This has been a really bad winter up here, right? Please tell me this has been a really bad winter.

This was a lovely weekend with friends and birthdays and Rock Band at home and Rock Band at friends' homes and all the great stuff that that entails. However, if you've been paying attention lately, you know I have a hard time putting virtual pen to virtual paper in journal fashion these days, so for the sake of getting anything down, I'm going to need to breeze past all that goodness in order to share two stories of a weekend with a headstrong two year old boy.

1) laura_md and I were stretched out on the futon resting while Jack was watching his evening movie (Kiki's Delivery Service is his current favorite, if you're curious. He tends to slowly drift between a few different Pixar and Miyazaki classics). Eventually Jack wanted to stretch out with us too, but Spoo had already taken up most remaining space. To solve this problem, Jack found a toy of Spoo's, waved it in front of Spoo's face until he got all excited, then ran off down the hall with it, Spoo trailing. We hear a door close. Jack comes back alone and starts climbing up on the futon.

Us: Jack? Where's Spoo?

Jack: He's gone.

Us: Shouldn't Spoo come back?

Jack: No. He's in Quiet Time.

2) At last night's Rock Band party, for the first time ever, Jack nominated me to do something. He's actually become pretty decent at taking turns at this point. Still, I was a little taken aback when after the first song Jack said "Ohhhh! Okay! Daddy's turn for drums!" I let him know I was happy to just watch, but he was fairly insistent: "No, no. Daddy's turn!" I managed to talk him down, but the drummer needed to hop out mid-song on the next set, so I acquiesced to the demand of my adoring fans and prepared to take over the throne. Before I could jump back in though, I felt a tug at my leg as Jack started climbing into my lap then pulling at the drumsticks. "Daddy's turn" mostly consisted of hitting the foot pedal while the kidlet got to Ringo-out on my lap.

He's a handful and a half, but he's fun.

Sometimes, my job requires me to do awful things, like throw myself into a cesspool of putrid decay. If I don't return, speak of me fondly. I'll try to post pics on my Flickr account right up until the point of my untimely demise.

Ha ha! GRRM cooks up how Jaime Lannister might possibly defeat the Dread God Cthulhu:

http://grrm.livejournal.com/140797.html

Warning, there's a significant spoiler if you're not fairly up to date on your Ice and Fire lore!

Jaime laughed. "What, me?" He took a sip of wine. "Sometimes a little terror just makes a man fight harder."

"They're talking about a lot of terror," said the dwarf. "Not the fight-harder kind, alas. The shit-your-breeches-and-curl-up-in-a-ball kind."

We're doing a multi-post story on the process of developing the original art for Bastion over on the work blog right now. It was a remarkably fun and rewarding process putting in the work to make it happen and watching it all come together, so hopefully it will be an interesting read. And at the end of the series we'll be showing off one of our first completed portraits, which is absolutely fantastic if I'm allowed to say such things...I admit I may be a bit biased.

If you'd like to follow along,
RSS feed is here: http://10x10room.wordpress.com/feed/
LJ syndicated feed is here: 10x10room

Oh that would be me. I would be the idiot.

A couple days ago I posted about how I was struggling to work on a five year old Mac mini because I was trying to find a way to get my Mac laptop's software to run in a desktop environment. Guess what? A five minute Google search taught me that you can run your Mac laptop closed with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse plugged in (pro tip: it only works if the power cord is connected).

So here I am, sitting at my desk working on my Mac, and it's not even horribly terribly painfully slow. Science! \o/

In my seemingly neverending quest to figure out a decent Ruby editing environment for my desktop system*, I've dusted off my old, still functional(!) Mac mini from 2005 (http://apple-history.com/?page=gallery&model=mac_mini), dug up a keyboard for it and plugged it into my monitor and am currently in the process of installing a few months (years?) worth of software patches. I'm not sure when the last time was that I tried to work on a five year old computer, though, and those G4 chips weren't exactly speedy when they were new. It's...interesting to watch Gmail struggle to load. Wave is Right Out. But hey, it runs Textmate, and apparently if you're a real Ruby hacker, you either work in Textmate or you wish you did. I'm tired of being in the latter category.

The poor box is trying so hard to install Rails right now. I think I'll go see how much a new mini goes for these days.


* The history of trying to build Ruby scripts on my desktop workstation (as opposed to my Mac laptop) is as follows: 1) Try to get a Ruby editor that works well on Windows. Install various Ruby stacks and editors, all of them are clunky at best. 2) Try to set up the desktop as a dual-boot Windows/Linux system. As always, always happens when I try to do this, the boot record on the hard drive quickly becomes unrecoverable and won't boot into anything. Reinstall Windows, curse loudly and frequently. 3) Set up a hardware virtualization system on Windows and install Ubuntu on that system. This is ok, but the hardware virtualization drivers don't recognize my mouse wheel, and it's hard to give up being able to use the mouse wheel to scroll windows up and down, let me tell you. And here we are.

Someday, I have to find the time to write about life, the choices I've made recently, and what I'm up to. Today is not that day. But I would like to say that work has been more rewarding in the last couple of days than it has been in a long, long time, and that's pretty exciting. More to come, as soon as I can find some time to post!

HAI GUYZ! One of my New Years Resolutions that I didn't make this year (because I never make New Years Resolutions) was to start posting into my professional blog. Because, hey, it's intended for nifty stuff I like talking about, so there's really no good reason not to sit my butt down in the chair and do it. So I finally did it today! You can check it out here: http://10x10room.wordpress.com/. I really want to start posting weekly. It's fun, and I have plenty more I want to talk about. Please check it out and comment over there if you'd like to discuss. It's intended to be a two-way (multi-way?) conversation!

...who may be wondering WTF happened in this state such that Kennedy's Senate seat is looking way more likely to go to a GOP candidate than it ever should have, Brian McGrory does a pretty good job of summing up.

The key points for the TL;DR set:

"Back in December, Coakley beat her closest opponent by 19 points in a primary in which she got stronger by the day.... So what did she do? Apparently, she’s tried to accomplish the impossible. Literally, she all but vanished."

"Scott Brown may not share the political values of most of the state and may lack the experience for the US Senate. And, let’s be honest, his nights probably aren’t tied up with Mensa meetings. But he’s out there hustling, meeting, asking, and convincing. People respect that, a lot."

Also, Coakley's TV ads are some of the most life-sucking counterproductive pieces of drivel I've ever seen. I want to stab out my eyes whenever she comes on the screen. Probably not the best strategy.