Took a first look at my spring­time yard today, since it was so nice out. Last fall I delib­er­ately didn’t rake any leaves, and the result­ing piles acted as nat­ural mulch on the lilies and other flora that are start­ing their pri­mav­era growth. The thorny rose stalks are even begin­ning to bud. I picked up a few bags of […]

Deb­bie and I spent three days in Penn­syl­va­nia for a last gasp at cou­pled free­dom before the Kid arrives. I planned out our itin­er­ary well in advance and we had a great time; plenty of stuff to do and plenty of time to do noth­ing. We left Mon­day morn­ing and went to Pitts­burgh where our first stop was the […]

I just fin­ished read­ing A Deep­ness in the Sky by Ver­nor Vinge. Since I’ve been cul­ti­vat­ing a gestalt knowl­edge of the sci­ence fic­tion canon for nearly two decades, I was able to notice nods and reflec­tions of past works. The book owes an obvi­ous and huge debt to James Blish’s Cities in Flight, but there are also Tolkien […]

Not only did my crazy yelling neigh­bor get evicted, but the dude that lives upstairs, a relaxed and friendly guy, just got taken away by the cops on sus­pi­cion of gun pos­ses­sion. Based on what his dis­traught girl­friend was yelling from the bal­cony, some­one gave a false report about it and she blamed the folks who live […]

I’ve been burn­ing up Immor­tal Tech­nique lately; dig­ging through a bunch of cov­ers by of Mon­tréal, Down­load­ing the thou­sands of songs in the SXSW music tor­rents, the online-​only release Over the Counter Cul­ture by Tim Fite [who was in my 2006 Best of CD] and this elec­tron­ica release by Fake Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­ica: You Are Not […]

As I passed the House of Blues today on the way to my bus stop I saw a high school emo boy throw­ing a tantrum at his girl­friend. She caught it and threw it right back, but was cer­tainly the more “mature” of the two. He was almost high-​step stomp­ing his way toward me with a giant pouty­whine face half […]

I was at the County Coroner’s Office yes­ter­day for a meet­ing about redo­ing their web­site, cur­rently one of the old­est in the County. After the meet­ing we were given a tour of the facil­i­ties, which are impres­sive. I learned a lot about their pro­ce­dures, saw where the autop­sies are per­formed [on the top floor, with plenty of win­dows], saw […]

I decided to go ahead and put my new design out there in its 40% done state. Hav­ing to see it when­ever I look at my site should encour­age me to fin­ish it up. I’m using one of Eric Meyer’s reset styles as the base, and build­ing from it. Even­tu­ally I hope to go through each post […]

While most of the rest of the county focuses on the vote counts tonight, I’m up late with a few fel­low crew-​members mak­ing sure that the web­site runs smoothly and doesn’t crash. Look­ing at the same page but see­ing dif­fer­ent sto­ries. Really, I’m the least crit­i­cal night-​owl, I just have to make con­tent updates if requested. The […]