Today our DSL started behaving like DSL again. While a week of 14.4-style modem speed gave me that warm nostalgic feeling, to be back at real speed, especially with Safari, is stunning.

Zing!

Squelch, write post. So, we return from another binge of non-postings. I've been distracted; I discovered my lost love of adventure games after I went looking for a way to play Zork on the Unix layer of OS X. I found that (as well as a way to play them on Palm OS), but discovered there a whole sub-culture out there, who refer to such games with the somewhat lofty title of "interactive fiction," and a whole sub-subculture of folks who write new programs for the "Z-machine," the virtual computer which the old Infocom games ran on. There are free Z-Machine interpreters for nearly every platform out there, and not only are the first three Zork games released to the public, but so is The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, which was actually the first adventure game I ever played.

So now, I'm thinking: Hey, I'm a writer and an actor and a programmer to boot. What could be better than trying to create an interactive world? I can see it now! I'll learn the language. I'll enter contests! I'll take them all by storm!

All the while, never revealing that I never actually finished an adventure game except Hitchhiker's, and that only because I bought the hint book and read every darn hint...

Literally? Heard on All Things Considered last Friday:

You have a situation where the President and CEO of an organization are literally dropping boulders on each other in public!
-- David D'Ellesandro of John Hancock Financial Services, speaking of what must be really nasty infighting at the U.S. Olympic Committee.

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Yesterday the Gonnas performed at a party. It was like we were rock stars, man.

Startin' early.

D stopped going to a developmental pre-school (which was doing him no good at all) and started going to his regular nursery school five mornings a week. He had been going there three days a week--Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, in a very small class with only three other boys (no girls). Yesterday was his first day at the Tuesday-Thursday class. There are two other kids who go all five days, and the rest are new.

So we asked him who he saw at nursery school, and he answered, somewhat rakishly:

"Malcom, and Marcus... and girls!"

At what point does a mom-and-pop store become an evil, profiteering monolith from whom it's OK to steal? I mean, would you have ripped off the Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) when they were building machines in their garage? Or, would you have made (if you could) and released an MP3 of "My Guy" when it was the first hit for Barry Gordy's upstart record company?

Think about it.

As for me, I encourage you to steal content from this blog. I've given up on riches, and I'll settle for notoriety.

This is worth a look. I don't neccesarily agree with the implication, but it is food for thought.

Funk soul brother.

Have a good weekend?

There was something profound I wanted to say. Alas! I don't remember what.

Someone asked me the other day to help work on a Star Wars fan film. Except it's not a film, but a radio drama. They had seen Star Wars: Episode One and a Half and enjoyed it, so they asked me to do some dialogue editing.

I'm touched. I'm also busy. But I'm afraid I have the Michael Caine disease (I Just Can't Say No). Still, I really really want to finish my current projects before I embark on anyone else's. So I'm thinking I should decline on this one.

On a side note, I found out today that my older brother, who I haven't seen in well over twelve years and haven't talked to since 1995 (nor has anyone in my family), got married in 1998. My Dad told me this, and he found out vis a Google search, of all things. Yes, I love the family communication skills.

Really, though, my brother (whose name I won't mention in this blog, to protect his privacy--he is not my younger brother C---s who I've previously mentioned) is a stranger to me. We didn't grow up together, he's twelve years older than me, he lived with his mother while I was growing up, and he doesn't keep in touch with anyone in our family but my older sister (also a product of my father's first marriage). I do have a few happy memories about him on the rare occasions he would visit my Dad; one particularly vivid image was one spring day, and all of us were running under the "helicopter trees" (you know, those seeds that spin around as they fall through the air) which were showering down like mad, and I ran straight into him and we bonked heads somehow (he must have been bending down). I can still hear the clonk! sound it made.

That's actually one of the few happy memories I have from childhood. Not that my childhood was unhappy; it's just that when a divorce happens, it tends to crowd out all the other memories. So I imagine my brother doesn't remember that moment, since his folks (obviously) divorced before mine... not to mention that if his folks hadn't divorced, his little brother Squelch wouldn't have even existed.

Bumped. Well, the NPR story came and went and they didn't use K after all. However, she did pop up in this USA Today article, where she even got a promotion (she is most definitely not "head of the [National Marine Fisheries Service]'s highly migratory species office").

(Burma Shave)

and a lot of things, at that.

I actually have things to say

so it will look like

post tiny little sentence fragments

I think I will just

Oh, and I actually made some progress with the music for the movie. Sounds like utter carp [sic] but hey, it's a start. There's time to finesse it after I get Directorial Approval.

K's NPR bit didn't happen tonight, so presumably if you listen to Morning Edition tomorrow, you'll hear it.

More! More! Give me more, I want more! (You know who you are, you PIRATE!)