Oh, hey, hi there. I own a home.

I didn't realize that being a homeowner meant that I no longer have any free time that isn't spent working on the fucking house.

This week is really the first week I'm in the house, but I'm not really out of the apartment yet, either. I've had LOTS of help from everyone, including a gigantic help-out from Cheryl doing a lot of painting as long as I do the prep work. And there is a TON of fiddly, annoying, pissant little work, which is the kind of work I hate. But while it's not getting done as fast as I'd like, it is getting done. I think I may be able to see the end of the tunnel.

July projects are all going to be outdoor projects, so I don't have to try and live in a mess of a house for a while.

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What I did on my Spring Vacation -- Day 3, Tuesday

We arose on Tuesday morning quite early, as we needed to get across town from Hollywood to Anaheim. Note on geography in LA: I have no mental map of anything that has to do with Southern California. I only know that every time we got in a car, it took two hours to get where we were going. That was as true of the 100-mile drive on Monday as it was for the 1 mile drive from the hotel to the nearest In N Out on Thursday. So no idea what that was about. We had tea and coffee with Damon, waiting for Ryan and his friend Megan to arrive, which they did around 7:30. From there, we said a teary goodbye to Damon and headed out to Disneyland! A note on Disneyland: I'd never been before. This was my first trip and I was not exactly expecting anything special. However, everyone around me (including Jean, Ryan, and our friend Donna) was very excited, so I was ready to be happy but underwhelmed. Boy, was I wrong. We reached the parking lot just before 9 AM, and there was plenty

The default state of technology is broken.

Score one for DRM making me a pirate. I had bought a blu-ray player for my new computer so I could watch hi-def movies on my entertainment-center projector. Apparently, despite paying extra for the hardware, I needed software to play the blurays. OK, fine, I said, and the person who helped me build the machine downloaded some software that would play the blurays. Then, tonight, I went to watch my copy of Inception, and it played for 4 minutes, at which point the software stopped working and insisted that the bluray disc wasn't valid, unless I ponied up $60 (59.95, 25% off for the new year!) to "upgrade" to the latest, licensed version of the software. So, not only did I have to pay extra for the hardware, and extra for the media, I now have to pay extra for the software. Pardon my language, but FUCK THAT SHIT. So, now I'm working on finding a less-expensive way to watch the movie (well, actually, the extra content) that I ALREADY BOUGHT. I've also uninstalled th

Occasional Media Consumption: Swordheart, by T. Kingfisher.

I'm not sure how to say what I want to say without saying it wrong. I don't think I have been this excited for a new author's work since I was in the rapid process of discovering and then chewing through the back catalog of C.J. Cherryh, who at that point had just published Foreigner and grabbed me by my whiskers and screamed (metaphorically) "Look! Here is an author whose style of prose and choice of character speaks directly and entirely to you!" Or that moment in my high school years when I stumbled upon Melissa Scott's Trouble and Her Friends and I suddenly knew, with a certainty that has still not yet left me, that I wanted to be a part of the future (and the culture) of technology. And yet that's not fair, because T. Kingfisher, nee Ursula Vernon, is her own writer, her own voice, her own authorial person, and doesn't deserve to be compared to others. To say that Kingfisher's prose style and choice of genre (which is to say, a

The Default State Is Broken

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