MISC FRIDAY NIGHT

Got the next Stargate Atlantis eps, "Home" and "The Storm" which is Part 1 of 2, the Part 2 of which will not be airing until 10 weeks from now. Sigh - it's going to be a very ... long ... 10 ... weeks.

Took my lawnmower down to the parents' house because the motor is chugging badly and eventually quits. Asked the neighbor's son to take care of my front lawn for $20 because I wasn't sure how long it'd take to fix my mower. Shouldn't have worried - about an hour at the shop and Dad had it running again. And, having watched him, I think I'll be able to take care of it if it happens again in a few years which might also include replacing the whole brush assembly. No program!

After the mower I helped Dad with the kreepy pump. Seems it had a little meltdown and various rubber parts in various deep-inside places had to be replaced. As I watched (and sometimes assisted) him go from the workbench to the press to the home-made tool he cut from a solid block of aluminum to the lathe to modify another piece, I wondered what ordinary people who didn't have a machine shop and engineering degree available did when stuff stopped working. My guess is they pay the people who have access to the machine shop and engineering degrees ...

Since I had the tape with me (and I seem to have created SGA addicts out of my parents ;), we watched those two episodes. Very well done, and I look forward to seeing "Home" again since the second time around it'll be from a different perspective. I'll just have to be careful and keep my mouth shut when I watch it with Tonbo and the guys on Sunday since that will be their first viewing.

WORK TRAVEL

Trip to the client site for a presentation, and then the 7 am flight back tomorrow morning (ugh). How lovely it will be not have to be on an am flight unless it's to some place I really want to go.

Presentation went well. Started late, less participants that scheduled, but they stayed late which was impressive because other have left the minute the meeting was scheduled to end. Now the really work begins which means I'm going to be busy for the next few week (for a change).

Didn't bring my camera and didn't really have time to wander around, but there's new statues to take pics of, so I'll have to remember to pack it next time I'm out this way.

DALLAS WORLD AQUARIUM

Morning was the annual Aki Matsuri (fall festival) put on by Fujitsu. Lots of fun. Met up with some friends Tonbo & I haven't seen in while, so that was also cool. Hot, but I guess that's still average for mid-September in Texas. :)

The afternoon was my office party at the Dallas World Aquarium. Hadn't been there is years, and oh my have they added a whole lot of very cool stuff. Whole 'nother building in fact. And the little enclosed area for the jaguars now holds freakin' huge river otters. Easy to see why they are at the top of their food chain. jaguar temple is very cool and I got some absolutely wonderful pictures. A caretaker was feeding the flamingos right beside the jaguar area and the spotted cat was very interested in her movements.

While on the bridge in the rain forest, Tonbo & I were watching the monkeys in the trees. Both of us were really surprised when this huge light grey shadow glided around the corner beneath us and then faded down into the depths. Manatee, and actually a young one I found out later. You can read about the 2 manatees we saw on the DWA site. We saw them again (and they seemed a lot smaller :) on the below-the-water level where one entire wall is a window. Gentle, funny, graceful-in-very-oversized-way guys that just kind of float around munching on lettuce. Before we left, Tonbo bought me a little plush manatee and I call him Manny.

Overall, a really great day

WWW.FANDONE.COM

I just launched my latest Web site: http://www.fandone.com/ with its first item - the Alpha Tee.

Got mine last night and had a lot of fun coming up with Firefly phrases for the pictures. Black or white, Lady's or Men's style shirts with a Velcro patch on the front. Then you get letters, numbers, and punctuation marks to create whatever message you want to wear (just remember to take them off before you wash it :).

Today I have "SKY CAPTAIN" on because Tonbo and I going to see the movie tonight.

The point of fandone.com as a whole is to promote fan-made (or 3rd party)items that don't infringe on the original copyrights and make enough money to create more stuff and help pay for promotional events, like our Browncoats table at the Dallas Comic Con, Oct. 23-24, 2004.

The Alpha Tee is 3rd party, but enough points and we can get some stuff to use as
contest prizes or for our promotional events. More stuff (that will hopefully pay for itself and then generate a little cash) will be up in the coming weeks, and I'll post about that as well. ;)

The Alpha Tee is cool because it's one shirt that can support any fandom, or mood, or personal philosophy by communicating whatever message you choose, at whatever time you want to display it. And it makes for a good trivia question during the con for prizes - how many Firefly phrases did Kestrel's shirt show today? :)

Please pass the URL www.fandone.com around to anyone you think might be interested.

side thought: pictures of my chest are now on the Internet 0_0;

CATCHING UP (AGAIN)

Oi, long time no blog.

Been a busy little Browncoat, getting stuff and info for our table in the dealer's room of the Dallas Comic Con. If you are anywhere near Dallas, TX on October 23-24, 2004, come by this con. Amazing guest list and admission is only $5. Then come by the dealer's room and visit our table and say "shiny!". I'll be one of the ones in the Blue Sun Shirts, complete with orange hat. ^_^

Looks like Stargate Atlantis (also known as Stargate Atlantis ;) is heading for a "summer finale" which means a cliff-hanger with the second part airing ... ???

You'll also notice the announcement at the bottom of this URL that as of September 2004, SGA has achieved history! It is the highest rated (non-sports) show amongst those money-spending fools and advertising golden jewels of a market audience, the 18-49 year old males, for both network and cable. w00+!

In the mean time, I'll be checking out Darklight with John de Lancie (a guest at the Dallas Comic Con and most noted for his Start Trek: The Next Generation Q role, and somewhat recently as Colonel Frank Simmons on Stargate SG-1), David Hewlett (of SGA and Cube fame), Richard Burgi (The Sentinel & Firefly), and Shiri Appleby (from Roswell).

Pretty much got the programming done for S4DA. Even uploaded the php pages and the db to the server. Everything was broken, but after a few hours and some "Oh, duh" moments, I believe it will work as planned. Still plugging along on content, but having defined the image format for the ps and then the copy style has speed things up a bit. Have new concept for products, so that will require some code tweaking but will make the images and content much easier. Once I get around to them. :P

Must also php my music videos page. Costing way to much per month, so I'm going to have 2 mvs up the 1st and 15th of every month. We'll see what that does to the bandwidth bill and hopefully I won't have to reduce it any more. Any new mv will have precedence, but that won't be for a while. Unfortunately ...

Launched the Quixtar Shopping Guru which will be updated every day (unlike this thing ;). Granted, it will never truly represent the freakin' huge amount of products and services available, but it might shine a little light upon some darkened synapses.

Tonbo went to a Japanese Meet-up last night and really enjoyed himself. Meet-up is a really cool implementation of the idea of local people getting together to talk about shared interests. I know I had a lot of fun and met some great people at the Firefly meet-up last month.

Sibling is deciding when to come back to this side of the world - holidays or parents moving adventure next March/April.

Work project re-scheduled, site reviews for pitches, shopping for usability and personal gain.

Guess that's about it.

SICK & SNICKET

Ugh ... don't know who or what I got it from, but I am exceptionally thankful I'm not in another city having to present to a client. Got up long enough to email work that I wasn't coming in and then went back to bed. Made it through half of lunch and back to bed. Much less stomach tourble by evening, although the massive headache was still there.

Read the first of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events book, "The Bad Beginning". It was okay, very British. Didn't do that much for me, although I have read lots of people compare it and in some cases prefer it to the Harry Potter books. Wasn't going to read any of the others in the series ... until I read the Author's Notes. Now I need to know. Innocent little statements suddenly have very interesting connotations and lost of questions have been aroused in my mind as to what's really going on. And I'll probably also go see the movie. Jim Carrey will be a brilliant Count Olaf.

!TRAVEL = DINNER DATE

Looks like the EB presentation that I was flying out for tonight has been cancelled. That means I can have a dinner date with my boyfriend. Works for me.

Decided it would be good to have a nice long dinner so we're going out to The Melting Pot. This is our anniversary tradition, so we're celebrating a little early. Michael, our server, was superb. Reminded me of a darker Jeff Goldblum from Buckaroo Banzai but with more charm. :) Didn't make it to dessert, but Tonbo said we could come here some evening just for dessert, so that'll be very fun.

Came home and he got online to catch up on everything and I had my little Witch Hunter Robin blowout. I could tell I was badly addicted around the 3rd DVD. It's always a sure sign when I start fast-forwarding through the opening and closing songs and previews to get to the next episode.

Overall I really enjoyed the show. And I guess I like the ending. At least it isn't stupid (like Trigun - like the series a lot, still think the ending is stupid), although I'm not sure it's inevitable the way Cowboy Bebop's ending is, even though I didn't like it the first time I saw it. Watching the first Bebop DVD again, it's pretty obvious that show couldn't end any other way. Spike wouldn't let it.

In two different interviews on the Witch Hunter Robin DVDs, the actors mentioned watching the series a second time and seeing new things. I had planned on watching it through again with Tonbo, and now, having seen the ending, I'm very curious to see how much of that was obvious (if possible) in earlier episodes. I do like the growth and change/non-change in Robin, and Amon has inspired another fansite for me to do. More details later ... ;)

LABOR DAY

Stayed up and talked with Tonbo after he got in, getting some details. It was really nice. Then we both crashed. I got up around noon to finish up some stuff and to get ready for the guys coming over in the evening to watch Stargate Atlantis. Tonbo was out until around 5 pm, but from the details, he didn't really get much sleep at the conference at all, so this was him catching up on 3 days worth.

2 more SGA eps, "Poisoning the Well" and "Underground". Still holds up as a very cool series.

End of vacation. Still need to see the last 2 DVDs of Witch Hunter Robin because all kinds of stuff has happened, but since I'm out of town the next 2 days, it'll have to wait until I get back.

VACATION DAY 4

Rained a bit in the morning which means the ground will soften up and I might do some gardening later in the afternoon.

Still hacking and programming. Stuff that worked yesterday, doesn't. Stuff that was broken yesterday, isn't. Sometimes I've very aware I don't really know what I'm doing, but then everything will fall together and I do my little happy dance and really don't care.

Rained a lot in the afternoon, so gardening is right out.

Tonbo called and they should arrive sometime around 5 am tomorrow. Don't think I can stay up that late since I've got to get back to a semblance of the normal job-dictated sleeping pattern. It'll be nice to have him back again. Not that I haven't enjoyed having the thermometer at 80-82 degrees this weekend, mind you ...

BROWNCOAT MEETUP

Slept in, watched more Witch Hunter Robin. Slow-going, but I find it very interesting. I want to know more about the characters and what's really going on.

Had a call from a friend who needed a lift to the car dealer to pick up his car. Seems their curtesy van didn't run on the weeknd (?!). And, since his wife was experiencing the first signs of labor, it would be very useful for them to have access to their transportation.

After that, I had a little bit of time before going the the Browncoat Meet-up. First one I've been to, and was a little nervous. Didn't really have anything to worry about at all, though. Nice friendly little sign on the door. Back-of-the-restaurant meeting room with music that could only be turned up, not down (?!). Meet lots of really cool people and had an enthusiastic response to my idea of having a Browncoat table in the dealer's room of Dallas Comic Con. Also meet a lady with some special relationships that might help in the getting of some BDH to be guests at the con. I would so love for that to happen. Works out really well as Nathan (who has the same birthdate as me :), Adam, and Gina have all also starred in Buffy and Angel, so they would fit in perfectly with the other media guests. Here's hoping ...

Returned the Witch Hunter Robin DVDs and picked up the next few. This will be my anime-of-the-vacation since I'm probably going to end up finishing it in a little blowout before the start of the work week again on Tuesday.

VACATION DAY 2

Apparently I've created Farscape monsters out of my parents. Seems I didn't tape as many eps as I thought I did for them and kind of left them hanging at the end of season 1. Not good. So we met again, for lunch, at Henk's, so I could hand over some more tapes. I've warned them repeatedly that I only have through second season but I'm not sure it's sunk in yet.

More php and mySQL. It's still a bit of a mind-bender for me that I'm programming a Web page. And that means it needs error-checking. Especially when it involves dates.

Have learned and re-learned all kinds of programming lessons as well:
- you can spend 1/2 hour looking through 3 different books or you can spend 15 minutes online with a Google search to find the answer
- don't program and cook at the same time
- time speeds up when you program
- some of the best programming you can do is after 10 pm
- some of the best sleep you can get is after 10 am

VACATION DAY 1

Went downtown to show Hawke how to ftp his site so he can do his own updating and maintenance. I'm still on-call for him, but this way he doesn't have to wait on me to update the various aspects of the Design America Foundation site.

Met the parents for lunch at Henk's. They have bought a scull, so will also need to fit into the container. The second container. The first one is completely filled. The shop itself is looking great with the newly painted walls and blast-washed front. It just happens to have two railroad containers sitting beside the building.

Stopped by Anime Pop to rent some DVDs for the vacation. Gravitation #2 was in, but on the New Releases shelf which means there isn't any more for a while. Same thing with Kaleido Star #3.

Witch Hunter Robin, however, was #6:Vengeance, so I went and picked up the first two WHR DVDS, #1:Arrival and #2:Belief. Have wanted to see this series for a while, as I am already hooked on the music by Taku Iwasaki.

Tonbo's packing and getting to bed early since he and his brother are driving off to St. Louis for Free Enterprise in the wee hours of the morning.

I stayed up until he left hacking more php and mySQL, but had pretty much had enough by 2:30 am when he left.

LAST DAY OF THE WEEK

Well, my week anyway, because tomorrow is the beginning of a 5 day vacation. Not going anywhere, but that's kind of the point. Not going to work gives me an extra 1.5 hours a day.

Helped with the EB some more and that was about it. Travel next week for the actual presentation and then I'll be busy with the usual deliverables.