The whole household is terribly excited about this weekend’s RavenCon coming to town; three days of hanging out with like-minded science fiction and fantasy fans, playing games, meeting authors and creators, and generally discovering new things to get excited about. This morning I got the email confirming our registration, and late last week the schedule […]

TheRAM arrived today; just swapped it out with the old chips. Twice as much, and a much faster transfer rate. I think my login time (password to desktop) is down under 10 seconds now; boot-up is under half-a-minute. I just opened up an 800 line openoffice spreadsheet in like four seconds…seriously, this thing is flying […]

I spent the evening on phase one of my campaign to make a few cheap tweaks to the laptop so I can keep it going another couple of years, dropping in a new, huge hard drive, installing Ubuntu 10.4 beta 1, and re-loading all my important old data (cheap usb hard drive enclosures are a […]

I love living in the future. Seriously, lag-free video conferencing with my wife and kids who are sitting over 100 miles away is a very, very cool thing. …now, to get working on those warrior robots.

A few weeks ago, I was surprised to find a moderate performance/bonus award in my pay. In addition to paying a couple of the few remaining bills I have, and taking care of a few necessities, i bought myself a present: Yep, that’s the original art for page 22 of Marvel’s She Hulk #16, signed […]

An evening out. At the historic National Theater in downtown Richmond, VA. On stage, perennial household favorite Jonathan Coulton and headliners They Might Be Giants, performing, in its entirety, and, improbably, in reverse order, the seminal 1990 album Flood. First up, internet troubador Jonathan Coulton, who I’ve seen in a different venue twice in as […]

In the last two and a quarter centuries of American history, it’s always been fashionable for politicians and politically motivated organizations to include callbacks to well-known historical documents and quotations in their speeches and published materials. President Obama titled his speech on race in America during the 2008 campain “A More Perfect Union,” referencing the […]

Look! My spouse knitted me a Dalek! She’s gonna make me a plush Cthulhu next. Sorry guys, she’s taken.

Among other things* this weekend, we took a trip (at my son’s urging) to the Science Museum of Virginia, which is twenty minutes from my driveway (and has been as long as I’ve lived here), but I’d never managed to visit before. It was a nice day out for the family; we played with a […]

With the weather being, shall we say, uncommon, for this region at this time of year, I’m hearing more and more comments from folks, both personally and in the media, questioning the validity of global warming/climate change, taking particular shots at one Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, former Senator, Vice President, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, and […]