Joshua Zamrycki's Weblog

Last night was Board Game Night at the Big Z Ranch. Jan and I had Juls, Ewan, Montsey, Baileys, Cointreau, and Absinthe over our house for a friendly game of Risk. The intended two hour game slowly turned into a grueling five hour debacle, after which Juls was the only one left standing - in every possible sense. By the time I kicked everyone out, set the clocks ahead one hour, had one last read through of the online Lost forums, and got to bed it was 6am. But that didn't stop me from waking up before noon and heading down to Castelldefels for my first day of beach volleyball of the year.

I vacantly stumbled onto a metro and met up with the French contingent of my indoor volleyball team: Remi, Xavi, and Stephane. Remi drove us down the coast to Castelldefels where the very first beach volleyball tournament of the year was taking place. None of us had signed up in time for the tournament so we all just decided to head down there anyway, set up a net, and get a few games in to inaugurate the beach season. Five hours later of almost nonstop playing, Remi and I had played the whole time while Xavi played most of the time (between his complaining of how out of shape he is) and Stephane and his steaming hangover only played a few games; he spent most of the day asleep on his towel. There was no waking the boy up! I even poured water on his back... nothing.

When we weren't playing against each other, we managed to clean the clocks of a few guys from competing indoor teams. Apart from the stupid sunburns, forgetting our sunglasses at home, and aching muscles, I'd say the day was an overwhelming success. Bring on the summer!

Posted by Joshua Zamrycki at 9:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Watch out! It looks like I've found new and exciting ways to fill up all my free time: sport and technology. Read on eager reader...

Last Thursday I found myself with no work and nothing to do. So I did what any red blooded American would do: I called my Belgian friend Julian (the coolest guy I know) who assembled two German friends and we drove off to the Spanish Pyranees for a day of international snowboarding at Masella!

That's me and my brand new Rossignol Avalon board.
We met this past Christmas and
have been inseparable ever since.

There aren't many places in the world where you can play beach volleyball and then drive just two hours and rip it up in a frosty snowpark. Barcelona is one of those places. It's absolutely wonderful. And last Thursday was the perfect day to make the trip. Spring skiing is very different than winter skiing in that you can have a day where the sun is shining so bright that you find yourself peeling off layer after layer of clothing over the course of the day until you're left with nothing but a T-shirt and ski pants. This was one of those days. Thanks to the gorgeous weather, I now have the beginning of a summer tan, a peeling nose, and a slight cold - but it was worth it. The only bad thing about spring skiing is that the snow at the bottom of the mountain was a little slushy. Yuck! But the other 90% of the mountain had choice conditions.

We had a great day bombing down the slopes and flying through the snowpark. I was even able to catch some of the day on film. I'm at the point now where I'm comfortable using my camera while I'm racing down the mountain. And I'm very protective of my camera. And this now leads me to the second part of this story...

As you probably know by now, I'm a bit of a technophile. I enjoy learning new things to do with my computer. You may have noticed this in the past few weeks with the impressive display of my Photoshop skills and Flash skills. But I'd never tried my hand at video editing. Until now.

Let me tell you something about Windows Movie Maker. It is a powerful and extremely easy to use program that will have almost anyone editing their digital videos in no time. Well, not "no time" exactly. It took me over four hours to throw together my first one minute video. Let me tell you something else about Windows Movie Maker. It is a flaming pile of shit. I say this after having lost ALL of the aforementioned work when the program spontaneously decided to freeze just as I was finishing the edit. I scoured the internet looking for a way to get my work back but all I found were dozens of other people saying the same thing about this Microsoft miracle. Grrrr.

I tried to install the newest version of Adobe Premiere Pro (the industry standard in video editing), but, for the first time in its life, my computer didn't meet the minimum requirements. Luckily I "found" a copy of an old version of Premiere from 2003. I installed it and messed around for a while before realizing that the steeper learning curve would not allow me to finish my one minute video in the next few days. I wanted immediate gratification! So back to WMM I went. Freeze, crash, freeze, freeze, crash and I was finally done. I sent the finished product to YouTube for all the world to see. Here it is, my very first video:

Posted by Joshua Zamrycki at 1:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just to inform all two of you who might be interested, the online fantasy baseball season is upon us! After my amazing performances last year, I'm back to win it all. This may sound terribly geeky to most of you, but I honestly enjoy playing online fantasy baseball (and football). For one, it gives me an excuse to follow my favorite sport while secluded in a far off country without any televised games. And then there's the fact that I get off on analyzing the statistics and giving my mathematical muscles a workout. OK, maybe it is a bit geeky... but so am I!

I'll be playing in two different leagues this year - the same ones as last year. Both are run on Yahoo and organized by friend and former Barcelona resident turned responsible father, Clayton. One is a 'keeper league' so my roster is the same as last year. As you probably remember, this is the same league in which I won the championship last October. The other is a draft league. I am proud and at the same time ashamed to admit that I have spent more time preparing for this draft than any other online draft I have ever participated in. I preranked my players, formulated my cheatsheets, and created more than one comprehensive spreadsheet to aid in my draft. Yesterday was the big day and I'm happy to say that all of my planning appears to have paid off. I could write out an in-depth review of why I think I've got a strong lineup, but I'll just let you see for yourself. Behold the glory that is my 2006 fantasy baseball team:

Happy birthday, Clay.
Now how about a Spanking?!

Posted by Joshua Zamrycki at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What Ed said to me yesterday morning:

"Can you come over this afternoon and give me a hand with some computer thing?"

What Ed meant:

"My sister runs a volunteer relief group helping tsunami victims in Sri Lanka and her organization is going to be featured on television on Thursday. Can you come over this afternoon and help me design, layout, and program a weblog style website for her organization in under three hours and in Dutch so that they have a web presence that can be advertised when they're on TV?"

And so I did.

Posted by Joshua Zamrycki at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are 3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury.
- Tom Duff, Bell Labs

Hey it's Pi Day! So celebrate one of the mathematical mysteries with friends / family / loved ones / your Math teacher / smart people / or some Dutch guy. Share yummy pies with them, sing songs, and send them cute ecards.

Some people might be interested in knowing that today
is also Albert Einstein's birthday.

Posted by Joshua Zamrycki at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today I dubbed two "romantic" films into English. One was based on The Da Vinci Code and the other was based on Sin City. They were both painfully bad but for very different reasons.

Let me first state that not all "romantic" films are bad (you do know what I mean by "romantic", don't you?). True, most are terrible, but every once and a while a production company takes pride in their project and develops an interesting story, writes a decent script, uses creative camera work, and hires actors who can actually act. I was not so lucky today.

The Da Vinci Code was you average, run of the mill, bad film. The dialog was dense and boring and so were the actors. Why they decided to shoot the film in English using nothing but illiterate French actors is beyond me. So it didn't really matter how good the dubbing actors were; every time someone spoke on screen, there was a two second pause between every word and the "actor" had the glazed look of a deer staring into headlights. Now imagine a four minute static conversation about the Vitruvian Man along these lines. I couldn't finish this one fast enough.

In all fairness, Sex City may very well end up being a halfway decent film. The version I was forced to watch, however, was laughable. The director of this film obviously understood something that the director of the other film didn't: namely that all of these crappy films will eventually be dubbed into seven different languages and then packaged together onto one DVD to sell all over the world. Therefore, sometimes there is no original version! This was the case in Sex City. There were actors speaking together in English, French, Russian, and German - sometimes just mouthing their lines - but all totally mumbled with very bad sound quality and occasionally drowned out by the director shouting instructions from off camera. I especially liked it when the actors pathetically made the sound of their gunshots with their mouths (of course, to be overdubbed with sound effects later). These are the things that won't make it to the final commercial version - thank goodness. I like to think that I'm just doing my part to bring a little bit of happiness into this world.

Posted by Joshua Zamrycki at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The deafening public demand has risen to the point that it can no longer be ignored. So here, for your wholesome family viewing pleasure, is "the bump":

Week 15: Your baby can now grasp
the umbilical cord and suck her fingers.

But what, I can hear you asking, is inside "the bump"? Very good question, my friends. I, too, have spent many a waking night pondering over this quandary. Will it look like us? Will it be left handed? Will it drop out of high school in favor of working at a 7-Eleven? Lucky for us all, I recently received my brand new V.F.P.X.D.5000 (Variable Future Possibility X-Ray Device). I just hooked this puppy up to my digital camera and snapped a single shot of "the bump" and this is what was produced:

I can't honestly say I'd be all that surprised by any of the above.

Posted by Joshua Zamrycki at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Since my full time contract with a touring educational theatre company ended last week, I totally assumed that I'd be returning to the good ol' days of staying up late, futzing around on the computer till some ungodly hour, and then sleeping until midday. I couldn't have been more wrong. Last week was probably my busiest week of the year! Allow me to recap the many different jobs I did this past week as I list them in order of increasing excitement (aka - payment):

1. Upon completing the touring season, all of the actors of this theatre company that I was working with had to meet at HQ to store and categorize all of our props and sets. Dolls were missing feet, costume stank to high heaven, and legs were falling off tables. It was bitter sweet to see everyone one last time before we all moved on to bigger and better things. I very well may be back next year. They want me for a 1960's psychedelic version of Romeo and Juliet.

2. Later in the week I got suckered into working a trade fair (in costume and character) for the above mentioned theatre company. I was dressed at Fred, Ebenezer Scrooge's nephew from A Christmas Carol, and hung around with Juls who was dressed as the dirty old Charity Worker. I got to wear a top hat and walk around with a cane handing out information packets to lost and confused English teachers. One of the other companies that had set up a stand had free candy to give out: jelly Coca-Cola bottles and giant chocolate Whoppers. So that was cool.

3. My other educational theatre company and I performed A Monkey's Tale for a very appreciative and well behaved group of nine year olds at a school up in Horta. Every kid there was named after the little insignia on their shirt. One boy was named Tiger and there was a girl named Wave. I think another boy was called Frog. A very cool way of teaching the little tykes English!

4. I worked a corporate event for a group of 80 Spanish doctors. I was one of eight actors placed at random locations around the city while groups of doctors had to travel from one character to the next, collecting clues. I was dressed as a musician and they had me stationed with my trumpet in the Plaza del Rei behind the Cathedral. If anyone correctly gave me the secret password, I was supposed to pass them an envelope with their next clue. I spent most of the afternoon teaching random kids in the plaza how to blow the trumpet. They were kinda snotty.

5. I made an afternoon stop at a dubbing studio in La Garriga to dub two episodes of an ongoing cartoon that I've been working on called Edebits and then I dubbed two "romantic" films into English. Hey, it pays the bills.

6. I went to a new dubbing studio not far from my house in San Gervasi to dub three "romantic" films. In one of the films I provided the voices for 22 different characters! No that's low budget.

7. A morning trip to a dubbing studio in Sabadell had me, as part of an ongoing project, recording all of the voices for four episodes of a cartoon series that hasn't even been drawn yet. I'm doing the "pre-recording" so the animators can match the images to the inflection and rhythm that I create. Later, they'll get a bunch of different actors to dub the voices for the final project.

8. The job that took the least amount of time to complete was a one minute documentary on Barcelona's Zona Franca. I had to put on my corporate voice for this one. I think it's scheduled to be broadcast on MSNBC. As you can see by its #8 listing, this was also one of the best payed jobs of the week.

9. Finally, I spent a couple days in yet another dubbing studio (making a total of five different studios in one week) dubbing the lead role in a horror film called La Habitacion del Hijo (The Child's Bedroom). This was a Spanish made for TV movie that was part of the Historias Para No Dormir (Films to Keep You Awake) series. The movie was actually pretty good. The actors were very good and it even made me jump a few times. It took two days to finish the dubbing. It was the longest of my week's work, and also the most rewarding. I was really happy with the work I did and I think the director was also. It was great when I overheard the sound technician telling the dubbing director that, after having worked with Spanish dubbers for many years, he could tell that I was "one of the good ones".

So there you have it. That was my week. A profitable and exciting time, full of thrills and spills. Now according to my Palm Pilot, the next few weeks should have me futzing and sleeping as usual.

Posted by Joshua Zamrycki at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

(the following is a letter that I have just sent to the cast and crew of the latest play that I was slated to produce and direct)

Dear beloved BT'ers,

This is very difficult for me to write and I was hoping it would not come to this, but I find myself in the unfortunate position of informing you that our spring production of Beyond Therapy is being postponed.

Please believe me when I say that I have done all that I can to avoid this sad situation. I was really looking forward to working with each and every one of you and I greatly appreciate all of the time, effort, and energy that you have already put into this show.

You see, through a series of unfortunate events and scheduling conflicts, we no longer have the necessary cast members to pull off the brilliant performance I had planned. Let me explain: I was lucky enough to have cast six actors who I thought would be perfect for this show. Perfect! Then one actor discovered that their work would have them out of town during our performance dates and could therefore not continue with the show. So I made some phone calls and found another competent actor to fill their shoes. Then another actor was to be called out of the country for work and couldn't commit to the show's schedule. So I found another suitable replacement. And then yet another actor found himself caught between chronic laryngitis and a difficult work schedule and had to bow out. If you're keeping score at home, that was now half of the original cast. I searched high and low for one more actor to help fill the void, but the right person for the part just wasn't available. This, combined with a ticking clock and the very difficult schedules of three of the surviving actors, meant that I was no longer in a position to produce the play that I had envisioned. And rather than put up a show that I was not confident in and whose quality could not be assured, I have made the executive decision of postponing this production. When and if this project will be revived is still yet to be seen. I am very sorry.

I must stress the fact that this decision is by no means the "fault" of any one person. This is a very complicated situation with many variables and I have called upon my extensive mathematical skills to formulate every possible alternative. I honestly blame no one. On the contrary, I thank you all for your desire to participate in one of my many dreams. I hope to hear from all of you when this phoenix rises again.

Much love,
Joshua

Posted by Joshua Zamrycki at 1:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)