Twenty years ago today, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first published. Somewhere in late 1999 or early 2000 (I honestly don’t remember quite when, but the experience sticks with me), I picked up a paperback copy of Sorcerer’s Stone (oh, how I still wish, all these years later, they just went with the […]

Happy Friday, folks. It’s actually not been a bad week at all. At work, I’ve managed to finally (I think) give everyone the documentation they need to wrap up the annual budget/contract stuff so I’ll be able to pay my folks next year. I hope, anyway. It feels good right now, so I’ll take it. […]

So, Friday night we did go to The Fountain and hung out with John Scalzi for a couple of hours. Nice crowd in the tiny, awesome store, including our friends Chris and Melissa in from Norfolk. Scalzi read a bunch of cool stuff (including a chapter from the forthcoming sequel to the very good Lock […]

Not gonna belabor the point. My schedule again this week has been wrecked, largely with a bunch of big important stuff coming up at work at literally the last minute (though that stuff worked out, for the most part, pretty well – important people said very nice things about me in front of my boss, […]

Today was actually pretty good day. Work was generally good; my 10am meeting was cancelled, which was wonderful, because it’s always a slog, and we’d spent two hours yesterday in an ad-hoc meeting discussing the same project anyway. I also spent some more time running some more numbers on my interminable budget nightmare, and proved […]

It was a weekend. Objectively, a beautiful weekend. It was sunny, and blew past 80° F here in central Virginia, which is weird, but not unknown in this part of the world. It was bound on either end by temperatures in the low 40s, so there is that. Anyway, the big highlight of the weekend […]

When I left work on Monday, I wasn’t expecting to go out to a movie, though given that I’ve got a couple of sick (for varying definitions of sick) teenagers, and a bouncing nine-year old who was bothering them, after knocking out out a one-take bass line for a related demo track* for the Humdingers, […]

happy friday, folks. It’s been a week of ups and downs, not the least of which involves waking up to find that somebody hacked my ebay account and bought a few unauthorized steam/itunes gift cards. It was thankfully only 45 bucks’ worth, and I’ve already nipped it in the bud, but this isn’t the kind […]

‘Twas a long weekend, but it was a good one. As detailed previously, I had a pretty full weekend booked, beginning with a trip down to NC on Friday for the gig at HonorCon. Traffic, thanks to construction, accidents, and certain late-model Dodge Chargers and Subaru WRX STIs driving like assholes down I-85 (you know […]

Okay, sure, it’s Thursday. I’m doing the random tunes thing a day early. It’s my life and my blog. Sue me. In any case, the reason I’m doing it early is that I’m taking a day off tomorrow and don’t really plan to be on the computer all that much. As I have enough service […]