Last night, Daniel, Janis, and Jon came down for the ballroom dance club's "high school stereotypes" dance. Janis informed me that Daniel had been practicing the night before—ostensibly because he didn't want to be one-upped by me and the skills I've picked up in my dance classes.

Ha! The illusion of my power lasted only as long as I put off dancing.

That said, Daniel and I did have a "challenge series," a la Tomo in Azumanga Daioh. Well, OK, it was only one challenge: sing along while dancing a west coast swing.

Let's just say I'll never again poke fun at someone who cannot simultaneously dance and sing. (On the other hand, the song I was trying to sing and dance to was Jason Mraz's The Remedy, which is almost certainly more confusing than whatever song Daniel sang and danced to. :P)

...

Now that the fun event of my weekend is over, it's back to filing paperwork and updating records and other "fun" activities that I've been putting off.

A one-time (barring overwhelming demand) waltz variations class was offered this term at OSU. It's been a bit over five years since I've taken a dance class, so I figured what the heck and you should pay for experiences, not things and whatever else I could tell myself to justify the cost, and signed up.

The thing about taking a credit of classes, these days, is that there are comparatively huge fixed costs involved—and those get halved, per-credit, if you take a second credit. So I also signed up for west coast swing II—a course I had taken at the end of my college career, which was both appropriate and far too early in my west coast swing experience to be wholly useful.

Thus my Tuesday and Thursday nights this month (and next) have been shot. Wednesday night is still, of course, the weekly dance practice... and suddenly the middle of my week is packed. With awesome.

After a little-too-sweaty first week, I determined that I should exercise after I danced. I've also been trying to make notes about the various moves I learn (Marin tells me that this is very much something I would do), immediately after class, because I have a terrible memory for physical motions—not just dance, but sports in general—until I do something a few gajillion times. End result: I've been exercising around the midnight hour in the middle of each week (witness the awful timestamp of this post). This has thrown pretty much everything else in my life out of whack.

It's been worth it, though. Five years of casual dancing with no instruction has made me a sloppy dancer, and now I've been getting called on it. My waltz and west coast are cleaner than they were before, and (get this) I can spin the other way when waltzing now.

I've only been spinning in one direction for ten years, now.

Even better is that my plantar fasciitis, which had benched me for the latter half of 2009, appears to have finally cleared up. (Knock on wood.) The first two weeks were a bit dicey—I was icing my foot every evening, hoping that it wasn't going to give out—but the last two weeks have been the most pain-free my foot has been in ages.

Barry and Meredith are in my waltz class. Poor Sarah is in both waltz and west coast, which means she sees me three nights a week. That's fun for me, but maybe not so much for her.

...

Work's been me staring at my computer screen in anguish as I attempt to redesign a website; I now have an idea where I want to take it—I just have to finish the job. Like, say, tomorrow. (Er, today.)

This week Apple announced the iPad, of course. (I still wish they had gone with "Canvas" instead.) Andy, Farm, Webb and I gathered in a virtual huddle over email to enjoy the revelations; at the end, pretty much the only response was Andy's "well, it's cheaper than I expected." (Save yourself some time and just read Steven Frank's commentary on the iPad; I wish I had some sort of brilliant insight like that every once in a while.) I have some PDFs—and maybe (oh) some Kenichi manga—that the iPad might make pleasant to read... beyond that, though, I'm rather underwhelmed so far.

Brian came down and visited last weekend, and he, Nate, and I wound up watching the Higurashi Rei OVA and the first five episodes of Saki. Saki is mahjong anime crossed with light lesbian romance, and is pretty darn entertaining. I had previously informed Andy about who my favorite Saki character was, prior to watching any of the show.

Andy's response? Gratz on picking the worst Saki character.

After actually watching the show, I can safely say that my runner-up favorite character is the mahjong club president who plays everyone like pawns.

Project Shinji-Dog III is slated to occur this weekend. We have yet to see if anyone (beyond Nate, Brian, and me) will attend, though—I still wonder if it's been too short a time (only a year!) since the last Shinji-Dog.

A few days ago, Brent Simmons (no relation) proposed that Mac developers should band together and create the high-power email client that the Mac has needed since time immemorial.

The main reason such a client has never been made, at least since OS X arrived, is that Apple's Mail client is good enough—and it's free.

Over the years I've used Eudora, Emailer, Outlook Express, Entourage and Thunderbird on the Mac; at work I use Outlook proper. (I have an ever-growing distrust of Google, which keeps me from keeping all my mail with them—though I have used the GMail interface a bit, too.) Out of all of those, Apple Mail (with the Letterbox plug-in) is the client I most like.

I don't think Mail is The One, though. I don't even know what's missing, but I can't shake the feeling that there's gotta be something better than this.

And, today, no-relation Brent announced via Twitter that the "president" of the version 1.0 release of this new, open-source Mac email client (named Letters), will be John Gruber.

This is pretty much the open-source equivalent to putting Steve Jobs in charge of the project: you get the sense that the man is an opinionated ass, and you might barely be able to put up with him in person—but holy crumbs does he have the goods when it comes to delivering(/understanding what makes) a "Mac-like" product. I'm officially excited about Letters' prospects.

I had been telling my sister about my office's holiday party, where one of the white elephant gifts had been a Sudoku game machine. I mentioned hearing about some sort of algorithm you could use to solve those puzzles. (I haven't actually been able to find that algorithm online, though, so maybe I was misinformed.) Lindsay stops dead in her tracks and says, "did you just say algorithm? You're such a nerd!"

I then mentioned that I had a degree in math, so I couldn't really deny the "nerd" bit, and Lindsay made a comment about wishing she could do math.

As I was describing this, I paused and wondered if I should take in my most impressive-looking math text and leave it lying around my desk at work. After perusing my options, I figured that the most promising one was Multivariable Calculus.

(The joke in this is that multivariable calculus is the easiest math class in the world, assuming you can do basic calculus.)

My sister then comments: "She couldn't do that even if it didn't have multivariable in the title."

She then thinks for a moment, and then continues: "She couldn't do that even if it didn't have calculus in the title."

Ouch.