bloviation extrordinaire
Finally fulfilling my dream to get some BIG CITY hang time! All my Chicago friends can laugh when I brag about working in a 19-story “skyscraper”, but I am loving it. I’ll add my favorite restaurants so u can meet me downtown and we can do lunch! Whoop!
Click thru to a site with all kinds of great pics of the Raleigh skyline…
Had a great weekend, starting a little early on Thursday with dinner with Sammy at the Raleigh Times. A great veggie burger with great toppings (avacado, grilled mushrooms and onions, lettuce, tomato, ketchup and mustard, mmm), and the beer list is to die for. I had a Belgian triple – three times the hops and barley of a normal brew. It was delicious and effective, one beer was plenty. Then we went to Escazu, the chocolatier I’ve been obsessing over for a year or more. They have the best bars at Whole Foods (out of 200 or so, it seems), and the actual shop, on Glenwood Avenue, is adorable – a converted house with a display case full of painstakingly handcrafted chocolate delights. Then it was time for Halloween, and we partied like twentysomethings. You’ll have to hook up on Facebook to see all the good semi-clean fun we had. :> Except for this one blurry picture I found on my iPhone…
Wrenny and I spent Sunday afternoon at the local coffeehouse. We had a great time drinking a “frappé” (latte blended with ice) spiked with chocolate syrup, yum… Kept us fuelled up for a nice long game of Elfenland. In the end it was a dead even tie, broken by Wrenny smashing my remaining pieces before I could get hers. :P
We also played Bluetooth games across the iPhone and iPod touch. Whee!
At times too close to reality for comfort, the laughter in this one was a bit strained. But that’s its charm, too. Globalization here we come! A nice easy primer on Indian culture that turns into a romantic comedy. And there’s music and dancing, too, of course. One thing’s for sure – I am heading to Udipi for lunch this week!
1080p lookin’ good. Guy Ritchie has never failed me (sorry Madonna). Not sure where he finds his motley crew of supporting actors but I bet his house parties rival his best scenes. Our favorite part is that he focuses on the wit and leaves most of the gratuitousness for other ‘hot’ directors to use as a crutch to keep up with him. Win.
1080p is a beautiful thing. This was an interesting character study with an action movie injected in bits into the middle. As in the-director-of-300 beautiful-physics-in-slomo action. I didn’t follow the original, and I’m not burned out on the ‘conflicted hero’ theme – ergo, I loved it. I really really loved it.
PAX 2009 flew by like a sonic jet. Dan and I met out in Seattle again this year (we did it once before in 2007) for the Penny Arcade Gaming Expo. In my quest to find work, I picked up a pretty nice Macbook Pro so I can do iPhone development. It turns out that it has a nice dedicated GPU, can boot into Windows, and with the latest Bootcamp set of Windows drivers that came with the latest OS X (10.6 aka Snow Leopard), it fully supports Windows 7 RC, to the point where I was ripping it up with all the latest games. What a deal! Dan kept the party rolling with a new laptop purchase in the 11th hour, so that by the time the games began on Friday morning, we had covered half of Seattle on foot but managed to be fully geared up.
On Friday we spent a lot of time in BYOC setting up the shiny new rigs. Saturday was a full day of joyous fun, from 10am ’til 2am (that’s 5am EST, for those keeping score). We played Legions on a local instantaction.com server (I was happy to place in the middle of the pack in the deathmatch tourney), a 100+-player Trackmania Nations Forever contest, Call of Juarez, Fallout 3, Eve Online, Marble Madness, board games including Puerto Rico, and most of the PAX 10, including Tag, Osmos, Puzzlebloom, etc. And we caught a minute here and there of the excellent panels, incliding watching Gabe and Tycho put together the strip for that day. Sunday we kept plugging away while managing to collect over a dozen t-shirts – LOTS of Tribes loot! On Monday we gamed the most, with our homebrew LAN-out-of-a-suitcase setup in the hotel, shooting each other endlessly in Juarez, and still managed to get to the mall to buy the wives something. And there was so much good food… Red Fin tempura, Cheesecake Factory, cyber-dogs… the Teriyaki rage of 2007 has been replaced by Pho on every corner (HOT hot salty yummy soup). When you get it to go, you get a vat of hot water and all the ingredients to build it yourself. And of course, literally, Starbucks on every corner. In central Seattle I had a triple-shot latte that made my day. Too much fun. Thanks Danno!!
Andrea packed her bags and headed to the beach with her book club buddies this weekend. The girls and I (and Grammy on occasion) had fun playing Age of Mythology, Tribes, soccer, wrestling, cooking cinnamon rolls, walking the dogs, getting takeout at the Gillespies (including Guitar Hero and Carcassonne games), going for pizza with the Prevosts… wow, we did a lot! :>
This beautiful atmospheric pop is lifting me up during my job search. It’s like Death Cab For Cutie’s Benjamin Gibbard’s optimistic younger brother discovered a magic electronics studio. It’s really polished, as in Top 40, computer-stabilized-vocals polished, but it is so well crafted that it works out. Good fun!
I’m super-busy trying to land a job in this impossible economy, but I had to take time out for my wolf friends today. They have unfortunately been on the receiving end of a backlash at their very moderate recovery. It’s not easy co-existing with predators, and currently, things are in real flux.
Donate to help the wolves here.
Read on for a discussion I had on another website, copied here to preserve it… Continue reading “Taking time out for the wolves”