There you see Sarah receiving her first belt at her taekwondo class. The final part of her belt test involved kicking through a board. I expected it to be some kind of styrofoam or balsa or something–she’s only four years old after all. But no, it was a pine plank, and a decently thick o...

I just received the strangest phone call. I answered and a recording told me that I had received a text message from a Rogers Wireless subscriber. Then recording then ended and a text-to-speech system read out the content of the message. Apparently Rogers hasn’t invested heavily in TTS, since ...

As you might have guessed from my continuing absence, work has not slacked off yet. However, that’s not the only thing that’s been contributing–real life has also been hopping a bit. A short summary: Sunday night Trish and I took Sarah to a sleepover, and then went to dinner and a ...

Among the artifacts were a few scribbled notes and I recognized the handwriting. Chris McLaren was a film major who worked for us in the early ’80’s, a skinny kid who wore black clothes and spiked hair and had an intense interest in Alistair Crowley, Roman Polanski, the Illuminati and ro...

As specified by roolet , I dance the meme dance tonight for you. Comment to this post and I will list 5 subjects/things I associate with you. Then post this in your blog and elaborate on the subjects I give you. I will be waxing rhapsodic about the following: Wm Shkspr What a bastard he was, eh? Mak...

You know those people who only read one book at a time? I’m not one of them. At the moment I have two novels (one noir detective, one hard SF) on the go in my reading room, a collection of short stories (”M. R. James by way of Lovecraft”) in the bedroom, two books of poetry and pol...

I found a place–or rather was referred to one–on Saturday that would happily sell me a replacement 1TB SATA2 drive for my RAID array, and at a decent price. (Yes, you can read that as “Future Shop can bite my shiny metal ass.”) The array worked perfectly, and none of my rough...

As I said the last time I talked about this, several times a week I find myself saying something and I realize that while I know what it means, I don’t know why it means that. When I catch myself at this, I’m off to find out why. This morning brought two new examples. The first was ̶...

Here is a late holiday story for you, because right now the only acceptable drawings I have to show are from secret projects! It was inspired because my brother Pete and I found a cool looking axe in the backseat. When winter winds blow cold and food is low, one must look elsewhere for meat! shhh......

For some reason I have this problem- when I go home to see family in Tahoe, where it is beautiful, and I feel happy and contented, and am surrounded by beauty, I ALWAYS have weird dreams and nightmares while I am sleeping there. So of course I had one this Christmas when I was visiting! This retarde...