Category: Random

Sounds like a cool marketing ploy. Win a Chain Mail shirt

I was at Ironman Florida, as you might recall.

Jef Mallet of Frazz was also there, and he was a competitor! He turned in an 11:02:53 which is a time to which I can only aspire, right now.

While it would have been cool to sit down and talk to some of the top triathletes in the world, I’m even more disappointed that I didn’t get to search out Jef and compliment him on his wonderful comic.

Maybe I’ll see him next year.

One of the reasons I like this comic:

Congratulations to Jenn for finishing with a 4:54:27, which beats her marathon PR by something like eight hundred minutes!

I hope everyone is enjoying spending time today properly aligned with the Earth’s orbital plane.

If you sit very still, you can almost feel the energistic miasma flowing around you. I feel like buying crystals today.

John Scalzi was at Dragon*Con this year, promoting his latest book, Zoe’s Tale. In his reading session on Sunday, he read the first chapter of High Castle.

Hi-freaking-larious!

I’m 100% certain that the chapter would not have been as funny if I had picked up the book at read it myself. John’s delivery was (can I say it?) fucking awesome with a few extra fuckings thrown in. His reading of the chapter makes me want to build a time machine tomorrow so I may move forward to Fall ’09 and read the book (which is when it is slated to be published. Woe is us.)

Later on, I popped over to the author signing room to get my copy of Zoe’s Tale signed by the man himself. Amusingly enough (I blame this entirely on the non-obvious setup inside the room) I totally skipped the line and walked directly up to the table where John Scalzi was signing the book of someone else. He gave me this very strange look and that’s when I realized that there was a whole line of people busy melting me with their eyes. I would have been dust if their Evil Eyes had been functioning correctly.

Needless to say, I apologized profusely and went to the back of the line. John was nice enough to memorialize the event with his signature.

If you can’t read it it says: “Bill – I’m signing this even though you are a bossy bossy line jumper. Go and sin no more.”

This year, I arrived a Dragon*Con with an 8 Gb compact flash card in my camera. This let me do two things:

1. Buckle to the pressure and shoot in RAW + JPG
2. Not need to switch out the card during the weekend

Unfortunately, it takes a long time to download ~7 Gb to by computer through the card reader on my computer. It’s been going for 1.5 hours now and I think it’s about 70% done.

I didn’t shoot the Dragon*Con parade (which I’ll explain later) so I managed to not need to switch out the card during the weekend. With my Canon Digital Rebel XT shooting on RAW + JPG, I had around 540 images to take. If I’d been at the parade, I know I would have exceeded that. So, for RAW, I need another 8 Gb flash card.

At least I didn’t do what I did last year which was sprint out to pay an exiorbant amount of money to Wolf Camera for three 1Gb flash cards (and borrow a battery from a very kind friend. Thanks Annie!)

Today is the last day pre-Dragon*Con which means there is plenty to do to get ready:

Sleep – Won’t be doing much of that at the Con. I maintain about a 4 AM to 8 AM unconsciousness schedule

Charge – We’re geeks, so we have a lot of electronic toys which need to be charged up, and their spare batteries also filled with electrons. I am once again renting a lens from Professional Photo Resources, the Canon f/2.8 L 70-200 IS. The “L” makes it awesome and the “IS” makes it an energy hog, so camera batteries need to be charged.

Pack – That’s easy, but there are several options for party wear to bring, and it all has to fit in the car.

Play – We have friends staying with us tonight, so we’ll be playing games and watching Mythbusters bust the Moon Hoax Myth.

We’re looking forward to tomorrow and the weekend! Downtown Atlanta will be interesting, with 30,000 Dragon*Con attendees and the Alabama/Clemson game at the Georgia Dome with god knows how many fans and tailgaters.

I love this picture.

I drove past this a few times while traversing the Lubbock, TX to Birmingham, AL southerly route (the northerly route goes through Oklahoma City and avoids this spot). This is Louisiana off of I-20.

Re: my last post, I’m very disappointed that no one has done anything interesting with roundworm.org.

Somebody has purchased it and is willing to sell it, I’m guessing. I’ll be they snapped it up in hopes some medial firm would want it.