A video montage of Prescott in goal

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You gotta love Mac’s out-of-the-box creative software. Here is a video I created from clips of Prescott at a hockey practice.

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Better pictures of my haircut

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Judy, the director of our You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown production, took some photos during rehearsal. Here are a few that show haircut a little better than the Halloween ones I posted.

I’ll also add rehearsal photos here.

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A haircut and a Halloween costume, all in one

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While watching the Olympics this summer (on my laptop, since I have no cable tv anymore), I found a new heroine: Zhang Xi, one half of China’s younger women’s beach volleyball team. Forget for a moment that she is the product of China’s state-run sports system, forget the debate of whether China should have hosted the Olympics in the first place, forget that I still really resent that Disney knock-off theme park in Beijing, complete with a full array of wannabe Disney characters which the state-run park claim are original creations, with only coincidentally striking resemblance to Disney’s versions. (I mean, seriously — they are shameless.) Forget also that today is November 4th, Election Day 2008, and I really should be occupied by a more important topic than my favorite volleyball player, but I’m not.

So why is Zhang Xi my girl? Her hair. Yeah, it’s cool that she’s part of the youngest women’s volleyball team on the circuit and a bronze medalist, but really, she’s my fave player because I love her hair. Plus, she’s six feet tall. I forget that she’s so tall until she’s standing next to regular non-volleyballers. Damn I wish I had her physique.

So on Halloween, I decided to get my hair cut. I downloaded a picture of Zhang Xi on my PDA and went over to Deluxe Hair Salon, which is a fabulous five-minute walk away from my neighborhood. All the stylists were dressed in full costume; mine was Kyra, dressed as the nurse from Kill Bill. I showed her the picture on my PDA and explained that I wanted to donate my hair, so I had to have a ponytail length minimum of 10 inches. According to her ruler, I had just enough. She whipped out her scissors and started snipping away at the base of my ponytail, and for a few seconds I felt a current of terror pass through my heart — would my hair be too short? Too late now.

It turns out that Kyra did an awesome job. Factor in the $10 coupon I found on Deluxe’s website, and I was stoked. Kyra also pointed me to another group that accepts donated hair called Beautiful Lengths, which makes and gives wigs to women who have lost their hair due to cancer. I had always donated to Locks of Love, which makes wigs for children who have lost their hair to primary disease or secondary to cancer treatment.

I went home, found the sporty two-piece swimsuit, and played pretend volleyball while Prescott snapped some photos. Some of them came out funny (really grainy) so I tried some Photoshop effects to make them a little clearer, and then I got a little experimental…All in good fun =)

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Godspell aftermath: photos and videos

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After several hours of media editing, I can now finally share my Godspell experience with some visual aids. Here are photos and videos. I also added stuff on Facebook for that demographic. I’m posting these mainly for my mom and brother, who couldn’t come to the show. But look who did!

I had my camera at the show only the last weekend of the show, so those are the folks of whom I have photos, but I can’t forget Steve, Steph and Kara, who supported me opening night; Susan and Dianne, who showed up and totally took me by surprise and delight; and Jenn and Laura, who have always been genuinely supportive throughout the crappy and the happy times.

That said, here are the folks whom I did manage to snag with my camera. Karla is the most chill MD-PhD I know; she’s so much fun and I love her. Allison, Sarah and Jess were in the same entering class as I, and they are now 4th-year medical students (oh, to be in their shoes...). They were sweethearts to come up and see me. Tim is the director of Final Respects, and he was really supportive in helping me get my theater wits about me when I first started working on his show (which was my first play).

And finally, Prescott was a gallant sport and came twice to see the show...mostly because I was upset that I didn’t do my best the first time and asked him to come again...but he could have said no, and he didn’t! He really is a darling when I need him to be. (But good golly, there are other times when I gotta keep him in line.)

I wish I could say the lovely lilies and roses in the last picture are from Prescott, but no, they’re from Karla. Purrrty. I hope inheriting my mom’s flower arranging habits.

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Creating an RSS feed and hooking it up to Facebook

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Today, I used that “Notes” feature on Facebook for the first time (I know, I’m slow). I saw that you can pull content from an existing blog feed and have it display as Notes, so that got me thinking: I should try to integrate my homemade blog. All it seemed to require was an RSS feed; if I could figure out how to create an XML file from my blog database, I should be good to go.

I did a little searching on XML structure and validation, and bingo -- I got my RSS feed running. Probably one of the easiest customizations I’ve ever done on this site! It’s now accessible from the blog sidebar.

I didn’t want Facebook to import everything, so I created a different RSS source for it to import. This entry should be the first one that Facebook adds. It seems that Fb automatically reverses the order of items that is set in your feed; I like my most recent to show at the top, so I set it for the opposite in my feed generator. We shall see what happens.

Further, I’ve read that people had problems with duplicate entries appearing in their Facebook Notes. I added a guid tag to help prevent this problem, but who knows if it will work?

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