I’m off to Dave Day, and from there I’m heading up to Tony and Carri’s for faire. If you need me, use the cell phone… If you don’t need me… well then don’t use the cell phone silly…

I did it. I finally got around to making the replacement scabbard for my knife I use on my pirate garb.

Not bad for my 1st wood working project in god only knows how long. Definitely my 1st one ever using a router.

Nice title, Dean…

Well, as I mentioned in a previous post Seelie Court was performing at the Fountainside stage. As they started their performance Susan Scott Fry walked up and sat in the audience, clipboard in hand taking notes. About halfway through the set, I started noticing a loud bell and annoying whistle coming from down the hill. I assumed Dextre had switched to a bell in place of his chainsaw, however later it was mentioned to me that the bell was one of the town criers. After a few seconds of this mildly annoying interruption (On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being chainsaw, this was no more than a 5 in my book), I saw Susan’s head snap to the right, she stood up and took off towards Lord Mayors Forum at a brisk pace. The moment she arrived both the whistle and the bell fell silent. By the end of the song Susan had returned to her place in the audience, and there were no more interruptions from the Lord Mayors stage. By the end of the set, when she left, Susan seemed to be in a good mood and had laughed at some of the antics of the show.

As for which crier it was, I do not know, and I am also not sure if it was actually Dextre, or one of the other acts on the Lord Mayors Forum stage. I did not have my glasses on and so all I could see were various moving blobs of color. What I do know is that Susan has now personally witnessed how disruptive acts on the Lord Mayor’s Forum can be to acts at Fountainside even when just hawking for a show.

Stolen from

huh… seems fairly accurate… at least I think so…

I know I haven’t posted other weekend reviews but I just felt like rambling a bit tonight. (ok, and as I typed that my internal soundtrack just switched to “I’m a rover” by Great Big Sea… funny…)
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I was just given the “solution” to a problem I have been trying to work around. Our library catalog has a scripting language of sorts that allows you to do a lot of great things. Unfortunately, it also has a nasty logic flaw that I have discovered.

I realize, internally the programmers decided to automatically lowercase all input fed to the comparison on the left side. The problem is, there is no function to lowercase a variable. So, If I save the value of some function, say “LibraryName” someplace, and then try to compare it later… I run into “Aurora” = “Aurora” equating to FALSE because what is really being compared internally is: “aurora” and “Aurora”…

GRRRR….

For those of you wondering, Live Journal, and a number of other sites are down due to a power outage in San Francisco’s Financial district. Sites that are affected include Craigstlist, Technorati, Yelp and all Six Apart properties, TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox according to an article on oreilly.com

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/365_main_datace.html

This weekend was quite amazing to put it mildly. I’ll get into more of that later in another post.

I just wanted to write down an interaction that happened, that has had me just feeling quite happy.

During one of the Seelie Court shows Sunday I was standing at the top of the hill at fountainside stage selling CD’s and trying to draw in more patrons. I noticed off in the distance, just about to pass the Italian ice booth, a family walking along. The father had one of his young sons clad in a bright yellow t-shirt, riding on top of his shoulders. The boy had one arm extended pointing off to various sights of interest. Suddenly I decided to mimic them and see if they would come up for the show. I stood at the top of the hill, stretched to my full height and then pointed my arm outward towards the boy. The mother noticed me first, pointed at me and said to the boy, “look!!!” (times like this my overly sensitive hearing comes in handy) The boy turned, saw me pointing at him, and then immediately turned his “pointer” towards me with a grin on his face. I then made a 90 degree turn and began walking towards the show in an exaggerated toy soldier fashion. I heard a laugh again from the mother, and a grin appeared on the fathers face. The boy then turned his arm the same direction and proceeded to lead his family up the hill to the show. Once they arrived I greeted them with a silent smile, a goofy wave, and a broad gesture towards the music. The two boys had already picked up on the music and seemed to be peacefully enjoying it. Seeing this the parents sat down on the ground with their kids in front of them and sat for the whole show. Towards the end of the show the boy in yellow began playing with a Chinese yo-yo and slinging it towards me… I grinned, and waved at them a few times, and had the gestures returned by grins, waves, and the occasional burying of a head in a parents shoulder. The mother started to become a little concerned about the yo-yo for fear the boy might actually hit me with it. I just smiled and rattled my head. (I’ve got a shakey-eggy-thing in my hat for just such purposes) To lighten her fears I presented both boys with “magic stones” and explained they were to help remember their day. (It really is bizzare how the stones always seem to come out of my pouch matching something about the child perfectly. ) They clutched their stones tightly, their eyes beaming absolute joy, each child in possession of a treasure most precious to them and then they left.
Some time later I ran across the same family. The boys were being entertained by Jane the Phoole as their parents looked on. Their mother turned, as she noticed me walk by, came over to me and said, “I just want to thank you SO MUCH for being so kind and generous to them!” It’s times like this I really wish I had something profound to say… but all I could muster was a smile and a simple, “You are most welcome m’lady, please do enjoy the rest of your festival day”. With that I made a quick bow and continued on my way.

Those moments, when things just slip into place, just make you feel good to be alive.

Tonight I went all vegetarian for dinner.

• Eggplant, and Tomato stacker’s with Fetta cheese: Slices of eggplant and tomato brushed with a mixture of red wine vinegar, rosemary, olive oil, salt and pepper are grilled individually then stacked in layers with feta cheese. The stack is then grilled a bit longer to melt the cheese.
• Grilled Zucchini stuffed with goat cheese
• Corn on the Cob

TOday I noticed a posting on slashdot. It’s title was rather misleading, HOWEVER the content it is still scary. It seems GW issues an Executive Order on the 17th allowing for the Secretary of the Treasury to seize the assets of any US Citizen basically for opposing the Iraq war.

Read the order
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Happy Birthday . A little birdie told me…

Ok, I never put much stock in Friday the 13th. It’s just an arbitrary set of alignments of dates and week days as far as I’m concerned. Today, when I arrived at work all of our public workstations were down. They all had an error message I’ve never seen before talking about their logins having expired, and having their grace logins used up. The thing is, none of the workstations logins have grace logins… Finally after grouching at one of the network admins (sorry CM… ) he found that even though the boxes for the disabling of this login process were grayed out, signifying that they were disabled, they were still active for some bizzare reason.
Welcome to Friday the 13th…

Crap…
I’ve just been notified of a bit of a scheduling conundrum… Fermilab has their schedule of concerts, and performances out. On that schedule is “Woods Tea Company”. Of course, they are scheduled for a faire night. Saturday, August 4th, at 8 pm. This is very frustrating. I could leave faire early, and make the show no problem. But of course I would be missing the end of the day revel that day, and that’s one of the things I really look forward to… Then again, thats only ONE DAY of the revel, and I’ve really wanted to see Woods Tea Company for a couple years now… Arrrgh decisions decisions…

Ok… Opinions people?

Tonight on John’s grill:

• Grilled Salmon steak brushed with a mixture of lemon juice, fresh ground pepper, and a little thyme
• Grilled Asparagus, brushed with a little sea salt, black pepper and olive oil.
• Noodles alfredo

YUM. The salmon was definitely good especially considering this was my 1st time grilling salmon. I’d like to know when I actually decided I liked salmon? I’ve never been much of a fish fan… I think perhaps I should blame Jon Baade and sushi…

The asparagus was tasty as always, although it’s getting hard to find decent fresh asparagus, and I fear we are at an end for the season.

Wow! What a weekend, it felt so good to be back “home” at Bristol. I got to see a ton of my friends again, and received many hugs, kisses, and shouts of joy. I still don’t know if I will ever get used to people shouting in excitement when they see me. For some reason it seems weird.

Highlights:
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Today, the song Caledonia popped in my head, and hasn’t left it… It’s really a lovely song, and the version I have is from “Nosey Flynn“. I first met them ~3 years ago in Nashville at Findley’s Pub in the Opreyland Grand Resort. I spent just about every night of the convention that year, and the year following in the pub listening to them.

I would like to get back down there some time to catch them at another venue, perhaps the next time I go down for TNRF I will go earlier in the week and make it a point to hit the pubs and harrass them.

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Tonight’s grilling involved fresh zucchini, polish kielbasa, and shells and cheese.   The kielbasa  took about 15 to 20 minutes on medium high heat and was straightforwardly simple grilling.   For the zucchini, I cut a V wedge length ways, and in the wedge i placed strips of muenster cheese, and replaced the wedge.   I then brushed the whole thing with a mixture of olive oil, pepper and a tiny amount of salt.  This was placed on my grill tray along side the kielbasa on low heat.    Once the zucchini was tender I placed another strip of cheese on the top of each and let it just barely melt before serving.

Yum…

Ok, I’ve been mulling over this whole presidential get out of jail free card scooter libby has, and frankly I’m pissed. The man was CONVICTED… What the hell! How is it because he’s friends of the president… he gets a presidential get out of jail free card… What the hell!

I signed the moveon.org petition, and I also wrote the following blurb and sent it to my senators, and Dennis Hastert…

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