Six Apart just launched their new blogging service, Vox, and it's really nice, so i'm going to try blogging over there for a while. if they get around to creating a tool to export data from MT and suck it into Vox, i just might do that. one less moving part for me to have to worry about.

anyway, here's my Vox url: http://bcm.vox.com/. enjoy.

Cosmo 0.3 was quietly released last week while i was away on vacation (yay my brother got married!), and i just now got around to announcing it.

i'm working my tushie off to get 0.4 out the door before i head to Europe in June. we're gunning for more frequent releases now, and even though i'll be away for a bit , we've got an intern starting tomorrow and a Google Summer of Code project kicking off this week, so hopefully we'll see interesting things coming available throughout the summer.

Peter went on a road trip to Ithaca, my old college town, and posted some pictures here. oh the nostalgia. i used to live right up the hill from the Ithaca Gun factory and swam in the gorge that feeds Ithaca Falls. i once hauled a case of warm PBR up to the top of Taughannock Falls for an overnight camping/truth or dare session with a frat buddy and some ΑΟΠ chicks.

big vacation plans this summer:

bro is getting married in Texas in the end of May. i'll visit NYC for a bit after that, then head to Barcelona in the first week of June for Primavera Sound (is that the name?) where Pinky's band is playing (as well as Dinosaur Jr and Motörhead, among others).

after bumming around Spain for a while, i'll hang with Dennis and Aimee in Paris, then head north with them to meet Lamont, Laurel and others in Amsterdam. if my proposal is accepted for ApacheCon Europe, i'll round out the month in Dublin.

my only regret is that i won't be able to stay long enough for Wacken... although Roskilde is still a possibility ... Opeth and Coheed & Cambria are very tempting.

Greg's friend's punk rock band played. i drank Guinness.

blast from the past

the performance began with Il Sogno, Costello's score to a ballet production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. then he got up and sang a bunch of his own songs, including ones recorded with the Brodsky Quartet and Burt Bacharach. he finished the set by putting down the microphone for the last song, projecting his voice and getting the crowd to sing along. i've seen Elvis before, but this was a really special show, made even more so by the Irish coffee i chugged at intermission.

for those who are keeping score, i would like to point out that i have been cigarette- and alcohol-free, with the notable exception of my birthday party weekend, since just after the new year. who'da thunk it. can't recall the last time i stepped into a bar. mostly just staying at home with video games and movies, gettin my hermit on in a big way. which is not to say that i'm uninterested in hanging out; it's just that at the moment i'd rather, you know, remain out of temptation's reach. so keep your dirty stinky smokes away from me!

according to this quiz, i am a chaotic good human bard. i guess it's cos i love the ladies and the liquor. according to the details, i am also very close to being a chaotic neutral dwarven barbarian, which is perhaps less surprising.

Alignment:
Chaotic Good characters are independent types with a strong belief in the value of goodness. They have little use for governments and other forces of order, and will generally do their own things, without heed to such groups.

Race:
Humans are the 'average' race. They have the shortest life spans, and because of this, they tend to avoid the racial prejudices that other races are known for. They are also very curious and tend to live 'for the moment'.

Primary Class:
Bards are the entertainers. They sing, dance, and play instruments to make other people happy, and, frequently, make money. They also tend to dabble in magic a bit.

Secondary Class:

Detailed Results:

Alignment:
Law and Chaos:
Law ----- XXXXXX (6)
Neutral - XXXXX (5)
Chaos --- XXXXXXX (7)

Good and Evil:
Good ---- XXXXXXX (7)
Neutral - XXXXX (5)
Evil ---- (-1)

Race:
Human ---- XXXXXXXXXXXXX (13)
Half-Elf - XXXXXX (6)
Elf ------ XXXXXX (6)
Gnome ---- XXXXXXXX (8)
Halfling - XXXXXXXXX (9)
Dwarf ---- XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Half-Orc - XXXXXXX (7)

Class:
Fighter -- XXXXXXXXXXX (11)
Barbarian -XXXXXXXXXXX (11)
Ranger --- XXXX (4)
Monk ----- (-2)
Paladin -- XX (2)
Cleric --- X (1)
Mage ----- (-7)
Druid ---- XXX (3)
Thief ---- (0)
Bard ----- XXXXXXXXXXX (11)

email from mark:

vigilante.net is sitting in my livingroom for the moment as of this evening, and I found a circa-1997 mbox of mine. among many other gems, this:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
####
####
#### Program: HelloFuckBag
#### Author: Grinning Evil Death (brian@7r.net)
#### Date: 01.13.97
#### Version: 1.0b1
####
#### Copyright 1997, Seven Raven, Inc.
#### All Rights Reserved
####
####


## print statement to screen
print "Hello FuckBag!\n";

## exit gracefully
exit 1;

#### END of HelloFuckBag

no -wT or use strict? exit 1, not exit 0? noob!

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 70% Iron Man 65% Hulk 65% The Flash 50% Green Lantern 45% Superman 45% Catwoman 40% Robin 37% Batman 35% Supergirl 30% Wonder Woman 15%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

i don't really understand this business about being tagged, but i guess when somebody says they tagged me in their blog, i have to do the survey or the top ten list or whatever in my own one. and apparently elly tagged me. so here goes. and somebody correct me if i'm wrong about how this works.

Four jobs I've had:

1. office manager for a shipping and storage company
2. box office/usher/sound board operator at cornell universty theater (or is it theatre)
3. concession stand at a AAA baseball stadium
4. master of database

Four movies I can watch over and over:

1. groundhog day
2. interstella 5555
3. zoolander
4. lazy sunday (well it's not a movie but close enough)

Four places I've lived:

1. rock hill, sc
2. ithaca, ny
3. san francisco, ca
4. melbourne, australia

Four TV shows I love:

1. the west wing
2. veronica mars
3. rome
4. deadwood

Four places I've vacationed:

1. italy
2. ireland
3. amsterdam
4. the australian outback

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. squat n' gobble's tofu scramble -toast +latte
2. memphis minnies' andouille sausage
3. luna park's mac n cheese with ham and broccoli
4. peasant pies

Four sites I visit daily:

i don't really "visit" many sites anymore. i am subscribed to almost 100 feeds and read them in feedlounge (and before that, google reader). here are some of my favorites:

1. the superficial
2. ytmnd.com
3. alien loves predator (well ok not every day)
4. world of warcraft forums

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. the punter's club in melburne, playing the elvira pinball machine and drinking a pot of guinness while frankenbok play a ridiculous death metal set five feet behind me
2. lounging at an outdoor cafe on the piazza at the pantheon watching tourists and waiting for that one girl to show up in her window
3. at the bottom of the grand canyon, having just hiked down the north rim
4. chilling in my living room with a fire and a bong and a dvd and good friends

Four bloggers I am tagging:

1. zach
2. dammit
3. pete
4. urcella

ps: i was too lazy to link anything. i recommend google.

i've been getting a lot of shit lately for not updating lately. ok fine. it's not that nothing interesting has happened. on the contrary - among other things, my penis bled a couple times. but whenever i think about writing any of it down, which is not often, i don't have any motivation for it. so i guess people will just have to look at this lone bloody penis entry for another month.

ps i know buttl have seen it but for those of you who haven't, the best thing to come out of SNL in a long time: http://media.skoopy.com/vids/vid_00924.wmv

i just found this in my Pictures directory:

after stumbling out of a bar at 4am, it's imperative to stop for deep fried hot dogs wrapped in bacon and topped with cheese and jalapenos. the attractive folks with me are Pete and Pinky. the location is Crif Dogs on St. Marks in the EV, NYC. the date is some time in the first half of 2004.

so Tivo gave me an RMA number for my DVR, but they didn't bother to tell me that since my unit was bought almost two years ago it would cost $150 for a replacement. yeah right - i could pay $50 for a brand new 40 hr unit and a year's worth of service. but you know what? i'm over Tivo. i chucked that box and got Comcast to switch out my digital cable box for their dual-tuner DVR. i'm still figuring out the UI and slowly rebuilding my "series recording lists", but i can already tell that it will be worth the $9.95/month. now i just need a nice flat panel HD TV to go with it. and a comfy chair. and a new couch. and repairs to the subwoofer.

ugh i am so polluted. this weekend was a long blur of self abuse. LA does that to me. i stayed at the Standard downtown on Jim and Oliver's recommendation but wasn't so into the scene. maybe if i had brought along a huge crowd of drunken friends i might have overlooked the cooler-than-thou attitude infecting everyone else in the building. ugh. it was a pretty place though. i guess i'm just too conscious of my own unhipness.

last night i got home and was all excited to settle in on the couch to catch up on the weekend's TV (tired and grumpy from sitting in bridge traffic for almost an hour after the drive back up from down south, plus i hate Halloween anyway), only to find that the fucking Tivo ate shit at some point during the weekend. even after a dozen power cycles none of the lights come on, and the screen only shows scattered dancing blue lines. made me want to eat a gun. WoW and sleep helped a lot.

Metric are playing at Slims Thursday if anybody wants to join me. my previous Metric show pals Elly and Oliver will be missing this one since Elly is getting some sort of alien lifeform cut out of her womb.

moronism of the week: Zach showed me this on Sunday afternoon, and from then on not five minutes would go by without someday hollering "ualuealuuealeuale" and both of us erupting in laughter.

ok now i have to go to the gym and sweat some of the poison out.

i'm back from Texas and have a new roommate. in a couple hours i'm driving to LA for a party weekend. the week seemed to abruptly accelerate a few days ago and doesn't show any signs of slowing down. i'm looking forward to getting my head straight next week. massage required ASAP.

ps: thanks to Elise for dredging up this lovely mess.

headed to Texas in the am to hang out with my mother, my brother and his fiancee's family for a few days. when i return, i get a new roommate just in time to drive down to LA for Kris' birthday/Halloween party. so SF peeps, don't expect to see much of me for a while.

the last several weeks have been long, slow, chilly, foggy, and mostly quiet too, though a bit of hell has also been raised. those of you who helped out know who you are - thanks for the company.

had a bit of a ramble through the Financial tonight. i love bundling up in pants, long sleeves and warm coat to wander through my city. memories on every block. did some book shopping for the first time in several months and over dinner lost myself in George Stephanopoulos' All too Human. i'm totally gay for that guy.

hooray! i released Cosmo 0.2 today!

time to kill some troggs!

there is a distressing amount of gray hair in my beard.

Greg came over last night and taught me how to play backgammon. we drank vodka out of huge goblets, smoked profusely, and listened to Pharaoh Overlord and As I Lay Daying. a wonderful distraction from the absurdity on CNN. we should do it weekly. anybody interested?

website of the month: pubwalk.com. mashes up Google Maps and Citysearch to show all boozing establishments near a specified address and allows you to build a customized pub crawl route with directions from each joint to the next and estimated walking and drinking times. there's even a streamlined interface for getting the directions on your phone. brilliant.

here's an example crawl of the Lower Haight bars nearest my house.

a few bars are missing - most notably Zeitgeist and Mad Dog in the Fog, dunno what's up with that - but the developer says he's working on it. i also want a permalink feature so that i can bookmark a map with my home address as the starting location. but that stuff is minor. i gotta call a bender to try this out!

posting from the leather chair in Pete's apartment in Brooklyn. 3am and all is peaceful and quiet. i am very comfortable.

the Lovemakers are playing in San Francisco this Friday night (July 1st) at Mighty. dunno what time. if you can't make that, perhaps you can catch them one of the subsequent Fridays in July during their residency at Cafe Du Nord. i'll be at every one of those shows. they are also playing a charity event at the Playboy Mansion on July 23. tickets only $550. shit, if i lived in LA i'd be there - only time i'd ever be allowed to set foot on those grounds, i'm sure. i'm looking at you, Mark.

let me just say that i am extremely fucking frustrated with .Mac. since i upgraded my PowerBook and two G5s to Tiger, .Mac calendar sync has not worked. changes to one iCal instance are not reflected in the others after sync. in a fit of rage i deleted all of the calendars in the PowerBook's iCal. now no matter what i do i cannot get any of the calendars that were supposedly synced to .Mac by my home G5 to show up on the PowerBook.

i guess this is just an ass backwards additional bit of motivation for me to get Cosmo's CalDAV support working ASAP, so that Apple will begin to have a reason to add CalDAV to iCal. imagine if we had to sync email between computers rather than using IMAP (and POP before it). the current state of affairs is just ridiculous.

speaking of sync - my Treo 650 showed up in the mail last week. once i was all moved into the new apartment i chucked the old 600 with the dying screen, set up Bluetooth on the 650, and used Missing Sync's iSync conduit to copy the iCal and AddressBook data from my home G5 to the phone. now that is what sync is for - when you have a device that spends most of its life offline and/or has a generally slow and flaky internet connection. luckily with the impressive Missing Sync tool, everything JFW'd and i have all my contacts, events and tasks on my phone.

i also set up VersaMail (which now does IMAP and supports SSL for both IMAP and SMTP - yay!) and VeriChat, which continues to be both simple and extremely cool. it's the one Palm app that seems to be able to stay running even when you switch to other apps. too bad the fucking scrollbars don't seem to work on the 650, and i have to tap any icon 2 or 3 times before there's a response. also there seems to be a problem with pssh on the 650 so that you can't import SSH keys. i really hate typing my passwords on the Treo keyboard. finger cramps!

i'm flying to Brooklyn this afternoon for a short visit, returning to SF on Sunday night. NY pals, call or email. Great Lakes Wed night!

after almost a year in the East Bay, i'm finally moving back to San Francisco. i found a charming old house on Carmelita St. just off Duboce Park, only two blocks from my last SF place. the place is immense, with two bedrooms upstairs and living room, dining room, kitchen and office downstairs. large back yard shared with the landlady who lives in the basement. quiet street, shady but gorgeous, in a wonderful neighborhood. i couldn't be more excited. moving June 18th!

today is Day 4 of not smoking. the first evening i wanted to kill myself. since then it's been pretty smooth sailing. most times when i would normally have a smoke (after a meal, when getting in the car), i think "it's sorta weird to not be smoking right now" and then go back to whatever i was doing.

the process has been much easier than it ever was the times i tried to quit years ago. i think low-carbing and regular training sessions at the gym have rebuilt my willpower, which was at an alltime low in the late 90s. i am looking forward to the next few months of abstention from cigarettes, booze, bread, potatoes, and sugar. i don't need the white man's poisons. my body is a temple. a really big temple.

my roommate and a half dozen of her friends, pressed into moving service, just pulled away with two trucks packed with all of her stuff. she's moving into her own place elsewhere in Oakland (i'm not sure where). i have good wishes for her, and i'm looking forward to living by myself again for a while, but damn the house feels sorta empty already.

the cats are staying here for the rest of the day while the new place is unpacked, and they clearly don't know what to think. i will miss Boy (the other one is Girl) sleeping on my bed with me every night! Anjuna offered to let me keep them here, but i hate taking care of cats. actually i don't mind feeding them, but i draw the line at changing litter. i'm sure my cat-allergic friends will be relieved to not have to pop pills whenever they come over.

now i get to decide what to do with the empty room. probably just make it into a guest room. Jim Home suggested i move the gaming/dining table in there, build a laptop tray and a removable projector stand to mount on top, and run games with photoshop maps driven from my computer. hmmm!

at my gym (Club One in downtown Oakland), there's a row of ellipticals on the third floor looking down over the basketball court. i watched a game of 2-on-2 today while warming up for my weightlifting session. three of the players were fairly fit and sporty-looking guys, but the other was a tall woman who drove to the hoop just about every time she got her hands on the ball. she made the guys look like absolute chumps. i'm betting she played college ball.

this woman's athleticism was head-spinningly attractive, and it got me wondering why i don't know more people who play sports or did when they were younger. i can't think of any close friends off the top of my head who have any game at all. i was a three-sport athlete in high school (football, track and [church league] basketball), and i played DI-AA college football. i don't believe i know any other former athletes. hell, i have been trying for ten years to get a pickup basketball game together. nothing. denied. my friends are all pasty geeks who commiserate on chat with each other about the jocks they hated in high school. to most of them, exercise is dancing all night at an oontz club, or maybe a round of golf. yawn.

here, i'll try again. my comments don't work at the moment cos of asshole blog spammers, so Bay Area pals - email me if you want to shoot hoops some time eh! also email me if you are a single female athlete!

ps: golfers excepted from above. don't email me. i loathe golf.

har - Warren Ellis refers to tribe.net as "Craigslist for the polyfucker/playa-crustie Bay Area community". the only person i've heard talk about tribe runs an astrology community there. go figure.

i have been quiet lately, both here and in meatspace, because i've been playing World of Warcraft like it's my second job. 6-8 hrs a night for over a week now. have a good group of friends there, some of whom live out of town and whom i consequently never see. if you are a WoW player, i'm on windrunner (alliance: angormor, ferguson) and hyjal (horde: grazztt) - say hi and we will destroy troggs and vile familiars together.

dear Internet: little of note has happened since i last checked in with you. tonight i finished a really long book and forgot to go see a rock show. also i had a brownie sundae at Fentons. yum.

the last several weeks have really flown by. i had forgotten how drastically my life changes when i have a fulfilling job. i work very intense 50 hr weeks and am too beat in the evenings to party like i do when i'm unemployed. i barely have the energy even to go out to movies anymore. and with my personal trainer destroying me every Wed and Fri afternoon (chick had me do 80 squat reps in 3 mins yesterday), i am often too sore to do anything other than lay around and read or watch Tivo. i've even lost all motivation to work on Warhorn. i know from experience that sooner or later i will adjust and become productive again, but for right now i'm a big blob just taking up space. i'm pretty ok with that.

oh, one interesting thing: as i mentioned recently, every time i am in a room with Mitch Kapor he is talking about del.icio.us and Flickr. so this week i finally got around to checking them out. Flickr is cute and all, but i don't really do the photo thing, so i only spent a few minutes with it. del.icio.us on the other hand is pretty awesome, and i found a great use for it right off the bat. i regularly read around a hundred RSS feeds on three different computers. with sync features still to come in NetNewsWire, it's hard to switch between those machines and remember which URLs i want to save to read in detail later. each machine usually has a bunch of different links saved on the desktop. but now i use Foxylicious to post them to del.icio.us and tag them with "unread". i always have a tab open to my unread tag page, so i can quickly select something to read while i'm waiting for code to compile. nice! tho since my dual 1.8ghz G5 showed up, code compiles pretty much at the speed of light, so now i have to explicitly set aside time to read, heh.

work has been keeping me awfully busy lately. i have been skipping meals and not checking in with friends. that's what happens when i get lucky with a super interesting project (for those keeping score, i am integrating Spring, Acegi Security, and Jackrabbit to create a secure calendar and sharing server). the world rushes by whilst i geek. i ordered a dual Power Mac G5 and a 23" HP dual input display for the home office earlier this week, so i predict i won't be coming up for air for some time, not without some help at least. reach out, my friends, and make me be social!

several people at work are heading off to PyCon next week. Mitch talked at yesterday's staff meeting about some of the interesting stuff at ETech. apparently they talked a lot about del.icio.us and Flickr, neither of which i've used yet, tho both are making people shake wildly and foam at the mouth. anyway, it all makes me fondly recall the late 90s when i was on the conference circuit, getting drunk with the modperl guys and struggling vainly to keep up in the perlguts and perlthreads sessions. OSAF will send me to one or two conferences this year - in fact i think i'm going to be on a CalDAV panel at OSCon in August. what are the best cons for Java web guys?

check out this gorgeous tarot deck. also, the catchiest tune i have heard in months.

i spent all week reading about JCR and Jackrabbit for work. we were originally planning to build our calendar server on top of Slide, but as i've given more thought to the server architecture, JCR has become much more appealing. the biggest hurdle to using Jackrabbit is that i really want something Spring-based. the guys who formed the Acegi WebDAV project have a similar goal, and we're talking about whether it makes more sense to somehow add Spring and Acegi Security support to Jackrabbit or to build new WebDAV/CalDAV and JCR implementations.

i have also spent the week looking for apartments in San Francisco. my apt hunting experience has been quite different this time than ever before (i have moved a total of 7 times since leaving college in 1996). usually i have great apt karma and find an amazing place within the first week (sometimes even the first day). not so this go round. i've been hearing from others that the majority of places on the market are shit, and now i'm experiencing that for myself. i'm trying to be patient, but if i haven't found something in the next few months, i will probably just suck it up and stick it out in Rockridge til next spring. rent is cheap, the neighborhood is quiet and pretty, and i can save lots of dough by not paying SF rent. but it means i will have to continue driving back and forth across the bay bridge every day. so mind numbing!

march looks like it's going to be extremely boring... and i'm very happy about that.

i spent 13 hours on a train today (xmas day). i took amtrak from charlotte nc to new york city. then i cabbed over to pete's place in brooklyn, only to find that i had the wrong set of keys. so i had a few drinks at great lakes and then came back into manhattan to spend the night at the w on union square. tomorrow egg will be home and i can get into pete's place. huzzah.

i want to take this opportunity to publicly apologize to elly and oliver for causing them to move away from new york. what an idjit i was to give up that palace in park slope. being back in nyc for just a few hours made me realize this. the bay area is great for gaming and hiking, but for good clean vodka and jager swilling fun, you can't beat this place. doesn't matter how long i'm gone, brooklyn always welcomes me with open arms. so my goal for 2005 is to get a job that will let me move back and forth between oak and nyc as i will. everybody cross yr fingers!

also let me just say that it's absolutely heart stoppingly shocking how cheap homes are in very nice areas of charlotte. my friends jason and austin have a place that must be three times the size of the house i grew up in, as big as the biggest of my friends' dot com millionaire houses, for ONE SIXTH the price. right on the lake. i'm so jealous. makes me want to invest in real estate down there. hell, since i found out that there are goths in charlotte, i could almost envision living there.

i finished today with the project i've been working on for the past six months. i'm looking for jobs now, but i'm being very picky, because i don't want to commit the next few years of my life to helping somebody manufacture widgets faster, or sell more widgets, or increase the amount of direct mail they can send, or do anything remotely related to the acronyms CRM or ERP.

in fact, i'm going to take the next couple months off and build version 2 of Warhorn. the original version was written in PHP, but it's slow and bloated, and the feature requests have accumulated so fast (almost a hundred as of today) that it's clearly time to plan a new app from the ground up with a modern architecture, using Java and the many excellent tools it provides (like Spring, Hibernate and Struts), and with the features that have evolved organically over the last two years as part of a uniform design.

nevertheless, if you hear of interesting software engineering jobs in the areas of entertainment, politics or education, or with somebody providing some important service that you and your friends rely on every day, well then, let me know. i do need to pay the rent at some point.

heading back to Oakland this weekend. will miss my NY friends - the weekend brunches, the debate gatherings, the Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and/or Saturdays at Great Lakes... speaking of which, below is a shitty Treo photo from last weekend at the bar. apparently after going home that evening Nick booted his portion of the Pino's double cheese and fresh basil pizza i brought home for dinner all over his bathroom and then passed out on the toilet. well done sir. the evening was also notable for Pete being set up with fellow Italian hottie Urcella. rowr.

Jeremy's tiny penis and unbelievably low tolerance for beer and chilled vodka shots caused him to shamefully pass out before the evening was half over, drooling on a woman's shoulder in front of a brick wall.

i just can't get the motivation to update my dum web site anymore. who cares about any of it!

spent the last two hours updating my resume. i need a job. let me know if you have one for me.

i'm in Brooklyn again, staying with Pete until mid-October. outfitted his back room with futon, dresser, nightstand and lamp. just need to sweep and mop and clean the dried cat puke off the windowsill, and it will be a quite cozy abode. a sorta spartan little cell for monastic Tuggy.

i'm reading a lot lately. an hour on the train each day, plus meals, and over drinks at Great Lakes most evenings. tearing through the stack of books i brought with me. luckily there's a four story Barnes & Noble next door to my office building. i am going through a historical fiction phase. can't bring myself to read anymore politics or current affairs.

what are you all up to? email me. i am out of the loop.

dear internet (with a lower-case i as per Wired style guide): tonight i am in Chicago, having left Indianapolis this afternoon after five days of Gen Con, the world's largest and greatest gaming convention. in my dreams i wade knee deep through rivers of orc blood.

after arriving at the airport to find that my roundtrip ticket had somehow been refunded *after* i flew to Indy, i managed to get a later flight into Chicago. then, because i hoped they had net and a smoking room, i threw down many clams for a Red Carpet Club membership.

three long hours and two round trips between Terminals B and C later (the RCC in B has no smoking lounge, but the one in C does), i gave up my spot on the Oakland flight in exchange for a free first class upgrade tomorrow morning, a free roundtrip ticket, and hotel and meal vouchers.

so now i'm sitting in a Hilton which is hosting what seems to be a Beatles convention. there was a group sing of "All You Need Is Love" in the lobby when i checked in.

i'm sure this all means something, but i'm not sure what. maybe my astrologer can offer some insight.

i'm pretty sure i need a horned helmet to wear out to bars.

random neat things accumulating in my inbox for the past several weeks:

Pirate Keyboard

Cthulhu LiveJournal

oh, i guess there aren't as many of them as i thought.

sorry for not updating you all lately on the riveting details of my fascinating, fun-filled life in the sun. i barely have time to take a dump these days. maybe you should come to my housewarming party tomorrow (Sat Aug 14) and ask me in person. email for details.

soooo busy. between the day job, the club, unpacking, and running the occasional game at Endgame on Monday nights, i've had almost no time to get together with friends. i've scaled my nights at the club back to 3/wk, but i still never seem to find space in the day to relax or see people. Creighton, Rebbie and Becky are in town this week too...

last night Finn reminded me of Grontar: the Frutang, possibly the most brilliant game ever devised. have a read of this play log - i think you'll agree.

saw Camera Obscura at the Great American tonight. so cute and charming. they messed up the encore and blamed it on some goofy indie rocker in the front row who was clapping out of time, so they brought him on stage and made him clap in front of the whole hall. ran into Elise and Jesse there - always nice to see friends again after a long absence. walking back up Polk the show, it occurred to me that i'm really happy to be back. the jury's still out on living in Oakland, as far as the social life goes, but with a car, and a couple of free evenings not at the club, i think i've got it covered. so if you haven't seen me in a while and want to get a drink or go for a hike, let me know.