Playing Mass Effect #1. I am frustrated and annoyed because:

1) the autosave is inconsistent. For example, no autosave before the matriarch battle, one in a mid battle cut scene, none after the battle. I could cope if there were no autosave, but the inconsistency has cost me a couple hours now.

2) moving my avatar around the battlefield during cut scenes. In a game where squad tactics and cover are  everything, this is a high crime. 

3) even worse, during 2) blowing my cover or making me adopt stupid tactics that make no sense given prior events. 

4) learn by dying (not doing). Games that can't be won except by discovering through death all the ways a situation will kill until you find the way it doesn't are poorly designed. 

I'm still playing because the story is engaging, but I'm not best pleased.

I just took a two-hour kizomba dance workshop with Manuel Dos Santos and Flavie, visiting from Montreal. Which is funny because we barely missed meeting them during our Montreal vacation this summer.

Manuel is a born entertainer, but he also has a rarer talent: he knows how to teach adults.

The thing about adults is that we usually don't have to be in that class. Sure, we'll miss out on something if we don't show up, but we have other choices. And we will exercise them if we don't feel good about what's happening.

To teach adults effectively, you gotta:

• Take the temperature of the room. Pitch your instruction to that level of skill.
• Take time to reemphasize things until they stick.
• Make sure people aren't frustrated.
• Make sure people aren't bored. (Quite a balancing act, there.)
• Keep 'em laughing, but not too distracted (see "bored" and "frustrated").

Manuel started off by blowing our minds with five minutes of kudoro— a high-energy but surprisingly easy step, as a warmup. Everybody feels good: check!

Then he asked us all to just dance for a minute, to gauge our level of skill with kizomba (hint: not a lot yet).

And then, he taught us two incredibly simple moves... and we did then for ten minutes at least, until he knew we had the feeling of the thing right. But he made sure we switched to dancing those moves together with a partner almost immediately. Because, y'know, that's the fun part.

And then he introduced the ladies' exit— the most important move in kizomba, the bit almost everything else is based on. And we drilled that for a long, long time...

And then we learned all sorts of things. And nearly all of us decided to stay for that second hour. Because we felt we were really getting it.

Toward the end, he threw in some slightly more advanced material. But he also quietly dropped one move when he saw the room react to it. Save that for another time. Teach the room you're in.

He's teaching the workshop again tomorrow out at La Luna in Bensalem. If I were free I'd go again.

My cat is snoring so loudly I'm wondering how he isn't waking himself up. It's really quite comical.

Today I cleaned up the house a little, slept a lot, cleaned up the house a little more, took a short walk with the fuzz-bucket, and here I am ready for sleep again. Tomorrow I see my one brother and his 6-week-old and the rest of the gang. Apparently there's all kinds of new trendy stuff now that comes with having babies: "push presents" and "baby introduction" parties. Man, I am out of the loop anymore.

Anyway, I get to hold a baby tomorrow, see the fam, and eat some noms. Babies are fun when they're that small. They don't do much but lay around and make funny noises. Kinda like cats.

As stated in my previous communique', for readers who don't have time for me to suggest a novel.

A Study in Emerald, by Neil Gaiman. Sherlock Holmes horror pastiche'.  It's free, short, and fantastic.

http://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles/exclusive/shortstories/emerald.pdf

The line between obvious and impossible can seem pretty thin at times.  What capability should your computer have that could be accomplished by a single individual in a reasonable time frame?

What a difference getting that BIG THING out of the way can make.

Last night I finished a week-long slog at work, bashing out a feature I'm tired of even thinking about. (It happens, even at the coolest job ever.) Today I got to work on... SOMETHING ELSE! I knocked out SOMETHING ELSE in one day. Because I was that happy to do something new for a change.

Speaking of which, today One Post Wonder got:

Email notifications. I was so nervous about enabling this, but the response has been very positive. You will receive no more than one per day, and you won't receive anything you already saw in your bellbox.

YouTube videos. Well, they worked before, but not if you used the youtu.be shortcut link.

Poetry. Specifically, if you press "shift-enter," you get a line break instead of a paragraph break. If you paste plain text from a text editor, you also get line breaks. And when you post, you'll find your line breaks stay in there! That's the really new bit.

Faster. Not to bore you with the details, but when you clicked on a notice in the bellbox, there was a noticeable pause while One Post Wonder loaded certain things all over again. Now we only load 'em once. Zoom zoom.

But this does not mean I won't be returning to the issue of locks. Sean and Dawn made a very convincing case for making things just a little more flexible, so that it's possible to avoid reading your aunt's unfortunate birther tirades while still giving her access to the baby pictures. Because you're just that good a person. We have a design solution in mind that won't add any extra work, apart from a moment's thought when you stop following someone. And hopefully you don't do that every day. Right?

"Kittens where kittens go yet do not belong", (C) Sean M Puckett 2014

These are the siblings we added to the menagerie last year. They're bigger now but this is the best recent photo I have of the two of them at once. It took a long time to be able to tell them apart and even now we're just at 95%. Easiest way at first to be certain was to either see the splotches on Vash's cheek or haunch, or by touch; Vash's fur is coarser while Spike's is quite silky.

These days they're almost trivial to differentiate as Vash outweighs Spike by a couple pounds and it seems to be all muscle, which you might think is an advantage in wrassling except that Spike is whip-lithe and has at least twice as much energy. 

Twenty internet quatloos if you can give me their full names.

Stress can promote creativity.  My sister in law had a stroke last night and right now me and Ami are focused on getting through the day so we can drive up to Austin to check in on her. 

During this time, I managed to record an audio track for the Stars and Garters Burlesque show stuff (two spots - one commercial for "Tobias the Adequate Magic TV Cards" and one where I argue with the announcer about whether I'm going to do a really dangerous trick or not in the second half) and get that sent off. 

Whee. 

My goals for today: clean sheets, vaccum, shower and get out of the house. If I am successful, maybe I'll even come back and add to this post.

What are your goals for today and how far are you?

• My skin is kind of sort of brownish
• Pinkish yellowish white.
• My eyes are greyish blueish green,
• But I'm told they look orange in the night.
• My hair is reddish blondish brown,
• But it's silver when it's wet.
• And all the colors I am inside

• Have not been invented yet.