I am not currently fit for general online sociability, and need to take an Internet furlough. I’m going to stay offline for the next few days; if you need to get in touch with me, please send email. Thanks.
There is not enough squee in the world for this!
Russell Crowe, joy of my movie watching and delight to my musical ears, announced on Twitter yesterday and to his fan site of choice that there are plans afoot to take the current incarnation of TOFOG (The Ordinary Fear of God) on tour next year! They’d been hoping to do August of this year as that’s ten years after TOFOG 1 (30 Odd Foot of Grunts) played in Austin–but that ain’t happening. They appear to be eying next May for a target range of dates, though–and best of all, Russell’s saying they will be bringing Alan. AND that Portland is among the cities in the US they’re eying.
My reaction to passing The Crowe on the streets of Portland in 2001 is fabled in song, story, and LJ post! (
flashfiresshamamishkakathrynt
Because if this happens, my children, I am going to this. Oh yes, I am going. And there will be massive, massive squee. Better brace yourselves now.
Want a free game? C’mon, you know you wanna
I would be remiss as an employee of Big Fish Games if I didn’t tell you all that we’re handing out our very first Mystery Case Files series game, Ravenhearst, for free until the end of August. All you need to do if you want to scarf the free game is to go right over here for the PC version, or here for the Mac version, click the Buy It button, and apply the coupon code FREERAVEN to the purchase before you complete it.
I can also cheerfully add that I am myself quite hooked on our Hidden Object games, and the Mystery Case Files series gets more interesting and complex the farther it goes. I actually played Return to Ravenhearst first, and liked it better, but you should totally play Ravenhearst before you go back for more.
Enjoy, all!
Rare sightings of Anna social in the wild!
This is a few days after the fact at this point but I wanted to do a shout-out post on behalf of a couple of very nice encounters I had last week.
First, I had lunch with two of my old coworkers from the Times, Kathy and Adila, and that was great. Conversation and tasty sushi were had by all, and we vowed to do this again. For general reference, local-to-Seattle peeps, Sam’s Sushi in Queen Anne is good tasty lunch-type sushi.
Second, solarbirdmathmuffinfrostmuffinxelona
It was great fun, and Dara and I quickly decided we really need to play more Mah Jongg again. If any local peeps want in, let us know!
Meanwhile, it was wonderful to see the Schrams again. Amy and Erin and Sharayah are on the way back East again, and get to stop at Mt. St. Helens and at other nifty spots on the way. I envy them the whole Traveling Across the Country thing.
On Saturday, the Murkworks descended en masse to The Burninghand, where kathryntllachglinjessicac
This week has been kind of crazy-making at work, but in the sort of challenging “trying to solve particularly thorny QA problems that are driving QA, Dev, and IT collectively crazy” kind of way rather than anything really, y’know, bad. So it’s nice to have had some relaxing social encounters.
And there definitely needs to be more Mah Jongg. Especially since on Saturday morning, spazzkat
More about Portland
Aside from the whole YAY WE WENT TO POWELL’S thing, it’s totally worth pointing out the other places we went to as well:
First, a cafe called Backspace, recommended to solarbirdcow
Second, after lunch at Backspace we popped into a little place called Barcade, which was awesome. Lots of old school arcade and pinball games in there, and Dara was stunned, yea, STUNNED I TELL YOU, to see that they had a Bubble Bobble game in there. That was great fun. So was the Lord of the Rings pinball game, on which I won a free game, woo!
And last, in between the main Powell’s store and the Hawthorne store, we went to Everyday Music and between us, Dara and I picked up a perfectly ridiculous number of CDs. I grabbed a couple by Karan Casey and one by Natalie MacMaster, mostly because I love Casey’s voice from her days as Solas’ lead singer, and because I want to give MacMaster another shot with the fiddle playing since I do like the one album of hers I’d had before.
I’d also totally had forgotten that the Roseland is right near the main Powell’s store–the Roseland being the place where we saw Russell Crowe and 30 Odd Foot of Grunts playing in 2001! We drove right past the place and I caught myself grinning at the sight of the sidewalk where kathryntmamishkasshaflashfire
We did not, however, have time to go find the 24 Hour Church of Elvis. Sniff. I told Dara and spazzkat
It was overall really quite a lovely afternoon, despite periodic bursts of rainshowers. There was a laid-back and relaxed kind of grooviness both to the neighborhood right around Powell’s and in the Hawthorne neighborhood as well–the sort of air I kind of miss from the better days of the U-district. Plus, we came home with books and CDs and got to have a lovely road trip.
All in all, a good day.
All hail SOLARBIRD!
Many of you have remarked upon this already in your own posts, but for those of you who might not have yet, hey, it’s the Day of solarbird
Happy birthday, beloved! <3 <3 Today there will be sushi and movie viewing (we're going to go see How to Train Your Dragon), and hopefully also speedy recovery from strep throat since Dara picked that up from Norwescon. Doh.
Signal boosting for Liz
It’s come to my attention that denelian
save_liz
An explanation post for what’s going on with Liz is here.
Not dead, despite rumors to contrary
Y’all may have noticed that I haven’t posted in days. This has been because I’ve been sick as a dog with a cold that just will not quit, and have been ever since the day I came back from Vancouver. Woke up this past Monday with a soreness to my throat, and my first though was “oh shit”. I made it to work okay, but by the end of the day I was quite hoarse. And by Monday evening it was official: I was sick.
I stayed home the rest of the week, coughing up a storm, fumbling for the tissues, and ingesting any number of OTC remedies. On Thursday, I saw one of the other doctors at my usual clinic (since my usual doctor wasn’t in that day), and she said that yep, I had a nasty cold. Never had a temperature of note so we were pretty sure this hasn’t been any form of flu. It’s just been a Martian Death Cold.
I got back enough brain by Friday to work from home, and as of today I’m functional enough to be bored silly, but I’m still snorky, coughy, and prone to needing to curl up under the blankets for random bouts of zzzz’s. I have been absolutely useless for getting any writing done or much of anything else. I’ve been consoling my ailing self by rewatching first season Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and solarbird
I’ll be staggering back to work tomorrow, and if Cliff Mass is correct in his last post, it’ll be just in time for the weather to take a turn for the sucky. Joy. I’m sick all week while it’s warm and sunny, and it gets wet and cold just in time for me to go back to work. I’ll be lucky to shake this damn cough before April.
The cats have been quite happy to curl up beside me while I’m making with the zzzz’s, though. I even got a picture of them. Dara says this is particularly good and that I should post it!
The Nook Report, Part 2
Now that I’ve had a few days to read on the Nook, here are my thoughts on the experience.
First and foremost, I am sold on the virtue of a one-use reading device for a reason I hadn’t foreseen: if all the device does is show you the books, there’s nothing on it to distract you from actually reading the story. There’s no “oh wait I’ll just check Twitter/Facebook/LJ/my email/the news/etc.” going on. I really like that. It makes reading on the Nook feel a lot more like reading on a real book.
I was pleased to note as well that the screen refresh stopped bothering me. Apparently I’m not the only one this has happened to, so that’s good to know. If you’re thinking of getting an e-ink reader and the initial flash of screen refresh is weird to you, feel free to take this as consolation!
I’m still disappointed with the device’s general lack of book organization, though. The lovely scrollable display of color book covers only works with your Barnes and Noble content; if you’ve got a lot of non-B&N books, like my Fictionwise and Stanza and Drollerie books, then they all get put into your “My Documents” bucket. Which doesn’t have the scrollable cover capability. This is a drag, and I really wish that Barnes and Noble would allow for, at least, treatment of Fictionwise and eReader.com content the same as B&N content, since they do after all own both of those properties.
Really, though, I’d prefer to just see it give you a way to access all your books the same way. One of the reasons I wanted to shift to a reading device was that I found it annoying on the iPhone to have my library spread out through five, count ’em, five applications. Having the Nook force me to split my library into B&N content and non-B&N content is the same problem, only less severe.
I could do the workaround of just manually sideloading my B&N content to the My Documents directory, sure. But the problem with that is that the display of your content from My Documents is really rudimentary. You get a listing of titles that you can either sort by author or sort by title, and nothing fancier than that; it’s not even visually broken up by first letter or anything.
I did at least discover that the “Reading Now” button on the main screen does take you directly to whatever book you’re currently reading, which is good to know. Before I found that, my only means to get back to whatever book I’m working on reading was to page through the My Documents listing till I found the right file. And since I’ve got 16 pages of files, that’s annoying. The “Reading Now” button is an acceptable workaround until something fancier is implemented, and I really hope something will be. At least, there should be a menu to let you jump to the appropriate letter of the alphabet as I see in several of the reader apps on my iPhone; more elegant would be a little bit of search capability that would let you type in a bit of the pertinent author or title and jump straight to those works.
All in all, despite my issues with the file organization, I’m enjoying the experience of reading on it. It’s very convenient at lunch since I can just lay the Nook on the table in front of me, and it’s bigger and more readable than the iPhone. It’s also easier to manipulate, for me; I find the pinching of the side to turn a page nicer on my hands than having to tap the iPhone’s screen, especially one-handed. (Thumb-tapping on the iPhone one-handedly, I have discovered, weirdly strains the muscles at the base of my left thumb.)
I haven’t yet tried its music playing capability and probably won’t, since the iPhone has that functionality covered nicely and I’m used to having a tiny music player nestled in my pocket. Plus, again, don’t need the distraction from reading! Apparently there are folks who can read and listen to music at the same time, but I’m not one of them.
Exercise update
I’m down to 178 pounds as of this morning, which is frankly stunning to me. That’s three pounds for this week, which is twice as much as I was expecting based on earlier performance in this whole endeavor. And it’s down a half a pound from yesterday, even though I had two breadsticks with pizza. And man, those Pagliacci breadsticks? Super-tasty, but expensive calorie-wise.
(This would be the part where a little voice in my brain is going “I REGRET NOTHING!” I’m going to be shutting it up by getting on the treadmill anyway, or at least walking down to the shops.)
Anyway, overall, this is 14 pounds down from where I started in early December. Going by my previous records, the last time I weighed 178 was in November of 2007, so it’s like 2 1/4 years. Not bad. We’ll see where I am after another couple months of doing this LoseIt thing.
Meanwhile, for posterity’s sake, I should also note that I did finally finish the Eowyn Challenge this month. I haven’t been posting updates about that mostly because I decided that those numbers were really mostly interesting to me, but I assure y’all I did keep at it! Ultimately it ran for me just shy of five years; going back and looking, I started it on 2/17/05, and ended on 2/4/10. Lots of miles walked. I didn’t start tracking my weight along with it until August of ’05, at which point I was 167 pounds.
I was toying with the idea of doing another run through the Challenge, following Frodo’s route rather than Aragorn’s, though right now it seems kind of redundant giving that I’m tracking calorie, weight, and exercise data via LoseIt. Now, if there were an Eowyn’s Challenge iPhone app that also tracked your weight and calorie consumption, that would be AWESOME.
Until somebody codes that, though, I think I’ll stick with LoseIt for the time being. Wish me luck, folks. 14 pounds down, another 28 to go!