Dickens Fair Pictures

(click to go to album)

Some pictures from Dickens Fair last Saturday.

End of the Holiday Weekend

So after getting to bed fairly late Friday after the Prodigy show, we got to sleep in Saturday and go off to the Farmer's Market before it closed, taking a nice stroll down fall-like downtown Pleasanton. Then we got some cleaning in and headed off to dinner with Aki and Rachel and Aki's parents. After way too much Indian food,we zoomed off to see The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky's followup to Requiem For A Dream and Pi. That movie was not quite what I was expecting, but I am glad I went to see it. I may need to go see it to figure out what it was that I was looking at. Sunday morning I got up remarkably early for a Sunday on a holiday weekend and went to Dickens Fair in San Francisco with Amber, Noelle, and Wendy. That was a spot of good fun. It was kind of like Ren Faire, except the folks were dressed more tastefully. :-D And most of the people who were dressed up seemed to do a good job keeping to period clothing. I'll have pictures up of that shortly. That night I went back to SF again, this time to see the reconstituted Alice In Chains. That was a fantastic show. The replacement for Layne Stayley has a remarkably good approximation of Layne's voice. Jerry Cantrell is still on as a guitarist. I would have liked to have heard "Heaven Inside" or "Head Creeps", but that's as close I can come to a complaint. They did an electric set followed by an acoustic set (and I could take my earplugs off at the Warfield!), followed by an electric encore. During the encore James Hetfield of Metallica showed up to play/sing "Would."Really great show. Catch it if you can.

The Prodigy

Whatever happened to drum and bass music anyway? Noelle and Carl and I went to see Prodigy at the Fillmore tonight. Great show, really good energy. I was a little concerned because I loaded up with Thanksgiving leftovers before we headed up to SF, so I was a bit sleepy (mmm, triptophan). But once they started playing, I started moving and didn't stop for the next hour and a half. Now it's sleepy time. I'm the fire starter, twisted fire starter!

Casino Royale

Wow! A bunch of us went to see the latest James Bond movie tonight and it is probably the best Bond flick I've ever seen. Daniel Craig is a much grittier, colder Bond than the ones that came before him. This movie lacks a lot of the high tech gadgetry and goofy gags from the previous movies but the fight scenes are outstanding. I like the fact that when Bond gets in a fist fight his knuckles get torn up. Highly recommended.

Gears of War

Holy crap the graphics on this game are good! Pretty fun to play too, once you get used to the weird cover fire system.

Neil Speaks!

So, about 6:30 this evening I happened to look at Neil Gaiman's blog while I was doing a build to be jolted into remembering that Noelle and I had tickets to see him at SJSU tonight. At 7:30. She had forgotten also, but we managed to sneak into the back of the room where Neil was kind enough to treat us to a reading of an interview (think police interview) where you heard the answers to the questions, but not the questions themselves. That was pretty entertaining. The second piece he read from was "Chapter four" in the novel he's currently working on called the Graveyard Book (think Jungle Book, except with dead people raising Mowgli instead of jungle animals) it was very, very good. It was also flattering because Neil claimed to never have read it anywhere else before. We stuck around afterwards just long enough to get some posters before we split to get some food. On the way over to Original Joe's we saw that there's a comic book shop open on San Carlos (Funny Monkey Comics). We stopped in after dinner and I scored a copy of Absolute Sandman and The Lost Girls. Turns out it's the same shop that used to be over Iguana's on Third Street. Speaking of Iguana's, the appear to be back in business! Woot! I needs me a super burrito! Great night! Now I just need to pack for our weekend trip to lovely SoCal.

Carmel Pix

(click to go to Shutterfly album)
Noelle and I took a drive down the coast to the Monterey/Carmel area. Here are a few pix from the trip.

Set Your Goals 2006

So, here's kind of a recap of my goals from last year, only a month and a half after I meant to revisit them:

1. Go camping at least four times.

Hmm, I went camping a couple times, but not four.

2 Visit two new national parks I've never been to before.

Easy peasy. I went to Death Valley, Arches, Canyonlands, and Devil's Postpile.

3. Read more books. Let's say, six.

I think I did this handily.

4. Improve my photography skillz. What does this mean? More workshops? Try to get to at least one workshop or class.

I got to a smallish workshop on my trip to Yosemite last February, but it wasn't that spectacular. I also picked up a number of neat tricks (night photography stuff, etc) but nothing formal. Marginal.

5. Get my passport renewed and travel abroad somewhere.

Nope. Didn't do this one. Have to get on that for next year.

6. Improve guitar playing ability to the point where I don't hate the sound of my own playing.

Another failure. I pretty much stopped playing at the beginning of 2006 and am just now getting back into it.

7. Develop and frame more prints.

As those who have been the recipients of my prints for birthday/Christmas/whatever presents know, I've done a lot of prints in the past year.

8. Lose 10 pounds by New Year's. Lose 30 pounds by next year.

I did the first part and for a while I was close to the second part, but I've been backsliding the past few months.

9. Take a Spanish class.

Wow, I barely even thought about doing that this past year.

10. Volunteer. I miss doing that.

I feel like I've done some kind of minimally qualifying volunteer work, but I can't think of it offhand, so I'm counting this one as a loser.

11. See if there are any women compatible with me out there.

An unqualified success! There's at least one woman out there who seems compatible with me. <grin>

12. Write one Mac OS X program on my own time for my own edjumacation.

Um, I didn't do it on my own time, but I have marginally improved my skillz on the Mac OS X as part of the work I've done at <the place where the money comes from>.

13. Fix up my damn yard.

Uh, I got a couple of fences replaced. Does that count? No? Ok, it's a fair cop.

Kind of a mixed bag in terms of my success rate, but I had a very decent year, so I am not entirely dissatisfied.
So what are my goals for 2006-2007? A bunch of them are recycled goals from 2005-6.

1. Keep my sweety happy with me.

2. Visit at least two national parks I've never been to before.

3. Read at least six books.

4. Improve my photography skills. Go to at least one workshop or class.

5. Get my passport renewed and travel abroad somewhere.

6. Improve my guitar playing ability. I got the new axe. I should get a new teacher and try practicing at least half an hour a day.

7. Process at least four of the photo sessions I took in the past year. Which is a pathetic goal.

8. Lose 20 pounds by my next birthday. Specifically, make a concerted effort to get into the gym four times a week.

9. Improve my brain: learn a new language, brush up on my atrophied math skills, don't get stale.

10. More volunteering/public service.

11. Go camping at least four times.

12. improve my Mac OS X hacking skillz. I even have a project in mind.

13. Fix up the house!!! Do at least four of the ten items I have my whiteboard to-do list.

I'll revisit the goals next year around my birthday.

Mu-Tay-Tor

(because Evolution isn't fast enough!)
Noelle, Carl, Wendy and I went to see The Taytor at the Fillmore last night. Fun show! Seven or eight percussionists, a horn section, a guitarist and bassist, stiltwalkers, and a number of scantily clad men and women dancing on stage, etc, etc. Oh, and a lion, chinese dragon style. Definitely a good time. Looking forward to their return to the Bay Area.

What A DIfference A Day Makes

Well, maybe more like three and a half years, several thousand dead US soldiers (to say nothing of the thousands upon thousands of dead Iraqis), billions of dollars down the drain, and a number of political and sex scandals. Wow. That sounds really, really bad when I say it out loud. The Democrats have wrested the House of Representatives (and it appears the Senate as well) from the Republicans. 1994 doesn't seem that long ago to me, but I guess it really is a long time gone. I hope that a certain amount of sanity returns to American politics now that Shrub doesn't have a rubber stamp for his various wacky ass ideas. Of course this may (may) require the Dems to conceive of (and properly communicate) some ideas about how to run the country. But it seems like good news to me that America seems to be finally repudiating the current administration. I'll enjoy that for a few days.

Top 10 Lies of the Web 2.0

This should be fairly amusing to those of you who went through the Web 1.0. I particularly like 1 and 2.
[Top 10 Lies of the Web 2.0]

More Reasons To Hate Technology

Ever take a cell phone to your provider to be fixed? Chances are you get a refurb back. And it turns out you might get the data from someone else's phone (i.e. you get their old data) with the refurb. This is despite the phone company's instructions on clearing off data from the SIM. [article]

Civic Duty Accomplished

Well, nearly so. The ballot is filled out (I love permanent absentee balloting), I just need to take it to the polling place. The ballot is four pages long. Oy gewalt! Now hopefully my ballot will be properly counted. HBO has a special on hacking the vote, which you can view on google video here or in smaller chunks on youtube here. This is an appalling subversion of the democratic process and I think a clear reason why transparent voting is necessary. ATMs can print out a receipt, so we should be able to have voting machines print out a filled out ballot. Period, end of story. Check out the story, but go vote anyway, folks.

Scientists Ponder Sun Shield To Fight Global Warming

A University of Arizona professor has proposed an armada of small satellites at the L1 point to disperse solar radiation to reduce the global climate change brought on carbon dioxide buildup. He believes that up to 2% of the energy could be dispersed in this way. Sounds interesting, but didn't Monty Burns try to do this in the Simpsons back in the 90s? [article]

Moderately Productive Weekend

So this was a pretty productive weekend. I got a lot of the cleaning around the house that I wanted to do, done. Did a bunch of shopping and errands and such. Did some laundry. Saw Nightmare 3D again with Noelle, Carl, Erin, and one of Carl's coworkers and SO. Still pretty entertaining. Got some quality snuggle time in with the kitties. Took a beautiful moonlight drive through the hills to the northeast in the Sex Machine which was a lot of fun. The weather here was pleasantly warm over the weekend, because of the rain front, I think. Got started on the voting. Permanent absentee ballots are a good thing, but a four page ballot is kind of ridiculous. Well, I guess I have to finish that up today.

Amber and Morgan's Wedding

(click to go to my Shutterfly album)

Amber and Morgan got married last Tuesday. That's right. Halloween. It was a masked ball reception and a really cool wedding ceremony. I got all dressed up in a tux with tails and a raven mask (which I love). I think it was pretty good, but I don't have any pictures of me, as of yet. The album above is some of the better shots I got that night. Quite a bit of fun.

Aerosmith

Noelle took me out to see Aerosmith at Shoreline last night. Much to my surprise, they were rather good. Joe Perry still has a lot of hot licks left in that guitar of his. What was cool was they did predominantly older material, which is what I like and hardly any Crazy-Amaza-Crazy. Although they did do Crazy. Which, with the drinks in me, sounded pretty good. ;-) I'd probably go do that again. They opened with Walking the Dog, which really surprised me since that's off their first album. But so is Dream On, so I guess it's not that strange. I can see why the kids in the 70s must have liked their shows so much.

The Prestige

Noelle and I saw The Prestige the other night in Dublin. Very entertaining movie, although I saw the end coming way better than I did for The Illusionist. Hey, it's got turn of the century magic tricks, a vendetta, and David Bowie playing Nikola Tesla. What more could one ask for? Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman did a very respectable job as the warring magicians and Michael Caine was superlative as always. Good soundtrack too. Reminded me of Solaris (the remake) for some reason.
[trailer (quicktime)]