February 2005←

March 2005

→April 2005



March 30, 2005

chris puzak’s toast

11:36 PM

In the third Mad Max movie, the Thunderdome was introduced with the words “Two men enter, one man leaves”. While the movie is clearly inferior to The Road Warrior, I find the concept of the Thunderdome particularly relevant to this special day. Today we have gathered to celebrate Bob Rudderow and Dia Siraki entering the Thunderdome of marriage and emerging as one soul, together for the rest of their lives.

When I first met Bob, he was a young man, going through life, growing like corn. He was a dedicated student, a devoted teetotaler, and an enormous fan of crotchless pants. He also had quite the affinity for Communism for no reason I could discern other than that he seemed to believe that when the workers owned the means of production, he would finally be able to live out his dream of being a pizza delivery man. While he always seemed content playing hours of Marathon or ordering free catheters off the Internet, I could tell that what he really wanted was to have that one great love in his life.

When I first met Dia, she was a young woman who wanted to become a news reporter for The Triangle. Dia worked hard and did a lot of grunt work, but most importantly, didn’t leave the paper despite the enormous amount of jokes we all made about her country being bombed by NATO. Sure, she began every production night by claiming it was her last week at the Triangle, but without fail she showed up for staff meetings the following Monday. At the time I thought she just enjoyed being abused emotionally, but as I look back now, I suppose she was just looking for that one great love in her life too.

I don’t remember the first time Bob met Dia, but I do remember the first time Bob told me he liked her.

“You know what? I really dig Dia,” he said as we walked by Myers hall one night.

“That’s cool,” I replied.

Then he said, “Yeah, I just love her childlike whimsy.” (This was a long time ago) And so began a long relationship.

When Bob was about to take over from me as editor of The Triangle, I had a lot of staff members tell me they were worried that Bob would find a way to ruin the paper. At times it seemed like everyone except me was losing sleep over the prospect of Bob Rudderow in the editor’s chair. I never worried though, because I knew that at the end of the day, I could trust Bob to do the right thing. And for a long time, the was a lot of resistance to promoting Dia to anything above reporter because people thought she was flaky and irresponsible. However, I knew that when the chips were down I could trust her too. Today is about the joining of two hearts, when it comes to Bob’s heart there is no one I trust more with it than Dia. And when it comes to Dia’s heart there’s no one I trust more with it than Bob. It has been an honor to know both of them, and while they may not be the most traditional of couples, I know of very few who belong together the way they do.

So today we celebrate Bob gaining a wife, Dia gaining a husband, and Bob’s dad gaining a daughter who won’t make him reach for his blood pressure medication. On this most special day, there are two things I hope for ” 1. that George Miller and Mel Gibson find a way to get the fourth Mad Max movie into production and 2. that Bob and Dia spend the rest of their days happy and in love.

pics have been picked

02:51 AM

There’s so much to say about our whirlwind trip to Las Vegas, my marriage to Dia, and the wonderful friends who both travelled with us and wished us well from back home. As it’s now 2 a.m. after an evening of doing nothing but importing, retouching, and labelling photos, I’ll cut to the chase and say my photos are up.

Before I hit the sack I want to add that while the whole trip meant a lot to Dia and me — and there were many times I felt inwardly emotional about being surrounded by so many friends — I was literally reduced to tears on my wedding day. It wasn’t at the altar with Dia, though she cried before she covered it up with laughter and I had butterflies in my stomach during the entire ceremony. It was the toast that Chris made. I had such a great time listening to him talk that I almost lost it completely. Lisa gave me his original notecards (on which she wrote “Slow Down” atop each one), but I’m waiting on the soft copy since I still have so much photo work to do.

Back to which, I’ve labelled every photo I didn’t take with the same of the person who did. Since all the files are posted with the original timestamp — adjusted to local time — my wedding gallery should provide an intertwined timeline for mostly everyone. I still have four more people’s photos in my posession to sort through, and plenty of other people to hit up too. It’s a nervewracking project that will be worth every ounce of effort in the end.


March 22, 2005

on a flow

04:34 PM

I’ve been creatively juicy recently. There could be any number of reasons for this, from publishing the basic structure of my photo site to the salads I’ve been eating at lunch every day for the past three weeks, to the excitement of tomorrow’s trip. At any rate, I feel great. The cards I designed yesterday and today weren’t too shabby and the “stupid” T-shirts I made for the trip are pretty snazzy.

In that vein, I’ve been working on other T-shirt designs in the hopes of getting enough to finally create my Fuqmi clothing line. Here’s the pitch:


    Top of the shirt reads (generic old-timey font): “Stalking Began with the Telegram”

    Punchline underneath (Courier font): “To my love— With regard to your advances, please don’t. Stop.”

Eh?

viva las wedding

03:35 PM

Tomorrow morning we leave for Las Vegas and everything is pretty much on schedule. We made our custom T-shirts last night, Anh is stopping by to feed our cats, and I’m picking up Dia’s wedding band at the jeweler tonight. What I previously considered no big deal is growing closer by minute. Even though Dia and I have been planning the trip for months, it didn’t hit me before today — not even at Daydreams on Friday where Tim threw a great bachelor party — that I was no longer going to be single.

At work, April and I have been talking about the wedding and trip with her co-workers in the IT department and whoever else happened to be in the lunchroom, but it was by and large on the down low. This morning, my boss Michael sent out an announcement to the sales team that I’d be out of the office for the rest of the week — in order to give them time to make any urgent requests. His e-mail naturally included a reason for my absence, so before I knew it notice was sent out to the entire company congratulating me and requesting that everyone wish me luck. And that’s how I realized marriage is going to be a big deal: Now that everyone in the office is aware I’m getting married I no longer have a chance with the work hotties. Dia it is.

All kidding aside, the trip can’t be anything short of fantastic. Forty-two friends and family members in my favorite city in the world — how could this not be the best wedding ever? People can keep their traditions, the flowers, the fancy get-up, and long ceremonies. Surround me with loved ones and good times and I’m happy as a clam. I’m so happy to have someone who places importance on the same things I do. So happy, in fact, that I’ll be proud to introduce Dia to everyone as “My First Wife”.


March 17, 2005

quizo is dead, long live quizo

08:59 AM

Quizo at the New Deck Tavern has gone the way of Caspers, which is to say that it’s no longer our primary Wednesday night hangout. Since our favorite announcer was told not to come back and was replaced by some tool that wouldn’t allow such team names as the previous week’s winning “The Patriots Drink My Sperm” and “God is the Biggest Cock Block”, we’ve set up shop at The Bayou in Manayunk.

Last night we actually took home first prize honors and a voucher for a $200 30-person happy hour. It surprised us, as we were set to leave after learning we were in fourth place going into the last round. There were so many people who placed at the end that the quiz lady declared a level playing field for the tiebreaker. We ended up being the only team who knew the origins of band names Duran Duran (Dia), Foo Fighters (Sean), and Five for Fighting (J.T.).

Winnability isn’t the only reason The Bayou is better: $1 bottles from 9:30-11:30 p.m., themed rounds announced at the beginning — so you know if you have a chance or not — and best of all we can reuse all the other team names that we’ve heard win elsewhere before. Since there’s no actual prize we don’t consider ourselves unscrupulous and I rather enjoy getting props for names we didn’t invent. This week we went with, “My Girlfriend Can’t Fight But You Should See Her Box.”


March 16, 2005

coffee makes me fart

02:06 PM

Regular, decaf… it don’t matta. A bean’s a bean and I guess that includes coffe. I did a little experiment today where I skipped my morning cup, and so far I’m having a much less painful time at work. I’m going to skip my afternoon cup as well and keep the area around me more pleasant the whole day through.


March 13, 2005

photos finally

09:32 PM

That photo page I promised myself is up and in working order. It took longer than I expected, as evidenced by the fact that my limited online time definitely was spent on blogging. Nonetheless, I’m happy to have finished well before my wedding so I can share those pictures when we return. I’ve been a busy bee most recently, reading up on my standards-compliance theory and finally hammering out some XHTML and CSS over the past two weekends. I like to think my hard work paid off since I’m pretty pleased with how it looks and that it validates at the W3C’s site. The code was completed last weekend and I spent until yesterday getting it to look okay. Today I worked out some kinks that some friends (especially Windows IE users) pointed out and now it’s ready to unvail.

http://www.rudderow.com/photos

That’s not to say I’m finished. There are still minor issues such as whether to ditch the Catch-22 quote on the main page which I found insightful at the time for some reason but now am questioning and the decision whether it’s worth my time to upload the full-size versions. Then there’s the question of adding the old photos. The upload and page generation process has been simplified beyond my expectations, but now I need to devote time to titling the photos and making sure the timestamps are correct. Since most of the dates and times were correct already I thought it a nice idea to display them. Now it’s opened a Pandora’s box since every time I create a new album or import more photos I have one more thing to check — an especially difficult task when the pictures aren’t downloaded from a digital camera.

The other issue I’m mulling is whether to post pictures taken by other people. I know there are currently some in my albums that don’t technically belong to me (though I’ve cared for them as if they were my own) and I’m too lazy to weed out. First there’s the issue of the timestamps — they’re nonexistant on the CDs people give me — and then I have to deduce a way to post them where I give credit to the original artist. The copyright can be amended to read “… except where otherwise noted”, but that entails adding an individual notation to each photos and I don’t know if I want to go down that slippery slope. Apart from those drawbacks it would be nice to display a more rounded version of future events just in case I’m not able to capture everything myself, i.e. my wedding or bachelor party.

Getting back to what’s actually up, I’ll spare most of the technical details but would like to note the basics of how the site was created. The main page is based on a javascript slideshow my boss first showed me and the rest is powered by Movable Type. I got the idea of using a blog as a photo gallery from Douglas Bowman and his use of the Photon plug-in for iPhoto. While my site is nowhere near as elegant as his, I like the fact that I coded it with my own two hands without any templates. It also helps that it’s incredibly simple to add pictures: highlight in iPhoto those I want to update, tool around in the Export to Blog window for about two minutes, and wait while the images are uploaded and the “entries” are created. After that I only have to link to my “archive page” from the main index and I’m done. In all, the repetitive tasks boiled down to no more than 10 minutes.

So for now I’m content. Even with all the edits and updates I plan to address I’m at a point where my site makes me happy. Now for another month-long break.