Month: July 2003

Friday night, bigdumbthing graced me with his presence at Friday Night Magic, then again on Saturday morning for the 10th Anniversary / Eighth Edition release. Somewhere within there, Chico flew in and did some grocery shopping, then went to a concert with ecafracs.

We had the send-off for Judy on Sunday (who’s going away to Japan for three years), and I didn’t do as much cleaning before the fact, and ended up doing too much of it at the last minute. (After the tournament on Sat., and early Sun. morning.) The party itself was entertaining, we crammed about 25 people at the highest point into my little townhouse. Alicia couldn’t make it up, so early on, we set up a one-way videoconference with my iSight, so she could watch and listen to the whole party. It ended up being on the whole time, and she was even paying attention to it most of the time. It was like having a disembodied person at the party. A few times, we even walked the laptop around and introduced her to people.

I got to introduce people to Happy Tree Friends, and caught a few of them by surprise… heh heh heh.

It was funny to watch people’s reactions to the Statue of Yoda, especially if it was after a while… it was just tucked away in the corner, looking very innocent.

I answered the question “how long did it take you to build that?” about five times over the course of they day, every time I took someone down to look at the Lego Star Destroyer.

desslok ended up coming home late and into the wrong airport, but he made it in time to have five of the six 5XL members in the same place at once.

…And the Present is getting pretty dang belligerent.

For the past, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about high school, partly because of an email I got out of the blue from an old classmate, and partly by finding Brea people for the first time on Friendster. Yes, I know I keep going on and on about Friendster…

The future.. well, we’ll leave that one alone for now.

For the present, well… you know.. I’m not going to touch that one either.

On a side note: Due to the magic of MAME, I was finally able to finish the Willow arcade game. I’d never made it past the second level, but after shoveling in the equivalent of almost $50, I finally beat the dang thing. Hooray for me. My thumb hurt afterwards.

I found Brea people in Friendster (ex- and otherwise). Well, a small group of them at least.

Heh.

Friendster is addicting. I just want to add more and more people as friends, so I can look more and more profiles. (Including a few people who I know are in there, but I can’t look at yet, but don’t know well enough anymore to consider “friends”.)

But anyway. Yesterday was a relaxing “watch a bunch of my favorite movies” day, even though I should have been straightening and cleaning the house for the party next weekend. I got to a lot of it today, though. The pies are mostly eaten (thankfully), and not as much by me as they could have been.

Operation “cut the plastic no-slip mat with a hacksaw and stick it to the bottom of the Cobalt Flux pad” was a horrible failure. I got to play with tools, yes, but it made the pad rock and tilt too much for it to be stable, even if it didn’t slide. I’ve been getting back into the groove of DDR, I’m back to being able to handle 8-foot songs, and most of the 9-foot songs as well (except the ones that really try my endurance). Looking at the 10-footers, though, it seems impossible that I’d ever be able to do them without first losing 50 pounds… I just can’t move and twist and turn that way while I’m moving this much weight around…. And I still have yet to AAA a song (any song, even the simple ones). I’ve gotten one Great and the rest all Perfects many times now… very frustrating.

So, it looks like I’m probably going to Indiana for Labor Day weekend for my Grandma’s 90th birthday party. I just need to figure out a) when and where I’m flying out of and b) how I’m going to get whichever airport I choose.

There are still the better parts of three pies in this house. *sigh* I was never good with temptation…

I’ve been getting some new toys recently. On Friday, I got the Cobalt Flux pad that I ordered way back when. It works really well, it just slides ever so slightly on the carpet. I’ll have to figure out a way to fix that.

The other toy I just got today is an iSight. It’s really keen. It’s tiny and light and fits right on my laptop. I’ve tried one video/video chat in iChat AV so far. It looked pretty blocky, but it was definitely cool.

Today was a big “catch up on errands that I’ve been putting off for a while” day. First, I finally picked up the certified letter from the post office that contains the title to my car, and the necessary paperwork to finish the transfer (which I have to turn in to the AAA on Monday). Next, I dropped off two cable boxes at the Comcast office, one of which we were getting charged $7 a month extra because they reduced what our package included a few months ago.

After that, I wandered down to Bank of America, where I did something I’ve been meaning to for a long time: I opened a savings account. It was a bit complicated, because my home branch is in Southern California, not Northern California, but if it had been anything else, I would have had to close my checking account and open a new one.

After that, I got my car washed… it really needed it. Then it was off to Bed Bath and Beyond, where I bought a few things that were needed (including guest bath towels). I had lunch at Quizno’s, and then rented Phone Booth at Blockbuster and headed home.

I didn’t make it to the barber or the grocery… the grocery will definitely be tomorrow, but I think the barber’s closed on Sunday… or is it?

Well, duh!

Friday was a nice relaxing day, finished up SG-1 Season 3 and watched a MST3K episode (The Skydivers). emerson85 showed up, he was staying with me for part of the weekend.

Saturday was the Anti-AX BBQ, for those of us who were passively protesting not going to AX, or something like that. I’ll have pictures up later.. probably tomorrow, including some character shots taken by meowa. We watched a few movies, including Charlie’s Angels 2, which was just about the worst movie I’ve seen in a while, I actually found myself comparing it to The Skydivers, the MST3K movie I saw the day before. It was that bad.

Today was the semi-annual Netrunner day. I picked cattekin up and drove up to Moss Beach again. I did better than usual, although the highlight of the day had to be one of Mark’s kids saying to me “you’ve got a big tummy.” Ah, out of the mouths of babes.

In my playing with Friendster, I’ve discovered another phenomenon… I was looking through the Gallery, when I saw someone who looked familiar (and had a familiar name), but was using glamour shots for her photos, so I couldn’t be sure. She was someone who worked in the computer centers at Berkeley at the same time as me. Well, sure enough, one of her friends was someone else who worked with us (whom I couldn’t actually look at his profile because he was too far away in the network.) So now, we have people who I used to know but don’t anymore… but who are only three degrees of separation from me.

There’s also a few people I know are in there, but don’t know enough to call a “friend” and aren’t in my network… if I were to “friend” them, it would open up another huge chunk of the network…

Note on the current music: Time from hearing on radio for the first time to purchase in the iTunes Apple Music Store… ten minutes.

Friendster is amusing. I remember the first time that I found a person that I had connections to through two completely different ways… now I’m finding that as the network of friends becomes more and more complete, such a thing is very commonplace. Six degrees-of-separation loops are nothing to write home about… five may be interesting, and four and three are the interesting ones… (a three degree loop is a friend of a friend who happens to know two different friends… unless the two friends don’t know each other, it’s not that interesting.

I want the weekend to start. This is how bored I am… I should be working, but I can’t keep my mind on PHP right now…