Firstly, someone has posted some group pictures from the Steampunk gathering at the Renaissance Festival last Saturday. Steampunk invades Larkspur Renfaire on The Colorado Chrononauts' League website. Three pictures and I'm in two of them. One before the rain, the other after the rain when it was cool enough to actually wear my duster.

Secondly, tonight was a Film on the Rocks night. A live band and a movie at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Tonight the band was Carbon Leaf and the movie was The Princess Bride. I was there with the girl from the coffee shop of last week, whom I'll be calling Elle here at least until I talk to her about blogging about her.

Much fun was had and things are going very well with her, so far as I can tell.

The worst part of the evening was the intermission between Band and Movie, wherein the promoters announced the winners of a couple of contests, threw t-shirts at the audience and had an Animal Planet quiz that many people weren't paying attention to (no audience participation was sought). I was also disappointed Carbon Leaf didn't play Mary Mac, my favorite song off of their live album, "5 Alive!" They're coming back to Denver in September to play a couple of smaller venues. Smaller than the 8000 person capacity amphitheater anyway. The show tonight was apparently sold out.

Tomorrow I pick my mother up from the airport, so I should probably get to bed reasonably early tonight.

Goodnight internets.

Yesterday, Saturday, was a Steampunk gathering at the Colorado Renaissance Festival. In character, many of the players were from their airship, the Lorelei. They meant to take a trip to the actual Renaissance period, but their chronometric-navigator had missed the coordinates. Instead of traveling in to the past, they instead went to the future, to a re-enactment of the Renaissance time period. My pictures of the event can be found in my flickr stream though I am not in any of them, for obvious reasons. There were several group photos taken. I'll link them here when I find them.

All in all it was a lot of fun, and I'd like to go back to the Ren Fest another weekend this year, in ren-garb this time.

Today, Sunday, Mike and Amy laid out a new garden bed in the corner of the backyard. Pictures of the area will likely show up in Mike's Picasa album before long. The bed that's pictured there now is one of the smaller beds, roughly two feet by five feet. The new bed takes up most of the corner of the yard, an area at least ten square feet, but oddly shapped. While they spread the manure, newspaper and cardboard, I "mulched" the weeds and other plants we hadn't planted in the back yard. The bed design is based on Amy's father's designs of permaculture; he believes in gardening without disturbing the topsoil much. The newspaper and cardboard act as barriers for weeds growing up in to the garden while breaking down and creating rich soil for the garden proper. I say I was "mulching" because in David's design, weeds are pulled but not thrown away. Instead they are tossed back in to the garden.

After the paper layer is set up, hay no longer suitable for feed is spread on top, along with more manure if you want to get things growing quickly. The weeds are tossed in with the hay, returning the nutrients they've taken from the garden, when mulched after the garden has gotten going anyway. More about David's designs can be read on his website: Organic Landscape Design.

We spread some hay on the bed tonight, but ran out of the bale David dropped off months ago. Tomorrow we'll get the bale David hasn't yet found a use for.

We have three beds in the backyard set up this way, including the new giant one. The small 2x5foot bed is a double-dug bed, tilling and mixing the soil two shovel heights below the surface, leaving the first shovels height mostly intact. We then spread the cardboard, newspaper, manure and hay on top.

Things are growing like mad. A pumpkin planted a few months ago has gone crazy with stalks stretching out in at least a three foot diameter, covering a good part of the six foot diameter bed it's in. It's gone past some stalks of Sage growing next to it, and actually wrapped a vine around a sprig of Spearmint a few feet away.

Mike is now turning a few leaves from the spearmint plant in to spearmint extract for use in making candy.

I've been slacking off. Didn't get much done Wednesday due to the cat situation from Tuesday night and in to Wednesday morning.

Spent half an hour with Yourself!Fitness this afternoon though. 157 calories burned, zero kittens injured.

Many things have happened since I last posted here.

The bad:
I apparently drove over a nail or other sharp bit of metal on Friday, or thereabouts, putting a small hole in my rear passenger tire. It was too close to the sidewall to be repaired. ~$200 later a new tire matching the other three has been installed.

An unexpected, scheduled-but-forgotten-about car insurance payment was paid recently. ~$650 every six months. Fortunately I had enough savings to cover it. And now I have more incentive to start up my retail business instead of waiting for tech jobs that don't seem to be appearing.

The good:
I had a date on Monday, if you call meeting for coffee and chatting for two hours a date. Either way it was fun and she's a lovely girl and we're planning to get together again.

The good/bad:
While Mike was working out with the Yourself!Fitness game, Momo (the adorable kitten we adopted from @GabeThexton a while back) was napping near by. Momo got up and stretched. Mike was wary, but the kitten was still a few feet away, watching. I was in my room giving Mike the privacy to look silly while exercising, so this is a bit second-hand. Mike was doing a new exercise that required bouncing on the balls of his feet. He brought his foot down and instead of carpet found a kitten. He thinks he hit the cat with his heel, which was still in the air and not intending to touch the ground. I heard a loud, angry mrowl from Momo who ran upstairs and hid under the couch for a while before walking to his litter box and vomiting.

We called an emergency vet and took him down to see the doc. This was around 11PM. They recommended keeping him for observation overnight and took x-rays and a full blood workup.

Mike and I went to Denny's to hang out while waiting for the vet to call.

After 1AM, the vet called and said everything looks good: Momo's diaphragm was intact and his internal organs were where they're supposed to be, no broken bones, etc. He's bruised and sore, but otherwise okay. We brought him home the next morning with four doses of pain killers and a bottle of Amoxicillin to curb bacterial infections.

~$700 later, we have our kitten back along with the knowledge that he's okay and will be back to normal in a few days.

Lessons learned: The kitten should be in another room while any of us are playing that game. Momo learned the world is not always playful and is sometimes full of pain and misery. I learned I should not drink coffee at Denny's for over an hour and a half. By 4AM I was tired physically, but too restless to sleep well.

A few interesting reads have cropped up in my feed reader recently.

This one is a long, fairly interesting post on the etymology of various video game characters names. Very long, but interesting if only for the trivia, and the subtle and strange changes in names from Japanese to English translation (or sometimes from Italian or German to Japanese to English).

Ever since Ferrett posted a link to his OverThinking It essay, The Horrific Underbelly of "Up", I've been reading the essays on OverThinkingIt. Recently a reader wrote in asking if the use of Deus Ex Machina was a crutch for lazy writers and if it was overused in the new series of Doctor Who. The resulting essay, The How of Who, weighed in at six pages (the first few about Deus Ex Machina in general) and proved to be an interesting analysis. As the graph on page 5 shows, Technobabble solves 12 of the tenth Doctor episodes plots (7 solved by unexplained Timelord superpowers).

And on a lighter note, Matryoshka cell phones.

Also, I have two more DreamWidth invite codes available.

Another 30 min cardio session with the Yourself!Fitness game. 149 calories burned.

Followed that with three sets of ten pushups and another 12 from my knees.

rea_ has been sick with a cold this week and hasn't been running. Though she's in Chicago, I seem to lack the motivation to run if I know she's not running too.

Tuesday got away from me like Monday did, but more so. It was after midnight before I had the down time to exercise and I still had a bed piled with stuff to clear off before sleeping, so I skipped formal exercise. I did, however, move three desktop computers, an Uninteruptable Power Supply (small plastic box seemingly filled with lead or other dense battery material), my recording gear and my desk from one end of the basement to the other. These are objects of a not-insignificant weight.

Wednesday I decided to heed my shins complaints and did a 30 min cardio workout with the XBox game in lieu of running around the park. After my last run there was a sharp pain in both shins, a couple inches above the ankle, with every step, even just walking steps.

So, Alarin and I are getting a plan together to have regular updates of fiction at AlterniaComics.com. I've been working on the behind-the-scenes workings of the site, getting the content in to easily readable organizational structures.

Still some to go, but I'm comfortable linking to the site as it is now. I think it's neat.

Suggestions for layout issues are welcome as I rarely have an idea about how things should look.

This also means I've been charged with getting more writing done. I think my duties at the moment are two short stories every twenty days while we/I post chapters from longer works until they're caught up.

My most recent, never-before-published-online story is Swing Shift. I like it, but then I haven't read most of it for the better part of a year. I re-read the ending while transcribing it (most of it had previously been typed up.)

The day got away from me today and by the time I had the free time for running it was 10PM and too dark to jog in the park.

But it wasn't a complete waste. Mike & Amy have a fitness game for the XBox, called Yourself!Fitness. They've been using it to manage their exercise routines for the past week or so and invited me to give it a try, so tonight I did.

I asked the game to give me an upper body workout, but tonight's session was mostly jumping jacks and other low-impact cardio. Mike suggested it would work better if we had weights of some kind. Perhaps next time I'll use water bottles or grocery bags with paperback books...

The game told me I burned about 80 calories. Armed with this information I may begin counting, or at least estimating, my calorie input throughout the day.

I decided to walk to a restaurant and try to get some writing in over dinner tonight, so I walked up to Wadsworth and Jewell. Then I headed West along Jewell to see what restaurants were there. I ended up at Garrison and decided to try the only restaurant there, an italian place that seemed to specialize in pizza.

The pizza wasn't too bad.

According to MapMyRun.com it was a little over three and a half miles round trip.

Not sure if the calories burned walking three miles outweigh the calories gained by eating a 10 inch pizza...

Pushups today. Almost to the 100 Pushups plan.


The plan was 10/12/7/7/9 with a minute rest between each set.

I did 10/10/7/6/10 though the last set was from my knees.

Another jogging day. Went around the block for half an hour, alternating jogging and running. Forgot to concentrate on breathing during one of the walking iterations. A stitch in my side quickly reminded me of the importance of breathing.

Also! New icon for the exercise posts. I finally emailed Paul Sizer about using images from his comics in icons. I asked permission to scan a page in and he counter offered: if I found an image I wanted and told him what page it was on, he'd send me a high-res color version (the comics are black and white), so I re-read Little White Mouse and sent my request to Paul.

Yesterday I got a call from a company I sent a resume to weeks ago. They wanted to know if I was still interested in the NOC Engineer position I applied for and asked me to take a Skills Assessment as part of the pre-interview process. I agreed and set up an appointment for Friday morning at 11AM.

I got to their office a little after 11, and the receptionist handed me the test. Three pages, ~15 questions, multiple choice. The woman on the phone said it should take me about 15 minutes. The receptionist led me to an empty conference room and I sat down with the test while she walked back to her desk.

The test was on basic things a network engineer should know. One question had a list of services/protocols and a list of port numbers and I was to draw lines to match up which services were on which ports.

Some questions were more interesting, like "Choose all that apply. Which of the following are displayed after running the command 'ipconfig' on a Windows computer."

Some were rudimentary. "A customer says they can receive email but cannot send mail. What would you have them check?" with possible options "POP Settings" "SMTP Settings" "DNS Settings" and others.

I finished the test in about five minutes and brought it back out to the receptionist. She said she would scan it in and send it to the hiring manager, mentioning that they recently filled a position but like to have someone in the pipeline to be able to fill a position quickly.

I do not have high expectations for this job turning out (especially since I haven't had an interview yet).

Pushups today. I went back to the 100 Pushups plan instead of the 10/10/10 plan, if only for the variety.

Today's set was 10/12/7/7 with a minute rest between. And now I don't remember if I did one set of seven or two... I remember missing the mark on the last set though and having to finish from my knees. I'll probably stick with this set for a while at least.

Three times walking/jogging around the park today for an estimated 2 miles.

Focused mainly on breathing this time: inhale for two steps, exhale for two steps. Had trouble keeping it even when switching from jogging to walking, but otherwise it went well. No stitch in my side this time.

Push-ups today. Three sets of 10 followed by another ten from my knees.

Then later I carried a box full of gaming books up and down the stairs, though I think that hardly counts..

I put "work" in quotes in my previous entry because more and more working for GeekGene is becoming a joke.

I've only been coming in on Mondays for the past six or eight weeks because I haven't had enough to do to fill a week. I came in on Mondays for the meetings where projects were discussed and new tasks were created for the coming week.

The past couple of weeks we haven't even had the meeting.

Today we did have the meeting. Sort of. We went to lunch and discussed things. The major project is waiting on customer feedback before moving forward. There are other projects in the pipe line, but none of them are actionable yet.

Arthur asked me if I wanted to do some work on a Demo site that would demonstrate what the web platform we use (Drupal) can do. I said I would love to do it if I got paid for it. That's the sticky bit. It's a demo site, so no customer is giving GeekGene money for the work to be done, and GeekGene itself doesn't have the money to pay someone to do it.

I have enough non-paying Drupal work with my site and Alternia Comics, so I passed.

The more I look for other work, the more I feel under-qualified. I can do 75-90% of what most job postings ask, but that last part is invariably something that's absolutely required.

Two options are presenting themselves:
1) Go back to school and improve my skill set.
2) Go in to business for myself.

Option 1 has the advantage that I know my parents will pay for at least the education related expenses, if not also food and rent. I could learn more programming languages. I could complete my CCNA certification, possibly even CCNP and/or A+ certifications as well. Throw in an MCSE or something for good measure.

Option 1 also carries several disadvantages: as stated above, I'm not sure how much of my living expenses my parents are willing or able to provide. Traditionally I am bad at school. I learn, of course, but doing the course work was always a chore. I completed the course work for a CCNA while I was in college, seven or eight years ago, but never took the certification exam. Being more educated and having more certificates does not necessarily mean I will be able to find a good job. And as far as the programming courses go, I can learn what I need by reading documentation and tutorials online for free.

Option 2 has mostly been sparked by a walk-about I took last week to the Villa South shopping center at Wadsworth and Alameda (North East corner). I found several vacant store fronts and signs from the property manager exclaiming "From $3.75/sq ft!" Further investigation revealed the $3.75 price to be for on shop in a back corner mostly hidden from the street by other buildings, Unit A on the North end of the strip on the East side of the image linked to above. Some of the other units were reasonably priced though, around $5/sqft.

The idea to own and operate my own retail store has germinated again. Villa South has the advantage of being across the street from a high school, and the available units other than 1050A have good visibility from Wadsworth.

The disadvantages of Option 2 are mostly in the domain of fear of failure. "Can I make it successful?" "Do I really want to be doing retail again?" "If it doesn't work out, I'll be in even more debt than I am now." etc.
Aside from the possibility of crushing debt, the consequences of failure don't seem that high, and at least I will have tried.

Option 2 is the more active solution to my job problems. It's also an idea that's been around for a long time.

And there's also the unspoken Option 3: focus on my writing and get enough things published to support myself. Given that historically my most conducive writing environment has been while eating in restaurants, this doesn't seem terribly likely and the possibility of seeing a profit seems like it's farther in the future than either Options 1 or 2.

Option 2 is certainly the most exciting.

Before work today, rea_ called to say she was going running and would I be running too? I said I didn't know, since this was the first day of "work" since I started running. More on why "work" is in quotes later.

I ended up going for a run after I got home. Same park, but this time I pushed myself. I used alarin612's suggestion for timing my run/walk schedule: I counted a know distance in steps twice, averaged it, and counted every time my left foot hit the pavement. Alternated 120 walking paces with 60 jogging paces. Mostly. The second jog iteration was only 45 paces as my right side began to cramp a bit, and I lost track once or twice on the third walking iteration.

I tried to keep things simple, but I also changed two parts of the routine today, so I'm not sure which caused what; I brought a long a 1 liter water bottle with a convenient carrying handle, and switched which hand was carrying it every 30 counts. I would count up to 30, switch hands and count up to 30 again.

Most of the time.

After I pushed myself jogging, the count would get out of sync with my foot steps as I focused on breathing and staying on my feet and the part of me that compulsively counts things would just keep counting nothing.

The counting did seem to make the run take less time though. Part way in to my second loop around the park I checked the time and was surprised to find I was where I should be based on previous excursions.

Another walk/jog. 40 min this time. According to MapMyRun.com it was about 2.12 miles to the Villa South strip mall by way of Wadsworth, then back home by way of Mississippi.

By the end I kept thinking "I should jog more" but my heart felt like it was trying to beat its way out of my chest, so I walked.

For others who are doing / have done the Couch-to-5K program, how do you time the intervals? How do I know I've been jogging for 60 seconds without constantly watching a clock?

Went to Costco last night with Mike & Amy. Saw a treadmill there that seems reasonably priced. Many features including the ability to program work outs. Seems like that would make a program like Couch-to-5K easier to follow; let the treadmill computer keep track of how long I'm supposed to walk vs jog.

Friday I went on a walk about that more or less followed today's path in reverse. Went to Mississippi by way of Pierce, then back home via Wadsworth.

I have two invite codes available.

For those who don't know what DreamWidth is, as I understand it, DreamWidth is a bunch of former LiveJournal developers who didn't like where the business side of LJ was going so they're using the open source code to make their own journal platform. They plan to never earn revenue through advertising on the site, relying instead on paid subscriptions and controlled growth. Whereas LiveJournal is open to anyone to sign up at any time, DreamWidth is only available by invitation (or paid subscription) and the number of invite codes available at any given time is regulated so that the total number of users will not go beyond the number which can be supported by current revenue. As I understand it, they're doing this to have fun and provide a service, not to make money.

Seems to make some sort of sense to me. I don't think they're trying to be elitist jerks by saying "Only X number of free users can join now" because it's only a number. They have no control over who joins to fill that number, though hopefully users with invites won't invite the people whose sole purpose in joining would be to make fun of or otherwise disparage other users, leading to a user base that may be small in quantity but high in quality.