jcfiala's blog
This last weekend was really a lot of fun. It's our last weekend here in Denver before we take off for Paris this Saturday, and so there was a fair amount of preparation for that going on.
To start with we headed off to Weight Watchers, which I hadn't been to in a month due to... well, a mix of different reasons, including my trip recently to LA for DrupalCampLA. Happily, it turns out I'd lost another 1.4 lbs, which means I've lost more than fifteen pounds! That, followed with a little breakfast over at the Village Inn (free wifi!) was a beautiful start to the day. We then slipped into Best Buy to look for the new Professor Layton game, coming out this week - I was hoping it might be out early. It wasn't. Ah, well.
After a bit of twisting and forcing, I've got the new http://www.dasfa.com/ up and running under Drupal, a feat which makes me feel rather happy. DASFA stands for the 'Denver Area Science Fiction Association', and I've been slowly taking over the webmaster duties for a while now.
I still need to get dasfa.org migrated as well, but there's some email forwarding accounts that I need to get sorted out first. But it shouldn't take too long.
Also, I've set up a new twitter account: http://www.twitter.com/denver_sf to keep track of local Denver SF happenings.
Here's the talk we gave at Drupalcampcolorado.
Presentation at http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dxmgvdn_4c2mfkkdj
(If you're seeing this on livejournal, there's files to download on www.jcfiala.net)
It was with considerable surprise that I weighed in at Weight Watchers yesterday morning and was told that I'd lost another pound. I hadn't been really concentrating on my diet for the last two weeks - since the last time I'd weighed in - and although I had generally kept away from the fattening and rich stuff, I hadn't totally. But apparently I'd been good enough, and my official tally at WW went up to 10.8 pounds lost.
From http://limerickdb.com/?top150 :
If A equals B (so I say),
And we multiply both sides by A,
Then we'll see that A squared,
When with AB compared,
Are the same. Remove B squared. Okay?
Both sides we will factorize. See?
Now each side contains A minus B.
We'll divide through by A
Minus B, and ole!
A plus B equals B. Oh whoopee!
But since I said A equals B,
B plus B equals B, you'll agree?
So if B equals one,
Then this sum I have done,
Proves that two equals one. Q.E.D.
John Scalzi posted a blog post about a session he did at the Tools of Change conference this year on his blog.
It's a long video - 40 minutes, as it's an entire session - but it's an interesting one, with him, Patrick Nielson Hayden of Tor, and Toby Buckell, discussing building online communities around a website and where you can go with them. It's not so much about where you go after 40K readers, as how dang useful it is to have 40K readers, in my opinion. There's also an interesting point there that Tor.com can hire writers at professional wages to write short stories and give them away and have it disappear into their advertising budget as opposed to the short fiction markets who can't pay a living wage to get printed in a small magazine that a few thousand people ever read.
Definitely worth watching. And now, back to prepping for my D&D game tomorrow.
Hm, seems like Twitter's Down.
I'm having some fun setting up a Drupal 5 install just so I can test that a patch fixes a problem with upgrading to 6 while using the link module.
I recently got a copy of The Chronicles of Riddick Trilogy, which is a bit of a misnomer, given that it contains two full-length movies and a short animated film bridging the two. That said, the word 'Trilogy' on an inexpensive disk probably sells better than 'Duo', so why worry about that? The following review/commentary contains spoilers for the film, but it's been out for a few years so I doubt that's a big problem.
I'm not sure if I initially realized how great a loss it was when Dragon magazine retreated from the world of print (and newstands) to become a purely digital offering. I know in the past I've been a great fan of digital releases of RPG materials such as games and supplements, but that's an attitude I've slowly been becoming less happy with. When I first was able to buy digital games, I went in whole hog and bought a lot of them... and then barely read any of them.
So, here I am, stranded in Boulder.
My bosses here at pingVision are pretty cool, and once it became apparent that the snow was going to be just this bad, and reports kept coming in from various quarters of the problems folks were having with the traffic, they were kind enough to feed us all early and send us on our way back home. Unfortunately in my case this release was a little too late - RTD had already shut down all of it's traffic down to Denver, and it wasn't clear if they would be opening for the day... so I got a room here in Boulder for the night.
