I'm posting in haste, so, sorry if this is ill-considered. But there seem to be a lot of LJ posts and discussion, and i gather some in-person flames, related to something which is, at least in part and i would argue primarily, a SWIL reunion administrative problem. So i would like to request that, if you have something to say on the subject which you want to make sure the reunion committee sees, please e-mail it (at least in copy) directly to plan-9. If you don't feel comfortable saying it publically, i can pass along anonymous messages, and i'm sure other people on plan-9 will volunteer to do that as well. I don't think it's safe to expect that the reunion organizers will see what's said on LJ.

Ann Richards died yesterday, at 73. Like many Texas liberals (can i still claim to be a Texas liberal when it suits me?), i had not yet stopped hoping she'd make another run for office. See The Houston Chronicle for stories. She's responsible for my sense growing up that some politicians really are witty and interesting and progressive, and i'm sorry to see her go. Bah.

Interesting. A guy who doesn't want to give up his jeep does a bunch of fuel efficiency experiments. I skimmed bits of it, and obviously it's just the opinion of one random car enthusiast, but it looks fairly worth reading.

In particular, it answered (albeit by referring to an external study) on question i've had for awhile: is it better to roll down your windows, or to run the A/C? He says: "Ultimately, as many have inferred, driving with the windows down at high speed induces more resistive drag on the car than an air conditioner exerts on the engine. With windows down, sedans incur a 20% aerodynamic drag while SUVs are only affected by about 8%, mostly due to the SUVs naturally poor aerodynamics. Air conditioning on the other hand, imparts a 5-10% load on the vehicle's engine. The rule of thumb goes that if owners need cooling, they must open their windows during city driving and use air conditioning at highway speeds." I am pleased, since that was the answer i wanted to hear, but i previously hadn't had any sense one way or the other, except to note that there must be a tradeoff.

Also, i made a cauliflower and eggplant korma which surprised me by being really good. I don't like cauliflower much, but the dish is clearly made by the almonds and cilantro in the sauce (well, and the large number of assorted spices). Word to the wise: coriander is the same thing as cilantro. I always forget this, and, in fact, i have trouble looking at the green leafy format object and thinking, "this is also known as coriander," but the Indian cookbook seems to prefer that name.

I am not going to Alumni Weekend. No, i mean, i'm actually not. I'm sad about it too, so far as it goes, but also looking forward to my actual weekend, so far as that goes. I kind of thought this was a known thing, what with my having made that post and not put my name on the Wiki and consistently told people since last fall that i wouldn't be there and all that stuff, but there we are.

Okay, i am running away now. Have a great AW, y'all! I'll see you next year, but hopefully a lot sooner.

The plus side, and i don't deny that there is a plus side, to the fact that little things continue to go annoyingly wrong, is that i am prevented from sitting around being melancholy for no reason. When things go annoyingly wrong, there's always some action (generally an annoying one) which needs to be taken.

In this case, i noticed about fifteen minutes ago that the stain in my bedroom ceiling, which has been there since before i moved in, and which had not done anything interesting up to this point, is now wet in one small patch. It's a small patch, and it may, in fact, have stopped dripping entirely now, leaving only a single drop of water on my bed. But i am sure as heck going to wait up until maintenance dude, who the front desk sitter says he paged, shows up, especially given the whole "going away for the weekend and would like to still have dry possessions when i return" thing.

I suppose i can knock a couple of things off my todo list while i wait. If anyone else is bored, though, i am apparently findable on IRC for the immediate future.

Bah.

[ETA: Maintenance dude has come and gone, and cleaned the A/C of the apartment upstairs in the interim, and promises to come back tomorrow and check again, and to get some folks in here to paint over those stains, which would actually be kind of nice. We'll see if the dripping goes away, but, so far, we are still safely within "most responsive maintenance i've ever had in an apartment building" territory. Go us.]

I feel like i should post something about my weekend, since so many distinct things happened during it, only a few of which involved mad late-night dashes through miscellaneous southwestern airports. (The Usair/America West merger can bite me.)

Logistics: the weekend finally compelled me to crack Tom Limoncelli's Time Management for System Administrators, because advance planning very quickly gave way to Making Shit Up At Random. But it's definitely worth noting that many, many things which could have gone wrong, didn't. So go them. And i did get to spend a lot of time hanging out with Jillian, which was excellent, even if much of it involved packing in some manner or another.

Graduation was pretty cool. I haven't been to one in five years, and i'm a lot more cynical now than i was the last time. But the first honorary degree recipient gave this fantastic speech. And the engineering department prank...

So, okay, at the beginning of the ceremony, the engineers came in, and they had masking tape on their hats so they collectively spelled "Class of 2006". "Bah," we groaned, "lameness," and then went back to ignoring it. During a long alphabetical period containing no people whose names i recognized, i was looking around, and glanced for the seventeenth time at the wire strung from the speaker to the back of the amphitheatre, and suddenly thought, "Hang a sec, why is there a wire stretched across the amphitheatre... at an angle... attached to a tree on the other end... with some suspicious-looking black squares hanging from it..." And, indeed, the engineers had slipped their hats to the back while no one was looking, so that the hats could be later returned to them --- by tripwire --- just in time for them to walk. Awesome. [Edit: it has been pointed out that i meant zipwire. This is, indeed, a fair point. It's bad when posting at 22:00 counts as "late-night posting".]

Belated internet congratulations to all and sundry who are now alumnified. I promise, it's not that scary. Well, okay, i'm lying.

Speaking of scary: in the fall, the class of '010 will arrive on campus. I will be to them as the class of '90 was to me when i was a frosh. Eep.

There is no one on the internet tonight, no one at all. Here, bored people reloading your friends lists hopelessly: i have given you something to read! Now you must write comments showering me with gratitude --- it's only fair.

Long day (long week, really), but it has eventually turned into a relaxing evening. Dinner with MR at the fantastic (and, as always, bizarrely depopulated) Salvadorean seafood place. Now i'm sitting on the balcony (it's really nice out, did i mention, though it's starting to become mosquito season (<pause> Ow)) watching people fail to be on IRC or AIM. Time for a book and a beer, i think.

Those of y'all better informed than i may already know this, but those less informed than i may not: apparently Al Gore made a movie about how we are all doomed. For those interested, that site has a shiny-looking carbon dioxide calculator with lots of bells and whistles (and a link to a site offering guilt relief for your commute in exchange for a small donation to research alternate energy, which may or may not be your personal cup of tea. Apparently i can get instant karma for under $100, just by clicking on a button. Who knew? I have not yet decided whether this is my personal cup of tea. More likely i'll just keep it in mind in December).

Anyway, Al Gore is Not Running For President, but he probably has my vote anyway, what with us being all doomed and all. And i imagine i will go see his movie. Stupid doom. Sigh.

Weekend at Swat. Remembrances were, and were good but long. I'm glad i brought cross-stitch, and glad i had determined in advance that i wasn't going to talk. (As it was, i could have said a bit less, should not have said any more, but it was basically okay as was.) I was by far the most outsiderish person there, the only one who had never overlapped in the Philly area with the class of '06. The coolest thing about Remembrances is the "wow, we all actually survived four years with each other" sentiment, and that was present in spades. I was pleased to get to see it. But, wow was it long. Yeesh.

I agreed to go to the Boy Meets Tractor (a sketch comedy group) show Saturday night, which turned out to be an excellent choice, insofar as it was completely hilarious. Yay.

I saw a bunch of folks, distributed some much-deserved hugs, and met a few people i hadn't met before. Swatties are basically nifty, but i still lack time and social energy, and i'd still like to be doing more of my socializing closer to home.

Sunday evening, i was sitting off in a corner of ML lounge commenting SWAPA to kill some time while Jillian was on the phone. One of the RAs came over and asked if i lived there. I explained that i didn't, and who i was visiting, at which point the RA said, "You're not the infamous Chaos, are you?" I'm not really sure it's in my interest to be the infamous Chaos. Bah.

A good weekend overall, though.

I've been crabby all weekend, but the magical mood-swing fairy stopped by a couple of hours ago, so i am now cheerful for no good reason. Yay! So, i decided to capitalize on my cheerfulness by going to the mall, where i need to run some errands, including the purchase of pants. (I am currently engaged in a race against time with the right knee of my jeans.) I hate malls --- shopping requires a sacrificial good mood, or else it won't happen at all.

I arrived, only to discover a suspicious total lack of parked cars in the lot. There was a single lonely-looking van sitting in one of the middle rows. I got out of my car anyway, just in case the problem was merely that no one wanted to go shopping on Easter, or the lot i parked in was secretly the double bonus overflow lot or something. But, no, there was a small sign printed on an 8.5x11 piece of paper informing all comers that the mall was closed in its entirety. On the way back to my car, i crossed paths with about five different sets of my fellow heathens --- so the mall was apparently doing at least some amount of traffic in refusing consumerist pursuits to the damned.

Oh well. Maybe i'll do laundry. If the unattended laundry room in my building is closed for Easter, i will actually be annoyed.

I just got back from a long weekend in New Orleans, where i visited L, a good friend from way back, and saw her new house. I have a lot of mostly-incoherent impressions which i don't think i'm going to write up here, since it would be hard to decouple my experience as a tourist from discussion of L's life, and, look, here we are on the internet.

Some stuff about Houston, which is hardly the most disturbing intelligence of the weekend, but: i learned that Astroworld closed in November, and they razed it to the ground. It is gone now. Zoicks. (That would be the amusement park of my childhood.) Also, Dolce & Freddo (awesome ice cream place) closed and was replaced by a Ben and Jerry's.

Also, if you are reading this, and your possessions are not insured (this is most likely to apply to people who rent apartments), make some phone calls tomorrow morning. Remember, if the probability that you'll lose all your stuff is low, the insurance is cheap, so there's no reason not to do it. Most (though not all) places which sell auto insurance also sell renter's insurance.

The plumeria is a small flowering tree which lives in a pot. My mother owns one, and gave me a clipping from it my sophomore year, which i took back to Swat. One of the features of the plumeria is that it is a summer plant --- it goes dormant for a few months every winter, during which it sheds all its leaves and looks like a dead stick in a pot.

Plumerias like sunlight, a lot, so i always kept it near my windows at Swat, to the extent that i had any windows to keep it near. One sleep-deprived night senior year, some combination of wind, the windowshade, and human stupidity led to my plant falling off the window ledge and snapping in half.

Plumerias are hardy. The plant (the bottom half) is still alive, and i still have it. However, it has, since that time, experienced persistent and severe seasonal confusion. To wit, i noticed about a week ago that my plant, which has until now been thriving in the somewhat hotter and muggier D.C. climate, has started going dormant for the winter.

Whenever i start getting too nostalgic for the life of the mind, i like to remind myself that college is an environment in which more-or-less competent people lack the resources to avoid scarring their houseplants for life.

That is all.

I just beat the hell out of my friendslist. Sorry.

I'd lost sight of the fact that i dislike LiveJournal. I keep up with it, even though i dislike it, because it's a way to find out what my friends are up to. It's tempting to expand that and use LJ as a way to get to know new people. But the outcome of that (particularly lately, when the people i've realised i'd like to get to know have largely been undergrads because i've been on campus so much) is that i spend my social time, of which i have little, getting pulled into current SWIL drama. I don't like seeing SWIL drama played out on LJ to begin with, and me getting involved in it is even worse. I said on That Mailing List that i blame LJ for much of the recent stress in alumni/student interactions. That's a little oversimplified, of course, but i think it's at least partially true. I don't want to be part of the problem just because it's tempting to use LJ to make friends. And spending my time this way has kept me from keeping up with my friends who are not on LJ, or who don't use it often.

The point of explaining this: i unfriended a lot of people who give the appearance of being highly nifty people, and with whom i would like to make friends. New rule: get to know people through some other forum: mailing lists, SWAPA, IRC, or, heck, e-mail, in-person conversation, or maybe even the phone. Use LJ to keep up with people i'm already friends with. Reclaim social time, conquer world.

Okay, then.

As happens most years, my half birthday came and went without my even noticing. (This year, i slept through it entirely.) In 2008, i will have enough time to throw a party, so maybe i'll do that. At any rate, i am now exactly 3/4 of the way through my 20s, which is nice and fractional. Damn. Clearly, i must party more, before i discover i have wasted my entire wild and crazy youth. Err, something.

If i don't go to the gym twice a week, i post batshit insane things to That Other Mailing List. I should keep this in mind.

LJ is not on my happy list right now, because they now have a new autosave feature (but what if i don't want them autosaving the five paragraph rant i later decide i don't want to post on the internet?), but mostly because they log me out multiple times a day, and i only notice when i stop to think, "Huh, wait, have there really not been any locked posts since last night?"

Right now, i am having a slothful and relaxing morning, the primary features of which are that it is sunny outside and i am drinking tea. Eventually, i will spring into action and accomplish many things in a short amount of time. (We have reached the part of the weekend where i note that, while three-day weekends are excellent, there is a sense in which four-day weekends would be even more excellent.)

I finally bought a new shredder, so now i can get rid of the piles of unshredded paper which had been sitting in my bedroom since the old one died in December or so. This one is a confetti-cut shredder, which is (as i understand these things) better than a strip-cut shredder (what i had before), but less good than cross-cut. It is definitely a much better visual effect than the strip-cut --- it does this cool back-and-forth rippling thing.

Last night was dinner and a play with KG and a large chunk of the extended G clan. Much fun --- they make me laugh. We approve of the Make An Effort to See Actual People Who Are Not on the Internet Every Once in Awhile plan. I'm a little sorry to have missed alumni reunion puckers night, but the occasional weekend at home in which i try to catch up on things is almost certainly a good idea.

Today: grocery shopping, cooking, finishing sorting papers, and maybe working on some overdue projects, maybe.

Everyone is very excited about this whole Johari thing, but, if i actually filled out the graphs for everyone on my flist who has posted them, i'd be here for weeks. Maybe i will, maybe, you know, not.

I don't have much to add to last year's Massacre Day post. Actually, i suppose i can now link to the relevant wiki page, in case anyone has a last-minute need to run their own massacre. That page is hopelessly biased, though --- everyone knows that thugtrons have the most fun.

Okay, off to find fedora. Later, y'all.

Sigh. Note to self: become able to take liquor. Oh well.

I just got back from an excellent weekend in the ancestral homeland of all right-thinking people (aka the Greater Boston Area). People were conversed with, new houses were seen, sushi was eaten, Attika was learned how to have been played, IRC was... well, the first step is admitting you have a problem, right?

On the way back from Walpole, i wound up driving up Mass Ave all the way from Storrow to Cambridge, mostly for the nostalgia value of passing all these places i used to go on a regular basis. I like where i currently live, don't get me wrong, and i'm pretty happy here. But the GBA really is my home, and one day i will get to go back.

Also, happy birthday, Ruthling!

So far in 2006, the number of pieces of spam which have arrived at my personal e-mail account has averaged slightly more than 972 messages per day.

I know there are people on my flist who have been getting spam at this level for years, but it's new to me. And, between SpamAssassin and other filtering, the number of pieces of spam in my inbox has been a manageable .097% of the total, or one message per day, on average. And there are definite advantages: none of this wondering whether it has really been half an hour since i last received new mail or if i should be worried --- if i haven't gotten a message in five minutes, i know for a fact it's time to start debugging.

Thing is: i like e-mail. It's a good communication method. But, a good 2/3 of my spam, i never even glance at the headers, and i'm going to have to reduce the amount of time i spend on the rest of it. And, of course, my filters are now turning up the occasional false positive (which i never had in my first few years of SpamAssassin use) --- how could they not? --- which makes me more inclined to check through the rubbish bin occasionally, as it becomes less and less feasible to do so.

In other words, i'm completely dependent on my spam filters in order to be able to read e-mail. If i went away for a week and procmail stopped doing its job while i was away, i'd pretty much be coming back and sending out one of those, "If you tried to contact me in the past week, please resend" messages to That Mailing List, and hoping for the best with regard to other friends and family. (Well, okay, realistically, i could probably hack up something using a perl script and my address book. But, not really the point, since i'd still miss things.)

This pisses me off. I learned to use e-mail under the arrive-or-bounce paradigm, and, dammit, i liked it. And, no, i don't want to give up my domain and start over. I like my domain (and a bunch of the spam comes from things i administer anyway, though a significant amount of it is mine). Bah.

I like 2006 so far, but it's eating my brain. More sleep? More productivity? Less mailing list configuration? All of these things are indicated, but it is possible that none of them are forthcoming. The denizens of That Mailing List were excited and chatty about the annual mailing list statistics for once, which is fun for me, but also time-consuming, since they ask questions which pique my curiosity, and then i go back to the stats board. The periodic mutation of IRC on the Eights into IRC All The Damn Time, Yes Including Right Now is at a high point presently. That's not a good use of the word "mutation". I'm not especially worried about it.

Anyway, if i can migrate lists at the rate of one every 5.8 minutes, i can get my work for the evening done and go to bed on time. Back here in the real world, not so much, but it's a nice idea. Okay, back to work. Yeah, okay, "to work." That's kind of the same thing.

Various calendrical objects tell me it is now 2006. The first message i received in the new year came from my calves. It said, "Dear Chaos: you do not do Scottish dancing any more. Why exactly do you think you can just show up and then do 17/24 dances in six hours, and expect us to be speaking to you in the morning? Well, not only are we speaking to you, we are getting our revenge on your nerves with the fiery wrath of 1000 suns. That is all for now. Talk to you again in the morning, when you will once again find yourself unable to walk."

I also threw my knee a quarter of the way through the dance, courtesy of failing to turn people down when they asked me to dance strathspeys. (But they were people i wanted to dance with! Augh! Indecision! Stress! Knee pain!) Anyway, it all worked out for the best, because i was then able to waylay other people i wanted to dance with by saying, "Ha! You have no choice. You must dance with me now, because i am crippled!" No, i have no idea why that was a compelling argument. Rule number one for 2006: don't knock it if it works.

We had a lovely, if brief, midnight roundsing in the bell tower. Many thanks to them as organized it and them as attended.

Playing a 12-hour strategy game in the middle of a mini-reunion is a stellar way to annoy everyone who doesn't want to play. Hopefully, they will all forgive us, because the game of Advanced Civilisation was entirely excellent. As Babylon, i was subject to catastrophes which reduced me to three or fewer cities on four game turns. I also engaged in several acts of gratuitously poor gameplay, thereby causing my poor beleagured civilisation to suffer further. Needless to say, i had a completely awesome time, and want to play again soon, preferably before i have forgotten the rules.

I drove back home this evening through driving rain and horrible traffic, and sang along to Liz's CD, Rush, and Libana. To avoid traffic, i took the route which goes a few miles on 70W, so i got to pass the "1700 miles to Denver" sign. So far, 2006 seems pretty good. Happy New Year, y'all!

So, item the first is that i just got back from LISA, and it was entirely excellent. I would post a summary of some sort, but i have to write summaries of various stripes for a bunch of other fora, and make that DNS change i've been slacking on since Monday, and make dinner and pay bills, so i'm going to give LJ a pass for now, which probably means indefinitely, because, you know, life is like that. Very very short version: i gave my presentation, and it didn't suck, and i met a bunch of famous people, and they were all nice to me. Dude.

I also met some people with livejournals. Hi, people with livejournals! I almost never post, but welcome anyway.

For those playing the home game who have no idea what i'm talking about: LISA is a system administration conference. It happened last week in San Diego, and i am home now. Driving advice: if you get on I-5 at Griffith Park and head north, you will not reach Glenmont until you turn around and go the other way. Should this ever become relevant to your life, you will almost certainly have forgotten it, so i recommend carrying a map instead.

A little over a month ago, Uncleamos and i had a conversation over IRC, which i can no longer find in my logs, but which went something like:

Chaos: So, what if we were to spend an entire day playing nothing but board games involving trains?
Chris: WE MUST DO THIS THING!!!!

Okay, that's paraphrased, but he did use all caps. I think.

So, we did indeed do this thing. We convened at 10:00 to eat bagels and formulate a plan. The following games were played by me:

TransEuropa: this is the (even more broken and imbalanced) European version of TransAmerica. We played it as a quick warmup round. Elapsed time: less than an hour. Game location: Europe. Number of players: six. Game mechanic for laying track: wooden logs (max 2 per turn). Game involves money?: no. Game fluffiness: not low. Crushing victory by Chaos status: strictly middle of the pack.

Age of Steam: this was the first of the serious games. It follows several U.S. northern rail lines through financial struggles and eventual stability (one hopes). It has only six turns, and there's a certain amount of bidding and some room for hoseage of other players. Interesting. Elapsed time: 3.5 hours or so, i think. Game location: U.S. midwest. Number of players: six. Game mechanic for laying track: hexagons containing pictures of track, purchased using money (max 4 per turn). Game fluffiness: low. Crushing victory by Chaos status: third of six, which i was happy with for a first game. I played a conservative strategy, didn't have too much contention with other players, and scored a moderate but not outstanding number of points.

Ticket to Ride: Europe: This was only my second game of TTR:E ever. In my first game, i learned how it is possible to get good tickets and defeat everyone utterly. In this game, i learned how it is possible to get terrible tickets and be hosed repeatedly in the effort to get a pitiful number of points and go home. Elapsed time: 1.5 hours, maybe. Game location: Europe and parts of Asia. Number of players: four. Game mechanic for laying track: little plastic train pieces, purchased using cards from hand (max 8 per turn, though 3-4 is much more common). Game fluffiness: medium to high. Crushing victory by Chaos status: bleah.

Eurorails: my first ever crayon rails game which wasn't Iron Dragon! Everyone else's first ever crayon rails game! Whee! I love crayon rails, but i think Iron Dragon is a little more fun. Eurorails is a smaller board (3 board segments wide instead of four), and the trains are correspondingly slower. It has no foremen, ferries instead of boats, no underworld, no rainbow bridge, and many fewer calamities. The game was very slow starting out, as always happens with crayon rails games with a lot of new players, though it eventually sped up. Elapsed time: 4.25 hours (we didn't play until the end, choosing to stop the game at a fixed time instead). Game location: Europe and parts of Asia. Number of players: five. Game mechanic for laying track: crayons!, purchased using money (max 20 per turn). Game fluffiness: low, though not as low as the seriously unfluffy games. Crushing victory by Chaos status: Bah. I never got my act together in this game. I can't remember if i finished third or fourth, and it wasn't awful, but i never got terribly good luck in commodity shipping (nor made an especially stunning choices), and always had to pay a fair amount to earn anything.

1830: this is possibly the canonical train game, and i'd never played, so i'm glad we fit it in, even though we didn't even start rules until 22:30. It's a fairly rule-heavy game in which each player is a rail baron trying to make money by running (and/or running into the ground) the great 19th century railroads. Definitely fun, but my comprehension of how the game worked would have been helped by being able to dither over each move for 20 minutes. Elapsed time: 3.5 hours (we agreed to stop this at 2:00, which wound up being past 2:30 by the time we actually finished the last turn. We got into early endgame, it seems). Number of players: four. Game mechanic for laying track: hexagons containing pictures of track (max 1 or fewer per rail line per turn --- on many turns, track is upgraded instead of installed, so there isn't much track at all on the board by the end). Game fluffiness: pretty much no. Crushing victory by Chaos status: i came in last, but i was within $20 of the third place player, and not too far behind second place. So it didn't seem so bad.

So, yeah, that was my day. I'm not sure i would, per se, do this exact event again, but it was a lot of fun to try it once.

I never update these days. But i was forced out of the woodwork by this knit model of the digestive system. No, really, you should go look. It's adorable. (Link courtesy of Jed.)

Okay, over and out.

Approximate todo list for the next 24 hours:

• make grocery list
• go grocery shopping
• eat dinner
• go to target for last minute floor pillow acquisition
• clean entire apartment
• sleep
• clean entire apartment some more (if necessary, which i hope not)
• eat breakfast
• go to post office
• go shopping for drinks and alcohol
• cook like insane person
• party (!!!!)

Looks like i'm going to be missing my first Alumni Weekend since 1999. Doh. However, circumstances are beyond my control, and certainly beyond your control, and, if you even think about casting aspersions on the parties whose control they are not beyond, you are going down. Even if you tell me only did it because that sentence was so hard for you to parse.

Relatedly: my friends from home are apparently dropping like flies wrt this whole marriage thing. Yeesh. Didn't we just get out of middle school? (Editor's note: yeah, i'm lying. Middle school graduation seems about as recent as the Norman conquest, but who asked you?) (Oh, also, confidential to Burgundy and Pfiscthur: this is K we're talking about here. Further to Burgundy: yes, this means i'll be in your town the first weekend in June. Socializing should occur.)

I clearly need to get my ass in gear. I'm falling behind the Joneses here. Aaaaah. I was thinking about going out to a movie tonight, and maybe trying a new restaurant and glaring at the waitstaff for seating me near those loud people when i'm clearly trying to read The Silmarillion in peace here. What? That's not even remotely anti-social. It would be antisocial if i subscribed to Netflix, and then spent this evening watching old Daily Show editions on the internet while eating takeout Chinese. Get your definitions straight, people.

Also, i'd be much obliged if someone wanted to organize a vacation of some sort next summer so i could see you wackos. Ain't gonna be me. I've even opted out of organizing the encouraging of other people to organize vacations, beyond this paragraph.

I love cities. I've spent the evening so far sitting on my balcony taking in a free jazz concert from two blocks away, while editing a paper and talking to folks on IM.

Now they've moved on to the jam session, and i'm gaming on BSW and drinking hard cider. Really, life is pretty good.