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Last week Kyra was performing in a concert at Skyline High School, and the band director announced that a group called Face would be performing tonight as a fundraiser for the music department. All ticket proceeds would be donated to the school. Face is an acapella group of six men; it sounded interesting so Laralee and I bought tickets. Kyra brought three of her friends.

It was really pretty cool. They performed maybe fifteen songs, ranging from a Gregorian chant of “Let It Be” to songs by Aerosmith and Linkin Park. One of them, Mark, was amazing because he provided most of the percussion. He did a solo and if I’d had my eyes closed I would’ve sworn it was a full percussion ensemble on stage.

I saw my friend Paul there; he said he and his wife first saw Face six years ago and have been groupies ever since. They go to as many of the shows as they can. Since Face is a local group from Boulder, they play mostly in the Denver area.

Now I’m a fan, and I suspect we’ll be going to their next concert in or around Longmont.

Zack got glasses today.

We’ve known for a while his vision was a little blurry, but he was able to get by. Laralee took him in for an eye exam a couple of weeks ago, and he’s roughly 20/40 (compared to my 20/500 or whatever). So he picked out some glasses, and they were finished today.

Strangely, he’s really excited about them. I remember when I first got glasses that I was mortally embarrassed about them. I refused to wear them in public, even though my vision was atrocious. I’d squint and use all sorts of tricks to avoid wearing them, but in the end there’s something about being able to see clearly.

I suppose it’s good that he likes them, because with his stubborn streak it would be a constant battle to get him to wear them if he wasn’t interested. I just hope he doesn’t get grief from his friends, since peer pressure holds a lot of sway at his age.

In 1989 my high school sponsored a math contest. It was called “Three Threes” and the rules were quite simple: write down mathematic expressions using three– and only three– number 3’s to derive all whole numbers from 1 to 100. Any math operators could be used in any combination, but no other numbers were allowed. For example, the number 6 could be represented with three 3’s as

3 x 3 – 3 = 6

It seems simple at first blush, and in fact the first few numbers end up being a breeze. But what about 47? Or 82? It gets tricky very quickly.

Being the math nerds we were, Bech and I both entered the contest. I don’t know if anyone else in the entire school entered, but it didn’t really matter. We were only interested in beating each other. We had several weeks to come up with our solutions, and I remember sitting in various classes puzzling through different combinations to come up with representations for stuff like 55 and 94 and whatever. It was hard. But both of us were very competitive and very determined.

In the end, I was crowned the victor. Bech actually would have beat me, but on his final answer sheet he’d mis-copied one of his answers and I ended up winning by one. I don’t remember the final tally exactly, but I think I was able to solve around 85 of the 100 numbers. He had 84.

I won a $50 U.S. government savings bond, which I think is still tucked away somewhere in the basement. Hey, that was big money in 1989!

Anyway, a few weeks ago I challenged Bech to a rematch. Once again, we’d write down as many expressions with three 3’s as we could, and on March 30 we’ll compare answers to see who’s the biggest math nerd. I’ve been working sort of on and off on this, but time is marching on and I need to get cracking. My pride is at stake here…

Zack’s package finally arrived!

(Read the story here)

Although I despise air travel, it’s nice to see that every now and then, someone in the industry has a sense of humor.

Happy 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510 Day!

It’s kind of a sad day. For years, my profile picture on places like Facebook has been some dude with a sweet afro:

But now, because I’m trying to be all professional and stuff, I have to change it to a far more boring one:

After all, potential new hires are looking at this as they decide whether Zing is the place they want to work…

What’s that old saying: the cobbler always has the worst shoes? It’s so true. At Zing we do web development all day for clients, but we never seem to find time to make our own site nice.

Well, after six months of work by Brent (our marketing director) and design/programming as we had time, it’s finally up and running:

zingstudios.com

It’s way better than our old site, and we’ll continue improving it. Hopefully prospective clients and potential new hires will be impressed.

Cool. That’s Earth, third from the left.

Background: on Tuesday I played ultimate on a slushy snow-covered field in 30-degree weather, and I was panting and wheezing. After the games– in which my team was trounced twice– I felt completely spent. Normally winter is kind of a slow time for me in terms of exercise, so I get a little flabby and out of shape. By mid-summer I rebound a bit because I’m back to ultimate four days a week, biking, and the occasional hike. Still, on Tuesday I felt like I was probably in the worst shape of my adult life. It was awful.

I vowed that it was time to get in shape. Seriously.

So yesterday I dusted off my bike and headed to work, even though it was about 25 degrees in the morning. I could tell it’s been a while since I was on the bike, because even my short 2.5-mile commute was kind of painstaking. It was a start, but I need to be better about exercising more regularly. Being out of shape sucks.

Today was a beautiful sunny 60-degree day. So yesterday, in anticipation of the unseasonably warm weather, I wrote to our pickup ultimate group:

To which Tall Paul responded with:

Michael followed up with:

And then Keffeler:

Finally Brad jumped in:

You can just feel the love from the guys.

Indeed, today was a gorgeous day and we had a pair of really close games. I still have an uphill battle to be “in shape” again, but I did manage to score the winning point in the first game (7-6). In the second game I did a down-the-line sprint to the endzone to block the other team’s game-ending point (although we still lost 2-3). Take that, hecklers!

Not me.