Well, it's been a week, and surprisingly a lot has happened.

Mostly the Emerald City Comic Con.

I did get my car serviced, which ate up my tax refund and stimulus check ...

Also got my old prescription lenses fitted in to the goggles, so I'm not completely blind with them. The lenses sit a bit too far apart currently, so beyond a foot or so I see double images.. Have to shorten the bridge on the goggles to bring the lenses closer together.

I didn't get a waistcoat, opting instead for a white dress shirt and tie, held in place with a tie tack that has a piece of Tiger's Eye set in it.

True to my word, the first place I went after getting in to the con proper was the studiofoglio booth and I threw money at them in exchange for Girl Genius volumes 1-6. Then we wandered the con for a long while. My outfit was a smash and many people asked a) if they could get a picture, and b) if I'd been by the Girl Genius booth yet. I may even have my picture in the Seattle Times. Not sure though ...

Apparently the inside lining still had some dye in it, or something, and bled when my sweat made the shirt damp. Wearing a heavy coat while wandering around and through the teeming masses of con goers does not make for a dry experience. Unsure if the shirt will wash out or not, but I plan to pick up a few more anyway. I also washed the coat when I got home. The recommended method is to hang it up and hose it down, then let it air dry. Hopefully it won't bleed on my shirts this weekend...

I started the weekend with $202 cash in my pocket, and ended it with no cash. The lion's share went to the Foglios. I also picked up a handful of other comics. Some I hadn't heard of, some I'd read online. Now they sit in the stack of other comics I should read soon.

ACen's gonna be a blast!

Happy Mothers' Day to all the mothers on my friendslist.

Sorry I haven't been posting regularly recently. It will probably be explained when I post after I get back from Seattle from Emerald City Comic Con this weekend.

As I walked down the stairs from my apartment this morning, I wondered idly about whether or not I'd paid rent yet this month. Something in my head said "Of course you have. The month is nearly half over, you simply must have paid rent or else we'd have heard something about it."

With this reassuring knowledge that I had indeed paid rent, I went about my day.

Then, checking the time after lunch (about quarter to three) I noticed I had a voice mail. Wondering what emergency had cropped up at work since I'd left 45 min earlier, I dialed in and listened to the message to find it was from my landlady, wondering when and if I was going to pay rent this month. I immediately called her back and said I'd lost track of the date and would give her a check when I got home tonight.

Then I realized the month was not "nearly half over" as I'd thought, but less than a week in to the month. Somehow the date in my head had skipped a week. I blame the looming May 14 (Start of road trip to Chicago) because it's a date that's standing out in my head. It whispers things like "I'm right around the corner!" and "Are you ready yet? Come on, let's go on the road trip!" when I'm not looking, confusing my internal calendar.

It seems like there's so much to do and so little time before then. I need to:

• Take my car in for service
• find a waistcoat?
• figure a way to get the lenses from my old glasses in to the blast goggles so I can see when I'm wearing them
• Go to Emerald City Comic Con and throw money at studiofoglio
• I should probably record an episode or two of Karak Speaks True...
• buy drinks and food for the road trip

And that's not counting things at work ...

We ordered a new firewall/router recently to replace the Linksys consumer router we've been using. It arrived last week and I've spent a few hours here and there the past few days playing with its configuration. I think it's ready to be swapped in, but I won't be sure until I actually do it. I'll probably do it Wednesday or Thursday night to minimize down time and give me time to kick it and make any changes that need to be made without people coming to me constantly saying "Is the internet down?" "How come I can't get to X?" "I can't send my email!" "The phones aren't working!" "We need a new GURU CD set made. Also, is the internet down?"

Final note: You'd think chewing gum nearly constantly would make me better at chewing in general, more accurate with my bites. But it doesn't. It just increased the likelihood that I will bite some part of my mouth (lips, tongue, cheek, etc.) simply by increasing the number of bites per day.

While chewing gum on the way home today, I bit my tongue. Hard. Cut the skin in two places. It hurt a lot at first. Then the pain was still there, but the affected area was oddly numb to the touch. The bleeding seems to have stopped now though.

Reading webcomics on Sunday morning, I read this Something Positive comic and followed the footnote text to HeroByNight.com and read through a half dozen or so pages, then said to myself "Man! You shoulda picked up this comic's FCBD book yesterday!"

Then I sorta forgot about it.

Until this morning when I saw the box of stuff I brought home from the weekend (mostly a box full of the games I tend to bring with me to Seattle) and looked through the FCBD issues I picked up.

Turns out I had, in fact, picked up the Hero By Night issue. Hooray!

And now, thanks to HeavyInk.com, I should have new issues of Hero By Night in my mail shortly after they're released.

So, for the details about the obstacles I mentioned yesterday

The day seemed normal enough until I got on the road. After about an hour of driving, my boss calls me to say they found a bug that we thought had been fixed. It turned out to be a bug that had been identified and a fix had been found and I thought created, but something must have distracted me before I updated the installer or created a fix installer (it's a database issue, not just copying new files over). Fortunately, it's not a huge issue, not a show stopper, so I didn't have to drive back home and fix it.

Ran in to traffic for inexplicable reasons around the Tacoma dome, and then again closer to Seattle, which delayed my arrival at duaiwe's apartment. The delay was exacerbated by following the Garmin's directions instead of the path I usually take through the city proper.

We don't stay around his apartment long before we head out to a local comic store, Comics Dungeon, for Free Comic Book Day! Sadly, the Red5 FCBD issue went fast, so I'll have to wait until next year for the Atomic Robo story it contained. We did get to chat with Phil and kajafoglio. Picked up the new Buck Godot book and kicked myself for not bringing the previous one with me to be signed (must remember to bring it to Emerald City Comic Con...).

After comicing, we drove to Renton, specifically to Renton Western Wear for a Oilskin Duster (long coat). The Renton location had several on the rack and I was able to try them on. Finding the Large rather small, and the 2XL rather large, I concluded an XL would be just right. Unfortunately, they didn't have any on the rack.

So I asked a cashier if they had any in the back. She checked their inventory and said the only one in the company was at the Tacoma store, and she'd have them hold it for me. Since neither of us had eaten much before going to the comic store, duaiwe and I drove around Renton for a while before finding an irish pub for lunch.

By the time we were done with lunch, it was 5:30 and the Tacoma store would close at 6, so we decided to just go back to Seattle instead.

So on Saturday I utterly failed to buy a coat. But I succeeded on Sunday. Along with some more LEGOs at Mario Kart Wii. Fun game, if you like Mario Kart, and the wheel is neat.

Home from Seattle.

Had to read ~6 pages of tweets on Twitter to catch up from this morning
Plus ~100 posts on LiveJournal...

Now have 21 podcasts sitting in queue.

Tired. Managed to actually buy a Duster (long coat) despite several obstacles. will detail more later when not so tired. (tomorrow?)

Good night internets.

Doing laundry now. When that's done I'll pack up and head North to Seattle for Free Comic Book Day at Comics Dungeon (with Phil and Kaja Foglio) and some general hanging out with duaiwe. No idea what Saturday evening or Sunday hold. Probably see Iron Man at some point.

Either way I'll be offline this weekend. If not hanging out, then I'll knuckle down and finish Day of the Tyrant.

Next weekend the plan is to take my car to the dealer for an oil change and the 100K mile tune up, then head to Seattle again for Emerald City Comic Con.

The the weekend after that is Anime Central. I'll likely be off line between May 14 and May 21, driving with duaiwe from Seattle to Chicago for the con, then driving back.

Then I don't have any plans for the next weekend. Yet.

Sometimes I'll be looking through old entries to try to find something and get annoyed at myself for having put a random song lyric in the subject that has nothing to do wit the context of the post.

Sometimes I'll put a random song lyric in the subject and it will have nothing whatsoever to do with the post, except that it's stuck in my head at the moment.

Sometime I'll write a story based on mightymur's News from Poughkeepsie Day 6 idea. It will be about the child of Templeton Sledmeir, AKA Tempo the time-bending speedster. The child will not be called "Templetot," tempting though it may be.

One of these days I'll stop posting in different styles and find a blog voice. One of these days ...

Sometimes I like to find a new blogging voice and try out a new style for an entry or seven.

Someday I'll stop lusting after steampunky things like this "Dwarven Far Seer."

Tonight, though, I'm feeling sick. Run down and tired, with the beginnings of a sore throat, and just a touch light headed. So I'm going to go fall in to bed and hallucinate for 7 to 9 hours and probably have forget it happened.

G'night

I'm down to a pack a day, it seems. No, not smoking. Chewing gum. I was chewing 7 to 9 pieces a day last week. So far it's 5 or 6 a day this week.

Closing some tabs here.
Happy 30th anniversary, e-mail spam! What was probably the first unsolicited commercial email message was set on May 3, 1978 via Arpanet, advertising the new "DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T."

April 29th's Astronomy Picture of the Day is fascinating. I could watch that movie for hours.

I'm goin to take another stab at making Sierpinksi triangle cookies this weekend.

I installed TwitterFox a while back, and seem to be using twitter more often now. Feel free to follow me. @KarakSindru Though if you're following significantly more users than follow you, I'm less likely to follow you. 2,500 followed, 300 following? Seems kinda spammy to me.

From @loresjoberg's recent tweet about an ominous message on his Wii: "Anything not saved will be lost."

This seems like it could be the core idea of a story ...

I hear weird things when I walk through the animators' room sometimes...

"The other day, I was at the gym, and there was this lady next to me, and she smelled exactly like ... microwaveable blueberry eggo muffin tops. It was delicious!"

So far today is fair to middling. It was raining on the way to work, but now that I'm here, it's not raining. One of the animators (not quoted above) brought in donuts.

Stayed up too late last night, but got the nerf machine client (windows service) all polished and probably mostly working. That was fun.

First attempt at making fractal cookies failed. The dough is too sticky/squishy to be moldable, even after having sat in the fridge overnight.

Lessons learned: Probably shouldn't have added the milk to make the butter easier to mix in. Need a better mixer; I could smell the motor ovehreating in the little hand held electric one I was using...

At least the non-fractal cookies baking now are turning out alright. They're edible. ;)

Now all I need to do is work up the gumption to try again (and buy a stand mixer).

A chef I am not.

So, this morning I had four installers to rebuild and test by four. Mostly minor-ish changes. "Okay, not so bad. I can put off lunch until four and get them done," I think.

The four installers are:

1. Full installer for version 3.0.1.11 (~1.3GB) (v 3.0.1.10 was Tuesday's build. As far as I know, there was primarily a build for the sake of increasing the build number.)
2. Limited Edition version 3.0.0.11 (~110MB)
3. Limited Edition version 3.0.0.11 Server (~20MB)
4. Version 3.0.1.11 patch (upgrades from 3.0.0.0) (~10MB)

One of the updates is to the language xml file to include a bunch of new Spanish translations. In the course of updating a few of those, I found about some items that hadn't been translated yet. So I had to go through the database to find all the missing ones and give a list to my boss. After he got most of them translated, I had to update the database again.

MEANWHILE, the installers take a while to build and test and while they build, my dev machine is crippled. Have I mentioned the InstallShield IDE loves to eat RAM more than AeroGlass and FireFox?

Around 4 PM I had everything finished, just testing a little bit more on the full version, when my boss finished the rest of the translations, and it was decided the deadline would slip from 4 to 5:30 (to get to the airport fedex by 6, instead of the more local fedex drop off that closes at 4:30 (five?))

So I left at 4:15 to get lunch: quiznos. Brought the sandwich back to the office and ate while installers re-built and installed.

Got the CDs burned by 5:40, handed them to the web developer (he goes by the airport on his way home) and hoped for the best.

Forgot to talk to the boss about working four tens ... Also need to get vacation time approved for Anime Central next month ...

Does two links really count as an extravaganza?

For those reading this who might be wondering "What is a podcast? and why should I care?" I invite you to watch this short video. Then you can ask me questions if you're still confused.

For the steampunk fans: you can build your own Victorian All-in-One PC. I fear I do not have the machining skills to make one...

Other than that, the day's been alright. Didn't build any installers, so I call it a win. Spent most of the day working on nerf with Mike. It's fun to be coding collaboratively again.

I think now I've settled on where to move. Now I need the when...

Contemplating two things:

1. Getting work to agree to sending me to CO to work on nerf with Mike
2. Convincing work to let me work four ten hour days and have a three day weekend

Stayed late last night working on installers. I thought they were done and my Tuesday would be free of that cursed program.

Turns out that was an incorrect assumption. I spend all day working on installers. Well, except for the bit where I ran a few laps around the building to work off some frustration.

Took off a bit early with the intention to get home and do laundry tonight. In this I was, again, mistaken. Both washers and both dryers were in use.

Blar.

Tonight's new plan is dinner, then video games and beer until bed, I think.

Must decide when I shall move, and where ...

It's been nearly a week since I last posted. Not a lot has happened.

Notable things:
I bought a new media shelf unit for holding DVDs. I put it together and realized it's a large black rectangle that looks close to having its sides be a 1:4:9 ratio, though I haven't measured to be sure. (On closer inspection and measurement, it's closer to 1:3:8. Sad.)

I went up near Seattle for the weekend, playing games and hanging out with duaiwe, Amie and Todd. Much fun was had, as well as some tasty tasty greek food on Saturday night.

Around 1 or 2AM on Sunday, Amie and Hawk and I started a game of Trivial Pursuit. Apparently my trivia-brain is good for something after all, especially at 3AM. The "Genus Edition" of Trivial Pursuit we were playing had a copyright of 1981, so you can imagine how topical the Entertainment category was. I was deemed "creepy" with my random knowledge such as "Who was known as 'The Hero of San Juan Hill?' Teddy Roosevelt." or "What is Greta Gustafsson's stage name? Greta Garbo." (60% guess)

Sunday afternoon we played again, with Todd this time, until after three hours most people had lost interest and I only had 5 of six slices (everyone else had 1 to 3).

Drove Hawk home and got home in time to fall in to bed and wake up to be groggy for work.

I finished Firstborn and am only slightly angry at the ending. It's hardly the conclusion of a trilogy. In a page and a half, it sets up the main conflict for a fourth book, but with Clarke dead and the subtitle being "The conclusion of A Time Odyssey," it seems unlikely there will be a fourth book. Baxter's a great writer though. He could easily pick up the thread and run with it in a new series.

Started Snow Crash (yes, I haven't read it yet. Stop yelling at me, I'm reading it now!) and found the first few chapters so engrossing I hadn't noticed I'd been at lunch for an hour and a half. This does not bode well for my writing productivity ...

alarin612 is starting a game set in Alternia's Mystic Frontier, and when asked for a background for my character, I seem to have fleshed out the history of a country, or at least a longstanding clan in a country... It remains to be seen how influential the O'Connor clan is.

As with most days, today improved greatly once I left the office.

I woke up with a slight headache that got worse once I got to work. It seemed to disappear over lunch, then came back when I got back to the office, and is now completely gone.

When I got home, I found I had a few packages waiting for me: Two from the Goats webcomic (three books, and two action figures), and one from Shirt.Woot (the Gettysburg Address shirt).

Now I'm goofing around chatting with neonphog and Mike. Much fun.

Not quite a week since I last posted, but close enough.

duaiwe came down from Seattle on Saturday for a homebrew game run by a friend in Portland. Great fun.

The rest of the weekend was pretty much spent unlocking characters and levels in Super Smash Brothers Brawl.

I finally started washing the hamster cages and what not, in preparation to sell them or give them away. At this point, it's probably a safe bet I'm not getting another pet, for now.

Worked from home Monday, and ended up working more than I would have had I gone to work..

Tuesday was ... frustrating. Suffice it to say, I will never be done with InstallShield work while I'm here ...

It was a good day for listening to The March of Cambreadth on repeat.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Sound the horn and call the cry