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At the end of the driveway: a field full of fireflies, with lightning flashing over the next ridge.  Finally, the rain that’s been threatening all day arrives, and it pours, and it pours, and it is still pouring.

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Too much good in today to encapsulate it here, but suffice to say that I feel like life is happening again, things are moving forward, and I saw a fox this evening, thus confirming, by the hand of Nature, that today was, unambiguously, good.

Also, does anyone in the Philly area want some kittens, at least to foster?  Friends of mine have found some, and are looking for a home for them.

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It’s a wonderful thing.  I stood the other night up to my knees in water, with Allie, for a good long while talking as the sun set.  We saw a shiba-inu.  If I ever were to get a dog, that’d be the breed.  Also, Princeton is a pretty great town, and I miss it.

Tonight, Chris came over and there was music and cooking and computer-talk.  The meal is worth recounting: it was a fruit-based almost-stir-fry.  Apples, peaches, clementines, around onion, garlic, ginger, cardamom, pine nuts, cinnamon, and all tied together with coconut milk, and underlined by habaneros.  Delightful.  Served over couscous.  Oh, also, sultanas and dried cranberries.

One thing Chris was sure to point out: habaneros are the necessary choice of pepper for this, as they have a real time-delayed effect.  This allows the sweetness of the fruit to be enjoyed, and then the spiciness to hit you.

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I write this in the Denver airport; I am flying east, to be there for a week.  I hope to see folks.

Also, I finished Dracula last night.  Quite good, though the entire role and character of Quincey Morris is underexplored and underexplained.  I would love to see some sort of speculative backstory for him, and why he’s so ready to accept the supernatural.  Worth also noting, the use of kukris in the book… is just cool.

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So, I went to another board game party with coworkers, this time at Aaron’s.  It was great fun, there was Settlers, beer, guitar, geeking out.  The best bit came, however, at the end: it was THUNDERING by the time we all left, so Theban drove all of us as far as he could manage (except for Vesa, the Finn, who decided this was fine weather to bike home in).  This left me at the Boulder Transit Center, a few blocks from my house.  I had thought, for some reason, to bring an umbrella, and it was definitely a good idea.  This rain is torrential, and I had a bag of games to keep dry!  But the weather lifted my spirits like nothing else I could imagine, and I started belting out Bold Riley as I walked.  A girl walking a bit ahead of me noticed, turned, smiled, so I commented that “you have no idea how much I’ve missed weather like this.”  Her rejoinder: “I’ve been in Cairo for a year.  I do!”  It was lovely, to sing in the rain, and, I must admit, frolic a bit.  Puddles may have been splashed in.

The thunder out here is spectacular.  When I was in Hakodate, I saw the most amazing fireworks of my life.  Part of that was just that the Japanese know their fireworks, but part of it was that it was a sonic display as much as visual: the sound was designed to have some impressive deep notes and booms, and best of all, echo off of the mountain at the end of the peninsula.  Here, the thunder—already impressive—has a whole mountain, and particularly good sounding boards like the Flatirons, to echo off of.  You get it all twice, at least.

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I just met R.M.W. Dixon!  That’s the dude who wrote Ergativity, which I keep in an honored position at my bedside.  I kinda can’t deal with the awesome.  The worst part?  He’s been in Boulder all summer so far and is leaving tomorrow.

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I’m not a storyteller, Stella, but I impersonate one and that is almost as good. Storytelling is an intimate art, practiced between people who know each other well, and I’ve known some great ones, a sculptor named Joe O’Connell and my great-uncle Lew Powell and the late Chet Atkins. Chet was a true storyteller. He blanched at the thought of doing it onstage, but when he drove you around in his pickup truck, he’d tell a whole string of stories, some of them ribald, about Nashville stars and he’d imitated their voices beautifully and he embroidered the stories beautifully and, listening to him, I just sat and laughed and wished we’d drive forever.

Garrison Keillor is great.

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Of all the people in the lab whose native language is not English, only one* speaks an Indo-European language (German).  We have:

• Turkish
• Finnish
• Tamil
• Chinese (I’m not certain what specific languages Xin and Wei speak)

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From halfway through Dracula: Abraham Van Helsing is the biggest Mary Sue I’ve come across in recent literary memory.  Geez.  “You forget that I am a lawyer as well as a doctor.”  Yes, thank you, I wasn’t certain you were a Mary Sue when you shared a name with the author of the work you’re in, and were the one dude who knew entirely what was going on.

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Well, I’ve done it: I’ve brought my concertina to the session.  And I could not have picked a better day; small, small, only three others there, and all the nicest of folks.  Two I know well, one I’ve just met.  And so, I played.  Not a tune, but a song, and it was lovely; I played well, with some minor slips, but all-in-all acquitted myself quite well.

Soon, I will get Rocky Road to Dublin down, and have a tune I can contribute.

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At the request of Ultranurd, allow me to explain my new shell set up.

I’m sick of bash.  The syntax is absurd, and absurd syntax makes me sad. So I’ve just recently set up iPython as my shell. What follows are the relevant config files and some explanation.

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I finally finished Silas Marner; pleasantly written, but thin.  Not much there there.

I made great spanakopita this weekend, and biked, and hiked, and played frisbee.  I was productive, too—I achieved in 2 hours what would have likely taken me a day to a day and a half had I been in the office.  This is consistent.

I was sent this link, which made my day.

I played concertina, I sang.  I began to learn a new song, Farewell to Nova Scotia.

And yet, I still feel the pull of the East as strong as ever.

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In the past two weeks, our lab has gone from 10 to 17 people, including people who are here on a temporary basis, such as summer interns.  It’s kinda cool, but mostly a packing problem.

Also, I have recently met someone name Attila.

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One of the best things I learned from my dad, that.  When estimating how long something will take, remember that just because an action is simple, does not mean it takes no time.  This weekend, I got a degree better at estimating how long various coding tasks would take me.  It felt good.

Mostly, this past week has been a great trip back east, for Miranda’s graduation and seeing lots of friends in the Swarthmore area.  I also had some time in Rosemont, just being at home and enjoying the rain.  It was refreshing, and continues to make me want to be back east.

The Front Range has been having some extreme weather lately!  Flying back last night (yay 4 hour delayed flight…) we passed, for a good 10 or 15 minutes, a massive thunderhead with constant flashes of lightning in it.  It was terrifying, but truly beautiful.  It seemed otherworldly.  I learned later that there had been baseball-sized hail and tornadoes attached to that storm.

I would swear I had a point to this post when I started it, but it’s quite escaped me.  It might have to do with my still-pervasive desire to work for myself (or at least on a flexible, I-can-do-errands-in-mid-day schedule—I was so productive this past week, and I think it was mostly due to being able to work and be distracted in intense, alternating bursts.  Or perhaps it has to do with the various ways in which Burke’s latest resonates with me.

Oh yes!  Perhaps I meant to mention that I signed my first patent application today.  Exciting, but I have very mixed feelings about software patents.

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It was a pleasant one; the thing that has made it best for me, though, is probably the rain every evening, like right now, as it comes down outside, and I contemplate how much water, particularly moving water, is amazing.  (Who am I kidding?  Seeing friends and talking with random strangers was what made it best.)

I’ll be back east in less than a week, and that’s great.  I am also coming to some very clear ideas about what I want in life, and possibly how to achieve that.  Fortes fortuna adiuvat.

Originally published at Transneptune. Please leave any comments there.

In that sense, you suggest that gaming, in fact, pops up everywhere. There’s a lot of stigmatism around the idea that you might sit at home alone playing a computer game—or blogging—or that you might go out to an internet café and play a game with your friends, as if there’s something socially wrong with you; but if you go down to the pub for a game of pool, that’s the height of sociability. That’s the right kind of gaming. So only specific types of games are stigmatized, and only specific types of play have been rewarded.

—BLDGBLOG interview with Jim Rossignol

So. It’s fairly well-reported that every culture has its approved mind-altering substances and its disapproved ones.  Anywhere you are, there’ll be at least alcohol, and quite possibly a plethora of local flora (and sometimes fauna) capable of putting one quite out of one’s senses.  And some of them are OK, and some of them are not, depending what culture you’re in.

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So, I’ve had the notion of reading Daniel Deronda by George Eliot in my head for a bit, but, failing to find it at the bookstore, picked up Silas Marner, also by George Eliot.  I’m proceeding apace through Silas Marner, and was intending to move on to Daniel Deronda, which my mother sent me in the mail, but another book may be inserting itself between them: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.

Given that these books place my current reading within a 60-year period from 1861 to 1920, are there any other things on the must-read list in there?  I’m readjusting to reading fiction, and finding it just the thing.

Originally published at Transneptune. Please leave any comments there.

I object to just posting a comic, particularly without some insight about it, but I really don’t have enough in my early-morning brain to say more than that this comic, while it’s simple, accurately captures my feelings on NDAs.  They’re quite silly.

Originally published at Transneptune. Please leave any comments there.

So, I’ve written a python-based MUC-aware Jabber bot framework, using XMPPpy.  If anyone would be interested in using or improving this, please let me know.  I want it to be of use to people, like a Jabbery version of your IRC-bot framework of choice.  It is currently instantiated only as Tyche, my dicerolling bot for tabletop RPGs online (who also provides some snark when people are predictable in the gaming rooms).  But the more uses it finds, the moar betterer it gets, right?

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A friend of mine went to school in Hong Kong with someone named Athens FitzCheung (correct me on this, Karen?).  This name is awesome.  It only recently struck me that Vienna Teng has a surprisingly similar name.

More to the point, Austin and I saw her live tonight, at the etown taping at the Boulder Theater.  She is more amazing than anticipated: pretty, socially conscious, really smart, and most of all astoundingly talented.  With versatility like you’ve not seen in a long time.  She went from classically-informed current singer/songwriter to “didn’t Alan Lomax record this?” in a moment.

Bottom line: check her out.