Made it to Indianapolis, we’re onward to the convention!

Woot!

It seems impossible, but tomorrow GenCon starts!! We’re in the process of packing up the important D&D related stuff that we want to bring and we’ll be heading towards Indianapolis tomorrow!

It’s going to be an interesting year for us, since we started StupidRanger.com last year we have been welcomed into a pretty cool circle of people that we get to actually meet and hang out with this year. This could very well trump last year’s excellence of getting to meet Gary Gygax and getting my book signed, we will have to see! The media guest of honor this year is Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in Star Wars. I don’t know if I’ll get his autograph or not, but its nice to actually have a star someone has heard of on the list this year.

Last year we got to see Hayden Panettiere, which was pretty neat. It aggravated me that she was only autographing for an hour at a time in the middle of the day on the last day of the convention, I would’ve liked to get her autograph but those are the breaks. I did manage to get a blurry picture though!

It stands to be further epic because some of my work friends, including one is going to attend a day of the convention. It’ll be neat to have someone else to swap nerd stories with when we get back to the Real World!

Well, I decided to call it quits around the twelve hour mark today. I think the bulk of my effort on my recent projects is past, I just have to help finish testing our code for one of my two assignments. Then its onward to GenCon!!

I’m ready to be done for the week. Or two. Or more.

Tonight we’re trying an experiment. Teddy is staying at my parents house while we visit and to see how he does with it. He gets to play with Wrigley for awhile, and the hope is that he’ll be able to stay with them this weekend while we’re at GenCon.

We did a trial run last night during our family dinner and they did fine. There were some sniffs and growls and the normal posturing but they got along pretty well for the first attempt. Tonight is the first time that we’ve tried to leave him alone with Wrigley and my parents, he’ll do great!

We’re planning our events for GenCon tonight! woot!

I was watching the Olympics tonight, and I was presented with a pair of presidential election campaign ads. I noticed the standard “and I approve of this message” bit at the end and wondered if there was any good reason why they did that aside from the obligatory face-time that it provided.

Two seconds with Google presented me the answer: it seems that there was some sort of campaign reform act passed in 2002 that requires candidates to identify themselves and their support of this message in order to cut down on mudslinging.

The Internet is so cool sometimes!

I really love the Olympics, for moments like what just happened in the Men’s 400 freestyle relay. That was incredible, and you’ve gotta love the underdogs pulling off a major upset!

What really gets me this year is hearing the stories of people training their whole lives for events like this. I understand that mentality since I’ve trained in karate since my early years, but to need to be in competition shape for the span of years that those people do? Amazing.

This is the first Summer Games we’ve gotten to see in high def and that makes a huge difference.

Thanks to the generosity of I returned this evening lousy with hostas. I had enough to ring our hydrangea and plant a big cluster of them on the other side of the garage by the downspout. We’ll have to manually water them and hope they settle ok, our sprinkler system won’t reach that far.

It looks great! I scheduled our wood mulch for delivery on 8/20, so the front yard landscaping will be complete then! woot!

Unfortunately, our clethra bush is looking a little dried out and wilted. I water in the morning and after work, however it wasn’t doing the job. Tonight I decided to ratchet things up a bit and I purchased a soaker sprinkler system. It is this hose that has five sprinklers that you can position around the garden. I ran that tonight for around 40 minutes, it did a good job of saturating the ground. I plan to run it again tomorrow morning for an hour or so, hopefully it will perk back up.

Yesterday I just plain forgot to blog. Oh well, that pretty much shoots my August Blog Posting Month, but I’ll shoot for over 95% or higher instead. I was so busy I even forgot to manage a post on Stupid Ranger too. Nobody seemed to mind me missing a day over there though.

When presented with the option of sorting through boxes and mowing the lawn, I voted for the lawn. Mowing the front yard went quickly enough, but the sidewalk was bothering me. Our sidewalk is pretty uneven, so riding over it with my riding lawnmower is not a good idea so I had a fair amount of weeds that had grown almost knee height in certain places.

So I sat down with my trowel and weeding tool and spent two hours digging up all the weeds. That is crappy, crappy work. I am glad I have my job instead of doing that for a living. I still have to do my back yard, but at least the front is looking good!!

After a long night of getting caught up on work and some errands, I turned my attention to my Eee PC once again. Last night I succeeded in screwing up my Eee PC so badly that it wouldn’t even reboot. Luckily, my mad computer skills prevailed and I got the system restored once again.

I am having some trouble with the Adobe Flash player taking up an unexpected amount of CPU (around 85-95%!) and I find out that it is due to the Linux version of the Flash player being truly awful. Apparently there is an open source Flash player called gnash that performs much better, however like many open source projects I can’t find the app in an easily digestible form.

Eventually I will figure it out, but it is more than a tad annoying. Problems like this make me understand why people continually go back to Windows.

I’m going to be at karate on Thursday if it kills me!