Once, when I was quite small, I had an opportunity to attend a science fiction convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I don't recall exactly when this was, it was long enough ago that Time Trax was on television and still in the first run of its first season (there was merchandise for it all over the dealers' rooms) but it made an impression on me. First, there were other science fiction fans out there, and second there was this thing called cosplay which I didn't really get into until college.

Long story short, I'm finally settled in enough to consider going …

As before, much of my spare time in the past two weeks has been spent making two more Scalemate plushies so I could give one of them to my little nephew Brandon this weekend as a "Hi, welcome to the world" present. I wanted to make two of them in case I messed up, and also to have a choice of which one to give him because they weren't going to be identical or perfect, but ideally better than the first one I sewed. I wanted them to be fairly bright and cheerful looking, the better to get his attention …

Life's busy right now. I'm being pulled in several different directions, sometimes simultaneously, which hasn't left a lot of time or compute cycles to do any writing. What I have had time for lately has been a lot of "fire and forget" stuff, which doesn't really do anyone any good. Failing that, long hours at my day job doing what I do best. I don't think any more need be said on that point.

The next release of Byzantium Linux (v0.5b) is due in five days, so that's where most of my spare time goes - knocking out the next …

I haven't been posting lately due to the fact Real Life (tm) has been keeping me away from the Net and generally too busy to write about what's been going on. Two weekends ago Lyssa and I spent the weekend with Solo of the Lost Boys and Shimizu, the latter of whom was in town for a couple of weeks. No one's seen any of the Lost Boys for a few months, so we jumped at the chance to hang out and talk shop for a couple of days. We spent much of that weekend running around northern Virginia, discussing …