a second time, and when I returned I thankfully had the foresight to try it out in the store, only to confirm that replacing the DVD drive hadn’t fixed the problem.

I then spent about an hour in the store with their technician, who suspected it was a problem with the memory and was trying out various configuration of memory in the device. At the end he concluded it wasn’t in fact the memory but the logic board, which meant ordering yet another part to be replaced. I left the DVD with them again, and when I got the call and returned for a third time I was incredibly frustrated to try the DVD only to find it still crashing within the first ten seconds.

I explained to them that my issue wasn’t that they were having difficulty fixing this problem so much as each time they called me and said it was fixed I returned only to try it out myself and find out that replacing the part hadn’t fixed anything, and if they had so much as tried the DVD themselves (which is why I had left it with them) then they could have saved me a trip to Bellevue Square which, at Christmas-time, isn’t exactly a holiday.

After admitting that they had dropped the ball and didn’t know exactly what was wrong with my computer they (finally) decided to replace it, so the good news is that I will be getting a brand new MacBook Pro with even slightly better specs than the one I have right now. The bad news is that I might not be receiving it in time for my next scheduled trip to San Jose. I received a call from the manager today and as penance for their errors and putting me in a bind he’s going to cover new AppleCare on my machine and throw in a backup drive as well, so at least that’s good.

The rest of the week has been ok, illness notwithstanding. My Theatresports team won last Friday by a single point against a very formidable team, although I think they did better narrative work than we did. Unfortunately we didn’t come back yesterday because the regular teams were usurped by special teams celebrating the departure of one of our ensemble members. We’re supposed to come back again, but with the Christmas holiday and then the new year frankly I don’t know how that’s going down.

On Thursday I was treated to a surprise birthday party that I knew about in advance, on account of the E.R. visit on Wednesday and scepticism as to whether or not it would still be happening. It was really nice to see people there from all walks of my life, and I am grateful to everyone who made it out to it.

It feels weird having left my twenties behind. They had their ups and their downs and in many ways were very successful and in other ways not so much… I am sad for the failures that were most profound, the wasted days and missed opportunities, and feel a strange sense of mourning for the closing of a chapter that I am no longer writing but instead has been written, and knowledge that the last chances to make any alterations to it have finally slipped away.

But then, there is every reason to believe that thirty will be the best year of them all so far, so I shall be happy. After all, having written the past is a small price to pay to get to write the future.

Dan.

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Knee-deep in nostalgia

Friday, December 11th, 2009

My pages of Night Zero are out! I am positively tickled by them, in particular how I am left begging my associates to kill me on the page immediately following their callous and lethal betrayal of me. (I was given a summary of each shot we were taking, but didn’t fully comprehend just how spectacularly undignified my character’s end would be.)

I went to San José for two days last week on business. It was a pretty productive trip, although we have an intense road map ahead of us. My return to Redmond was graced with my new work computer finally arriving: a beautiful 27″ quad-core iMac (with a secondary 24″ cinema display). The story behind these computers is that they were introduced a couple of months back as the latest-and-greatest iMac entries, but in doing so they killed the 24″ model line which I had been using at my previous job, leaving me the rather undesirable options of either going down to 21″ or up to 27″. If I wanted the quad-core, though, there was no choice but to get the 27″ model. Which means I now nearly have to strain my neck in order to read the time in the menu bar. Man, is it beautiful though, especially with Parallels technology that lets me run my Mac on one screen and Windows simultaneously on the other.

Turning thirty has been on my mind as of late. My birthday is barely a week away, and I can feel it creeping up alongside the various holiday business that otherwise occupies my free time. I wouldn’t exactly say it’s been bothering me a whole lot, but it’s hard for me to ignore the milestone, no matter how contrived it may be.

My parents sent me a very nice care package to celebrate which had me wading knee-deep in nostalgia. Among its contents were an outlandishly Canadian tuque and mittens, a block of 6-year-old Balderson cheddar, Mennonite salami from the St. Jacobs’ Farmers Market, President’s Choice white cheddar macaroni and cheese, and perhaps most interesting a wall calendar of various gorgeous shots of Ontario, including places like Webster Falls that I used to go to back in university.

Tonight I return to Theatresports with my team that won last week. It’s been terribly hard to get cast in the show with all of the new apprentices and my general dislike of manually setting up teams, so it was a relief to win last week and get a chance to play a second time. There is also talk of returning to the randomized teams one night a week, which would make me very happy. Next week regular Theatresports is being preempted by a special show, so it doesn’t really make a difference if my team wins or loses tonight.

The temperature has been below freezing all week. It mercifully hasn’t rained and as such the city remains functional, but there’s talk of it snowing tomorrow in which case I might as well batten down the hatches and hunker down until spring arrives, as there’ll be no hope of going anywhere or doing anything until it does.

Dan.

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