I have to get back to hunting down spam, more tomorrow!

Not much else to report today… I slept in a ton, we went to the store to get food for the D&D session tonight.  That’s about it, we’re pretty unexciting right now!

Aside from that, I’ve gotten back into some of my old D&D notes from the best campaign I have ever run.  Tasha kept copious notes during the campaign, I’m amazed at how much I forgot about until re-reading through our Livejournal archives and all my old campaign plans.  This process has gotten my creative juices flowing, we’ll see if it helps my current campaign!

Water slides are very expensive, and the guy presenting showed us options ranging from the $3000 70′s public pool special, all the way up to a $15,000 molded plastic twisting job that looked like a small version of a water park slide.  It had a corkscrew and looked pretty neat.  Some discussion was had about the merits of doing that in the current economic state versus the amount of use and improvement to the neighborhood, eventually they deferred the topic to a future meeting.

It was nice to get to meet our neighbors, they seem like a pretty good group of people.  There’s a bunch of community events coming up, including a neighborhood-wide garage sale.  We might have to get in on that, I’ve got too much stuff for the size of house that we have!

Tonight I purchased my first electric guitar from Ebay, it’s a 1998 60′s reissue three-tone sunburst Fender Stratocaster!  I was originally going to save up and buy a new one, but this one showed up used and in great condition from a reputable buyer so I jumped on it.  The above image is from the seller of the auction, there’s a few superficial scratches but that’s fine by me.  I’ll have to get it set up once it arrives, but I’m pretty excited about it!

I’m putting this post up now because tonight is our No Doubt concert… its going to be a good time, hopefully the weather holds because its an outdoor venue (Fiddler’s Green).

After class, I was chatting with Sensei Gordon who is a sixth dan (I believe).  He threw a few techniques in “just messing around” fashion, I countered them back and commented that I hadn’t had much of a chance to free spar since I’ve been out here.  He said “Well, we can fix that” and out to the middle of the room we went.  There were other students doing kata, but they stayed mostly out of the way from us.  I got in with several of my usual tricks, but Gordon got the last word with a Heian Yondan style technique where he grabbed my shoulders and threw a knee strike right into my slightly untensed stomach.  Almost knocked the wind out of me, but I got tensed just enough to make a grunting noise.  That was about the end of it, but I requested more of the same after class in the future.  He said that it wouldn’t be a problem and that it was fun.

Sensei Yaguchi was watching us spar, and when we were done he told me “Good, but big problem!  Tense stomach more!  Tense legs and stomach!  Tense tense tense!”  I felt like my showing was passable, and at least I got some good feedback from him.  And I have a sparring partner again!  I have a passing distinct fear that Sensei Yaguchi himself is going to want to free spar me one of these days.  That will be a “tense your belly and attack” day, for sure!

I’ve been toying with the idea of putting the MythTV back into use, but it’s going to require a little bit of infrastructure work since the new wireless router that we got only has one wired port.  I suppose I could either get a wireless card for the MythTV or the Xbox360 and that would solve the problem.  My SchedulesDirect subscription expires in June too… I might just punt and use that machine as the foundation for my Multitouch table project, but I’m not sure that I’ll actually execute on that project this year now that I’m saving up for an electric guitar.  There’s also the small matter of not having the appropriate power tools to build the case.  We’ll see how the year progresses and I’ll decide what projects to take on!

This is my first guitar, which I got from my parents for my 20th birthday.  I’ve been working on my guitar skills lately, practicing on this and my other guitar (a Seagull S6 acoustic/electric).  After our grocery shopping, I decided to create a page on my new guitar website TheGuitarZero.com to show off my guitar gear.  I recently signed up to be a Musician’s Friend affiliate, and luckily enough they have a way to link directly to product pages and still get my affiliate’s bonus if anyone buys anything.  Pretty neat stuff!

I’ve still been shopping for electric guitars, and I really like the aesthetics of the Fender Standard Stratocaster.  During my research, I came across Brian May’s signature Red Special guitar.  Brian May is the guitarist for Queen, and his Red Special guitar has a very interesting story behind its construction.  I want this guitar because I’ve been a big fan of Brian May for a long time, however with so many intricacies and oddities in the guitar itself it is probably no the best to cut my teeth on.  It’s still going to be quite some time before I have the money saved up to buy my first electric, so I’m happy shopping around and looking at the options.

As soon as we are done paying off my last student loan, you bet both of these guitars will be in my stable.  Fun stuff!

This evening we are continuing our long week of movies by watching the Bourne Trilogy.  I’ve not seen these movies yet and the first one is pretty good so far!  That’s all for now…

The rest of tonight has been spent vegging out in front of CSI Miami reruns… this has been a good start to an extended weekend!