It’s been a while, but I’ve finally broken my string of project disasters with the fused glass. To celebrate, I’ve made a small piece for my mother’s birthday (shhhhhhhh… don’t tell her!). It’s just a little trivet with an abstract flower-style pattern. Pictures after the jump.
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I haven’t written much about Second Life since I first mentioned it here. I won’t say much about it now, since I’m a bit pressed for time, but I wanted to post some pictures from last night. It was my birthday recently, and my friend Brenda decided that she needed to buy me a tiny bunny avatar as a present. "Tinies," as they are called, are little (mainly animal) avatars you can use and that people in Second Life have created (not Linden Lab, incidentally… this is all user generated). They are very small and maybe come up to a normal avatar’s knee (hence the name). They are terribly cute and funny (especially when you find that people now make clothes for tinies and special animations like dances). I’m posting some pictures from our shopping trip from last night after the jump… good, silly fun!
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Just a quick note to let you know that I’m setting up a space over in Flickr for my photos. In future, I’ll be posting pictures there and not directly here (although I’ll be linking to them from here). Flickr is rather easier to work with than the WordPress stuff I’ve tried for managing photos, plus it does tagging of photos and slideshows.
Just a quick post to let you all know I’m still alive. I went for a bike ride with a friend yesterday, and it was the first time I’ve been on my bike in months. We didn’t go all that far… just along the Los Gatos creek for a bit, and we took it easy. Still, I’m clearly out of shape and went too long without biking, because I am reminded of yesterday’s excursion every time I sit down. *wince*
Things have been a little hectic the past couple of weeks, so my apologies for the silent treatment. The main bit of news is from work: the project I’ve been on for the past two and a half years has finally released code to our production servers. Wooo-hooo! At the moment, we’re in our so-called stabilization phase where we’re letting the users bang on the application and shake out any of the last remaining bugs (our QA people were very good, so we have had a remarkably small number of bugs). I have to say, this particular project has been a very long haul for me (if this is any indication, my beard has started to turn gray and the hair on my head is noticeably thiner than it was when we started), so it is a big relief for me to finally see it finished. Partly to celebrate the release, and partly to start to prepare for the next phases, I am actually up in Oregon this week meeting with various parts of the team.
To try to have a little fun this week, I took a little extra vacation time over the weekend and went up to Seattle to visit with my friend, André (aka Ozymandias). We bummed around a rather chilly and damp town, strolled around the Fremont neighborhood during the tail-end of their Solstice festival (and got an eye-full of some unfortunate fashions… hint: kilts are in for the men folk, but total nudity will do in a pinch… or not).
On the way back down to Oregon for my meetings this week, I was going to swing by Mount Saint Helens (I have been coming to the area for years and have never made it there), but the weather was less than cooperative. Combine the lack of visibility with some camera problems (hint: if you have digital SLR, don’t try to clean the sensor yourself), and I’m afraid you’ll have to do without pictures of me trotting around the north-west. Sorry… maybe next time.
Oh, incidentally, I just discovered that my e-mail address here at tailrecursive was forwarding to the wrong mailbox… so if you sent me anything recently and I didn’t respond, that is probably why. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Ok. So, I haven’t posted in a long, long time. But I saw this message when I checked out the administrative interface on WordPress:
[Missing Picture]
Akismet, by the way, is the WordPress plug-in I use to catch and throw out the spam comments I get on this blog. That’s right, if I didn’t have Akismet, I would have had to delete more than 13,000 comments by hand. Yikes!
[Edit: Removed image link after I lost the image file on the site... oops!]
The Register just posted an article on the old Epson HX-20. I don’t know if you remember these things, but I sure do. I wanted one of those things so badly when I was a kid: very portable, a full keyboard, and a killer battery life. Of course, today I’m mainly just amused by the ad photos. What’s with the riding cap on the flight attendant… is she going to compete in dressage when she gets to her destination? If so, how is the Epson going to help?
In California, it sometimes seems to be the case that Nature has a switch: flipped one way, it’s winter outside… cold, drizzly, dark; flipped the other way, it’s summer… warm, clear, and sunny. On Monday, Nature flipped the switch. As a result, I have the itch to be outside, and my wild lilac is blooming… making me and my bee-ish neighbors ecstatic.
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Attention Neil deGrasse Tyson and the rest of you anti-Plutonians, the New Mexico legislature is fixing to show you what’s what. You may have fancy degrees and all that, but the legislature has the power of the resolution.
Seriously, I’m starting to wonder if the main purpose of a state legislature is to look asinine. I think one of the problems here is that people seem to think that Pluto’s being reclassified somehow makes it a less interesting object… like this reclassification is somehow an insult to Pluto and Clyde Tombaugh. Really, it’s a very strange reaction to have; and it’s an even stranger thing to feel the need to legislate. Don’t these people have real problems to be dealing with?
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been noticing some odd things going on… an accelerated heart rate, general nervousness and irritability (more so than usual, that is), and a lot of anxiety (to the point where I have trouble breathing). I was putting a lot of this down to general work-related stress (and I’m sure some of it is… combined with lack of exercise), but then I did a little monitoring of my behavior and habits and realized something startling: with the exception of morning orange juice, I was drinking only caffeinated beverages. Basically, I’ve been saturating my bloodstream with caffeine; and while it’s really neat to be able to see into the future and be the kwisatch haderach and all, I doubt it’s worth the medical side-effects.
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