(not the same as revisions, but we have some of those too)

I'll be in NYC this weekend for various reasons, the most writerly of which included a weekend lunch with my agent to go over the last round of revisions and meeting up with Matt Cody, author of the upcoming Powerless, to coo over his (and his lovely wife's) newborn son. Unfortunately, the agent-meeting had to be canceled for unexpected reasons, so we'll just have to settle for emails and phone calls for now.

The primary reason for the trip is, of course, to finish packing up the last of Kate's things in anticipation of her move to Denver next week. I cannot describe how happy I am that we're finally at that dream-like future place that was always there and never here, and describing things is what I do for a living. We'll also be meeting the reverend on Sunday, and... oh, I dunno. Other stuff. Probably walking somewhere, or looking at things, or maybe a movie. If I want to think about 9/11 for the next couple days, maybe I'll suggest Cloverfield. We'll see.

January: Goodbyes are a total crap idea in general, and I'd rather have no part in them.
February: This year has been so much more full, that it makes it seem as though more time has been compressed into the same number of days.
March: So we ate, we danced, I proposed, she shrieked and cried and finally said yes, then cried some more, said some very funny things, and then we resumed dancing.
April: I'm getting married in exactly one year.
May: I finally watched An Inconvenient Truth this evening. You should watch this movie.
June: As she moves that elbow, even the tiniest little bit, it starts again - surprised and hurt and confused, like she can't understand what she's doing wrong - and my heart, people, it is breaking, breaking, and broken.
July: Your religion (or, more broadly, your faith) is like your car.
August: Been too tired to blog, but I finished the Triathlon.
September: I found my dogs!
October: So let's say you're folding your laundry, naked.
November: As Kate mentions here, the most recent anthology from Wicked Words finally hit the US shelves this week, and reviewers have been very friendly to the story we had in the book.
December: I have a literary agent.

Anyone have any suggestions for a good way to "lick" a bunch of envelopes without (a) using your tongue or (b) getting one of those silly sponge-bottle letter-wetteners?

Kaylee has what I call "rehearsal mode". Every few hours she'll pick a phrase she finds interesting and repeat it, with full emotion and body language, until the words have lost all meaning to me. This morning, the phrase was:

"*gasp* Oh, the baby is sooooo cute!"

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I lost the code for embedding the little flickr picture-show/scrambler thing in my sidebar. I miss it a lot, and I can't find the program anywhere on the internet. It makes me sad.

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Moblogging via flickr/movable type still isn't working.

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124 days!

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Kaylee showed me how to take a bow this weekend. The end result, with her bent nearly double, her arms flung to the sky and hands flipped around like a stage magician, is Made of Pure Win.

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I'm buying a new mattress for Christmas. My back would like it to be Christmas now, please.

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Windshield still has a huge crack in it.

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My DNA thwarts me in mid-winter. As much as I work to maintain a good weight, the only things that smell instantly good are fried, grilled, or chili. The idea of a salad, even a big one, makes me cringe at an evolutionary level, unless I imagine the thing swimming in dressing.

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I'd really like to fly back to SoDak and see everyone.

Today, I was introduced to the concept of Hanukkah Gelt.

That would be MONEY, made out of CHOCOLATE.

Genius!

I don't remember that last time that's happened. Ugh.

Okay, let's just let me talk here for a bit and see if I've got anything to update you people about. The stream of consciousness is flooding its banks.

Thanksgiving ended a five-day Kaylee-free fasting. That was good (the ending, not the fasting). Much of the rest of that day was not good (despite wonderful eats and hosting at the Consortium), but that part was good.

The next five days were also full of spectacular Kaylee goodness. We have games that we play together that I really look forward to. She is a little playacting genius; it fills me with delight.

Note to self: you're pretty much out of soda.

Actually, there's been a strong pattern in the last couple weeks were things that are not Kaylee are full of suck, and Kaylee-things are good. On the one hand, this is bad, since it means that a lot of stuff is not good. On the other hand, it is a wonderful thing to find so much joy and contentment in your kid -- to really look forward to seeing them on a day to day basis. Walking up to the front door of the daycare in the afternoon is like getting up on Christmas morning.

The game I ran on Sunday was a not-Kaylee-and-still-good thing. I liked that a lot.

Haven't been getting to the gym as much as I'd like. Swing Dance classes begin anew in January and/or February. I'm very much looking forward to that.

Work is ... eh. Fine. Eh.

Someone used to say to me "I wish you push half as much effort into school (read: work) as you do your reading or your games."

I think: "I wish the things I get paid to do were half as engaging as the things I do for the joy of it." Or "I wish I was getting paid to do things I enjoy."

I'm using the word 'joy' a lot in this post. Tis the season, I suppose.

I like fall the best of all seasons. I do not, however, like being cold. At all. It is very very hard to get out of bed in the morning, if the house is cold, even if you're well-rested.

My phone has decided that I don't get to use one-touch speed dialing this week. It's mad at me about something -- I dunno what -- I don't understand phones.

Haven't seen Beowulf yet, or a half-dozen other movies I'd like to see in the theatre. I'm halfway through Becket downstairs on the home theatre -- it awaits only my next laundry day to finish it up.

There's a full length Avatar movie, set after season three, coming out on Nick this weekend. Haven't seen season three or the last part of season two yet, though, so I must avoid.

I have Battlestar Galactica: Razor taped and ready to watch, but maybe I'll just watch it with Kate this weekend.

Oh yeah. Going to NYC this weekend. This may be... very unlikely, but it MAY be the last trip I need to take simply to see my fiance for the first time in a month. Maybe. Probably at least one more trip in January.

I haven't seen my folks in ages. I really need to get out to South Dakota and see everyone. Stupid cheap airline tickets and I still don't have time.

My folks' computer has been on the fritz for a month. Hard to fix from here. Another reason to take a trip out there.

My windshield looks like it's going to collapse at any moment from nothing more than the pressure of the wipers moving over the surface -- so many cracks from one little (huge) rock. Really need to get that fixed.

The tire just had a screw in it. Big O fixed it for free -- that's a relief -- I thought I'd have to replace all four or something insane like that.

Traffic this morning in the new snow and (rumored) ice was... very very slow.

And... if you couldn't tell... my focus is shot and my attention wanders all over the map. I'm ready for 2008.

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

Don't want to give candy to the neighborhood kids (or, more likely, don't want the leftover candy taunting and tempting you for several hours months afterward? Hand out affordable toys, instead -- crafty things, packs of stickers, or even those little mini containers of play-doh.

I probably won't do the play-doh thing (since I don't want THOSE leftovers in my house either), but the stickers? That's a serious possibility.

(via ParentHacks)

A one sentence review of Mark Wahlburg's "Shooter":

"The fairy tale that redneck conservatives tell themselves when they want to believe that they could fix the government if it gets too corrupt... with the help of a good woman and a 30/30."

Kate's one-word review of the movie:

"ENUNCIATE."

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We're out in Utah for the weekend -- Kate's one of the speakers/interviewees at a writer's conference and I'm splitting my time between that and working on a book editing job in the (really) gorgeous two-story ski condo that the conference got for us. On a mountain lake a few miles from the winter Olympics ski site, free high-speed wifi, hot tub on the deck, roaring fire (that turns on with a switch!) and a bunch of DVDs left by the folks who own/sublet the place... not a whole lot to complain about for a short weekend away.

During the weekly team meeting:

"This issue is becoming a real bone of contingent between the two departments."

Cut the jack-o-lantern hole in the BOTTOM of the pumpkin, not the top.This serves several purposes:

1 - you can cut at an angle to help the pumpkin stay straight (if you have an odd shaped pumpkin).
2 - you can put the candle on the bottom without risking burning your fingers to light it from above.

(Via Parenthacks)

SABMiller and Molson Coors to Combine U.S. Operations in Joint Venture

SABMiller plc (SAB.L) and Molson Coors Brewing Company (TSX: TAP)(NYSE: TAP) today announced that they have signed a letter of intent to combine the U.S. and Puerto Rico operations of their respective subsidiaries, Miller and Coors, in a joint venture to create a stronger, brand-led U.S. brewer with the scale, resources and distribution platform to compete more effectively in the increasingly competitive U.S. marketplace.

The new company, which will be called MillerCoors, will have annual pro forma combined beer sales of 69 million U.S. barrels (81 million hectoliters) and net revenues of approximately $6.6 billion. Pro forma combined EBITDA will be approximately $842 million(1). SABMiller and Molson Coors expect the transaction to generate approximately $500 million in annual cost synergies to be delivered in full by the third full financial year of combined operations. The transaction is expected to be earnings accretive to both companies in the second full financial year of combined operations. Closing of the transaction is subject to reaching final agreement, obtaining clearance from U.S. competition authorities, certain other regulatory clearances and third-party consents, as required.

SABMiller and Molson Coors will each have a 50% voting interest in the joint venture and have five representatives each on its Board of Directors. Based on the economic value of the contributed assets, SABMiller will have a 58% economic interest in the joint venture and Molson Coors will have a 42% economic interest.

Ugh. Tired. Let's see what's been going on.

Work
Lot's of deadlines. No real surprises or drama there, I'm just busy.

Gaming
Very little of that in the last week or so -- just been too busy. Been online a couple times with Kate, playing Lord of the Rings Online (which is fun), but otherwise not much of anything. Should have at least one if not two face to face game-togethers this weekend, though.

Social
Both sistergirl and Kate were in town this weekend for fun and shopping. Emphasis on shopping. Belated birthday presents were purchased, and there was a lot of clothes shopping. I bought a tux.

Yes, tux.

Yes, bought.

I'll be eating leftovers on a bed of Ramen noodles for a month, but it is swexy.

Dogs
The dogs got through their grand adventure with no injuries... and the Jake promptly (re)injured the tendon in his back leg the day he got home -- he's been gimping around for a week now, unwilling to give up the squirrel chasing that is causing continued soreness. (Activity I'm unable to prevent when the dogs have free run of the house and yard all day.) No, I don't have the two grand handy for the surgery he probably needs. :P

Kaylee
Apparently I haven't been knocking on wood hard enough, as girly-girl has a pretty good (read: bad) head cold going on right now. Kaylee is normally super-healthly, and that condition has brought with a certain lack of conditioning on MY part when it comes to repeated wakings in the middle of the night when she's stuffed up and can't breathe.

Also, since she's rarely sick and sleeps soundly, she is handling this new situation with all the grace you would expect from someone with no experience at being sick -- in short, she's as graceful about it as *I* am when I'm sick, which makes her a real bundle of suck joy to be around, lemme tell yah.

And the cough medicine makes her SO HYPER. Yikes. Hyper-grumpy. Double yikes.

And this morning she decided she wasn't going to take any more medicine.

Me
Today I'm coming off four days of driving all over, shopping all over, taking care of Kaylee, sick Kaylee, and frequently-interrupted "sleep". I'm punchy and groggy. The words I needs in conversations are coming slowly to me, if at all.

I need a nap, a good long swim down at the rec center, and then more sleep.

Kate was in town this weekend after a long long time for the two of us, apart. That was good. What was bad was when it ended, but let's cover all the good stuff in between.

Thursday/Friday morning
Ugh. Okay, Kate's flight was delayed due to a crazy person, and I first had to drive to the airport at 2am in a thunderstorm, then missed a turn on the way home that added 20 minutes to our drive. Upside? SHE GOT HERE!

Friday
I had a whole lot of meetings going on at work, but after that we did some shopping. I picked up a memory card for my new phone, and a small USB hub, since my Dell Tower has run out of ports.

That afternoon we picked up Kaylee, played with the girl, presented some birthday presents, and generally had a grand ol' time. Kaylee really didn't want to go to bed at all, but eventually she went down, and we proceeded to unload, rearrange, and reload my office. I really like the new layout a lot better -- we reorganized the rat's nest of cables behind the desk (which moved across the room) and cleaned out all the drawers in the desk and closet, junking some cables and peripherals that haven't been viable or useful for anywhere from 5 to 10 years. On a surface, this was a pretty subtle change, but a very palpable one for me -- and the rearranging also made my wireless signal a lot stronger in the house, so that's a bonus.

Plus, we watched Mulan. Bonus.

Saturday
Kaylee and I met Jackie at Doctor BoomBoom's office for her two year checkup. Monkeygirl is very tall for her age (35 inches and change), and is exactly in the middle on weight. If she stays that way, she'll probably be very happy. The doctor's questions about her developmental "stuff" was all about three months out of date, from out point of view.

"Has she been doing this?"
"Oh yeah. For months now."
"How about this?"
"Since she was 18 months, at least. Maybe longer."
"Oh. Wow. Okay... how about this?"
"Yes... probably in February."
"Wow."

He says she's "perfect." I like Doctor Boomboom. :)

Speaking of perfect, Kate and I went to see Stardust on Saturday, and it's also pretty darn perfect, for what it does. I recommend this movie very very much, to everyone. Great flick. If you liked the Princess Bride, or Ella Enchanted, or Labyrinth or...

Just think of every good fairy tale movie you've seen, and take the best bits, and that's Stardust. Yes, really.

But I got ahead of myself -- before the movie we did some shopping, and Kate found her shoes for the wedding. She was very pleased. Is very pleased. May, in fact, continue to be pleased for months to come. They're pretty cool shoes, I have to admit.

(I got some shoes too -- which ironically cost a fair amount more than Kate's fantastic heels -- but they aren't worth a whole post about them. They're black. The end.)

Saturday evening we went over to the Consortium for some game fun, and that went pretty well, if digressiontastic from all directions, and then it was CRASH into bed.

Sunday
Sunday was more shopping errands for us in the morning. We went looking for a Joann Fabrics in a location we weren't sure about instead of going to the one we knew, and couldn't find it. From there, we hit the Shane Company to look at wedding bands, where we learned that Kate's band will be simple and elegant, and that I (as Margie would say) "have excellent taste." Oof.

Lunch and Dave and Busters (where Kate invented a new sandwich that they should put on the menu), then we met Jackie and Kaylee for a visit to the nearby Butterfly Pavilion. This was a lot of fun, despite one of the butterflies going right into Kaylee's face early on and freaking her out a little for the rest of the visit. A little more shopping a local super Target, and then back home.

A quick stop over at the house to charge back up, then we headed to the theatre for Bourne Ultimatum.

I loved the first Bourne movie. I sort of hated the second one, because the shakycam they used made it impossible to see the fights and car chases that I could almost but not quite see were pretty good. I was pretty nervous going into this installment, because I'd heard people bitch about the shakycam again, but in this case they found a level of 'realistic' shake that I could live with, and really enjoy the movie.

And enjoy it I did. This is a deep tale with a lot of stuff, even after it 'concluded', that I still wanted to learn more about. I will definitely own this one. (Stardust also, but for very different reasons.)

After that, we (mostly Kate -- I can't remember what I was doing but it kept pulling me out of the kitchen) made up some spaghetti and meatballs with garlic bread, and watched "For Your Consideration", which was...

it was...

Well, in terms of movie-watching karma, it balanced us out against Stardust and Bourne Ultimatum for the weekend.

And then to bed, and a work from home Monday morning, and driving to the airport, and goodbyes, and then back to the office for afternoon meetings.

A great weekend, over all too soon.

"People are stupid.

Friends are cool. Acquaintances are nice. People are dumb. People are ignorant. People are loud-mouthed schnooks. People need to take a long quaff from a great big tall frosty glass of Shut The Hell Up.

Unfortunately, too often in our lives we have to deal with People. "

Quick update:

Gmail/Google Reader/GCalendar is even slicker than than I expected. I don't even have to use the web-page interface for Gmail -- I can just grab everything as a pop3 account. I was particularly impressed that setup consisted of "here's my ID, here's my password... you go out on the internet and pull the correct settings for everything else" and it WORKED.

Outlook Work email/calendar -- setup took all of four minutes and the interface to my Outlook Inbox folders is even better than the web-based interface. Awesome. (Helped that I could call a guy I know who both sets the exchange server up and LIVES on his smartphone.)

Still haven't had time to mess with the camera or video. I think perhaps tonight with Kaylee.

Haven't quite figured out how to get ringtones downloaded. The Verizon "get it now" option I'm familiar with is nowhere to be found.

Still need to figure out what I need to do to get GChat working on the phone. I've seen some stuff I can download that claims to do what I want, but I also want to make sure it's what I need before I spend 35 bucks on the software. (Oh for the days when handhelp apps were a piddling couple of dollars per app.) I'm also scared to go shopping on Handango, since I'll probably grab iRogue and a bunch of other games.

All in all, I'm quite pleased.

My main cell phone is still jacked up (and very badly in need of replacement). If you're trying to get me and can't, use the other phone number.

Sleep is a weapon, and I am currently bringing a dull butter knife to a gun fight.

"You see, it was a rhetorical question."

"What's that?"

"That's a question that you ask, when you already know the answer."

"Why on Earth would anyone do THAT?"

Heh.

Wednesday last week Kate got into town late, due to flight issues, so that meant she and Kaylee and I finally got back to the house around 2 am. Yuck.

Thursday Kate spent some time at the gym and biking around the neighborhood. She was heard to comment: "street names like TimberRIDGE and NorthRIDGE, all located in HIGHLANDS Ranch seem to indicate hilly terrain. Who'da thunk?"

When I got home, we finished up a project Kate had started -- cleaning out the hallway hutch to make a space for our wedding china and other pretties. It felt good to get that generally cluttered and poorly used area all straightened up.

We then went to Transformers. This is a great, fun summertime flick. If you saw and enjoyed Die Hard for its summer movie goodness, you will enjoy this movie -- that's my personal belief. Good stuff -- lots of funny -- we had a great time.

FridayI had work, and Kate went back to the gym and a longer bike ride. This time, she was lulled into a trap by the innocuous sounding "Venneford Ranch" street name, which is actually both steeper and longer than any of the streets with "Ridge" in the name.

That evening, Dave and Margie and Jim and Ginger and Katherine came over. We ate a lot of good food, talked about home improvement stuff, let Kaylee charm us, and then Dave and Margie and Kate and I played Primetime Adventures, and other three headed home.

Saturday, we dropped Kaylee off at Jackie's and headed to the Aurora Reservoir for check in and orientation for the Triathlon. Met up with Kate's longtime friend Yi Shun and her husband Jim, who came in from Chicago to do the tri, as well as visit friends and do some work meetings. The orientation, bike drop off, and lunch took up most of the day. We headed home, got some pizza for supper, and watched the fourth Harry Potter movie on DVD.

This was not the movie we watched.

My thoughts on HP #4, from a guy who hasn't read the book yet:

#4 is not a movie adaptation of a book. It's a audiovisual summary of the book... and not a great one; about like having a friend a stranger who read the book try to get you caught up before you go see Order of the Phoenix. I was left thinking "if all I had to go on was this movie, I would be wondering what on earth made someone think making a movie from these books was a good idea." It's not... BAD -- it's just... uninspired.

Sunday The Triathlon, about which more has been said elsewhere. Check out my Flickr page for more pictures.

I love Flickr, by the way. I've upgraded to the Pro Account for the extra functionality, more sets, unlimited uploads, and what amounts to a private domain just for hosting my pictures. The price is reasonable, the service is top-notch, and I can pick up prints from my local Target about an hour after making the order. Plus, it allows picture blogging from the phone, and a host of other goodies. I'm in the process of getting ALL my pictures up there.

In the afternoon, we moved Bert-the-Oven over to Jackie's, and moved Unnamed Oven back to our place.

Yes, after getting up at five in the morning and doing a Triathlon, Kate then helped me move two ovens across town. She's like a super hero or something.

That evening, Kate and I went to Harry Potter #5.

My thoughts on HP #5, from a guy who hasn't read the book yet:

This is a great movie. It's fun, it's dark, the translation from book to film is inspired and well-done (notable: this is the only movie that hasn't been translated to film by the same guy as #1, #2, #3, and #4, and it makes me sad and worried that Mr. 1 though 4 is coming back to translate #6), the acting is superb, the real villain of the piece (played by Imelda Staunton) is easily the most HATEABLE character in the HP stories, and quite possibly in any movie I've ever seen. Most villains (and the actors playing them) go for a kind of bad-boy cool -- Staunton goes for the most pleasantly loathsome creature I've ever ...

*shakes head* She steals the movie, then tortures it, while you watch, breathless. She's THAT good at being THAT evil. GOD I hated her.

Anyway: good movie. Easily my favorite of the HP series to date. (Azkaban was good, but still managed to disappoint me in its delivery in some places. Ever nit I've ever picked about the HP series in general is handled with a kind of inspired grace in Order of the Phoenix.

To compare: OotP made me want to read the book because it was a fun movie and I want to reexperience the good stuff from the screen and get all the extra bits that they had to take out. Goblet of Fire made me want to read the book because I figure that the story can't actually be that bad. (I'm assuming/hoping, there, that #4 isn't bad for the same reason #2 was: that it was based on a bad story to begin with.)

Monday Countdown, a plugin for your iGoogle page, is very handy. What date could I want to count down to? Hmmm...

Did a bit of errand running in the afternoon, then picked up Kaylee (I have her all this week, due to some work stuff Jackie's got going on) -- we all sat around and watched Titan A.E., which both Joss Whedon and Ben Edlund wrote for -- good fun stuff, and Kate hadn't seen it. After the wee munchkin was off to bed, Kate and I watched Resident Evil, which she also hadn't seen. Fun Zombie flick. No nearly as scary as the game, but good action movie zombie fun.

Tuesday Kate flew back to New York. Happy Doyce is all out of Happy. :P

That evening, Kaylee and I played and watched a bunch of Avatar, Book 2 episodes. That is one of my favorite animated shows ever, I think. Great stuff.

Wednesday Today! Umm... not much going on. How about you?

You know that ringing in your ears? The one you can only really hear when it's quiet, like when you're about to go to sleep, or just after you shut off your car and the music abruptly stops?

That's the sound of your ear cells dying. Once the ringing fades, you'll never hear that particular frequency ever again.

Sweet dreams.

• 35.75 mpg on the Matrix at the last refill. That's kissing close to the best advertised highway mileage, and includes at least two trips to Golden during which I was NOT driving optimally. I'm trying out different speeds each tank to figure out where the engine's true sweet spot is, and I think I might have gotten closer this time, because the numbers shouldn't have been that good.

• I am sometimes reminded (thank you, Internet) that my nearest and dearest friends are part of the smart minority -- the 10% of everything that isn't crap. I'm lucky.

• Collaboration on creative things does amazing things. I've had great stuff come out of the stories I've collaborated on with Kate, so I knew this, but I'd never tried it with gaming. Randy and I are both running stuff in this new game we're starting up, and Dave will later also (I hope), and sharing the vision and incorporating each other's ideas takes us in directions I'd have never gone on my own. Doesn't make it any better or worse, just excitingly different.

• The longer we do it, the easier the trip thence-and-back between NYC and Denver gets.

• The longer we do it, the yuckier the time in between trips becomes.

• SUX airport. Heh. Still funny.

• Spent a chunk of last weekend fixing up the 'sight lines' for the sprinklers in the front yard -- big sections of the lawn were drying out and dying simply because some of the pretty flowering plants had grown up to the point where they totally blocked the sprinklers nearest them, which in turn made them flourish even more. Ruthless pruning = lawn dry spots on the mend.

• I need more paving stones for the walkways in the yard.

• Sprinkler system is leaking. :P Just a little, but :P

• Casa Testerman now gets all its electricity from a front range wind farm.

• The recycling truck comes by EARLY. You don't want to miss it, either, because it's only a biweekly pickup.

• Mmm... rice.
  

Boing Boing: Sicko inspires grassroots action in Dallas cinema

Yes, I should go see this. Yes, I know.

I also know most of the depressing and just plain wrong things in the medical industry already, thanks to training people withing said industry for years.

Or 100 degrees farenheit, which is what the thermostat in my car was reading as the external temp as I drove around this afternoon.

"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-- Marilyn Manson

Proving once and for all that anyone can be profound if you edit well enough.

Going from:
"Man, I've got so much stuff to do -- so many deadlines."

To:

"Check. Check. Check. Check... and Done."

That's nice.

One on-the-side editing job finished.
Two MAJOR work-related to-dos, to-done.
BLOODY BOOK REVISION: finished.

Now it's just making sure I didn't miss anything, taking care of some minor things for the beach trip with Kaylee this weekend, and (finally) printing out a hardcopy of a certain someone's book I promised to read.

I meant to mention this yesterday, as it actually happened then, but neck pain and work pain conspired to distract me from the internets for most of the day.

With a few relatively minor tweaks to my driving style (drive about five mph slower than my norm, set the cruise and leave it alone), I managed to wring 401 miles out of my last tank of gas in the Matrix, which worked out to 35.8 miles-per-gallon. That's on the (very) high end of the dealer-advertised mileage for the model, which I think everyone knows is usually a wistful fiction, so I'm pretty happy.

Especially since I did at least forty of miles of that down in the middle of a sweltering stopsign-every-other-block residential area, with the air conditioner running. In short -- it means I could get it even higher.

I wish the car had one of those "this is what your MPG is *right now*" readouts -- it'd be like playing a video game. :)

Hmm.

Seems like I'm typing a lot of stuff, but none of it's pointed at this (or any other) blog. Interesting how these things go in cycles.

I spent a short weekend in NYC, during which it was hot, then rainy, but mostly hot.

Saw Pirates #3, which I actually enjoyed quite a bit more than 2, plus found it helped #2 make more sense, plus I liked the various endings, including the happy little denouement at the very very end.

Played a few games while there, heard some baby news from (and for) a friend, which was great.

Not nearly enough time out there. Going longer than two weeks between trips is getting more and more unhappy-making. Next trip is me out there again in three weeks -- this time with Kaylee, and involving a trip to the Jersey shore, so Kaylee's first encounter with the Ocean -- my money is on Kaylee.

Let's see:

"Hey there Delilah" by the Plain White T's makes me melancholy. Also, it's sweet.

I'm loving Ubuntu Linux on my laptop -- it's made that particular machine so much more useful to me, just in terms of operational speed, more applications, and battery life. Awesome.

And... that's about it for now.

In lieu of, you know, actual posting material, I've been doing okay with just posting links to interesting/alarming things but even that's dried up a touch in the last few days.

Heading to NYC tomorrow for a short weekend in the city. Planned highlights include playing a western-style zombie-killin' game on Friday night, watching some Pirate-style zombie killing movie (PotC3) on Saturday, and a whole lot of nuthin' on Sunday. I'm bringing a couple books along (or maybe just Faerie Reel), a notebook, perhaps my laptop (for some writing time on the plane ride), and not much else.

Unlike last year, the lawn and controlled plantlife outside actually looks okay. I hope that trend continues.

Kaylee thinks hollering (not screaming -- it's not high pitched enough to call it screaming) "Nooooooo..." at the top of her lungs will actually accomplish something when she's not getting what she wants. I don't know that either I or her mom are, objectively, more stubborn than her, but we have a lot more practice in getting our way, so this particular tactic isn't getting much traction.

The annoying thing is that, even when she's doing that, she's still cute.

Also? When she's pissed at me for not giving in and is starting to pout, she has no one to come to for comfort but... me. She hasn't yet realized the conflict of interest in seeking a hug from the person who denied your wishes, and here's hoping she never does. I love me the hugs.

Wedding stuff is pretty much all locked in except for clothing and flowers... and only... ten and a half months early. There's a super-sekrit website we're putting together with all the information on it, though, so you can go see it if'n you want. Just email me or Kate.

Is that it? I think that's it.

I don't make a lot of super techie posts (at least not about computers -- I do plenty of that with games), but Lee wanted to know how my experience with Ubuntu Linux went, so I'm going to try to sum it up below. I'll try to keep it from being too techie, while getting to the meat of things.

So... I don't have Windows Vista. Good lord willin', I never will have it on anything but work machines or in dusty, rarely used partitions on my hard drive. It costs too much, the Digital Rights Management (which I already find irritating and insulting in Windows XP) is enough to make me actually angry in Vista.

So lately, I've been looking really hard at computing alternatives. While I was in Chicago for Forge Midwest, my roommate had a Mac Powerbook that was several different kinds of hot and sexy, and Kate has commented a number of times about how her friend MJ has a Mac PowerBook that "sure can do some neat stuff with iLife."

I agree, and I'm more than a little interested -- I actually expect that either Kate or I will have a Mac in the next couple years -- but Powerbooks aren't cheap (by which I mean they cost as much as any other new laptop), and we've got a wedding to get ready for, so if I really want to move away from Windows right now, I need a cheaper alternative.

So there's Linux -- the third player in the home computer market -- which is cheap.

By which I mean free.

Why have you (maybe) never heard of Linux? Mainly because it's not (at it's heart) a product of a for-profit company (or even companies), and because, as a kind of garage-moonshine-hippie-ninja-commune-operation, it's not historically been 'friendly' to users who aren't that tech savvy and want a new computer, but has been very open to 'fellow geeks'.

Why should you know about Linux? You can put it on pretty much every piece of computer hardware out there -- yes, even on Macs.

Assuming you can get it running, right? That's the punchline.

So... I'm fairly tech savvy... and I've used flavors of Linux here and there, every since college, and I've even installed different flavors of Linux on different machines -- I know how to build my own boxxen, but not write my own programs. I may not know how to do something, but I can take the time to figure it out.

In short, I should be able to do this, right? And hopefully I can do with Linux pretty much everything I can do in Windows?

Lets find out.

So I grabbed my two year old Dell Inspiron laptop (2.8 GHz Pentium 4, 40 gig harddrive, and 500 megs of RAM), hooked it up to a LAN cable so that I didn't have to worry about losing my Wireless connection in mid-install (smart move, that), and started a download of Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu: Ancient African for "I Can't Install RedHat"

There's lots of different versions of Linux, all customized and modular, which means you'll probably never see anyone with the exact same Linux setup. (Think of the way Firefox looks different on everyone's machine -- it's like that.) I wanted to try Ubuntu because it's what everyone's talking about -- the (current) Linux version voted Most Likely to be Easiest to Use for the Home User (Dell has just started offering Ubuntu on it's regular laptops and desktops as an option).

The previous holders of that 'easy' title were SuSE, Mandrake, and RedHat (in reverse order) -- I've installed two of those before.

Ubuntu, by comparison, makes those previous 'easy installs' look like bending steel with your teeth. Ubuntu comes on a LiveCD, which means you can download the Ubuntu install, burn it to a CD, and RUN THE ACTUAL OS from the disk, WITHOUT INSTALLING FIRST. You don't have to reformat your system (or install a new partition) -- you can just 'pretend' run it, and see what it's like -- up to and including checking out how your hardware's running and so forth.

((Side note: what's a partition? Think of your hard drive as a big house. It's all one partition. All of the stuff in that 'house' needs to use the same OS. Putting a partition on your hard drive is like converting your regular house into a duplex in which you take turns living in either side. This halves your available space in each partition (obviously), but you can put a different OS in each partition -- it's something you might want to do if you need to use both Windows AND Linux -- I'll come back to that later.))

Anyway, one of the huge advantages of the LiveCD is that it is a good indicator of how much work you're going to have to do to get your hardware working. Granted, some stuff may not work right off in Linux, but CAN work with some massaging that you can't do while running straight from the LiveCD -- but even if some things don't work right away, knowing how much configuration you'll have to do is a good way to make the decision for or against installing.

Installation
So I copied all my documents and music files from my laptop to my PC, and started up the Ubuntu LiveCD -- just booting from the CD.

(I pretty much use my laptop for writing, browsing the internet, email, watching DVDs, and keeping gaming documents at hand during games -- it also has/had a 'backup' install of World of Warcraft and City of Heroes that I rarely use. That list of stuff is what I wanted to at least try to get working in Linux.)

My First Mistake
I liked the look and feel of Ubuntu running from the CD, so I started up the install. Now, if I'd been THINKING, I would have converted my hard drive from the NTFS to something like FAT32 ahead of time. (What's NTFS and FAT32? Think of them as the... umm... let's say the voltages that our imaginary house is wired for. NTFS pretty much just works for Windows, and it's what I had on the Laptop. Linux can read files on an NTFS drive all right, but they can't (without some extra plug-ins) write to them. That ended up being a problem at this point -- I left the drive set up for NTFS, told Ubuntu to install, and Ubuntu cleared the boot sector of the drive, hit the NTFS partition, and the install failed.

What did that do? Well, to stick with my house analogy -- it destroyed the steps up to the front door... before it managed to get inside.

Which also meant I couldn't get into the house either, even "through the Windows." Oops.

To fix this, I had to boot to my Windows XP install disk, format the drive to something Linux could read, then start up the install again. Not a big deal, and mostly my fault, but it might have been a problem for a complete tyro.

To say that installation was easy after that point would be an understatement. Using LiveCD means you're already using the OS while you install it on your hard drive -- what I mean to say is that you can sit there and play Solitaire or Frozen Bubbles (GREAT game!) while the install runs.

First "Real" Boot
After installation and reboot, the PC comes up into the first 'real' run of the default UI -- called Gnome, which utilizes a window manager called Metacity. Gnome is typically referred to as the simpler of the two big user interfaces for Linux.

Gnome's default interface feels like "Mac layout, with a Windows taskbar." The desktop is fully customizable; you can pretty much tweak the location, look, and performance of every element on the desktop to make it more Windows, more Mac, or something else entirely, and add applications like a weather report, battery monitor for notebooks, etc. (the one that I wanted right off was the system monitor).

Example: In Windows, I keep Metapad (a slightly more robust Notepad program) in my taskbar for quick and dirty writing/editing and as a copy-paste holding pen. In Linux, check out the applications list for "Text Editor." Doesn't get much more obvious than that. "Text Editor" is actually Gedit - a notepad like program with spell-check and find-and-replace. Handy. I right-clicked on the "Text Editor" button and hey look: there's an option to add it to the top bar just like that - convenient.

Now I was ready to move ahead with installing my applications.

But first, System Update
As soon as it got running, Ubuntu notified me of updates. I clicked, and it brought up the software updates application and installed everything (including stuff that didn't have anything to do with Ubuntu.

After the updates, I reboot. I really, really, REALLY have to remind myself to do that when it says to.

Right. So... on to installation of "stuff".

Finding Solutions
There are many 'redundant' applications which do the same things in Linux (because of the 'built my own version in my backyard' Linux community) so you can keep trying different solutions until you find one that does what you want. You can start with the Ubuntu defaults, then move further and further afield to find what you like (if necessary).

Easier and easier
Linux programs have traditionally been a pain to install. At first, they had to be compiled by hand -- I did a lot of those "make" commands back in my days as a PennMUSH admin in the early nineties -- it wasn't fun. Plus, the programs usually had package dependencies -- other programs you have to install before you install the program you actually want -- and many of those package dependencies were either undocumented (!!), hard to find, impossible to install, or available in multiple versions. Keeping track of it all was an absolute nightmare and is one of the reasons Linux has this lasting rep as being user-unfriendly.

That was then. This is now.

In Ubuntu, there is an "add-remove programs" menu item. It's a massive list of programs, including descriptions, and all sorted by usage -- all of which can be installed by just checking the programs I want and hitting the install button. Forget how much this improved Linux; this is also much better than Windows, and includes a PILE of 'third party' options, because EVERYTHING IS FREE.

The end result is that you can install every program you could want simply by checking off the programs in the list, then downloading and installing them in the background. It's like moving from carving in stone to have a psychic personal assistant do all your writing for you.

So I went down the list of programs I want - each one comes with a name, icon, and detailed description. If I need more information, I can click on the project homepage link provided in the description.

So in one shot, I select:
* AbiWord, a word processor,
* Frozen-Bubble, a nifty little Bejeweled/Tetris/Blockout mutant love-child.
* Gstreamer plugins (to play, among others, MP3 files and UNencrypted DVDs) -- I also get Automatix, which installs the codecs I need to play Encrypted (ie: commercially purchased "movie") DVDs.
* Gstreamer ffmpeg video plugin (to play Divx and other video files)
* Kino (Digital video editor)
* VLC Media Player (which pretty much plays every bloody video format on the planet)

I hit "OK". It gives me a final look at what I chose to install. I hit apply, and wait for the laptop to burst into flame. The laptop is fine. I browse the internet with Firefox (which I haven't mentioned to this point because it's automatically a part of Ubuntu) and pick up some Firefox plugins while the install runs. There is no lag.

Web Browsing & Flash
Firefox 2.0.0.3 comes installed from the get-go, with Flash, and everything works just fine. I installed the same addons that I use on my other machines, and all THAT worked fine also. I'm doing this whole post from the laptop.

Afterward the install, I play a few MP3s and non-DVD videos, just to see if I can. Everything works fine, even though I haven't done any kind of configuration for any hardware.

E-Mail
I use Gmail for everything at home, but just to check it out, I set up Evolution, which is an Outlook-workalike and Ubuntu's default mail client. I also installed and set up and ran Thunderbird for awhile -- it's still nice, but I just don't need it. Because I have Gmail, I also installed CheckGmail which puts an e-mail notifier in my system tray.

Peripherals & Hardware
Flash Drives: I plugged in a couple USB flash sticks just to see if Linux would find them. Worked like gangbusters -- even pops up with an icon, automatically mounted.

Printer: I installed my HP LaserJet 1200 as a network printer (shared via my Windows XP desktop) -- it took about... as long as it does on any other machine. A minute? Piece of cake. More interesting will be putting my Canon color printer directly onto the laptop via USB, then sharing it to the rest of the network -- haven't done that yet.

CD Burner: Gnome offers many, many, many ways to burn a disc. I had no problem burning disks, either data disks, ISOs, or music disks. I don't have a DVD burner, but I'll tell you what: this OS makes me want to have one.

WiFi:
This... wasn't fun.

The bottom line is this -- Linux had the driver for my WiFi card, but it can't put the WHOLE thing inside the OS, because the OS itself is free, and the manufacturer of this particular WiFi card (Broadcom, which is the chip Dell uses for their WiFi) want some of the drivers to somehow be attached to the spending of money. Or something. There's politics surrounding the whole thing that make me nauseous when I think about it too much.

It took me a long, long, long time to figure out what all that meant -- in short, you have to download a program for Linux that extracts the 'rest' of the WiFi drivers right out of the chip's firmware itself, sort of to prove that you bought the card, I guess.

It took me HOURS to figure that out, during which I did other stuff while I poked at it. Ironically, once I figured that out, I got it working in a few minutes.

DVDs
Philosophically, the problem I had with playing DVD Movies was the same thing -- since Ubuntu is free, no one wants to package their DVD codecs (read: translation files) with Ubuntu. Somehow, using an OS that you paid for gives you the 'right' (in their mind) to play DVDs... which you ALSO (and ALREADY) paid for.

Right. So Ubuntu is nice and law abiding... they don't package that stuff, so DVDs don't work. Then you get Automatix running, select all the codecs you need, read the big red warning that tells you you're a bad person for wanting to watch your own DVD movies on a dirty hippie operating system, and install the stuff anyway.

And movies work just fine. I even got the Kino video editor running and stitched together two short movies into one longer one -- that's pretty cool, though it took a long time to convert them into a kino-friend format, edit them, then save them back the other way -- I've never done anything like that in Windows, because every software package that lets me do stuff like that costs WAY too much money. Functionality like that is one of the reasons I've been looking at Macs and their iLife package so closely.

And... here it is in Linux. Free. Not perhaps as full-featured or friendly as iLife, but... again... free.

Getting Stuff Done
Word Processing: As I mentioned, I installed AbiWord. Ubuntu comes prepackaged with OpenOffice (which is a total work-alike for Microsoft Office's Word, Excel, and Powerpoint that I've been using on some of my Windows boxes for ages), it's overkill for someone who just needs a good word processor. Abiword is just that: a good word processor. It does Word-like spellchecking-as-you-type and all the good stuff I use RoughDraft for on Windows.

Image Editing: The GIMP has been the main Linux image editing gorilla for many years. Comparison? Photoshop has a better UI, more features, and you can do just about anything you want with it -- faster. It costs 600 dollars. The GIMP has most of the features regular people would use in Photoshop, and it's free.

Gaming
Hmm... Yeah. Read "the Bad" down below.

The Good
OS Installation from the LiveCD is incredibly easy and problem free - and you can use the OS before and during the installation, in order to "test before installing."

Ubuntu's resource management is great. I managed to max out the CPU load to 100% only once during 12 hours of messing around on the machine (during a massive install of DVD-player-related packages), but while the system slowed down, it didn't crash, or freeze. You just don't get a slow and unresponsive system that takes forever to start new processes or even to stop them, just because one program is being a resource hog.

The Add/Remove programs tool (and the related tools Synaptic and Automatix) is fantastic. Forget about the improvement to the old way you had to install things on Linux -- it makes installing programs on Linux much easier than doing so on Windows.

Linux is a good platform for productivity, with free apps which are compatible with Office documents. Everything I've used for writing and such just worked, and I didn't have to think about it -- there's very little else I'm interested in but that.

The Bad
You're not going to do much of your computer gaming on Linux. The problem is, companies aren't making games that work on the Linux platform. (In some ways, this makes it a great OS for Work environments -- it's just plain harder to screw around on these machines.) The best solution is to operate a dual-boot system -- there's a very good chance I'll do that on my desktop machine sometime in the future because the fact is this except for gaming, the Ubuntu Linux OS gives me more of what I want from my computers -- I'm already finding myself annoyed that I don't have some of this functionality on my main machine.

Linux installation/configuration is not nearly as difficult as it used to be, but I did have some frustrations. It was a pain to get the WiFi card running properly, and the fix involved typing a lot of arcane commands into a terminal window to sort it out and only hoping that this time it'll work. Getting DVDs to play was also a terminal-command pain, but I understood the stuff better by that point.

On the upside, I finally get all those sudo jokes out there. They're actually damn funny.

The Ugly
As has always been the case, newer hardware, like cutting edge video or network cards, often take a bit of time before it's usable in Linux because the manufacturers typically don't worry about Linux drivers, and the community has to develop drivers on their own. Having a big company like Dell producing Linux boxes could do wonders for this situation.

So?
This isn't a solution for the easily frustrated. However, sticking with it, I found the payoff very very satisfying. Linux has gaps, but it also has some capability that you can't get elsewhere without spending a LOT of money.

There are some things (big-name games like WoW or CoH) I just can't have in Linux right now. However, there are some great things I *can* do in Linux that I can't in Windows (or can't without a lot of cash).

I'd recommend Ubuntu's desktop edition (the 32-bit version -- the 64-bit one sounds... a bit raw, which is something developers have got to fix if they want to stay abreast of their competition) to at least try out. I mean, it’s free; why not? Find out what you're getting into before you take the full plunge to Linux as a primary OS, thought. I think it's worth it (provided you keep a Windows installation around somewhere to blow up aliens with).

I expect that within the next few months I'll put an Ubuntu partition on my desktop machine... or maybe just get another harddrive for the box, just for that purpose -- I can totally see most of my day-to-day activities taking place in Linux, and that hasn't been the case before now.

It doesn't do everything, but what it does do, it does really damn well.

And it's free.

How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu

Top 10 Ubuntu apps and tweaks

Amazon.com: The Dangerous Book for Boys

That pretty much sums up the weekend for me -- while pretty much everything in my Friday-Saturday-Sunday was concentrated goodness, I was left wanting more.

Kate got in on the red-eye at midnight on Thursday. Not much else to say there, except that conversations that late at night (on the drive home) are surreal and not always totally productive. :)

Friday, I did some work stuff in Golden, then took the second half of the day to start on our Project o' the Week: painting and the replacing the flooring in kaylee's bathroom. Friday was putting on the primer (holy cow that stuff smells like burning) then a run out to pick up the lovely vinyl tile and cheery yellow paint for the walls, then back home for the initial coating of the paint, tearing out the old carpet (which had been doubling up til that point as a dropcloth) and cleaning up the subflooring. Then we went to pick up Kaylee and spent the rest of the afternoon with her. After she went to sleep, we went back to work and got the second coat of paint on, then put the new flooring down. While I had experience with this type of flooring, Kate had some cool ideas for laying it out and I was quite happy to let her do all the fancy tile staggering and precision cutting (not to self: scissors work SO MUCH BETTER for that kind of thing than the carpet cutter I've used in the past!) while I stayed busy with paint-related cleanup and getting the new carpet boarder down at the door jam. We got the whole thing done within five feet of Kaylee's bedroom and she slept right through it.

Saturday, we spent the morning with Kaylee, then dropped her off at Jackie's and headed out for some shopping and supplies at... wow: a ton of places. Notably, I picked up a nice leather ottoman for downstairs and Kate found probably the PERFECT dining room table (which we'd be silly to buy right now, with all the wedding downpayment type things that need to be handled first). Then there was another stop at Home Depot (those became quite common this weekend), the grocery store, and Michaels for some frames and crafty things. We rounded out the evening by catching Spiderman 3, which is an overcrowded movie that unfortunately sort of needed to be. Fantastic Four looks decent. So does Pirates 3. At home, we lazed about but couldn't quite get the up the gumption to either watch another movie or do more work on the bathroom, so we called it a relatively early night.

Sunday, I got up early and ran out to Home Depot for more supplies, then back to the house for breakfast and bathroom work. This time, it was paint touch up, more taping, and painting the baseboards for Kate, while I replaced the 20 year old seats on a couple toilets. We also mapped out the next couple projects, including (in order of likely occurance):

- Painting the door inside the bathroom so that it matches the "brilliant white, high gloss" frame.
- Tearing out the remaining carpet in my bathroom and retiling both it and the already-tiled sections.
- Painting the deck flooring and trim in the backyard (pretty much a must-do-soon.)
- Painting the family room and kitchen upstairs, including a white paintjob on all the cabinets in the kitchen and bathrooms.
- Getting all the windows replaced (another must-do before next winter).
- Painting the big living room.

And after that, there's flooring to do all through the upstairs and yet more painting. Whoosh.

We had lunch with Jackie and Kaylee at Gunther Toody's, which was fun, then it was off to the Consortium for a stab at a new Primetime Adventures Series, which took a bit longer to get rolling than expected, but looiks quite promising, nonetheless.

Then it was home, packing, driving to the airport, and Kate on a red-eye back to NYC at about midnight.

Busy weekend. Exhausting. yet disappointing to see it end so quickly.

"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind." -- Aristotle

Do you ever get interrupted in the middle of a Copy/Paste and then realize that you can only remember that you've Copied something, but not what it was, or where you were going to Paste it?

That happens to me All. The. Time.

Kaylee and I went grocery shopping yesterday, which meant (before we headed out) making a list on the note pad that hangs on the fridge. It was then that I noticed someone had already started a list for me on the pad.

1 qt. liquefied dragon's breath (lite)

I have interesting friends.

I'm out in Chicago this weekend for a gaming convention -- should be a lot of fun, but it'll mean I'm very slow to reply to emails and the like.

See y'all on Monday.

(PS: blogging this on a pretty, pretty MacBook. It sure is PRETTY. Wow.)

If you were a knife, what kind of knife would you be?

How many of these movies have I actually seen? Cars. Devil Wears Prada. Both on airline flights. That's it.

Oh, and Pan's Labyrinth.

But what the hell, why not? After this, I'm writing all night, so I might as well have some fun:

Best Actor: Forest Whitaker. (got it)

Best Actress: Helen Mirren. Again, duh. Judy Dench for the upset. (got it)

Best Supporting Actor: Alan Arkin, because I like him. Eddie Murphy will lose, because the voters have seen Norbit. (got it!)

Supporting Actress: Hudson Duh. (got it)

Best Director: Scorsese with the pity win. (got it)

Best Picture: Children of Men or Little Miss Sunshine, but CoM will be my official vote. (didn't get it!)

Animated: Cars (didn't get it)

Art Direction: Pan's Labyrinth (got it)

Cinematography: Children of Men (didn't get it)

Costume Design: Curse of the Golden Flower (didn't get it)

Documentary: An Inconvenient Truth (got it)

Film editing: Babel (didn't get it)

Foreign language: Pan's Labyrinth (didn't get it - aMAZing)

Makeup: Pan's Labyrinth (got it)

Score: Umm... randomly... Babel (got it)

Song: Whatever's nominated from Dreamgirls. (didn't get it, and that's awesome)

Screenplay (adapted): The Departed (got it)

Screenplay (original): Little Miss Sunshine (got it)

Visual effects: Pirates 2 (got it)

Documentary short: The Blood of Yingzhou District (got it)

Animated short: The Little Matchgirl (didn't get it)

Live-action short: West Bank Story on a complete whim (got it)

Sound editing: Letters from Iwo Jima (got it)

Sound mixing: Dreamgirls (got it)

So I'm thinking of some scene in either a movie or possibly a Joss Whedon show (I think).

The villain has the hero under guard, and also has someone important to the hero in his grasp. You can see that what the villain's probably going to do is put this big dilemma before the hero -- "I'll free one of you, who will it be?" kind of thing -- actually, you can tell that the villain is about to start this long monologue.

He gets out about five words -- something like "Oh, what a choice I'm about to --"

And the hero (or heroine? not sure) interrupts and says "Me." There's a beat and they continue. "You were going to make me choose between him or me, right? I choose me." And it just takes the wind out of the bad guy's sails -- he was clearly looking forward to the speech.

What the heck is that from?

Edit: Several drunken New Yorkers quickly informed me that it is, in fact, Zoe, cutting off Niska, in the Firefly episode War Stories (the details of the scene were also a bit different). They then mocked me for not remembering it.

Heading to South Dakota with Kaylee and Kate, both of whom I expect to be shocked into speechlessness by the... umm... stark... beauty of the bitter cold.

Like everything else, there isn't a lot of internet connection out there, so I'll see you guys on Monday.