For those of you who watch Good Eats but don’t read , Alton Brown has posted another Rant, this time on cattle-raising practices.
Also, if you want to keep updated on Alton’s Rants, there is an LJ syn feed of his blog at alton_brown. It doesn’t have the whole entry, just the first line and a link, but at least you will know when something new is posted.
Everyone please welcome mconnor who is sort of skeptical of this LJ thing but willing to give it a try. (She is my sweety if you didn’t guess :) If you already know her RL or virtually from Pern etc. please give her a welcoming comment.
Thursday: Interview with some startup in Mountain View. I think they like me, but I’m not sure if I like them, or rather, if I would like to work for a startup and have no life again. Oh and the site melted at work while I was at the interview. Oh and Bruce is leaving, which is going to be good for him.
Friday: Left work early to meet with a recruiter (“We have to meet before you can interview with them again” Ok Sure). Anyway it was my first time at the BART station in Millbrae (wow that thing is BIG) and it was my first BART ride in a long time. BART is cool, I wish it ran farther south, the crappiest part was driving 101 in the rain to get to Millbrae.
After that, gaming. A really good game, kudos to Merlin. The story was good and it actually took some work to discover. Sometimes you can tell when you’re taking the story in the “wrong” direction because things get hazy and the GM “leads” you a bit, but I don’t think Merlin does this much (or if he does it is subtle). I like it best when there is a fair amount of backstory and not much attempt to script the adventure itself – this is difficult to pull off and Merlin does a good job. I get the impression that the world is rich and fairly well-imagined but also that what we do as players is shaping the story as well, which is excellent. Now I really want to run my own game and give Merlin some healthy competition :)
Saturday morning: Getting back late, I decided to stay up even later and make the casserole for the next day. Got to bed at 5:30 and woke at 9:30.
Saturday: Got up at 9:30 and got ready to go to D and C’s – though I was distracted a bit by trying to find the cat pee stains in the spare room. Actually got there at 11:30. We had missed second breakfast, but came in time for elevenses, watched FOTR, with a break between for lunch, then had tea between movies. Then watched TT, with one more break for dinner, then after the movie we snacked a bit more and went off to the theater. I became popular with the crowd by buying bottled water for everyone with the movie coupons I had collected from missing a couple work events.
Sunday morning: Got home late (like 1:30) and stayed up a bit longer than that (again) so actually got to sleep at 3:30 or so.
Sunday: Not much of anything got done, though I went out and bravely hunted for food, bringing back a Carls Jr bag, canned drinks, medicines, etc. No laundry was done though.
OK time for bed I think.
Time for another Weekend Report.
Friday, stayed late at work, not because of any work I was doing, but because I was reading Spam-L and other anti-spam foo and lost track of time. Friday was a busy day but the rest of the week wasn’t. I think I got Baja Fresh and Pho take out because they were right near each other. On arriving home, watched TV and didn’t do much that was productive.
Saturday, slept in a little, then went with M to get her hair cut and bought some stuff at Bed Bath Beyond (or as esmerel says Bed Bath in a Handbasket). After which, got take out Thai food and went to see D and C. Dinner, game, talking, another game, and soon it was 1:50 and we said “Eeep, time to hie ourselves back.” Got to sleep about 3:30.
Sunday, woke about 11:15, consume coffee, cereal and TV. After lots of TV, I retire to geek.room and hook up the old old tape drive. This is the one that holds 4 4G tapes and will no longer open, so we have a choice of the existing 3 tapes that are loaded, or a cleaning cartridge, but that’s it. Luckily it still has a backup on it from Really.Old so hopefully that will have the files we want to restore–the Europe pictures of Michelle’s that were lost in the big move to Neko-base. Tape is now spinning, but due to a combination of “old slow tape drive” and “this is a windows box” and “saving tape image to Netbios share drive” we are getting about 55K bytes/sec throughput. (This is about 10x the speed of a 56K dialup modem). So the tape will take anywhere from 15 to 20 *hours* to load. Better check on it in the morning…
OK time to change the laundry and scrape up some dinner.
Here are 6 random things about me, to feed the meme that is going around…
1. I wrote 50K words for my novel in November. I probably will finish at some point; I estimate it is 2/3 done or so. Or, I might turn the story and setting into a campaign for D&D, who knows.
2. I have been married 11 years. I consider myself poly, but M is not, so I will remain mono for the forseeable future.
3. 9th grade sucked, I went to public school, and got picked on by jocks, enough so that I skipped PE and took and F because I didn’t want to go into the locker room with my classmates. 10th-12th I went to Catholic school. I am not Catholic, but I enjoyed the environment. Some other kids made fun of me because I was a nerd but I didn’t get pushed around, that’s always a plus.
4. I think I would be a good father, because I am very patient, and have a good sense of empathy. However, I don’t believe the world needs more children in it – if I decide to be a father I would rather adopt than sire my own spawn. Also, I am too selfish with my time and money – I am not 100% done being a kid myself. I value my free time highly. We have 4 cats at home and that’s enough demands on my time, thank you.
5. I *say* that I value my free time highly, but I am still more likely to spend 2 hours watching TV per day and 0 hours doing the things I *claim* I should do with my free time, like study Java, study Japanese, write, run D&D games, whatever. Though I am thankful to Nanowrimo for breaking me of that habit for a month, it was a bit of overkill and now I’m in danger of backsliding.
6. I like spinach sauteed with garlic, I like mayonaise on my broccoli and artichokes, and ranch dressing on my fries and my salad. If ranch is not available, half-mayo and half-ketchup works for fries, and 2/3 mayo 1/3 soy sauce works for salad.
Friends, I know I haven’t been updating very often, but I do appreciate your reading my semi-random babble. Peace.