Every ten years or so, it would seem, I go to Shakespeare in the Park, to see Twelfth Night. It’s that time of year again, and Martha’s in town for the weekend, so off we go.

It’s been whole minutes since I last saw Aven and Mark, too, so it’ll be good to catch up.

Eep, I’m late — almost an hour! — for my appointment to resuscitate Aven and Mark’s computer, and I still haven’t had lunch. If I hustle, I can probably avoid starving, and get done in time to take care of Em’s machine today as well.

Why can’t I tell time?

I spent a few more hours today playing with various Movable Type features; mainly cleaning up the absymal default CSS, sorting out the archives, and fixing my RSS feed. Most of the stuff I still want to do falls into the category of “don’t make me edit this in fifty places, you steaming pile”, though there are some archiving limitations that aren’t entirely pleasant.

(I’m also tempted to add some more categories, but then I’d want to go back and reclassify a pile of ancient entries, and that’s just a horrible waste of time. Why am I wired this way?)

I wonder if this thing is at all legible with NS4 anymore. (I also wonder if I still care.)

I’d been meaning for quite some time to pick up American Gods, probably since dan_b recommended it to me back at some forgotten conference. I never seemed to remember when I was actually in a book store — and for all my hip-and-wiredness, I don’t actually buy books online hardly at all ever not really; book purchases are visceral and instantly-gratifying, and must be for all time — so until today I still hadn’t read it.

Today, though, I was reminded to purchase it, when Mr Gaiman himself sat down at the next table while I was eating a lovely Japan Sushi meal. He was being interviewed pretty poorly, IMO — the interviewer asked the same question three times, for example — but he did manage to trigger some piddly royalty on a trade paperback, and I bet he wasn’t buying his own sashimi.

I threatened to switch over to Movable Type, and I wasn’t kidding. I’m not entirely thrilled with some of the template mechanics, but the handful of plugins I’ve installed so far have been both painless and pleasant to use. Not bad for software, really.

I’m even experimenting a little bit with the whole “Extended Entry” thing, for no especially good reason.

My experiences importing my old entries into here were not entirely disastrous, but that’s largely because I still have a pretty steady hand with Perl, at least when it comes to text manipulation through brute-force application of regular expressions. If Tyla wants to switch over, she’ll have some learnin’ to do!

I haven’t yet figured out what to do with links to the old entries, which are a source of some not-inconsiderable google juice. Probably I’ll just leave them where they are, perhaps with some biohazard-grade warning label. (I think I might actually have some of those still lying around, because I’m way too much of a pansy to actually put them on things that I might some day want to take through airport security.)

(This entry was, perhaps obviously, written retroactively.)

We flitted off to Las Vegas today, after the whole Chester Incident got mostly sorted out. Alasdair had arrived at my house — and I hope he doesn’t take offense at my sharing this — hung right the heck over. Apparently a wild night of fondue and drinking was necessary before he could face the prospect of four whole days away with me. Tyla’s been known to brace herself that way as well, which might mean that there’s a hint in here for me.

The flight itself was pretty much uneventful, though we still don’t quite understand why there’s so much Japanese-language signage at MSP. By the time we got to our hotel, it was nearly 9PM, which meant that we didn’t have a whole lot of time to arrange our plans for the evening — at least, as long as the plans were to involve the 10PM Penn & Teller show. The show itself was pretty excellent, but I was left wondering who, exactly, thinks it’s a good idea to bring an eight-year-old child to that sort of show. I mean, I will, but I’m clearly different.

(Assuming, of course, that Tyla ever lets me bring our children anywhere near Las Vegas, but I’m sure she’ll come around.)

The hotel is OK (“Holiday Inn OK”, if you will), and it’s on the strip, so in theory we can walk to pretty much anything. I have forgotten my cell charger, because that’s the sort of modern-day superhero that I am.

Fiore micro-review: decent steaks, somewhat over-seasoned sides, least elegant up-sell patter I’ve been subjected to in a restaurant of that general quality-range. I’m sure you can do better in Vegas for the same price, but we were at the Rio already, and time was running out.

Man, I am getting to be so bad at this. When I do update, I end up spending 30 mins editing and linking and such, so I can't really stop and do it in the middle of some work task as a diary-prone thought springs to mind. But then by the time I have time, the moment has really passed. I'm going to try solving this personal problem with software, so the next time I post here will probably be with that.

Some things of recentness:

• It was dark here for a while.
• The Blizzards came and visited, which was nice. They enjoyed the darkness somewhat, I think. It was certainly novel!
• Alasdair and I are not going to Copenhagen, and we're not going to Zurich -- at least, not now. We're going to VEGAS, BABY instead, and in fact we're leaving for the airport in two hours. I should pack. I'm actually quite looking forward to it, especially since there are some things that even Tyla would approve of.
• Novell is paying for my trip, or most of it. Thanks, Novell!

I was going to pack this morning, but then at around six AM Chester decided to get on the roof, and he ended up on the slate side of the roof, and then after several minutes of wailing and scrabbling he ended up on the ground. Because cats are designed to make humans' lives difficult, he had hidden himself in some undergrowth by the time I got downstairs. Black cars may look better in the shade, but grey cats don't look like anything at dawn in the neighbour's garden.

We took him to the emergency clinic, where the nice vet man told us that he'd broken off half a tooth, and split his palate slightly, but was otherwise fine. And no, not to worry, he would not learn one damned thing from the episode. Sigh. Tyla's going to pick him up this afternoon, and then I guess we'll figure out what to do with his tooth at that point.

Some of you may recall that at the end of the trip to PNNL there remained one performance improvement on the list. Last week was spent constructing said improvement, and this one was devoted largely to wrangling for cluster time to test it. We delivered that drop to the customer today, after Matt was unable to break it overnight, and things seem to be going pretty smoothly. Not bad for, well, me.

My grand plans for our anniversary were to rent a steam cleaner, clean all the upholstery, and generally improve the living room to a state of excellent repair. Alasdair helped me truck the cleaner around, but various errors and defects and frustrations involving an upholstery wand and a grocery store kept me from getting a huge amount done on Friday. Also, I was suffering through the tail end of a nasty cold, so I had a lot of napping to do.

We finally managed to get the wand replaced, and Tyla and I cleaned the loveseats and armchair and ottoman and futon mattress — especially the futon mattress — into whatever sort of oblivion is reserved for things that are inexcusably clean.

Yes, Jacob, I'll be there for your birthday.

I've started to jones for hockey again already, for which I cannot offer a compelling excuse, and it made me think covetous thoughts about the NHL Centre Ice package. It's not a horrible deal — cheaper than season tickets, honey! — but the pricing baffles me. $24.95/mo if you take two other channels of bletcherous baseball and football, or $199.99 for 7 months of just the hockey. I can save how much by adding channels I won't watch? (I bet I can get more Coop-visits with the football feature, though.)

I need a beer.

My intention, you see, had been to not write this entry until I had delivered unto my lovely wife — whose vague terror of my anniversary plans grows with the passing of every minute — the gift with which I plan to commemorate the fourth anniversary of our marriage. But my plans are being laid to waste by the swift and sure hand of Cruel Fate, so I thought I'd vent a little bit. More detail later, but I wanted to get that off my chest.