Author: Andy Scheffler

I’ve played a lot of Magic recently. Last Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and again tonight… yesterday I had a migraine again, and I thought I kicked it a few times, but it kept coming back, even into this morning, but I finally slept it off with a generous helping of water and ibuprofen.

Fanime is this weekend, and for the first time that I’ve gone to it, I’m not staffing it, which makes me feel very relaxed about it, not surprisingly. I’ll be able to take all sorts of pictures! I’ll be free to roam around and go to panels! Oh, it’s gonna be great! Woo!

I bet I’ll be bored two hours in.

I finally broke down and bought a gaming peripheral that costs more than the system it plugs into. Now perhaps I’ll be less frustrated when DDRing…

A couple of things that I’ve left out of previous entries and had it bugging me:

When I was driving down to LA two weeks ago, I saw a little dust devil off to the side of I-5, and thought that was pretty cool. Then, I looked ahead and saw something that looked like a fire, but as I drove by, it was another dust devil, this one at least 20 feet in diameter, just off the edge of the freeway.

…

Dang it, I knew there was something else! Now it’s just going to sit in my head until I remember it again, and it’ll get appended to the end of another entry… Bah!

[Edit: Stupid me didn’t form his <a> tag correctly, so the last half of this post was hidden. Fixed now.]

This last weekend was pretty lazy, Saturday involved finishing up Dark Angel season one, and cleaning the kitchen. Well, at least the counters, the floor can wait, and the counters needed it way more. Sunday, I watched Wag the Dog for the first time. Found it rather predictable. Went to the grocery, then walked to the Sunnyvale Art and Wine Festival (and around it, and then back again, of course).

Then the less enjoyable portion of the weekend began. Well, it should have been fun. I got called upon to be the sixth person in a Magic draft, which is normally a fun thing… but this time, a combination of minor errors and horrible luck on my part made me go 0-5 over the course of two drafts, and end up walking away a frustrated ball of nerves. After oversleeping this morning, I get called by my boss at 10:30 just as I’m pulling into the parking lot, asking me to do a quick change that I assured him would be easy (after he insisted that I at least try it once, but I didn’t… I mean, it worked two years ago, why wouldn’t it work now?). I get in, and of course, I no longer have permissions to make the change, and the guy who needs to do it is not in the office yet.

So I spend the whole morning trying to figure out if it was an error on my part of if they did, in fact, change permissions, while simultaneously trying to get ahold of anyone who could make the change, and just feeling horrible all around. The change eventually got made, and they confirmed that they didn’t want random people making changes,

Blah.

Addendum to Long Post: During the incident on the freeway, I failed to mention that the whole time, “Don’t Fear The Reaper” was playing on the radio.

Addendum to short post: The duck didn’t really have one leg, but it looked like it. (It was doing a flamingo thing.) It really really freaked Gracie out, though. I took a picture of the ducks, but it’s still in the camera.

Speaking of pictures, I put the album of Chico and Jane’s birthday party online.

Also, as I was driving around LA, I’ve noticed billboards for a local engagement of The Producers, with George Alexander and Martin Short in the lead roles. George Alexander as Max Bialystock I can see, but Martin Short as Leo Bloom? It just doesn’t work for me…

And one more thing. The “Classic Rock” radio station here, KLOS, has been playing music that really scares me to be called “Classic”. Yes, folks, they are playing music that I remember being originally broadcast on the radio and calling it “Classic.” Dang it, I’m getting old.

So far today, I’ve seen a cell phone tower that looks like a palm tree, and a one-legged duck.

Well, I got my laptop working with my mom’s wireless network, but more on that later (and more on what the title of this entry means later as well)… let’s go back to yesterday…

*diddleiddleah* *diddleiddleah*

I’ve noticed two memes going around. The LJ Barcode (which just looks dumb) and the LJMatch graph (their website has gone *boom* today, they got too popular, it seems).

I refuse to put either one in here.

That is all.

So, the house buying process is proceeding with only a few minor bumps. The bank sent their appraiser on Friday, and there was a termite inspection today. The only thing left that I have to help coordinate is the HOA inspection, which I just found out today actually has to be set up by the home owner, or at least he has to empower me to handle it.

I’m driving down to LA on Saturday, and it appears as though I’ll have a passenger, at least for the drive down… Lynda… but she’ll be doing homework. The last few times I’ve driven down, I’ve used my laptop as a very large iPod, basically, with powered computer speakers plugged into a power inverter… the whole apparatus resting in my passenger seat. With the passenger seat going to be occupied by a human this time… I wonder what I’ll do…

Oh, I know! She’ll bring her TiBook, right? I’ll set mine up in the back seat, start up iTunes 4, and host a local Airport network. Then, she can use her laptop on her lap, plug that into the speakers, and use Rendezvous sharing in iTunes to listen to my MP3s! It’s brilliant! It’s geeky! It’s perfect! It’s… overkill.

Oh well. Maybe I could just buy an iPod before Saturday.

Nah…

I just spent eight hours at Baycon, figuring out that scifi fans aren’t that much different from gaming or anime fans. I went in specific to play Netrunner, and I didn’t really leave the gaming room, but it was enjoyable nevertheless. I did make a pass through the dealer’s room, but I really wouldn’t buy anything in there that I couldn’t buy in a bookstore. Supposedly Fanime had a fan table, but they must have packed up by the time I got there. (I just got an evening pass, didn’t get there until just before 7) Ran into a few people I didn’t know except by reputation, and saw a handful of people I did know. Also saw some people walking around with LiveJournal nametags on, but couldn’t find the guy handing them out.

Now, I’m just waiting for the Excedrin PM to kick in… I think I can start to feel it now…

This morning on the way to work, I was just about to pull into the parking lot, when I saw something in the road that looked like a piece of paper blowing in the wind.

It wasn’t. It was a possum.

And it wasn’t dead yet.

Now, I thought that possums were nocturnal creatures, and it had been daylight for a significant amount of time… just how long was that critter lying in the road twisting away while cars drove around and over (straddling, of course) it?

*shudder*

As promised, here is the picture of all my extra common Magic cards. Yes, that’s a lot of extra cards, and you can see the tops of a few of the folders that I’ve been putting them in to. Since I took that picture, I have put all those cards back into the card boxes they came from. Step two is now complete (step one was sorting all those cards into piles by set). Step three, the final step, is collating all the missing cards into one master list, so I know what I need to trade for to finish out my sets.

I’ve been having such a ball on this project at work… I’m learning PHP as I go, and I’m using MySQL. I’ve been abstracting the hell out of everything and it feels so clean. I love OOP. Now, let’s see if the beauty survives the actual development process.

This whole house-buying thing is a bit complicated because of the oddness of our particular transaction. One, there are no realtors involved, and two, the buyer (me) is occupying the property, not the seller, which is usually the case. This means that I’m having to schedule some of the inspections which are normally handled by the seller (although he is still paying for them, of course).