Received telegram from abroad: “By wire from The Empire of Terafina. Stop. We have founded the terroriry of Hy Brasil, and invite your government to depart your territory and join us. Stop.” Conferred with Majesty during twice-daily “lap conference”. Replied to The Empire of Terafina: “Message from His Majesty: We care little about “region” affiliations, but since your country exports some fine Treats, we will forward the request on to our minions for their consideration.” ...

Not wanting to be left out, I decided to go to nationstates.net and created The Dictatorship of Bunland. This land differs from other nation states because it is governed by a non-human: a near-domesticated British shorthair mackerel tabby cat named Bunny. Since Bunny doesn’t speak English (and by most accounts understands very little of it as well) the business of the nation is carried out by his Minions. Those Minions in favor with Bunny may make policy decisions from time to time. Those Minions who fall out of favor are scratched and bitten, though they may be given a chance to earn favor again by lobbying him with treats. (Yes the currency is the “treat”. We use paper money here… we’re not savages… the name “treat” is of mostly archaic/historical significance but the paper currency still bears caricatures of little fishies, chickens, etc. – a remnant of the days when we were still on the Savory Treat Standard.) Some of the more liberal-minded Minions have collected themselves into a Parliament, but this is more to make their nation appear legitimate and less about making policy decisions fairly than one might at first suspect. ...

Things I wanted to do this year Write more Roleplay Go out with friends Exercise How it really turned out Exercise: Exercised regularly during the end of May and most of June, most of August, and pretty much blew it off the rest of the time. Writing: This has been inconsistent, just don’t seem to have the excess energy or enthusiasm for it. Roleplaying: There was Merlin’s game that has wrapped up, but nothing really other than that. I probably need to get involved with a Mush in order to get more roleplaying and I am afraid of getting wrapped up in something that takes too much time. Go out with friends- I am doing better on this but we are still a bit constrained because M prefers to stay home a lot. ...

I am starting to slowly switch services over from charon to neko-base (two servers here at home). The first step has been started, which is to duplicate all DNS information to both and start switching over domains to point to the new servers. If you’re a charon user, you may have already received mail from me about that. The idea behind a slow migration rather than a quick one is so that each service will be impacted for a minimal amount of time – hopefully no more than an hour of inconvenience to the owners, and no Web/Mail outage observed by their clients. For Mush clients there will be an interruption, either the users will not be able to play during the switchover, or if the owner prefers, the users can stay logged in to the old server while the new one is being set up (and they should not do any building or send/change their +mail). The slower migration of services to the new host also allows me to double-check the services we are providing, to drop any services that are no longer required, and change the setup on the new machine if needed. ...

Happy Birthday! Today would be J.R.R. Tolkien’s eleventy-first birthday. http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/books/01/03/film.hobbit.reut/

I wrote this in response to Pixel’s post. It is a suggested reply to someone who is “offended” at a web site. Apologies for the duplication, but I wanted to save it in my own journal too for future reference.

A friend of mine pointed me to this (as a cool party game) http://www.princeton.edu/~mafia/

Christmas was good. Went to see M’s grandmother on Tuesday. Her parents and a couple cousins and other friends dropped by. My mom also came down (she lives further North so it is a good halfway meeting point) so that was good to see her too. Drove back really late Tuesday night, stopping by to see J and A, finally getting home at 1:30. Went to bed about 2:00. Wednesday, got up and went to see my grandparents. This was only a 35 minute drive so that was good. ...

Today’s poll: What else should gconnor write about Please answer. If you want to hear about something not listed here, please reply to the post. (If you are not a LJ user, you will not be able to submit the poll, but you can add a reply comment to the entry). Results of the referendum are not legally binding and by participating (or not) you agree that gconnor will continue to write about whatever he pleases.

I posted the following as a response in someone else’s journal, but it seems to be good writing and somewhat relevant and revealing. So, I will reproduce most of it here. I have pretty excellent communication skills, so in general I’m a pretty good mid-level manager. I seem to have avoided getting promoted into uselessness (“reaching my level” as students of the Peter Principle would have it) and I now have about the right balance of Doing Things and Other Stuff. Life is pretty good. ...