Requiem Aeternam

I have had enough of frivolous blog posts for a while. Today’s post leaves behind childish things to explore a very mature and important subject which has serious implications for every American (and probably Kazakh) family. My subject has its roots in the great American and Canadian prairies where it is carefully cultivated and nourished, growing tall and golden until it is cut down in its prime, dried, sorted, processed, and shipped to millions of households across the world. I speak, of course, of cereal.  And here, for the very first time, I list the ten best cereals * available to mankind.

10. Honey Nut Cheerios

Normal cheerios taste good enough with milk and sugar, but it’s even better when the sugar has already been added! Honey’s one of the best tasting natural sweet flavors, and is well applied to these delicious little o’s. Equally good with milk or handfuls straight from the box!

9. Alpha-bits

Marshmallowy cereal at its best! Of course the little marshmallows are the all-stars of this cereal, but unlike lucky charms, marshmellow mateys, and other similar cereals, there’s something left to do with the remaining cereal once you’ve picked all the marshmallows out! See how many words you can find, write a story even since the marshmallows will be gone looooooong before the rest.

8.Golden Grahams

I haven’t had these for a while, but I like them much! They have the honey flavor fused with a little graham square. While some people I know have a distinct disregard for “SQUARES!!!!,”  squares in this instance are umm…not square.

7. Oatmeal

Plain but hearty, it’s perfect for cold northern mornings and gives some good lasting energy. Plus it’s healthy! At least that’s what it says on the canister. I’ll admit it doesn’t taste too good on its own, but there are lots of ways to spruce it up. My favorite is with butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon.

6. Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Cinnamon and sugar toast was an integral part of my childhood. Almost as much as spankings and groundings, but much tastier.  This cereal brings back great memories and tastes, but is much faster and easier to make. Plus it leaves behind some of the best tasting milk.

5. Cinnamon Life

I must sadly make a confession: I terribly enjoy a good bit of cinnamon. Probably more than is healthy. In fact, I used to eat cinnamon sticks from my mom’s kitchen. In fact, I still would, but there seems to be  a distinct lack of cinnamon sticks in the guy’s dorms. There aren’t any cinnamon trees nearby either. I weep.

4. Frosted Mini-wheats (Maple and Brown Sugar or Vanilla Creme)

I still shudder at memories of mini-wheat’s predecessors. Big bricks of wheat that you had to break up by hand. We heated it with milk in the microwave and added sugar, but it was still rather wretched. These, on the other hand, are delicious bite sized crunchies with great flavor. The strawberry flavored ones are probably good too, but I’ve never had them.

3. Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds

Mmmmmmmm. Now we’re getting into the really good stuff. Sweet, nutty, and even a little healthy. I could eat it all day long just about.

2. Blueberry Morning

Beats out Honey Bunches of Oats by virtue of fruity goodness. The blueberries are vastly better than the fake fruitiness of Trix or Fruit Loops or Fruity Pebbles. On a similar note, Strawberry Special K is really good too, but I forgot about it until now and I don’t have room to put it on the list because the top spot is reserved for the one, the only . . .

1.  Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs

Calvin, the world cannot thank you enough. ^_^

* The committee has deemed grits inelligible for this list on principle. Also because it is corn rather than wheat based. Also because of your face. And because I said so.

Dona Nobis

I dream of street lights passing by:
Sleeping against the window, your face fades
In the dark spaces between
Then returns; the shadow of rain on the windshield
Cascades down your face like dark tears
Dissolving your form into darkness
Until the next light passes and you reappear.

Once, time slowed and the sun obeyed
Us, our arms outstretched binding
Afternoons and evenings to eternity,
But now we hurtle over pavement,
A wheeled rocket racing toward the end of the world,
Incapable of turning or stopping.

Dies irae, dies illa
Solvet saeclum in favilla

The city blinks away behind us and
Street lights pass less frequently.
The dark spaces grow stronger,
Leaving you longer in shadow,
A black hole just beyond my elbow.
What beauty was in the world vanishes
As the last light fades, leaving
Only headlights to light the road ahead,
And no light shining on you at all.

Qui Mariam absolvisti,
Et latronem exaudisti,
Mihi quoque spem dedisti.

I must drive deeper into the night,
Hoping to reach some distant sunrise
In whose light you would again appear
And wipe the sleep from your eyes.
If I stopped while darkness still veils you,
I would reach out my hand to wake you
And find only air where you once were
Because you had faded away forever.

So I grip the wheel and drive sleeplessly
Toward morning hoping desperately
That the road beneath me will last
Until the sun rises from its grave
Reclaiming you from shadow,
Despite knowing, as one does in dreams,
That night would prove longer than pavement
And the road would end, leaving me alone
Listening to windshield wipers in the rain.

Fac eas, Domine, de morte transire ad vitam.

Exhausted I wake relieved of dreams and see
Shadows diminished, through the window
I feel sunshine and hear a new day calling me

Lux aeterna luceat nobis, Domine,
Et requiem aeternam dona nobis.
Lux perpetua luceat nobis, Domine. Amen.

It seems that for some reason people get the impression that all I do at work is write e-mails and surf the internet, but I want to make perfectly clear that this is a totally false presupposition–I drink coffee and eat donuts too! But here’s a brief description of what our job requires.

Introduction to Project Management

As project managers, we attempt to manipulate the project management triangle and direct team members in order to effectively produce a product (textbooks, in our case).

The triangle demonstrates the relationship between a project’s scope (its size or amount of work required, for instance how many pages will be in a textbook), the time needed to complete the project, and the cost necessary to complete it. For instance, if you want to decrease the amount of time needed to finish a project (demonstrated by shortening the corresponding side of the triangle), you would also have to change the other two sides to maintain the triangle shape. You could decrease scope (the amount of work you plan on doing), or increase the amount of money you want to put into the project, or decrease both scope and cost in order to make the project’s duration shorter. You could also accomplish a project in a shorter duration by changing the angle where the cost and scope sides meet without reducing scope and without increasing cost, but that would negatively effect the quality of the product. It’s not a perfect illustration, but it gives a general idea of what we’re trying to do, namely manipulate the three sides of the triangle to be the optimal size and shape.

Meetings

Pretty much everything we do to accomplish this job ends up in some sort of meeting, so the best way to describe more precisely what goes on would be to discuss the different types of meetings that we have. Most meetings fit into the categories of project planning, implementation, and tracking.

Planning meetings include product line meetings, charter meetings, and project planning meetings. Product lines include all textbooks of a certain subject. For instance, the product line I work on the most is secondary Bible, which includes Bible Truths A, Bible Truths B, and so on up to Bible Truths F (7th grade-12th grade). Our goal is to maintain a copyright age of 5 years or less for all textbooks. Since there are six products on my product line, this means we need to come out with a new textbook revision every year (the first year a book comes out it has a copyright age of zero, so it works out). In product line meetings all the different department supervisors (authors, art/page design, page layout, photo/text acquisition and permissions and editorial), as well as marketing representatives and a few others try to balance the consumers’ needs, our resources, and our time requirements to develop a general plan for the next twenty years or so. My job is to organize the meetings, direct them, make sure all relevant information is examined, and finally to produce a written version of the plan (normally an excel file complete with charts and graphs) to hand to sponsors (the really high up people in charge) for them to approve.

Charter meetings are more specific in nature; rather than looking at all the products in a product line, a project charter defines the attributes of all the items in a single product. My team just finished a charter for our next Bible Truths project and the charter goes into the particulars about what items will be included (student text, teacher’s edition, a CD to go with the teacher’s edition, tests, and test answer keys), what level of revision we will do (generally light, medium, heavy, or full), how much money we can spend on the revision, and when the items need to be finished. In other words, a charter defines what the triangle will look like for each individual project. Pretty much the same people come to charter meetings as to product line meetings, although supervisors might send a worker who will be working on the project instead of coming themselves. My responsibilities are similar as well, but the final draft of the charter is prepared by a marketing representative and then given to me to route around to the sponsors.

Project Planning meetings are even more specific. Project planning meetings include the workers from each department who will actually do the work on the project rather than their supervisors. These meetings produce the specific schedules that we use to execute and track the production of a text book. Normally I will create a preliminary schedule for the different items of a project in Gantt chart form using Microsoft project and go over that schedule with the team who will suggest changes to make the schedule more realistic by dropping tasks or adding them or changing their durations. We break each schedule up into work packages so everyone is working on a maneagable amount of work (like a single chapter or section) at a given time rather than just trying to complete the whole book. Each work package will consist of 5 to 20 tasks depending on the project and what stage of development it’s in. A team member will complete their task and pass the work package on to the next person. For instance, an author will write the revisions for a chapter and then pass the work package on to an editor who will edit it for conceptual or structural problems (proofreading type editing occurs later) and then hand it back to the author to incorporate the editor’s suggestions. I have to schedule and coordinate all the tasks for all the departments and make sure the durations are reasonable and everything is in the right order (trickier than it may seem sometimes–on our current project we’re scheduled to finish the testpack before the teacher’s edition, but a certain amount of the teacher’s edition needs to be finished first because the test answer key references page numbers in the teachers edition).

Moving on to project implementation meetings–these are meetings that take place weekly or biweekly after work has already been started on a project. The team members meet to review what has been accomplished, communicate and resolve issues, prepare for upcoming tasks, and reexamine whether or not the team can meet the scheduled completion dates.

Project reporting meetings consist of a weekly meeting between all the project managers, all the department supervisors, and a few other people. The main purpose of this meeting is to make sure that supervisors are aware of potential problems in their departments and that the head of the product development division of the press has an accurate idea of what projects are running late or early or on time. To relay this information we use an excel chart such as the one below.

Each vertical column represents a work package. A column that is green all the way to the top means that work package is ready to be sent to the printing press. Red indicates where a task or series of tasks is late, light blue means a schedule has been made, and so on.

We also have meetings within our department to discuss better methods of management, strategic planning, and tactical approaches.

Summary

A good analogy for a project manager is a coach on a sports team. Like sports players, our team members do the real leg work, but we are the ones planning and directing the team members to do what they do more effectively and meet a common goal. One of the most important aspects in project management is communication, and that means a lot of meetings, and standardized graphs, and charts, and forms, and templates that we create and use as tools to help the teams as they work.

Now, if you actually read all that, congratulations! You get a big fat juicy cookie!

I’ve added a brief description of the four main races inhabiting Coriander: Humans, Halflings, Elves, and Krychnari. If the last one doesn’t sound familiar to you, don’t be surprised. It’s not a traditional fantasy race. In fact, it’s my version of a Dungeons and Dragons race, the Kenku (you can find a brief write up about the DnD version here).

Now, these four races are not the only races which inhabit the greater world around Coriander. There remains an indeterminate number of races which exist throughout the continent. I think there are far too many intelligent races in the Dungeons and Dragons universe for a realistic fantasy setting (there’s already about 30 different races in the current edition), but there are a few interesting races not normally found in high-fantasy that I’d like to use.

So far I know goblins (possibly the whole goblinoid family consisting of orcs, goblins, and hobgoblins) will be included. They live under the mountains bordering Coriander and occasionaly goblin raiding parties will attack smaller towns or unwary travellers.

Dwarfs seem too iconic to leave out. But I think in this world they have been mostly driven out of the mountains by the goblin races and instead travel in bands like gypsies selling precious stones and clever mechanical devices, possibly piloting ever popular steampunkish airships. The other option I am considering is to have dwarfs be not a distinct race, but the clumsy misshapen result of unions between halflings and larger races.

Besides that, I’m not sure what to include. So far I’m leaving out races of draconic heritage like kobolds (possibly too similar to goblins) and dragonborns, not to mention dragons themselves.

Giants are another race that may be easy to include without feeling like there are too many random races.

What about faeries? Doppelgangers? Minotaurs? Centaurs? Trolls? (Trolls and giants, or just one or the other?)Mer-people? Selkies?

Griffins have been suggested as well, but I think I would place them in the realm of animals rather than sentient races.

In other news, I’m hoping to have a satisfactory map of the continent that Coriander is on ready soon and then a more specific map focusing on Coriander itself. If anyone knows of any really good free online photo editors that might be helpful for making a cool map, let me know.

As always, suggestions and feedback on any aspect of Coriander is welcome ^_^

It feels like time for another top ten list. I like movie soundtracks because of their accessible and emotive qualities, and a lot of the CDs I own are soundtracks. I looked up several lists of best soundtracks, such as Entertainment Weekly’s top 100, and realized that most of their picks I had never heard at all, so my list is relatively unaffected by other lists. This was still a hard list to make because, well, I like a lot of soundtracks.

*disclaimer* I have not actually seen all of the movies the soundtracks I mention come from. Some of them may not be suitable for everyone.

10. Gettysburg (Lala) by Randy Edelman

This is somewhat of a sentimental choice. Filmtracks lists Gettysburg as the third most overrated soundtrack of the 90s, but I like the music anyhow. It was the first movie soundtrack that I owned and one that’s been played many times. “Fife and Gun” is probably the song people hear the most, but my favorite is “Over the Fence.” The slow melancholy version of “Dixie” is a nice twist on the normally upbeat Southern song.

9.Master and Commander (Lala) by Iva Davies/Christopher Gordon/Richard Tognetti

I’m not entirely certain I should put Master and Commander on this list. I love listening to the soundtrack, but by far the best parts come from the classical and traditional music included instead of original film score music. I think the combination of relaxing beautiful classical music with the more tense original music gives the soundtrack a good sense of balance, but, with apologies to Davies, Gordon, and, Tognetti, they just can’t compete with the Bach, Vaughn Williams, Mozart, and music from other classical greats on the CD.

8. Edward Scissorhands (Lala) by Danny Elfman

The soundtrack to this gothic fairytale contains some of the most beautiful music you’ll hear on a soundtrack. The children’s choir music can be especially heartbreaking. I like how the love theme never resolves; “Elfman always ends the theme (and cue) on a longing note, never returning to its grounding key and thus drawing out the score’s tragic intent even further.” In “The Grand Finale,” the theme simply fades away. I don’t think Elfman has the technical skill of John Williams or some others (though I’m not really a music expert), but this soundtrack is certainly worth listening to.

7. A.I. by John Williams

The movie was weird and at times disturbing, but the soundtrack is haunting (in a good way). Williams borrows some minimalistic elements and does so quite well, resulting in passages that sound like something Philip Glass might write when he decides to write agreeable music rather than dizzyingly fast repetitions. The “For Always” song and theme lends a needed lyrical presence to the soundtrack as well. The only thing I really complain about is the techno-ish portions of “The Moon Rising” (I’m not really a big fan of the Josh Groban inclusion at the end either).

6. Schindler’s List (Lala) by John Williams

There’s not really much I can say about this outside of what the filmtracks review says. It’s an old favorite of mine driven by simple but beautiful themes. Appropriately for the movie’s subject matter, the soundtrack lacks any real heroic or triumphant music. This lack of real climatic sections probably makes me less likely to listen to the CD than otherwise, but this is still John Williams at the top of his game.

5. Kingdom of Heaven (Lala) by Harry Gregson-Williams

While Gladiator almost made this list on the strength of “Am I not Merciful” alone, Gregson-Williams’ soundtrack to a violent medieval movie is stronger and more interesting throughout. The soundtrack opens with a great medieval feel as a choir introduces the movie’s main theme. The soundtrack continues by blending medieval and Middle Eastern sounding themes with exciting action cues (that don’t rely on synthesized sound or plagiarism). It’s hard to put this above Gregson-Williams’ soundtracks for the Narnia movies, but I think overall it’s slightly better.

4. Star Wars by John Williams

Perhaps the most iconic film music in existence, from the original trilogy to the prequels, this is my favorite John Williams music. I’m not as familiar with the original trilogy’s music on CD form–I’ve only heard it in the films themselves–but from the imperial march to the lightsaber duel music at the end of Return of the Jedi, Williams produces legendary material. My favorite Star Wars musical moments are the dramatic choral pieces like the “Duel of the Fates” in The Phantom Menace, the aforementioned Return of the Jedi music, and much of the music in The Revenge of the Sith. If you can get past the corresponding film cheesiness, the love theme from Attack of the Clones is great music too. Overall Star Wars has just about perfect mix of fun, serious, and emotional music.

(I’m giving all the Star Wars soundtracks (and one other set) one spot because otherwise they’d take up most of the top ten list by themselves).

3. The Village (Lala) by James Newton Howard

After a rough day at work I love to get some tea or coffee and sit down, put headphones on, and listen to “The Gravel Road,” which may be my favorite single song from a soundtrack. The combination of strings and piano “that literally blow in the wind and swell and sway from bar to bar” in the main theme melts stress away. Tense moments occur occasionally in the soundtrack, but overall the soundtrack shares much more in common with the movie’s visual and emotional beauty than with the sense of suspense and fear. Oh, and did I mention the violinist is Hillary Hahn?

2. Lord of the Rings by Howard Shore

Shore brings Middle Earth alive with his fresh themes and orchestration. I like the Rohirrim theme best, but all of the themes are good. The Two Towers with the most frequent use of the Rohirrim theme, the Helm’s Deep music, and “Samwise the Brave” is my favorite CD, followed by the Fellowship of the Ring with “Of Hobbits” and “The Breaking of the Fellowship.” Overall, The Return of the King sits slightly below the others in my rankings, but it contains some great individual songs like “Twilight and Shadow” and Billy Boyd’s song at the end of “The Steward of Gondor.” At first, I didn’t like “Into the West” because the style seemed out of place; I still think that, but the song itself has grown on me.

1. Lady in the Water (Lala) by James Newton Howard

The fact that I’m putting this first despite its shortness (not even 45 minutes of film music) and the inclusion of four Bob Dylan covers at the end speaks volumes about what I think of the rest of the music. It’s beautiful like The Village, but with a little more variety and some interesting chord progressions that I can’t get enough of. Listen to “Prologue,” “The Healing,” “The Blue World,” “The Great Eatlon,” and “End Titles” for the best parts. As for the Bob Dylan songs, this version of “The Time They Are A-Changin” is pretty good, but the extra music on the Chronicles of Narnia soundtracks are better. I like this movie itself well enough, but I’d watch it over and over just for the music.

So that’s three for John Williams (seven if you count all the Star Wars films separately), a group of three for Howard Shore, two for John Newton Howard, and a big fat zero for Hans Zimmer? Well I do like Hans Zimmer a lot, but after a while all the bombastic synthesized action cues start to sound alike. I think the best Zimmer soundtrack is Hannibal (Lala) mostly because it’s a bit different from typical Zimmer. The incorporation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations is nice, and I love the inclusion of spoken parts performed by Anthony Hopkins. Additionally the last song, Vide Cor Meum, is stunningly beautiful (and ironically not composed by Zimmer) and the ending . . . is brilliant. The soundtrack has plenty of flaws though too. Other Zimmer soundtracks I like include Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean: At Wits End, Thin Red Line, parts of Black Hawk Down, and the two Batman soundtracks, but none of them really stood out enough to make my list.