So today's trial did not happen.  Trials get continued for so many technical, mundane, not-worth-explaining reasons...  The stars really have to align for a trial to happen in Boston.  Meanwhile, the cops show up & get their union-negotiated four hours of overtime ($75-100/hr?  I'm guessing).  Everyone who runs the courthouse gets paid.  I get paid. So does the judge.  Maybe we'll have a trial in January.  It will be hard for the government to prove my client did the rinky-dink druggy thing of which he is accused.  If we win it will have been a waste of time and money--a windfall for the police witnesses who will rake it in without regard to the outcome.  If I am wrong and my client is convicted, he'll get a disproportionate two-or-so years in county prison (~$50K/year).  Waste, waste, waste....

This past weekend I was vending for Utilikilts at the New Hampshire Highland games. I've been working with them for nearly 5 years, and sadly, this was the worst weekend I've had doing it. Scotland lost the bid for independance, which left a damper on things to start with. I've heard attendence was down considerably, which would match with sales. Now, sales are not the primary reason I do these events - but knowing I'm making the money I'm spending has a big mood impact. Normally - and this is the case for any weekend event, Saturday is your busiest day, and the bulk of your customers come through then. It was COLD. No - high 30's with mist and wind, bringing the apparent tem down around freezing. Sold all my socks, but not a lot of kilts, and we were reduced to hanging out in the Portable Bathrooms for heat. 

The only saving grace was my crew. 

What a fitting suggested post, thanks 1PW.. as the last time I went swimming was in the ocean, and a big wave snuck from behind and swiped my glasses into the sea.​

THANK YOU, Past Karen, for putting an iced coffee in the fridge last week. Future Karen, please buy more granola bars.

My wallclock with the fake little swinging pendulum died at exactly midnight. Or at noon, I'm not sure. I thought these things only happened in movies.

Also, pink toebeans are a good treatment for a bad cold. Pick up said owner of toebeans (feline or canine) and apply front paws, toebean-out, directly to face, cheeks and forehead. Is toebean owner wriggling? Good. Wriggling only makes it better. *evil laugh*

I think the pseudoephedrine has kicked in. Yes?

[twelve hours later...]

I am sneaking in a post-pseudoephedrine edit (yes, twelve hours later) to let you know that I have found the bottom of the internet. And on the bottom of the internet is this: "Bagel-Heading"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagel_head

First off: Hello world!  This is my first OPW post and I'm excited to have finally made it over here. I haven't figured out the nuances yet, like if I can tag people or not... but if I could I'd love to tag Boutell and thank him for making this whole thing happen, and Sean (Catbear of LJ fame) for designing the UI-- it's very purty and pleasant.

Anyway: Past Tense Jill wrote Future Forgetful Jill a note on my calendar that says "Cancel your 'Protect My ID' membership today," because it stops having its bill footed by Adobe (remember their little security breach a while back?).  So one of my to-dos today was to cancel my membership to this identity-theft monitoring service.  However, conveniently, just this morning I got a love-letter from Home Depot saying that they had a giant security breach recently and lucky for me I get a free year of ID monitoring through Protect My ID starting today.

So convenient! I wonder if these hackers actually work for Protect My ID and their goal is to get giant companies to buy a zillion memberships for people. :-)

Curious to see if I will have to create a new account or if I can apply the credit to my existing account.

Anyway... thanks, hackers!

We are in NYC this weekend.  No, not for the climate march; we didn't know that was happening when we planned the trip.  No, we are mostly here to see theatre, though we did see an excellent concert last night with some friends who live in Boston.

The two people in front of us as we went into "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" had gotten rush tickets for $35. I remember, when I was their age, getting the $5 tickets through the MIT Council for the Arts, which got me the chance to see the first production of "Angels in America" in Boston, and to see a couple of plays at the Huntington Theatre Company, and (most importantly) to come to NYC just before graduation, to see the Bang on a Can marathon at Lincoln Center.

Now, I come to the City with a pile of pre-purchased, full-price tickets, and "spontaneity" is taking the East River ferry, instead of the subway, to cross over from Queens to Manhattan.

That said, it's still an awesome place to visit, and it's a great trip. 

"I'm sore as hell from yesterday's dancin! But now I'm going to twitch and stomp and tap my foot because I expect the same level of activity I had yesterday."

[Eyeroll]

Whatever, body.

... In OPW news: that new "bug" button you see at the top of the page is meant for bug reports 'n' such. Bugs wing their way directly into our issue tracker, the same place Sean and I keep track of our own stuff. If we comment on your bug, you'll get an email, which includes a link to a page where you can reply further or unsubscribe.

For the geeks out there: we're using a github private repository for source code control on this project. Each repository comes with an issue tracker... but if the source code is private, the issue tracker is too. I spent quality time with the github API this weekend adding just enough plumbing to allow OPW users to create and update issues without ever having direct access to github.

It's kinda nifty. I spent too much time on it, but I reckon I'll either open-source it or turn it into a product in its own right.

A lot of my days are defined by what I'm not doing. Today I am not joining my girlfriends at a winery in NJ for some food and music. I am also not mowing my lawn or starting my fall cleanup. Neither am I walking the cat or... doing anything productive, really, for that matter.

No, well, I'm writing. That's good, right? And I this week did manage to get the house back to hygenic standards (well, for me, but I was the Crazy Cleaning Lady). And I am recently showered, including hair washed, and teeth FLOSSED. Booyah.

Oh, and I did my bedding. Ahhh, clean bedding. Actually, the sheets are not just clean but NEW. I found "performance" sheets at the Blue Box Store for half the price they usually go for. I desperately needed a change in my bed situation because I am always hot and always uncomfortable (and I'm always in bed) even with the eleventy billion mattress pads, foam pads, pillows, and feather toppers. So the sheets are not just freshly cleaned, they are DIVINE. Seriously soft, like that stretchy wicking material in workout clothes. And they do feel cooler to the touch. So there's that.

Now if I just had some decent food in the house. Who bought all this junkfood? Potato chips and onion dip? What? Nice going, inner 13-year-old.

...until I read Moby Dick.

Watching: One more disk of Twin Peaks episodes left, plus another one of special features.  Started on Doctor Who Series 3, with "The Runaway Bride"...not sure if that was the best start, but it was okay.  Currently half an episode behind on "Outlander"--seriously, who does 90-minute episodes?  We also watched "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "The Winter Soldier", so we're almost caught up on Marvel.  I'm still conflicted over the "Days of Future Past" X-Men movie, though.  TV shows return next week, so I predict epic falling behind.

Reading: Finished The Talisman, it was okay; since then have reread David Gerrold's Bouncing Off The Moon (second in the series; a lot of lunar travelogue, not a lot of plot advancement), read Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz vs. The Knights of Crystallia (third in the series; still amusing, but it had some slow spots) and Diana Pharaoh Francis's Bitter Night (first in the series; kickass start and excellent tension and pacing, with the exception of one "characters captured too easily" sequence, will read more).  I also did a reread of Buffy Season 8 comics, and discovered I had the first collection of Season 9 but not more, so I picked up a second Season 9 collection today.  The plot had some serious "Oh, really?" moments in it, though.

I've just started S.M. Stirling's The Sword of The Lady, sixth in its series, and having a little trouble getting back into the series, since I read the previous book in 2008.  (Coincidentally, it seems like I may have bought it at the same time as Bitter Night...)

Listening: The usual random stuff.  Nothing really notable for new stuff, a few albums from eMusic that sounded okay based on samples (Lore, Black City Lights), plus an EP from Eliza Rickman heavily featuring toy-piano instrumentation.

Playing: On the computer, I've been going back and forth.  I had a big surge of Morrowind a few months ago, where I finished the main plot with my Character #3 (the Argonian mage, Speaker-to-Animals) but started to bog down in the expansion pack plots.  I've also just recently finished the main plotline in Skyrim for the first time (I was very close), but again, bogging down in other quests.  Rogue Legacy is good when I want to kill a few minutes here and there, and I've still got old standbys like Spider (where my win rate is about 31%, by the way), Sherlock, and Solitude (a big card-solitaire pack).  A few weeks ago I even dug deep into the past and played a couple of games of Empire--the old one, early 80's, from when it had just been ported to the new IBM PC.  I still enjoy that from time to time, even though by this point it's almost zenlike.

But if I do pick a big game to play, at this point it's like to be either Crusader Kings II or Europa Universalis IV.  I got started on CK2 a while ago, and have just finished my third game of it.  It's occasionally highly frustrating, but I love the scope of it, and also the scale, where I can get down to the level of individual people, and then arrange their marriages for them and stuff.  It's been very educational history-wise, too.  In my first game, I started as Earl Godfrey Ivaring of the Isle of Man, and followed the Ivarings through to the peak of their success, King Pridbjorn of Scotland and Ireland...and then back down to a single county again.  My second game was somewhat better--I started as Count Aner de Marsan from southwest France, and ended up growing more steadily up to becoming things like Duke of Brittany, King of Castile, and finally Emperor of Hispania...which I kept until the very end of the game.

My last game (the third, or at least the third I finished) I was trying to play in "Ironman" mode, which is a) designed to keep you from tampering with your save files, and b) the only way you can get online "Achivements" on Steam; I picked, at random, Count Radislav Kometopoulos of Dorostotum, on the northern frontier of the Byzantine Empire in modern Bulgaria.  This game also had some ups and downs--in fact, I actually "lost" at some point as my only heiress had foolishly not married matrilineally, and so my titles passed into the hands of another dynasty.  I was able to keep playing as that dynasty, though, and the Shishmans had a little more success, at one point even managing to become Kings of Bulgaria and achieve their independence from the Empire.  Being independent from the Empire while enclosed by it was a little bit stifling, though, so I stupidly decided to rejoin the Empire, even though the Empress hated my guts, and so she systematically stripped everything away until I was left with very little, and was unable to regain much of it before the end of the game.  I've just tried starting one with the "Old Gods" expansion, as Estonian pagans back in 867, but I'm still on my starting character for that one.

This being me, I also had chracter naming schemes for each game--well, for the first game, I let it pick the names for me, just to see what I would get.  But the second one, I went through an alphabetical list, first using standard Occitan/Frankish/Basque flavour names, and then using some custom ones (which is how I ended up with a King Azpiazu and an Emperor Ornigan).  To some extent I'm fascinated with the names different cultures use (Boson, for instance, was a well-known Occitan King, and "Eudes" is their form of "Otto"), I do like using my own, and I'm tickled when the built-in code for naming children after their parents or grandparents causes my custom names to be passed on for several generations (like the several Queriches descended from my original).  So for the Dorostotum game I used strictly names drawn from Steven Brust's Dragaera books, because some of them are vaguely Slavic, and I'd just been through them not that long ago reading them to Simon.  My new one, I was feeling whimsical, so, based on a recent conversation about the Order of the Stick "Polearm Shop Sketch", I'm naming my children after polearms and/or types of cheese.  (Having just finished one of Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz books, I anticipate moving on from there to prisons and mountains when I get tired of those.)

I'm not quite as fond of Europa Universalis IV (EU4, henceforth).  It doesn't do as much on a person level, being more nation-oriented.  I enjoyed my first game of it as Castile mostly because I got to colonize large chunks of the world.  Castile ended up with most of northwest Africa, Australia, a lot of South America, the Pacific Northwest, bits of the African coast, islands in the Indian and the Pacific...  It was almost as interesting to see what other nations got.  Mexico was British; a lot of Canada was Breton (which is great, I love Brittany); Florida was Norwegian.  None of the colonies actually became independent, but then I don't have that expansion pack yet.  I never got to unify with Aragon, though; I skipped the obviously-planned "Royal Marriage" event, and I never got that good a chance again.  So no Spain, just Castile.  (Aragon didn't get any colonies.  Ha!)  I've started a second game as France, which is not quite as fun, especially since I discovered how severe an advantage Portugal and Castile have in getting a head start on colonization.  Plus the religious wars are kicking my ass, as Catholic and Protestant and Heretic armies keep rising up and laying waste to the countryside.

But then I got the plugin that lets me export CK2 games as EU4 mods, so you can basically continue your games...and that's been more interesting.  I took my Emperor of Hispania game and have been playing as Emperor of Spain, which has been fairly fun.  My Spain started out with all of the Iberian peninsula, as well as Aquitaine, Brittany, most of the rest of France, and little bits here and there in the Holy Roman Empire, and even bits of the British Isles.  I get to do the lion's share of the colonizing, because there's not even a Portugal or France to compete with.  There was Scotland, but it was mostly concerned with winning the rest of England back from the Aztecs.  Oh, yeah, the Aztecs conquered England, thanks to a CK2 mod called "Sunset Empire".  And then I ended up King of Scotland too, through a royal marriage, and now that's all part of Spain too.  So the poor Holy Roman Empire has been getting squeezed between me on the west, Lithuania on the east, and Byzantium in the south, so it's really starting to fall apart.  Flanders and Holland have been doing a little bit of colonization (as well as scattered bits like Hwicce and Orkney, but I've engulfed those too.)

I also had a CK2 game where, through the use of extensive cheat codes, I managed to conquer most of the map with the Empire of Brittania, just to see if it was theoretically possible.  I bogged down when my only remaining opponent was the Mongol Ilkhanate, because I kept having to wait ten years for truces to expire...  Anyway, I exported that map into EU4 as well, and now I'm trying to make the rest of the world British too, without further cheat codes, to see if that's possible.  It diverts me, and I don't have to worry about losing battles all that much, just dealing with overextension as I try to integrate my new possessions...