Will Hines Dot Net

Thank you to Dyna Moe for my new awesome “Will Hines Under The Sea” header. She took that photo of me originally, also — it was for the UCBT’s performers page.

There’s no reason I’m under the sea. I just think it’s funny and oddly soothing.

EDIT: If you don’t see the new header, hold down shift (or option on a Mac) and press F5.

Continuing my trend of listing items with minimal to no attempt at tying them together in a cohesive entry…

• Saw The Squid and the Whale– a fun-filled tale of a pompous has-been NYC writer being divorced by his philandering wife while his two kids get screwed up before your very eyes — on Wednesday (yes, it’s still playing). I really liked it, although it seemed slight, sort of. By the end I felt a bit not-full, like I had eaten just cereal all day. Regardless of that, I have a strangely-worded compliment for it: It was a remarkably responsible movie. It shows the audience the main behavior of each character and how they all feel about each other in [...]

My cats are fighting more lately. Sometimes I think they like it, but Maggie seems to meow in protest a lot. Are the sisters going through an aggressive phase, or does this increased animal anxiety mean there’s an earthquake coming? I’ll try to take some pictures today and update you all.

Kevin gave me a stats-heavy description of how the Sox won the 2004 World Series called Mind Game by the very articulate group over at Baseball Prospectus. I love it. Now if someone could find a way to express improv teams’ success statistically and write a book on that, my worlds would merge happily.

I did an improv show Monday night with a sort-of thrown together cast of UCBT regulars. [...]

Some quick bullet points as I bask in the glow of another Boxing Day.

• Xmas at Pops Hines house was a good time. Eliza attended and seemed to handle the room of muttering self-deprecating self-involved men (my brothers, father and I) quite well. Among the highlight’s were Kevin’s gift of a Garfield joke/in-your-face insult book to Brian, and “Booyar’s” gift of a skull piggy bank to Kevin. Pictures to come.
• The majority of The Swarm are performing improv this Thursday — you should really go to this. I see 10,000 improv shows a week and I’m STILL excited for this one.
• Been enjoying the software skils of 37signals
• The song I can’t stop listening to recently is “I’m So Lonesome I Could [...]

With my new day job, I’m absorbing a lot of information fast about the latest in Web programming. Terms like Web 2.0 and Ajax, which I knew nothing about, are filling my brain. As a man who is part robot, it’s actually a fun experience.

Derek Sivers’ blog is a really fun read if you’re a web tech geek. He’s the guy who made CD Baby — apparently he’s the SOLE PROGRAMMER behind it, which fascinates me, especially because at my new job I’m going to be expected to heft some pretty epic projects with just me and not many other people. He talks a lot about keeping things simple — doing only the features you NEED, not [...]

My car battery seems to not hold a charge. During the transit strike, I was content to let it sit on the side of the road — I didn’t want to fight the massive snarls of traffic in Manhattan anyway — but this morning, with the end of the strike, alternate side parking regulations were back in effect. That meant if my car wasn’t moved by 8:30am — it was parked illegally. THe ticket is somewhere between $55 and $85, I forget. Whatever amount it was, I didn’t want it.

Yesterday I was sick with mini-food poisoning so I didn’t want to deal with it. But I woke up at 7am today, figuring I could get a jump start from [...]

Busy couple of days. I went to Ohio, got a haircut, am featured in a video with Eliza and others online at improveverywhere.com and had to wait up until 4am for AAA to give my car a jump start so I wouldn’t get a parking ticket this morning.

But first things first: Rob Latham has a show tonight, and it’s funny. It’s called The Dahlonega Jr. High Talent Show: Teachers vs. Students. Rob plays all the parts, except one. 9:30pm at UCBT with Nick Kroll. Some key words: Stilts, The Message and Osgood-Schlatter’s disease. Some one-person shows give you a lot of insight into the struggles and triumphs of the performer. Then are shows like this one which [...]

• I started the new day job last week. It’s also fun, as far as these types of things (jobs) go. I’ve been catching up on the web development world, reading about Ruby on Rails, Ajax and any number of other acronyms that have blossomed since I last paid close, close attention.
• Got to participate in an Improv Everywhere mission this past Saturday. Great fun. I will describe it after the mission is made public on its site.
• There wasn’t much parking in Manhattan on Saturday. The city of New York was gracious enough to remind me of that by towing my car. I was parked illegally just off of 8th Avenue (I didn’t know it was an illegal [...]

Lots of John Lennon on the radio and in newspapers yesterday, in tribute of the 25th anniversary of his death. I understand that everyone’s heart is in the right place but it is strange, and perhaps even morbidly inappropriate, to commemorate someone’s VIOLENT MURDER. That’s not what we’re doing, but it sounded strange to hear DJs on Sirius radio say “we’re honoring the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s death” — almost like they’re saying they’re glad it happened.

Not that I haven’t done just as bizarre things in the name of the Beatles. In college and just after, I had so many Beatles and John Lennon posters in my room at home that it looked like I was a 12-year-old [...]

I subscribe to the New Yorker but never read it. That’s not a comment on the magazine as much as it shows that I value re-listening to my favorite songs on my .mp3 player on the subway over exerting mini-carlories of effort to Learn Actual Things. Nonetheless, I picked up the November 21st issue recently to happily discover that Woody Allen had written a piece.

I think I love Woody Allen’s writing more than any of his other work. I discovered it in 1986, when my Dad brought home a paperback copy of Without Feathers from Heathrow Airport book shop. I had been on a Woody Allen movie-watching binge and he apparently had noticed. I devoured that book, and it’s one [...]