Well, it looks like I'll be moving offices for the third time in as many months, but this one's only temporary, and I'll keep my old office.

I've been a lot busier of late, and I've got to find a way to bring meaningful blogging (as opposed to meme-linking) back into my daily process. I've got to find a time and a place to blog, and then put it into my schedule.

Tonight's Poker night at Google (which, considering Poker night at TiVo, either means I'm becoming an addict or a shark (or both)). After Poker is Rachel's and my last waltz class with Richard Powers.

Tomorrow is Friday Night Waltz, then a blessed break where Rachel and I can play catchup on our lives after too many full weekends.

Rachel's been doing such a bang-up job on her own personal site that I'm really inspired to enact more of my own web visions, but then there's this whole job thing that cuts into my play time.

Wanh, wanh. Pity me. I'm too successful for my own good.

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Well, it's the end of week one, and where else would I be on a Sunday afternoon but at work?

No, it's completely by choice. I wanted to get a head start (sooo many meetings last week) and it's always nice to get a little work done when the office is quiet.

In other news, as my Mom has already mentioned in the comments of the previous posts, I got the two bedroom, 2.5 bath townhouse I really wanted. My landlord-to-be bought the place when it was built, and has lived there for the last 18 years, only now his sister and her husband are relocating to Guadalahara for three or four years, for work purposes, and he's moving in to their house, where he just has to pay utilities.

So moving out of his place and renting it out means he gets to live in a million dollar house in Los Altos and gets to collect rent on his own place in the meantime. Quite the sweet deal.

Sweet for me too, since it means I'm living in a townhouse worth nearly a half-million (gak!). It has beautiful new hardwood floors and the place has been kept-up perfectly. I get to move in a week from today!

Last night my cousins Steve and Susan, Jill, and Randy and Debbie were all in town at the same time, like some planetary alignment. (Well, Jill lives in Palo Alto, so that's no huge coincidence.) I came over for dinner and to hang out with the next generation. I was the only one there without kids!

Spending time with them, I felt closer to them than in a long time. I'm absolutely going to make a point of spending more time with Jill and the kids, in addition to driving down to LA more often.

Stuff stuff stuff stuff. So come Sunday I'l have the keys to an empty living space, and I'll need to fill it. My stuff from Pittsburgh should be in a truck and on it's way before the end of the week, but in the meantime I have a two-bedroom apartment's worth of stuff in storage in Berkeley, and here and there in a few friends' houses. I'm going to take a look at getting a U-Haul to trundle the furniture and boxes down from Berkeley to Mountain View, or I could hire movers. I've got to go to the space and do a little accounting of what I have, what I want, and what, if anything, I'll need to leave in storage a bit longer.

Then there's the stuff in Los Angeles. The ten days of going through Dad's house with Mom and Susie has yeilded about 10 boxes of 'near-term' items I want to incorporate into my own life, as well as a few more 'long-term' items for when I end up getting a house of my own.

Luckily, the townhouse has a garage that's longer than a car, so I may have some room to put things. Or there's always storage.

This morning was more hangoutage with the cousins, and this evening is friend hangoutage and spaghetti dinner. I meant to get a new cellphone today, realizing that both my phone's form factor (bar of soap) and service provider (T-Mobile) are ill-equipped to serve as my mobile communication solution. I'm interested in trying out the Treo 600, but it doesn't come out until October at the earliest. Now that I'm working full-time again, portable IM and email aren't as important as they were on campus. AT&T has one of the best coverage blankets in the Bay Area, and I'm thinking of the Nokia 3650 or the Ericsson T616. They both have bluetooth, and both have cameras (yeah, a gimick, I know. That is, until I set up the phonecam-to-weblog gateway and can blog pictures on the fly).

I just want a phone that fits in my jeans pocket, and though none of them approach the sveltitude of my old Nokia 8290, that phone only works on Cingular and T-Mobile, both of which share the same spotty network in the Bay Area (unlike in Pittsburgh, where T-Mobile covers you like a bolt of wool!). I'll take a look at the phones in person and give one a 30-day trial. It couldn't be worse than the Sidekick, which dropped my call no les than 5 times in 90 minutes while talking to Rachel today.

Well, that's it for now. Tomorrow is the one-two punch of Plough and Death Guild, which Karen says is okay because everyone expects you to come in bleary-eyed on the Tuesday after Labor Day.

I hope everyone has a nice, calming, fruitful month in September! Don't forget your 'Rabbit, rabbit!' tonight, if you're a latenighter, or in the morning otherwise. You'll thank yourself for it!

Oh yeah, and tomorrow I'll write in and tell you about my unexpected dental visit on Friday, and my plan to save a cherished tooth through sheer will.

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So in a half day I start my first day at Google. So much backblog stuff to write about: the road trip, my sister's birthday party at the Inn of the Seventh Ray, coming back home, apartment hunting (sooo excited now that I have a rental application in at a 2 bedroom townhouse in Mountain View that I'm highly enamored of), house painting at Karen and Crystal's brand new house (they got the keys Friday!) (Crystal just said, apropos of nothing, "We're not just talking about house. We're doing house!") They're incredibly excited, and so am I.

We painted two rooms today, and painted clouds in one of them. It's a fun place.

Okay, now off to dancing, then sleep, then Google, then to see a cottage in case the townhouse doesn't go through, then Plough (more dancing), then sleep, and repeat!

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Happy Beltane, everyone! Would that I had the time and opportunity to dance up the sun this year.

Would that I had the opportunity to sleep. Well, I'm going to try, before coming back to my slavedriving powerbook.

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Sitting at gate 2, terminal one, Southwest Airlines. Thanks to ample construction along Pacific Coast Highway, a 40 minute airport sortie took nearly two hours and skidding through security and up to the gate at 7:07 for a 7:10 departure is exactly 30 seconds too late.

NEVER plan on taking the last flight out.

Luckily, though it was the last flight to San Jose, and the first morning flight would get me there too late for the wedding, there's another flight in 40 minutes to Oakland. The LAST flight out.

So now instead of a nice evening with Ammy and Rick, I'm off to a night of retro-eighties dancing at New Wave City with Karen and Crystal, unless good sense gets the better of me and I work on my game design assignment instead.

Cest la vie, in the purest form.

I hope your weekend is happy without being quite so eventful.

Oh yeah; yay Cal, and go Raiders. Okay, done now.

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As promised: New Years Eve pics. Commentary to follow, except to say that I just love these four pics, especially the ghost dancers. Wonderful digital camera serindipity.

(click to enlarge)

If anyone's interested in the full source for the ghost dance pic, let me know and I'll put it up.

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I feel the obligatory need to post something today.

Dickens Fair was great, danced a lot, ran errands in Berkeley, came home, and will be going out to Gaskells Ball in about an hour.

I got so many warm fuzzies today, and I'm not even at the Ball yet. It's a good day.

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So today is my last day of classes for the semester. I still have a final on Monday, and a final presentation the day after, but as far as class goes, I have my last session of Communication Design Fundamentals in a little over an hour, and that's it.

I'm sure it's partly the snow, partly the fact that I'm coming off an all-nighter, after coming off 4 hours of sleep (6am-10am) on Tuesday night (Wednesday morning), and partly having far more exciting stuff to do than time to do it, but it's literally incredible to me that the semester's essentially over. Incredible, as in not credible, as in I understand the concept, yet cannot give credit to the prospect of its validity. Sure, I still have work to turn in in three of my classes, one of which I haven't started yet, and sure I have a final that could snap me like a tiny twig of logic, but I'm not the only one. A lot of people are in a daze, looking vaguely like they should be passing their yearbooks around for people to sign, but they forgot to make yearbooks in the first place.

Okay, enough with that. Time to enumerate stuff:

There's snow on the ground and lots of it. I checked Weather.com at 4am and saw Pennsylvania covered in dark white (heh, 'dark white' makes sense if you look at a precipitation map). I looked out the window and saw the world covered in softness. Don't worry Ali, I got your snowscaped graveyard picture. I just need to get home to download it. I forgot to bring the cable. The snow's about 5 inches deep; just enough to change a road from a right to a privilege. The forecast is pretty clear for the next week, but the temperature will sway from 36 to 8, so I don't see much of this stuff clearing away before I take off. I hope my car likes its snowbank.

My powerbook came last Tuesday (wow, two days seems so much longer when you were conscious for 49 of the intervening 53 hours), and I've barely had time to give it its due, much less revel in it here. Fittingly enough, I'm typing on it now in the UC center, its frosted silver mirrors the suddenly winterized world just outside the double-paned glass. I haven't had time to install enough apps or docs on it to feel comfortable giving it dominion over my digital well-being, but somewhere between Tuesday and Thursday I'll be loading it up with my 20gig mp3 dowry, 4gig photo tome, and assorted other data vaults. The thing is truly freaking beautiful. I don't know what more I could want in a machine. I can't reasonably ask for faster than a 1Ghz G4, and the screen constantly seems bigger and brighter than this svelte machine should be able to house. Internal wireless is also a dream come true. Joy.

When I brought the box up from the FedEx guy Tuesday morning, I gently patted my newly-old powerbook, telling it that it would always have a place with me. I have an affinity for my portable machines. In contrast, I'm planning on selling my Quicksilver G4 tower, its noise and continuing depreciation outweighing the little unique utility not duplicated by my sibling powerbooks.

I should have treated my sidekick so well. Nestled in my pocket yesterday, it decided to make a plea for attention, no doubt feeling neglected and threatened by the new baby. It decided to deactivate every other vertical line of pixels, and dim several of the others. Cajoling, rebooting, and eventually slapping it briskly (think baby's first breath, not crying toddler over the knee) to kick'start the display, but to no avail. The true irony (if one can extend anthropomorphosis this far) is that the temper tantrum is backfiring: T-Mobile is sending ad advance-replacement my way this morning, and it'll be here early next week, so the sidekick that wouldn't shape up will now ship out, replaced by a new doe-eyed machine that's never known a world without the G4PB. Now I just have to make sure the powerbook doesn't get jealous. Oh, and a name for the new powerbook? I'm leaning towards 'Sendai.'

What else can I tell you? For the first time in memory I have both of my Congresses of Vienna blocked out for a Gaskell's Ball that's still over two weeks away. Not bad for a country boy. Now I just have to make sure I can still dance.

The Great Blogger Diet hasn't been forgotten or abandoned. On the contrary, there's quite a tale to tell on that front; one that might just rival this post in length, and may even rise to the level of the mythic laundry story, so you'll understand that I want to take my time with it. Some time this weekend. (I just want to add how cool it is that searching for that url was so easy

It's amazing how everything's quieter in the snow. It's like hanging tapestries on the walls, all over the world. Busses driving by no longer chug, but shoosh, and traffic moves slow enough that you don't have to look both ways, just walk with the traffic, going at a downstream angle, just like how they told you to escape a running river.

The air is so quiet, and everyone looks like a student. It feels like a weekend on campus, which is just like a weekday on campus, with authority figures removed.

But I still have a few miles to go before I sleep, and more upon my next waking, so I'll cut this short (even though it's anything but). I could write all day, but I need to turn it to more scholastic ends at the moment.

And yea though I had to trudge through powder to get to a packed damp bus early this morn, I do still so love the snow.

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So last Saturday was the Gaskell's Ball and, being 2600 miles away, I had to miss it this time around. I really haven't done much dancing since I've been out here. I've been going off and on to the SCA dance practices on campus (mosly English country: picking up sticks, milkmaids, kettle drum, jenny, sellenger's round, and the like) but I haven't had a good waltz in too long.

The ballroom dance club on campus has been teaching salsa, swing, samba, and that kind of thing, but I have yet to find a group who dances more or less what I would call 'Victorian Ballroom', polkas, Vienese waltzes, schottishes, all with abandon. I miss it all so.

Still, I'll be in town for the Christmas Gaskells, and I'm really looking forward to that. To get my fill, I'll also go to Dickens Fair the same weekend, either the day of Gaskells or the day after.

Meanwhile, maybe it's time to try expanding my activities here, and see if that subculture exists in Pittsburgh, and has just been eluding me.

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I went to the CMU Ballroom Dance Club's first meeting of the semester last night and it was a blast. Though in form and nature it was almost identical to the UCBD lessons I took five years ago, but my experience here was completely different, because somewhere over those intervening five years I actually learned how to dance. Not necessarily specific dances, but just the general comfort of dance.

It's like learning to play the piano. Learning to dance isn't about learning one kind of dancing, say foxtrot, then learning another, say cha-cha. Learning that way is like learning to play the piano by learning one song, then another song, and another and so on until you're a pianist. No, it's far more effective to learn how to play the piano, then learn songs.

I suppose that's how general dance classes work, but sadly 'pick-up' lessons, like those taught in most clubs, have to cater to all points in the learning curve, so they just teach you the specific dance, like teaching a specific melody.

The good side of this is that nowadays I can pick up these dances in a snap. Lead/Follow ratio was about 1.2:1, which isn't bad, but if UCBD is any indication, it'll oscillate over the course of the semester.

In the absence of a dance-focused circle of friends (I miss Plough/Gaskells/Peers/FNW) I'm also planning on attending the Saturday competition team lessons. It looks to be a fun group, and though I've never tried competition ballroom, it could be a lot of fun.

Only they all do Rotary Waltz out here, not Viennese. We'll have to see what can be done about that.

That, and I'm considering teaching some Irish set dancing... (Ammy? Any advice on a lesson plan? It's been forever since I've spent time in the beginning class at Plough... Oh, and I might need my Starry Plough dance book after all! We'll see...)

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So my camcorder came today, and the building manager signed for it, but he wasn't in when I got home, so I dropped by his office on my way to the Starry Plough at 9, and he was there.

Tromping back up to the top floor with my new tech, I wondered if Sony was cool enough to charge the battery for me. they were, but about half of it had bled off since it left Sony's hands, probably over a month ago.

Still, half a charge was better than none, and I wasted no time (well, maybe a little) getting the beastie to the Plough where I was a wallflower, but a wallflower with a third eye.

Coming home at about 11:30, what else was there to do but fire up iMovie and make my first quicktime? Okay, it's a little rough. I did something wrong when I tried to up the brightness and contrast that resulted in some funky color shifts, but all in all I'm pretty impressed considering the low ambient light and fast action.

I even made you a copy (3 minutes, 4.9 megs). W'hoo!

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Gaskell's Masquerade Ball was a blast last night. It was a little lower-key than past balls (especially halloween balls) but it may have been even more enjoyable for that. People did a great job on costumes all around, and it seemed far more towards positive, fantasy-oriented outfits, rather than anything negative or literal. The ripples are still obviously still with us and will be for some time.

A few windows into the evening:

Here's the entire gallery (unedited, uncorrected, and uncropped).

If anyone wants the high-res version of a pic (1600x1200 instead of 800x600) email me with the file name and I'll get that out to you.

(for a blast of Samhain past, here's last year's gallery)

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First, Romeo & Juliet (L337 version) is really funny if you've spent too much time in chat rooms or on IM, and pretty nonsensical if you haven't. Gotta love flash.

Second, an inpassing moment last night:

Getting into my car, parked at People's Park, at 11pm last night...
• Girl on sidewalk: You leavin'?
• Me: Yeah.
• Girl: 'k, cos I'm gonna cop a squat an' I don't want you to watch me.
  and then she does...

Third, Gaskell's Ball is tonight! Ammy's getting back from Lark in the Morning Camp today, and I finally have to clean the post-Europe luggage explosion from my living room so she'll have someplace to crash after the ball tonight.

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Hey y'all! I'm still working out the kinks with Omnisky. I've been writing blog entries on the palm pilot, planning to post them wirelessly. Most of my blogtime is now on the train an hour to and from work each way, so I'm building up stuff there, without an easy synch method at home.

Regular updates are coming again. I'm fulfilling a promise to myself by going to sleep now, but in so doing, I'll be awake enough throughout the week to blog on the train and/or when I get home at night.

Yahoo! is a great ongoing adventure, as is the commute. Last Friday the train got stuck, the engine died (twice) and though I left my house at 6:45am, I didn't get into work until 11:45. Hopefully tomorrow will be more normal, and I'll be at work by 8:45.

Anyhow, Gaskell's was great on Saturday, though very sparsely attended (I've never seen so empty a Gaskell's Ball), but the upside is I got the chance to dance with some new people, and a few very good dancers.

Off to bed for me now. I have a list of interface-related posts that are in process, and most likely I'll have a large block of posts tomorrow evening or Tuesday. Until then, stay tuned, enjoy, read the arcives, and have a great Monday!

  --Kevin

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Yep, I've got to finish that 'unpublish' feature in Metacookie... I was blithely clicking through all my bookmarks when I noticed that one of them is my 'update fury on metacookie' link. Gar.

Going to the Gaskells Ball tonight. I've still got to pick out what I'm wearing! I'll try to take lots of pictures and put up another gallery, this time with more full shots of the people and clothes rather than poorly lit motion shots.

Have a great Saturday everyone!

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Damn, I accidentally hit the 'update' button for metacookie, so now I feel obligated to write a post. What's going on with me right now? I'm franticly working on the last three weeks of school before graduation (which I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to!)

In the meantime I have a midterm (I'm not sure what's 'mid' about it!) on Tuesday, a short report due tomorrow, a final paper due a week from Tuesday, another one due a week from tomorrow, an in-class presentation on Wednesday, and finals right after that.

It's all okay though, because Gaskells is this weekend and ballroom dancing with beautiful women makes everything okay.

All right, that's it for now, other than to note that for every post I actually write, I have two more notes, either in my palmpilot, my class notebook, or voicemail I've sent to myself, for ideas I want to blog. One day in the near future I'm going to do some serious info-purging.

Have a great Thursday!

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Sans captions, sans prettying up in Photoshop, here are pictures from last weekend's Gaskell's Ball!

Here's a faster mirror.

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So tonight's the Gaskell's Ball. For those of you who don't know, Gaskell's is a bi-monthly formal recreation ball in Oakland. People dress in formalwear from any time or place in the last 250 years and dance. Waltzes, Schottishes, Polkas, Mazurkas, a few set dances like Sir Roger de Coverly and Sallenger's Round, and the Congress of Vienna are examples of the dances.

I've been going pretty much constantly for the last four years, and it's taken a place in my life that mirrors its historical purpose; essentially, it's an occasion to see friends you don't regularly get to see, make new friends, dress up, and feel good about yourself. This is pretty much the purpose of 19th century Vienese bals, except hopefully with a little less snobbery and class distinction.

I've taken pictures at Gaskells before, but with a traditional camera or large digital camera, I didn't end up taking very many because I'd have to put it away when I actually wanted to dance. Now that I have my Digital Elph I have a camera I can actually slip in a pocket while dancing.

So, tonight I'm going to try to truly journal the Gaskell's experience, and try to bring some of what I like about the event to this weblog. To whet your appetite, here's a picture taken at the Christmas Gaskells about 4 years ago:

I hope you all have a great weekend, and I'll try to put the pictures up tomorrow or Monday.

Argh. My costume isn't comping together the way I'd hoped it would. Looks like I'll be wearing something more formal-ish and less costume-ish. Ah well. I'll have to save going oer-the-top for next week's Le Bal des Vampyres.

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Argh, busy week. I'm working on our first interactive prototype for my groups web project in UI Design class, I'm still working on AOLiza and Cameo updates, as well as changes to this very page, I have tons of reading to catch up on in my other classes (Cogsci, CogNeuro and Philosophy), not to mention something happening nearly every night this week, and the Gaskells Ball on Saturday. I have no idea what I'm going to wear.

To top it off I'm starting to make some serious grad school decisions and breaking ground on applications, and at the same time I'm arranging interviews at interactive companies, because I'm still undecided as to whether I should go back to my career (which I really enjoy) or head straight to grad school to get my HCI masters (which I would probably also enjoy).

And, of course, my TeleBears tade for Spring Class registration is on Thursday, so I have to get that figured out as well or I won't graduate in the Spring at all!

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I'm going to Valhalla Faire this weekend, playing and dancing with the Travellers Union and Merrie Pryanksters. I'll bring my camera so I'll have something to share when I get back.

If I really get moving today (and the IKEA movers who are dropping off Karen's sofa appear towards the latter end of their 4-hour window) I may actually get a few Cameo cameras ready to disseminate at faire as well.

Anyhow, if you're in the Lake Tahoe region this weekend (or next, it runs two weekends) go to the faire! Having worked most of the Northern California ren faires, I can say without a doubt that this is the best one. Not as big as Novato (now Vacaville), and definitely not as commercialized, it's a real blast filled with a lot of people having real fun, and you can't beat the forest location.

Hope y'all have a great weekend whatever you do!

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I spent far too long this evening working on Sendmail, BIND, and weblog analysis.

I intended to go to the Starry Plough, but it wasn't destined to happen I suppose. Now I'm off to sleep. I'll have some breakfast questions for you in the morning, so be ready with your spoon!

G'night.

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