The 2012 CCM Opera Scholarship Competition winners are:

Yi Li (Candidate – Artist Diploma)
From Ji’nan, Shandong, China; studying with David Adams
Prize: Full-tuition scholarship and the Corbett Award ($15,000)
The Corbett Award is supported by the Corbett Foundation in cooperation with the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. This award also guarantees a stage audition with New York City Opera.

Jacqueline Echols (Candidate – Artist Diploma)
From Detroit, studying with David Adams
Prize: Full-tuition scholarship and the Italo Tajo Memorial Award ($15,000)
This award is supported by the Italo Tajo Memorial Scholarship Fund (established by Mr. Tajo’s wife, Mrs. Inelda Tajo) in cooperation with the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

Thomas Richards (Incoming – Artist Diploma)
From Burnsville, Minn., studying with William McGraw
Prize: Full-tuition scholarship and the Andrew White Memorial Award ($12,500)
This award is supported by the Andrew White Memorial Scholarship Fund in cooperation with the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

Edward Nelson (Candidate – Master of Music)
From Saugus, Calif., studying with William McGraw
Prize: Full-tuition scholarship and the Seybold-Russell Award ($10,000)
The Seybold-Russell Award is supported by the Seybold-Russell Scholarship Fund in cooperation with the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

Chabrelle Williams (Candidate – Master of Music)
From Philadelphia, studying with Barbara Paver
Prize: Full-tuition scholarship and the John Alexander Memorial Award ($10,000)
This award is sponsored by the John Alexander Memorial Scholarship Fund in cooperation with the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

The following student also received an award as part of the competition:

Summer Hassan (Incoming – Master of Music)
From Raleigh, N.C.
Prize: Corbett Incentive award for new Master of Music students ($2,000)
This incentive award for new MM students is supported by the Corbett Foundation in cooperation with the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

The judges’ panel for CCM’s 2012 Opera Scholarship Competition included:

• Fabrizio Melano, acclaimed director
• Claudia Catania, mezzo-soprano and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Westminster Choir College
• James Robinson, Artistic Director, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis

About CCM Opera
The Department of Opera at CCM boasts one of the most comprehensive training programs for opera singers, coaches and directors in the United States. Students at CCM work with some of the most renowned teachers and artists active in opera today.

CCM students frequently advance to the final rounds of the Metropolitan Opera National Council (MONC) auditions, and CCM’s Mainstage and Studio Series of Opera have received some of the National Opera Association Production Competition’s highest honors throughout the years, taking home six of the 18 non-professional prizes awarded in 2010 and four prizes in 2011.

CCM Opera graduates have performed on the stages of the world’s greatest opera companies, including Cincinnati Opera, Metropolitan Opera (New York), Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Royal Opera (London), La Scala (Italy) and more.

CCM’s 2011-12 opera season continues this spring, featuring Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress May 10, 12 and 13 and Rossini’s La Cenerentola May 25–27. CCM gratefully acknowledges the support of Season Presenting Sponsor: The Otto M. Budig Family Foundation and Mainstage Season Production Sponsor: Macy’s.

Here is a rundown of what is going on in various SUNYAC sports. The Men’s baseball team kick off our SUNYAC rundown after taking on SUNY Oneonta in a three game series this past weekend. Fredonia seemed to be the top dogs in the match up after they defeated the Red Dragons in a double header on Saturday. The first game was switched from a 9 inning game to a 7 inning tilt to ensure that the second game could be played. Fredonia won the first game 3-1 and the second game 6-1. The Blue Devils couldn’t keep their foot on the gas pedal, however, as they dropped Sunday’s game 6-3 to Oneonta. The team seems to have defeated themselves as they had an error in the eighth and ninth inning.

SUNY Plattsburgh currently sits in first in the SUNYAC conference at 4-2 in conference play. The Fredonia Blue Devils are hot on their tail, however, at 3-3 in conference play after a mildly successful weekend against the Oneonta Red Dragons. It should be noted that the male Blue Devil’s traveled to Allegheny last night and put on a clinic against the Gators by a score of 19-8. First basemen Dan Fetes described the game as an “awkward blowout”.

“We had one of our pitchers starting to hit,” said Fetes. “And then he got hit (by a pitch) and it was just awkward.”

The Fredonia State Women’s Lacrosse team was in action this past weekend as well but did not play any division rivals. Instead they traveled to the mid-west to take on Adrian and Wooster, respectively. The Blue Devils were fortunate enough to walk away from the weekend with two wins. Fredonia beat Adrian in a double overtime game and were able to squeak away with a one goal lead. They then took on Wooster and won by a score of 14-10. There are no standings at the moment for Women’s Lacrosse in SUNYAC because none of the teams have competed in conference play.

We return to the diamond for Women’s Softball. From a SUNYAC standpoint there isn’t much to include here. This is because no one in Softball has started SUNYAC play yet. Pretty much every team in the conference does start SUNYAC play within the next two games. Stay posted here for the latest updates of the ever exciting SUNYAC play. To conclude the Women’s Softball portion of the rundown, they took on the Allegheny Gators at home in a double header yesterday and lost the first game 7-2. The second game was a 5-5 tie in an eight inning game that was shortened by darkness. Fredonia State currently sits at 6-5-1 on the season.

That’s it for this SUNYAC rundown. Come back to GOTW in the next few days for a video interview with a staff member of Fredonia State hockey. Until next time, dear reader.

That One Song You Heard In The Basement of That One Party You Went To That One Time

A couple of hints:

This band is a Fredonia based, local band. They have been playing for a year and a half and are well known (not necessarily well liked) in the Fredonia bar scene. They are mainstays at local dive/ venue “Live @ Doon’s” which everyone still knows as “The Hairy Lemon”. To incorporate sports into this, their lead singer is massive Buffalo sports fan, the lead guitarist is a huge Boston Bruins fan, their trombone player actually played two Fredonia club sports and is an avid jersey wearer and their drummer is a big baseball fan.

This is a stretch but it will all make sense in time. I hope.

Do Fredonia students really care about Fredonia sports?

Photo courtesy of Dan Fetes. He's actually in this picture. He's the one who doesn't know how to high five.

The answer to this question has yet to manifest itself in any solid form but I’m starting to lean in a certain direction. I’ve tried numerous times from the start of this blog to garner readership and acquire some form of audience. Many of these attempts, however, have failed miserably. At first, I thought I wasn’t pursuing views hard enough. I hit social media pretty hard with this blog in an attempt to get some cheap views but the ends did not justify the means. I’ve examined a couple of factors that could lead to this failure on my end.

The first factor is that I don’t have enough posts to warrant any real readership. There’s no denying that consistency hasn’t been the greatest aspect of this blog and my lack of posts exemplifies that. It’s tough to keep a consistent readership when there is no reason for readers to consistently come back. From this point onward, it is my goal to keep a consistent stream of interesting posts going on this blog. This will force me to restructure things slightly but the general idea of the blog will still remain the same.

The second factor that I took into account was the idea that perhaps my posts just aren’t that interesting. I can’t really be a judge of this but that would definitely contribute to a lack of readership. Expect more posts to contain more interesting topics. I already have two video interviews lined up as well as other plans to take this blog to the next level. I’ve promised a lot with this blog and delivered almost nothing so it’s my turn to step up to the plate and hit a home run of clichéd awesomeness.

The third factor that I examined recently is something I call the “Spam Factor”. Basically, using social media for views is a one trick pony. It’s a great way to get clicks but eventually everyone has their limit. It is my fear that I’ve hit that limit. More often than not, when I post on Facebook or Twitter it is to promote some thing that I run (i.e “Spam”). Between the campus TV station (WNYF-TV), the aforementioned Sabres blog, this blog, the a capella group that I’m in and the band that I’m the lead singer of, I spam Facebook and Twitter quite a bit. It is my belief that it’s at the point where I post something on Facebook and people automatically know that it is spam and skip over it. As sad as this is (mainly for my ego), I believe this to be the truth. For what it’s worth, the first thing I’m going to do after the posting of this blog is sharing it to social media. I guess I’ll never learn.

The final factor to take into account with this lack of views is the primary point of this post. Even if I fix all of the issues listed above, do Fredonia students really care about Fredonia sports? It doesn’t matter if this blog has all of the bells and whistles I want, if no one cares about the subject then there is no way to get them to read it. It is within this idea that the blog will focus on for the rest of the semester. This theme will present itself a few times from now until the end of the Fredonia sports season. It is now my goal to answer this question. At the end of this semester, I will have a definitive answer and that is the point of this post.

Do you have an answer to this big question? Sound off in the comments! Help me find an answer to this terribly disturbing question.

Stay with GOTW, folks. It’s going to be an interesting ride from here on out.

Let me start by saying that all of these photos were provided by my good friend C-Bass…yes that’s her real name and I was too busy interviewing people and sampling all of the fine spirits that NYC had to offer (that’s not her real name and I was in no condition (i.e. I was too drunk) to hold a camera, much less snap some sweet pics).

The first pic…Kelly’s Pub. This is a Buffalo sports bar located in the heart of NYC. The night that I stumbled in there the Buffalo Sabres were facing the Colorado Avalanche. They lost unfortunately but I still had a damn good time. I enjoyed 2 or 5 cans of Rolling Rock and 1 or 12 cans of this interesting brew called Bomb Lager (I had three Rolling Rocks and one Bomb Lager). Good shit.

The next pic…Brooklyn Brewery. This is a brewing facility located in smelly Williamsburg. Their beers are hella-delicious and although the brewery tours were all booked; I still stood in front of it and that counts for something dammit.

The last pic….Rosemary’s Tavern. Also located in smelly Williamsburg, this is a quaint little pub with a huge offering…32 oz. beers served in foam cups. The three 32 oz. beers they offered were Budweiser and Bud Light for 4 bucks and Becks for 6. I’m a top shelf guy so I went with Becks the whole night (I’m a cheap bastard and had one Becks and two Bud Lights).

More dope pics to come!

Cheers.

Everybody loves P*Dubbs. Seriously. EVERYBODY.

This man is a saint. Anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong. DEAD WRONG.

MOAR HEFNER.

Seriously. SERIOUSLY.

That’s it for now, but stay tuned. There will be more soon.

Allegheny Gators:

The Allegheny Gators are coming off what could be regarded as the best season in team history. That being said, they aren’t exactly a powerhouse. The Gators posted a record of 12-6 last season which was good enough to put them into the NCAC playoffs. That would be as far as Allegheny would get, however, as they dropped their first playoff game to the Wooster Fighting Scots. Within their organization, the Gators are coming off of what is considered a breakout season last year. Records were broken and expectations were shattered. The Gators made upsets (including a regular season victory over the aforementioned Fighting Scots) and buried some opponents (a 21-3 win shows that clearly there is no mercy rule in DIIIathletics). After examining their 2011 record, one major thing stuck out to me with the Gators. Today’s game marks their season opener and it should be noted that Allegheny lost their season opener last year by a score of 18-10. It should be even more noted that they lost their season opener last year to a certain team named the Fredonia State Blue Devils. This loss came on home soil as well, where the Gators went 5-3 last year. Their away record was even more impressive at 7-3.

The Gators have a small squad but still pack quite a punch. Also, they're good at being badass in pictures.

The player to watch for Allegheny is Kiah Voyer-Colbath. She had a monster season last year as a Junior and comes into her Senior season as an undisputed veteran presence on the Gator offense. Her 60 goals and 8 assists in 17 games were good for second on the team in points in 2011. She is the only Senior attack and is clearly the go to player for this potentially deadly Allegheny attack. Her partner in crime this year will likely come in the form of Sophomore attack Brennan Maine. Maine spent the 2011 season in Voyer-Colbath’s shadow, somewhere that a young freshman might actually want to be. She netted 41 goals in 18 games and will only get more opportunities with another year under her belt. The biggest loss for this team comes from graduated attack Jensen Patterson who put up the bulk of assists and goals in her Senior season last year. Her 38 assists were easily unmatched so the Gators will need to find someone to fill that role this season. It wouldn’t be surprising if Voyer-Colbath filled that slot by setting up Maine for a good chunk of goals. It should be noted that the Allegheny roster has shrunk by one player from 2011 into 2012.

Fredonia State Blue Devils:

Unlike their opponent tonight, the Blue Devils are coming off of a slightly disappointing season that saw them fall one game short of the SUNYAC playoffs. Fredonia State came roaring out of the gates last year by winning their first seven straight games. Three of those games came in a spring break tournament in West Palm Beach, Florida while the other four were against regional opponents. The dominant start was highlighted by the latter three wins which were all decisive victories over Wooster, Oberlin and R.I.T. in that order. In 2011, the Blue Devils were nearly automatic on the road. They won seven games on unfamiliar turf and only dropped two away games. The same can’t be said, however, for their home performance. The most significant losses of the season came at home against SUNYACrivals in Geneseo and Buffalo State en route to a 3-3 home record.

Spring Fling? It's far too cold for it to be close to spring yet.

The clear-cut choice for the player to watch for the Blue Devils comes in the form of their tallest player. At five foot ten, Senior Amy Simon is easily the most dominant member of the Blue Devil squad both on the stat sheet and on the field. Her 48 goals and 20 assists were by far the best numbers of any Blue Devil and those totals came during her Junior year. She returns this year as a Senior with more veteran knowledge and an even better knack for the net. The Blue Devils are a noticeably more veteran squad than Allegheny. Their thirteen upperclassmen easily outnumber Allegheny’s eight. Actually, Fredonia’s squad has one less upperclassman then the entire Allegheny squad has players (the gators roster is only 14 players deep). Amy Simon is a massive part of the Blue Devils leadership among a squad that lost only one player to graduation. The chemistry between FSU players shouldn’t be hard to establish and Simon will be a key factor in the success of this team.

Prediction:

I predict the Blue Devils larger squad and experienced leadership will prove to be too much for their foes from Meadville, Pa. Fredonia State will win this game but not without a bit of fight from the Allegheny Gators. Stay posted to Game of the Week for photos and videos from tonight’s game. See you within the next few days for a game recap!

Now that that apology is out of the way,  it’s time to get down to business. This week’s Game of the Week returns to an actual SUNYAC team. The team presented for this week has high hopes and even higher standards. They fell one game short of the SUNYAC playoffs last year and are looking to tear out of the gates and into a successful season. With that, I announce that this week’s Game of the Week is… Women’s Lacrosse vs. Allegheny at 6:30 PM tomorrow. The most notable part of this game is that it is not only the first Women’s Lacrosse game featured on GOTW but also their first game of the season. The home opener is tomorrow and Game of the Weekwill be there to provide the best coverage and analysis possible.

Fredonia State vs. Allegeheny

On a semantic note, I do have to take care of some business. I have class until 7:00 tomorrow so unfortunately I will miss the start of the game. Despite this, I will do my best to cover the rest of the game. Expect more pictures, some interviews and maybe even some video. The Women’s Lacrosse team is bringing their A game and so am I.

Stay tuned to Game of the Week, where we treat every game like it’s the SUNYAC playoffs.

March 2, 2012 – April 3, 2012
Opening Reception March 2 from 7–9:30pm

The works of more than 20 artists from throughout Western New York will be on display when the Cathy and Jesse Marion Art Gallery at SUNY Fredonia hosts the “MARK 11/2012” exhibition beginning March 2.

The exhibition features the works of artists who participated in the New York Foundation for the Arts’ MARK program in 2011. Participating artists are from Fredonia, Buffalo, Rochester and other locations in Western New York.

“Each of the 21 artists will be submitting one or two pieces for display and includes a variety of mediums,” Art Gallery Administrator Tina Hastings said. “There is no other theme that ties this exhibition together, so each artist’s work will make a truly individual statement.”

The exhibition will feature paintings, sculptures, photography, video and drawings.

The painting shown above, Sliding Frame of Reference (2011), will be featured in the exhibition.

More information about the NYFA Mark Program
More information about NYFA

* Information taken from the Gallery’s press release

That’s not to say, however, that there still aren’t important games occurring this week. SUNYAC playoffs are in full swing for numerous sports. Men’s hockey takes on Geneseo Wednesday night in what looks to be an intense first round. Men’s and Women’s track and field both travel to SUNYAC championships this weekend. Both basketball teams are in action tonight with the Men’s team at Buffalo State and the Women’s team in Geneseo. There still remains one issue amid all these games: none of them occur on or around the SUNY Fredonia campus.

After wracking my brain, drinking some coffee and sitting down with a professor, I finally came to a decision. First I thought to cancel the Game of the Week for this week. That was a terrible idea for two reasons. The first being that I don’t want to rob my massive readership (which currently consists of 15 people) of the artistic gold that is GOTW coverage. The second (and perhaps more realistic) reason was that I would lose out on a lot of content and would be forced to create some mediocre posts that no one really cares about. Being the awesome problem solver that I am, I found a way to still keep the Game of the Week while not compromising the integrity of this fine blog.

On that note, I present to you this week’s Game of the Week Announcement. The game of the week for week two will be: Intramural Broomball. The game I have selected is taking place Wednesday night at 1:00 AM in a heated battle between Fredonia for St. Jude and Wizard People. Stay tuned folks, it’s going to be a wild ride.

Some people may not even know what exactly Broomball is or how it is played, so this week will serve to teach readers about both intramural sports as a whole and the sport Broomball itself. Get ready for interviews, game previews, video footage and maybe even some live blogging. It’s all going down this week at Game of the Week, where P*Dubs gives out pizza at every sporting event (not just hockey).

Photographic evidence that your fearless leader once played Broomball. I'm the scrawny dude in the top left corner with the crossed legs. Fierce.

My view of the game. Taken from a Smartphone.

There was no lack of physical play from both sides as these I-90 rivals went toe to toe on faceoff, loose puck and scoring chance. This was the last game of the regular season for both sides with Buff State and Fredonia sitting 3rd and 4th in the SUNY athletic conference respectively. The winner of the game would basically secure their position in 3rd place and earn the right to play the 6th seed in the first round of the playoffs. The difference between 3rd and 4th is having to face the 6th seed or 5th seed (respectively).

Buffalo State showed why they deserved their 3rd seed by beating Fredonia all over the place in the first period. The Blue Devils somehow managed to snag a goal two minutes into the game off of the stick of Brett Mueller. This tally, however, was not indicative of the game itself. After a disallowed Fredonia goal, the Bengals of Buffalo seemed to have an extra jump in their step. It was clear which team ate their Wheaties for breakfast and that team wasn’t wearing blue and white.

Discipline would prove to be the Blue Devil’s weakness as the home team took a penalty around eight minutes into the first period. The Bengals would make them pay with a power play goal from Trevor McKinney. Penalties would continue to be an issue for Fredonia into the second period as they allowed another power play goal from Buffalo State. Drew Klin (pictured in GOTW’s Game Announcement post) would quiet the already subdued crowd and find the back of the net to make it two to one.

Mike Muhs found the back of the net one minute into the third period. At this point, things began looking up for the Blue Devils. Despite their sweeping ineptitude on the power play (zero for seven isn’t exactly stellar), the home team seemed to be building quite a bit of momentum. Passes started connecting, players started hitting and with under ten minutes to go we suddenly had ourselves a game.

As I was about to hit send on a text message to a friend that read “I’ll be late, there’s five minutes to go in a tie game”, Buffalo State’s Nick Melligan fired a shot that found its way past Fredonia keeper Mark Friesen to all but seal the Blue Devil’s fate. I was forced to send this text instead:

Lame. I have 39% batttery in case you were wondering

Fredonia failed to mount anything short of wide shots and missed passes as they dropped the last game of the season to a surging Buffalo State squad. Senior night wasn’t completely ruined, however, as senior Bryan Ross’s 132nd point came on an assist on the Muhs goal. This point was enough to propel him into a tie with Neal Sheehan for fifth all time on the Fredonia State scoring list.

The pivotal loss forced the Blue Devils into 5th place in the SUNYAC standings which means the team no longer retains home ice advantage for the playoffs. The team travels to Geneseo on Wednesday to take on the 4th seeded Knights at SUNY Geneseo.

Stay tuned tomorrow for the next game announcement. Thanks for following this week’s Game of the Week , where President Hefner is always in the stands.

The burgeoning Bengals from Buff State come to town to face off with the Fredonia Blue Devils in an icy version of this week’s Game of the Week.

Drew Klin and his Buffalo State Bengals come to town to take on Bryan Ross and the Fredonia Blue Devils.

The second post that will follow the announcement (usually within 24 hours) will be the Game of the Week Preview. This post is pretty self-explanatory. This post will be a (wait for it) preview of the game of the week.

The third type of post will be the Game of the Week Review. This type of post means exactly as it sounds. They will be analytic reviews of the game that summarize statistics and outstanding player performances. Check back to GOTW the day after the game for a lovely review of the game.

Aside from these weekly posts, Game of the Week will also contain feature style pieces. The type of these will vary from player interviews, archived statistical analysis, depth stories relating to current teams, historical background posts and even in-depth fan interviews.

Stay posted here for everything you need to know about SUNY Fredonia’s Game of the Week!

Stay tuned here to Game of the Week where I treat every weekend like it’s Pink the Rink.

The program was part of an extra credit assignment in my VisualBasic II course. After much time off from school (and much interest from the head of the department), I decided it was time to port the application to C++ (using Qt) for use on PCs, Linux, and Mac OSX (seeing as the entire theatre department runs on Apple products).

Just a couple weeks ago, I started porting the project to Android. While writing this application, I am simultaneously learning Java and Android development. Fortunately enough for me, Java is very, very similar to C++ and it’s been a breeze so far. After about three weeks of off-and-on programming, I’ve finally made a nice, working version of Weight Gallery Mobile. The application doesn’t save or load yet, but the calculations work and, as of now, it is completely error-proof. Go ahead and try to make the program crash, this is the third time I’ve written this application. I know everything that could/will possibly go wrong with the operation of it.

Screenshots:

As you can see, the maximum number of items allowed on a lineset is 60.

Stay tuned for more information!

Download it here. <- Click that!

The following is from my Tumblr on November 21st, 2011

Last semester, I was involved in the student expo at my university with the CS department. My task was simple: make anything I wanted in Visual Basic (this was extra credit for my VB II class). Freaking out over what I would do, I decided to help out the theatre department. One of my least favorite tasks while building a show was sitting in the weight gallery, so I thought I would figure out ways to make it easier for everyone.

On April 20th, I released Weight Gallery to the world (which has had 125 downloads since). Fast-forward to this semester. After talking to Tom, the head of the theatre department at SUNY Fredonia, I began working on a cross-platform port of Weight Gallery. Coincidentally, I am also taking a course in Qt4. Seeing as most theatre technicians at SUNY Fredonia use macs, I began planning my port immediately.

Unfortunately, my semester has been intense, so I didn’t get much work done until just yesterday. Within one day, I completed almost as much as I did in one entire month.

It’s fully functional, just not as customizable as its predecessor. That is all to change within the next couple days.

More of my plans?
(keep in mind these have not been discussed yet)
- I want to implement this in Marvel Theatre
- There will be a server application on the ground floor that will
communicate with a client application in the weight gallery.
- These programs will both be run on tablet PCs (running linux) connected
via wifi.
- I would like to make this program mobile (Android, iOS, etc)
- Synchronization between platforms will happen via a linux server (free to all
SUNY Fredonia students – using their FredID).

I’m too tired to stay awake and continue typing. Any questions? Wanna beta test? Let me know!

The following post is from my Tumblr from May 5th, 2011.

Introduction
I’ve spent the past 4 months programming my chops off and trying to retain a good grade in school while doing so. Not that I don’t have good grades, but the programming from one course has absolutely hindered my chances of reaching my potential in my difficult, non-programming courses (*ahem* Biology) – oh, and in another programming course.

In the beginning of the semester, my Visual Basic professor noticed I was doing a good ‘ol job in all the projects and asked me to do something that made me feel as special as Charlie when he got the golden ticket (and an honor that any programmer would jump at); he asked me to create a program for the Student Exposition on April 28th. Immediately, I said yes because – why not? I asked him what he wanted me to submit and he said “anything.” Naturally, I panicked. This is for two reasons:
1.) That’s a LOT of freedom to give to me
2.) That’s TOO much freedom to give to me

Allow me to expand my thinking here. If I even HAD an idea for a program, I would have already been working on it. Unfortunately, every idea I could come up with was sub-par and nothing that would be a challenge, which is what I needed. Likewise, I wanted it to be something people would USE. Naturally, I thought for days.
Cue my OTHER major (Theatre Arts). During the excruciation that was Sound of Music, I was asked to work in the weight gallery. If anybody out there is a theatre major, you either love the weight gallery or you hate it, there’s no in-between. I hated it. For those of you who don’t know, the weight gallery is located about 60-80 feet above the stage. When you’re up there, you must be harnessed in and the people on the floor yell to you to lift heavy bricks to and from each lineset. However, none of these were the reasons why I hated the weight gallery – it was simply too boring. You’re 60 feet in the air and you have nobody to talk to except whoever they stick you with.

View from the weight gallery – There’s a person down there.

One day, whilst sitting in the weight gallery (alone), I got fed up with how long it took the people on the ground to calculate the weight of each lineset and started thinking about how I could improve it. Not that I was fed up with the people – the process was just too long, which is understandable, it’s an important job. Thus began my months of agony and little sleep.

The Business of Life
This semester was, hands-down, the busiest one of my life, and hopefully will never be topped. Not only did Sound of Music, classes, and my TV show (coming soon) suck up about 70% of my time, but other homework (that wasn’t my new baby, “Weight Gallery”) took up about another 10%. This left 20% for food, sleep, and Weight Gallery. Needless to say, I slept maybe 4-5 hours a night and lost over 20 pounds since January.
My C++ class began losing my attention. To be honest, learning 2 different languages at the same time really messes with you. I began writing VB code in C++ and vice-versa. It’s funny when you think about it, but extremely frustrating while it’s happening. I would put random semicolons in bits of VB code, making it give me dozens of errors. Thankfully, Visual Studio 2010 is very good at telling me how terrible of a programmer I can be at times.

For months, I stressed over small errors (forgetting to type “-1″ was a huge one… a few times). Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I would have to stop being stupid and start being a real programmer. My typical day went as such:
- Wake up seconds before class
- Show up to class with semi-closed eyes
- Pay as much attention as possible
- Eat something… maybe
- More classes
- Sound of Music until about 8:30 at night
- OR – If it was during tech/show, until about 12:00-1:00 AM
- Fooooooood
- Energy Drinks!
- Shower
- Contemplating on crying
- Suck it up, and program
- Go to bed at 5:00 AM

In the end, I finished my program the night before the expo with about 36-48 hours of work (probably even more), over 1,000 lines of code, and probably just as many facepalms. My work was rightfully reflected in the outcome of people interested: 3 people. Yeah, that last sentence was sarcasm. 3 people looked at my exhibit, and I knew them all. Not that I was expecting everyone to run to me, but whatever. The expo isn’t the end of my program’s life, it’s just unfortunate that nobody noticed it.

 You like it? It’s pretty isn’t it? Hard to believe I stressed so hard over something so simple-looking, eh? Well I did.

The Experience
Overall, if I had the opportunity to do this project again, I would [WHICH I'M DOING NOW!]. In order to get this project done, I had to read through future chapters in the book and learn things I didn’t think I’d ever know. As challenging as this project turned out to be, I know it could have been much worse. It was about as challenging as I had hoped it would be. As stressful as it is, it’s extremely fun to get stuck on a problem, stare at the screen for 3 hours and notice that you forgot one letter. This is something that I created from the ground up. It started with one line of code and blossomed into a beautiful, multi-thousand-lines-of-code flower.
Not only was the knowledge extremely useful, but I’m building my career. My professor told me I could use him as a reference whenever I needed, I have a program under my belt that is actually useful (and released!), and I’m recognized by the school as having participated in the exposition. I can actually make a resume that has experience on it, which is something that is incredibly useful.

Closing
So there it is, my semester in a nut-shell. If you’re a theatre technician with a Windows PC, you might as well download the program, it couldn’t hurt anything.

 To download Weight Gallery, click here!