The Monkey Guild

This was a little surreal for me – it’s the cast of Metal Gear Solid hanging out, doing a bit of improv. If you never played MGS, it may not be quite as weird for you (or as funny) but I enjoyed this quite a bit.

I have a hot date tonight with this lady:

Yes that’s my girlfriend, yes she’s laying across the counter at The Isotope. It’s OK to be jealous.

I seem to recall this scare hitting a few years back as well, but apparently there is talk that LJ might be disappearing. I’d say anything is possible considering the current global financial meltdown, but I’m in the “I’ll believe it when I see it” camp. Still if you’re especially attached to your LJ entries, you may wish to check out ljarchive to backup your entries. I’m going to have to try out their XML export utility to see how it plays with Wordpress. I’ve never imported entries with comments before, so that promises to be interesting.

I’m always one to hedge my bets, so I’ve backed up my entries. I’ll probably make new posts through my site from here on out on the off chance this comes to pass. Just passing on the news.

For some reason I find myself missing Shakespearean acting today. In another life, I was in an outdoor production of Othello in which I got to play Iago (my favorite villain of all time). I haven’t read Shakespeare in many moons, but still I find myself thinking about it today. There is something inexplicably fulfilling about packing a living room with Shakespeare and tasty victuals. OK, perhaps it’s not that inexplicable after all.

I’m toying around with the idea of getting some people together for an afternoon of food and Shakespeare. We’d pick one of Shakespeare’s plays and we’d each get a part. No memorization of lines or anything high-stress like that, just reading and eating. Any interest? Those not interested in reading could still come hang out and eat food with us. If enough people are interested, this may involve invading someone else’s home (as we tend to have a shortage of seating at our house).

I was awake for the winter solstice this year (it occurred at 7:04 AM EST). It tickles me that people celebrate the solstice, mainly because it is such a short event. It’s what…a second long? A millisecond? Technically less than that actually. It’s the precise instant when the Sun is positionally at its greatest distance from the northern hemisphere (or southern hemisphere depending on how you swing hemispherically). How did this celebration start? I just picture a bunch of druids hanging out all night, checking their pocket sundials. Is it time yet? How about now? OK everyone, get up, it’s almost here. And in 5-4-3-2 achoo…damn, I missed it. Well…err…should we drink punch now?

I choose to pick the 21st as the solstice even though I’m as astronomically incorrect in that assumption as people who celebrate the solstice on any other given day. That’s not true – I guess so long as you’re partying through when the actual moment of the solstice occurs than technically that counts, right?

Sigh…looking back at this I am most definitely crabbier this morning than I originally gave myself credit. Behold the power of a good snarky LJ post – I’m feeling better already. Besides, it’s the 25th of Kislev and that means the first night of Chanukah. I’m off to make coffee and pancakes and hopefully avoid a day spent wallowing in snark.

I actually thought I was working next week up until X-Moose. It turns out that we are in fact shut *all* of next week. This, combined with the vacation time I am taking has me off from December 20th to January 5th. Sixteen days in a row? Happy Chanukah to me

From the weather predictions on Weather Underground:

Friday
Snow. Heavy snow accumulation. Colder. Near steady temperature in the mid 20s. Northeast winds 10 to 15 mph. Gusts up to 30 mph in the afternoon. Chance of snow near 100 percent.

Last year I really hated driving in the snow up here because I had to schlep between Westwood and Watertown and the roads in between were often times messy. That’s an annoying drive even on a sunny, clear day and the snow really didn’t help. I’m interested to see how it goes this year. I have a small stretch of road between me and Route 9 that I suspect doesn’t get plowed until everything else is done. Still, it’s maybe 1/4 mile tops and then I’m on Route 9. I take that to 95 which is even more of a major thoroughfare than 9 is. At most I’m facing a minute of slushy nastiness and then it should be just wet pavement. I think with all that, I’m going to enjoy the snow this year.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Sometimes you just have to take a step back to regain perspective, especially when you feel like you’re transmuting molehills into mountains within your own mind. We laid off around 35 people yesterday, which really sucks. Despite my normally sane response to such things, I found myself spiraling a bit. Maybe it was a build-up of stress, maybe it’s because I haven’t been sleeping well, who knows? I have a job, in fact we still have open reqs in my group despite the lay-off. Truth be told, this didn’t really impact the people in my area at all. However I found that because the people here are more kindred spirits than coworkers in previous jobs, I was really affected by what occurred. I’m grateful that I still have a job. I guess all I can do is continue to give my best and hopefully never give them a reason to give my team the ax.

Any good news going on with you guys? I’m not down like I was yesterday, but I could use some osmotic perking if you’ve got good things going on that you’d like to share.

My brain is a whirling torrent of craptastic today so I’m taking a break to collect my thoughts and be geeky for a moment. I use Linux for several of my automation tools so I always maintain a VM running some flavor of Linux. I installed Linux Mint last week and I’m loving it so far. It’s built on Ubuntu (which is itself built on Debian) which has been my distro of choice for awhile now. Mint seems to pull from all the best of everything though.

1. It uses the apt packaging system, which I already know and love.
2. The WM is fast and streamlined the way xfce is, but it runs Gnome (which I’m partial toward).
3. It plays amazingly well in a VM environment.
4. Setup from start to finish from a mounted ISO was around 8 minutes (possibly less since I went to get tea).

Color me impressed. I’ll keep you updated but if I continue to like what I see, I may transition my other desktop systems to Mint and move away from Ubuntu.

This weekend I attempted my first foray into the world of flavor-tripping through the magic of Miracle Fruit. It’s quite a surreal experience to bite into a tomato and have it taste sweet as sugar, or have a lemon taste like lemonade. I did not get a chance to try beer, but I heard it removed any hint of bitterness. Also, all wine apparently becomes Manischewitz when under the power of the fruit. Non-acidic foods had little change to their flavor. Apparently there has to be some amount of acidity to the food in order for it to be modified at all. It was quite interesting and enjoyable, so I will probably do this again. If you’re interested in trying this on your own, ThinkGeek sells the tablets as well. They are perfectly legal to be taken on their own, they were simply declined by the FDA for use as a food additive.

I’m debating building a full dinner menu around the use of miracle fruit, but I haven’t decided if I really will or not.