jeffpaulsen

Jeff said he watched the wall go up. He never expected to see it come down in his lifetime. Some wonderful things are possible, and remain possible.

Since my last post, there was another earthquake, the Afghan election re-running was cancelled, and the Halloween decorations have come down. It is this last that I wanted to share about. We had lots of these gel, sticky decorations that are made for windows: spiders, bats, ghosts, pumpkins and the like. As we don’t have any windows in our office, we had put them up on the monitors and whiteboards. I was standing in the office holding a jack-o-lantern gel when a co-worker says, “I’ll bet you two bucks that you can’t stick it to the ceiling.” Well, never one to back down from a challenge, I grin and climb on the desk and fling it up to the ceiling, which is about 14 feet up. Still smiling, I hold out my hand and he proffers the two bucks. That’s a coffee for me! This starts a chain of events in which everyone now is involved with finding all the gel decorations that have been put up and chucking them up to the ceiling. Some of them stuck pretty flat, but a good number of them are sort of hanging like ectoplasm from Ghostbusters. After almost a week, they show no signs of falling off, though. I guess the cement of the ceiling is pretty porous.

I pretty much got everything I wanted this weekend.  We won (did I mention that? we WON) our competition.  I at least partially cleaned my room.  I developed a theory of the case for my trial tomorrow (eep) and got my partners on track, got through my facts section for my opinion (yeah, like that doesn't sound like an oxymoron), found pix of boobs in my emails, and am currently negotiating what the win t-shirts for MC should say.

Things that amuse me: L discovering Pacific NW riesling agrees with her. "May it please the motherfucking court."  My sister asking for a dog sweater for her puppy's first birthday. Yoga pants. the giant pile of bras drying in our living room.  Winning best brief using the word "l33t" and a yo mama joke.  The size of our trophy (pix are coming!).

I am going to write it and lock it down to only the people who request to be added to the list due to the graphic nature of the blog. There are photos of me killing a goat, and skinning various animals (I am not sure what all I will add until I start writing) and if you are ok with that and want to read it, answer here or ping me in message or im and I will add you. If you are at all into foodie stuff, it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life and I would love to share it with you!

Parris will soon be on her way home to take care of the cats, before they start rioting and have wild parties. So I'm pressing on by myself. Arrived in London a few hours ago. Signing at Forbidden Planet on the 11th.

Best Argument: elshadye
3d Best Argument: Me

Best Brief: Us

Overall Winner?  Us.


All these things come with BIG GLASS TROPHIES and MONEY.   

To mah Bethy (TEAM 3 FTW) and the inimicable Ger....Gir... uh... well, the guy my mom once called my "sex kitten."

It has been nearly a week since The Big Broadcast of 1938 went up at the Somerville Theatre. I can say without reservation that it was worth it. Thrashing my voice, getting the Martian Sickness afterwards, feeling completely overwhelmed... everything. It was all worth it, and I'd do it again; after I graduate.

I had a couple of people ask me what it felt like to be performing on the same stage as U2 and Bruce Springsteen and so on, and the answer is "I didn't think about it much." There's plenty to pay attention to without standing there looking astounded. If anything, I thought about it as adding to the legacy, instead of basking in someone else's.


Then again, when I got there a little bit before call time, and there were no other actors around, I walked onto that stage.

Ka-click, ka-click, ka-click, ka-click, ka-click, step, shift, stop.

I stood on that stage, and I looked at the 900 empty chairs, and I closed my eyes, and I listened, and for that small, finite, and yet immeasurable amount of time, I did feel the magic, and I understood the history I was about to become part of, and I allowed myself to be in awe.

Then? Well, there was a rehearsal to get ready for, and the green rooms were downstairs.

Ka-click, ka-click, ka-click, ka-click, ka-click, step, pause.

"Good night."

Ka-click.

Lights.

I just tried a slice of the tongue, which was salt cured and then air dried... all I can say is wow, it is really good! I think it is one of the best salumi I've made so far. Gorgeous texture, color and flavor. It probably would have been better weighted/pressed. I think I am going to do a beef tongue and I will press it. I'll grab it when Else and I are at the Asian store on Monday. I am really pleased with how it came out and I will likely make a few for Boars' hunt for Else's feast since I think it will freeze well and be a really nice/easy cold item. I am having dinner with friends next Saturday and I think I will bring a healthy sampling of it. mmmmm I am not sure why I am still surprised when home made salumi is so much better than what you can buy? I don't think they allow American makers to dry it properly at 50-60 degrees.

Just tons of cooking to do today. I am prepping for for the dinner tonight, plus food for this weekend at Ariah's. Lasagna and tri tip, potato salad and sandwiches, breakfast sandwiches with home made pancetta.

Still need to:
Crisp up the crostate
Make bechamel
assemble the lasagna
Stage all the stuff I need for tonight
Truss and start the pork
Grind the sausage
Stuff the calamari
Make the caper parsley sauce

And here we are in Dublin. Ireland has been exciting but exhausting. We had a huge turnout last night for the signing at Eason's, with a queue that seemed to go on forever, but I finally scrawled everyone into submission, and afterwards I signed all the stock as well. If you missed the signing, or happen to live a thousand leagues away, you can still get an autographed copy of the SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH hardcover or any of the Ice & Fire paperbacks by phoning, emailing, or dropping by Eason's on O'Connell Street. They even have a few trade paperbacks of DREAMSONGS.

Afterwards we adjourned to a nearby pub for a lively evening of Guinness and conversation with the local fans. I met the good folk who will be running next year's Octocon, where I'll be GOH, and hoisted a few with the hardy survivors of the Eason's event. Didn't stagger back to the our hotel till after midnight, by which time Temple Bar was roaring. Ah, if only I were twenty years younger...

The Belfast event on Tuesday was also a hoot and a half. The crowd was much bigger at Dublin, but in Belfast some of the cast of the HBO pilot dropped by to sign books and meet the fans as well. My thanks to Ron Donachie, Richard Madden (Best Dressed Man in Scotland), Alfie Allen, Kit Harington, Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner (and their moms) for joining the festivities. And to the lovely Ros, Esme Bianco, who dropped by McHughes afterwards for the moot. Matthew Hughes, one of the authors who contributed to our Vance tribute anthology, also turned up at Eason's to help me sign SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH.

In between signing and mooting, I've been hanging round the shoot, trying not to get underfoot. "How is it going?" everyone wants to know. I think it's going great. Wednesday's location was amazing, so real I could hardly tell where the real castle ended and our fake castle began. I saw Bran and Tommen swatting at each other in the yard, Joffrey taunting Robb, the Hound growling at Ser Rodrik, while Arya displayed her wretched needlework to Jon above, and it all looked wonderful. Saw some of the footage from the crypts too, and that looked amazing as well. Yes, some things are not exactly as they were in the books, that's inevitable with any adaptation... but these are my characters and this is my story, and it's thrilling to see 'em come to life.

Last night in Belfast I got to meet two more of the cast, quite unexpectedly. Some of the Moroccan players were in Ireland for costume fittings. I ran into Ian McNeice for a brief moment outside the hotel, as we were waiting for our rides, and the night before we bumped into Dany -- the amazing Tamzin Merchant, who is even more beautiful in person than she is on screen -- into the dining room. What a terrific cast Nina Gold has assembled.

Also toured the Paint Hall, though we didn't do any shooting there while I was in Belfast. Some of our sets are going up, and look great. And in another part of the building the huge castle sets from the big budget (compared to us, anyway) feature YOUR HIGHNESS are still standing. Their great hall is pretty eye-popping and they built an impressive castle yard as well.

Tomorrow I'm off to London . Signing at Forbidden Planet on the 11th, Then it's off to Marrakech.

Life is magical and full of joy (but no, I have not been seeking out football scores, so don't tell me. TIVO is getting all my games).

This list business is definitely helping me get 'er done. Today I:

1. Contacted my internship professor.
2. Made a couple more favicons for Agile.
3. Did some handwashed laundry.
4. Made art for Orycon, a cute purple monster.
5. Cleaned the living room and kitchen.
6. Had lunch with a friend.
7. Exercised my abs.
8. Did homework.
9. Read another chapter in my HTML/CSS book.
10. Tidied my room.
11. Activated my new debit card (something I'd been putting off for weeks; no, it makes no sense.
12. Returned a phone call.

A slutty Santa party.  Yep.  Get on that, people.  I'll be home Dec. 22d. (actually the 21st, but considering jet lag, I make you no promises)

Start here.  Add eggnog.  Stir.

I have not been posting as much lately because I've been busy trying to kick Mary's butt in Bejeweled (and the rest of my friends). I am also, probably for the first time in my life, experiencing a mild depression. It just means I am tired... like in a weird brain-tired way. And I am kind of distracted and snappish; I feel more brittle around the edges than usual.

Like yesterday in class I was the server for Claude's table. ( Read more... )

Today's Subject might reasonably be Everything you know is Wrong, because I've got a lot of articles to share talking about things we know that just ain't so.

Iran continues to have a revolution in very slow motion. (Aside: in historical terms, I don't believe that this is especially slow motion. Our generation has watched the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of the Internet, and we expect to see things happen in real-time, and that's not how things actually happen; each of those events, which seemed to happen very, very quickly, was the culmination of decades of underlying internal shifts in the countries involved. The Fall of the Berlin Wall didn't cause the collapse of the GDR, the Fall of the Wall was the final evidence that the GDR had collapsed) A recent article in the NYTimes looks at the current state of play, and strongly suggests that the Green Movement missed a chance to simply overthrow the regime back in June. Josh Shahryar, who writes The Green Brief and has been doing excellent work gathering together ongoing reports of what's going on in the country as the Western Press has been thrown out and the domestic opposition press has been shut down, has written a response to the NYTimes article, and it's very, very good.

The notion that US Manufacturing has collapsed as production has been outsourced to China, India, Eastern Europe, and the Third World generally seems to have been thoroughly absorbed into the national zeitgeist, whether you're on the right, the left, or a small furry green creature from Alpha Centauri. The thing of it is, it isn't true. The US manufactures four times what China does, and the US' share of global manufacturing exceeds the total of China, India, Brazil, and Russia combined. And while the US lost 2.6 million manufacturing jobs between 1996 and 2004, China lost 25 million. I suppose in some sense that means that they've endured less pain, because they've got twenty times as many people, but they've only lost ten times as many jobs. But that's a very strange way to look at it.

There are new studies showing that, in at least some sorts of cases, primates learn better from success than from failure. So much for that old adage.

Some of you know that I am fond of rotating restaurants. I had been under the impression that these are a modern innovation. Apparently I'm wrong. It seems that Nero had one, part of his Golden Palace, overlooking Rome from the Palatine Hill. The main banquet room had a diameter of more than 16 meters, and rested on a water-powered mechanism that rotated it continuously.

Transit is always greener than private vehicles. Well, actually, if you're in the US, not necessarily, because we're really, really bad at it. Also, an awful lot of our cities, like San Francisco, are in a nasty sour spot where we try to make up for not having the urban density to reasonably pay for transit by cutting the schedules and speed of the transit system enough that it's only sometimes useful. San Jose is worse. Although Portland is pretty cool.

Some people are just born lucky. Well, actually, not exactly. A lot of the things we call Luck are the result of how people look at and interact with the world. But that's not the cool thing, some of us have claimed that all of our adult lives.The cool thing is that there's now research showing that it's a trainable skill.

Microsoft has one of the larger research organizations in the Computing industry, and employs a substantial fraction of all programmers in the industry. This means that, should they choose to do so, they have the ability to collect more hard research data on the actual process of creating software than, well, most other players. Among other interesting things, they now have hard data showing how effective broadly distributed teams perform compared against teams working closely together in the same building. As you've probably guessed by now, the real predictor of success is not is the team geographically distributed or do they all see each other every day. This will not be a surprise to some software developers.

While we're on the subject of software, another standing question is How much does it cost to make software more secure? Well, it all depends on what your required standard of software quality is. Essentially, the fewer defects you're willing to release with, the lower the cost to improve the security of you're software. It's not quite fair to include this one, I've been telling people for close to a decade that most of the things you do to make software secure are the things that you do to make software reliable, it's nice to see corroboration from the outside world.

And now for something completely different. In 1943, Jack Warner (y'know, the guy who imprisoned Yakko, Wakko, and Dot) was asked by the US Government to make a Pro-Stalin propaganda film to be shown to the American public. The result was a strange thing called Mission to Moscow, which got a lot of people involved into a lot of trouble when HUAC rolled around, even though the film was not a commercial success and was not that widely viewed. Hat tip to shoutingboy for the link to the NY Post article on the film, where I learned about it. Very wacky.

While we're on the subject of film, Philippe Petit, the man who did a 45-minute tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, when they were still under construction and only partially open, is currently on a screening tour, showing the 2008 film Man on Wire, an amazing documentary about the feat. The film itself was constructed using footage taken by his friends in the early seventies, while they were planning and performing the stunt, and combining it with modern interviews and reconstructions. I particularly want ariyanakylstram and vito_excalibur to see it - it's stunning. The walk was not remotely sanctioned by the Port Authority or the City &emdash; after his walk, the NYPD thrashed for a bit, trying to decide what to do with him. Ultimately, they sent him for psychiatric testing, and eventually dropped the charges and gave him permanent visitor access to the observation deck. Although they did choose to deport some other members of his team. But it was an amazing feat, and an amazing film. Sadly, I didn't find out about the screening tour until too late to get to yesterday's showing in Napa.

I've posted before about how appallingly bad eyewitness accounts are, and that we're beginning to learn how to fake DNA evidence. Science marches on, however, and now we're learning how to implant falsified memories in fruitflies. For Science!

The Pew Research folks have been looking into the impact of Internet use on the American public, particularly things like social isolation and the effects of social networking. As may not be entirely surprising to this audience, being involved online leads people to have more diverse social networks, with more connections across class, race, and political divides.

Nate Silver, the statistician who runs FiveThirtyEight.com, has a nice article up on 15 questions to ask to gut-check predictions of close elections. Tasty stuff for helping you figure out what those conflicting poll numbers mean.

The Office is not one of the most pleasant pieces of Anglo-American television, but a lot of people find it riotously funny. Here is an interesting article about the underlying arguments the show makes about Corporate heirarchy.

Carville's Democracy Corps has been running focus groups of Conservatives, asking them what they think about the government and the state of the union. Conservative Republicans feel very, very alone. I won't comment further, beyond observing that it's extremely interesting reading.

Finally, I'd like to give this year's Mechanical Turk award to the folks over at Galaxy Zoo, who have an online site where visitors categorize astronomical images to identify what sort of astronomical features are shown in the image. They're trying to categorize the more than a quarter million galaxy images that have been collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and humans are a lot better at doing this than computers are. Go check it out, and consider spending a few minutes of your time helping classify a galaxy or five.

Dumb internets went down at 1:00am.

Yesterday, the Stacy did more stuff, including but not limited to:

1. Met with portfolio instructor.
2. Went to class, biking both ways.
3. Did homework for both classes.
4. 50 ab crunches.
5. Closed out my space at the antique mall and rid myself of the detritus.
6. Made art.
7. Did laundry.

Woot.

It's of no great importance, but how well was the video programming recieved?
Also, if it is not too personal, what was the con's final attendance?
Thanks in advance! ^_^

hi everyone. please excuse any misspellings in the post. I was at SteamCon and selling these cute little things http://xxthefirecatxx.deviantart.com/art/the-Three-138262113
http://xxthefirecatxx.deviantart.com/art/Grimold-the-first-135830833
http://xxthefirecatxx.deviantart.com/art/Scrapper-138725596
http://xxthefirecatxx.deviantart.com/art/Min-yon-and-his-new-friend-142456175
http://xxthefirecatxx.deviantart.com/art/the-macanics-assistant-142456366
the thing is is that not many of the people that got them have contacted me. I would like to get ahold of them so that I can send them the pictures of them with their new pets. if any of you are out there please contact me (chaos_bear@hotmail.com) I also would like to know the names of the new owners so I can put names to faces.

cross posted from steampunk fashion

Definitely not in this order:

1. Biked to the grocery store.
2. Biked down to PSU.
3. Read a chapter in my HTML/CSS book.
4. Worked on resolving a situation.
5. Made some art for the Orycon art show.
6. Studied for tomorrow's vocab quiz.
7. Did homework for my portfolio class.
8. Washed the green skirt that's needed special attention for about a month.
9. Did more ab crunches. Tired of being flabbarific.
10. Cleaned half the downstairs.
11. Contacted my internship boss about my hours and did some more work for Agile.
12. Made favicons for the first time ever.
13. Cooked dinner. Cinnamon chicken with kale and jasmine rice with carrots.

So we got some time to hang out with some amazing people, and i agree with Ula there needs to be som kind of  Edmonton convergence, just sayin'...

I always enjoy the challenge of taking available light pictures at gatherings, but it is surely a challenge.  Here are the shots i took from this year.




Gallery