Steps taken forward...

For those of you not in the know the, last night, before I went to game, we found that the Girly Girl was running a fever of, roughly, 102 degrees. The doctor was called and we were told to keep an eye on it. lunargypsie sent me off to go with sylvan to get gaaneden to go to game and help set up. About 10 or so, Girly Girl's fever had spiked to 104.7 and lunargypsie took her into the ER.

That should catch up everyone to where we were last night.

What we know: The fever is not the result of the flu.

That's all we know from the tests last night.

Today, her temperature is down to 100.4, still hot but not as much of a concern. She is up and she is active, presently engaged in a conversation with lunargypsie with regards to that most importat question, "Which is cooler? Pirates or ninjas?"

"Ninjas attack faster, so they're cooler."

Mom disagrees. ;)

I probably should've mentioned this when I returned from WorldCon, but this piece, "In, Through, Beyond", took a Juror's Selection Award in the art show. While sales of my pieces were not spectacular, the award certainly brightend my day.

Made more progress on cleaning out what will be sylvan's room.

Why did I never think of using the shop vac to deal with spiders before? It made for getting them out of the way really quick!

Made another run to the transfer station to today.

Showed up at the location for today's shoot at 8am. I was the only one at the PAC until W showed up 45 minutes later. Fortunately, we wrapped for the day around 2pm and not 5pm.

The Girly Girl really likes playing Pac-Land and Marble Madness. I told her that Marble Madness is much better when you get a big arcade trackball for it.

I have astolfo's hard drive to try doing some data recovery.

I have about ~350 photos to go through from today's shoot. Lots of pictures of the cast on the fly system. Some of them for the first time in the harness.

I am doing research to support a LARP I am workingon with sylvan. What I am looking for are books and websites that have information on mythological creatures from North America and Central America.

Thanks!

I am in the home stretch of editing these photos. I have 88 to go. Yea!

Edit on 6:25 AM, 4/29/2008: Removed the custom group.

Here is perhaps my favorite outfit from the show, though I don't think the purple and black of the two piece has anything to do with it. Seriously, I really like this outfit and would love to have it. Sadly, with the distribution of my body fat, it wouldn't look good on me. But I love it none the less and would love to have it. Or, maybe I should use it as a carrot for getting rid of the belly? Hmmm. I may have to sit down with tonyawinter at some point as I get closer to talk about ideas.
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Yes, this is late, I know as the week is now half over. I've been busy, so you'll have to live with the tardiness of the post.

Friday night: was working madly on getting ready for the LARP. Lots of writing and suffering from my brain wiring. You see, as I was working on the game, it occurred to me how useful it would be to able to search the character's background information. Something that should be easy enough to implement, right? You would think. Something funny was happening with the code, causing the CPU to peg out around 100% and spike the memory usage to up around 2 GB for the IIS application.

Debugging was going on was difficult because of the memory and processor constraints. What was bothering me so much, though, was the fuck that I was stuck. I could not get past it. I would tell myself that I needed to work on content rather than fiddling with code. I knew this is where the work I should be focusing on ought to be the game content, but I could not take my mind off it. I had to fix the problem. There was nothing I could do stop myself.

Frankly, it drives me completely nuts. Anytime there is a computer problem, I will focus on it until it is solved. Focus really isn't the right word. It's more like I obsess about it and it becomes the driving desire. The only time I stop before it's done is when I am on the verge collapse. Even then that doesn't always work.

I eventually found the problem: the counter variable used in the loop that was iterating across the characters was not, for some reason I could not discern, incrementing. I looked and I am positive that it was some side effect because I was passing the variable by value, meaning I was passing a copy of variable and not the variable itself, to the helper function. So that couldn't be it. For what ever , the counter was stuck at 2. Forever, causing a tight loop that brought the system to its knees. The fix was to use a different variable name.

In the grand scheme of things, this feature was icing. While it makes life easier and could've waited, but I could not let it go. The fact that I was helpless to it bothers me a lot.

We ended up canceling the Ji Dian Station game as sylvan was sick. I survived the vampire game on Saturday night. Score! Mission accomplished and now Mr. Crescent can get on with paying work. ;)

Sunday was a photo shoot with Jenny Rotten of the Nasty Habits and then a play session later.

"Of course it's habitable, otherwise they wouldn't have given it a cool name like 'Athens'! It's all about learning...and stuff." - sylvan

"Oh come on, it smells like a gas giant!" - me

Of course, if I meant this to be "a brief post", why the hell am I writing it Word? Eh, get over it.

Yesterday started out in an exercise to flesh out an idea that actually germinated the day before that:

What if you knew you were going to die soon? But you didn't know when and you didn't know how. What would you do?

Generally, the idea is the easiest part for me. Where it gets difficult is fleshing out the details, but I am determined to continue this through. The idea has promise for me on a couple of levels and I want to see what I can do with this.

Yesterday, while looking through the Redmond Value Village for a blanket I need as a shoot prop, I came across a set of black satin sheets, $5 for the top sheet, $5 for the fitted sheet, and gorgeous satin comforter. Yes, we bought them and my inner hedonist was in bliss last night, in spite of the top covers that kept trying to slide off.

I went to the Life Long AIDS Alliance benefit concert with Aeolian, Genowen, and Abney Park last night with evaleastaristev.

Prior to Doc Maynard's letting us in at 9pm (the tickets said 8pm), nathan_fhtagn and robert_from_ap hung out with us in front of the venue, just shooting the breeze and that was awesome, especially when the chit chatting continued through the set up of Aeolin.

The first group, Aeolin, was best when they were just playing. The moment the they started singing along, then things got iffy, though I suspect a lot of it could have been that their sound mix was crap. Maybe they sound better in the studio. Anyway, there was one song they started playing which had a pretty elaborate musical set up and I found myself thinking, "Please, dear goddess, don’t let them sing." Do people not do instrumentals any more?

The second group, Genowen, sounded a lot better. nathan_fhtagn compared their front man, Sean Sonnet, to Robert Smith of The Cure, but I didn't hear that. What I heard was someone who reminded me a lot more of David Bowie, but perhaps that this comparison is because I've listened to more David Bowie than The Cure. I signed up for their mailing list and grabbed one of their free CD's to hear what their studio sound was like, because the live mix had problems. My favorite was when you could see their guitarist play, but no sound matched it.

The last group, of course, was Abney Park and the reason I was going to the show in the first place, so I could see them live. There is a palpable chemistry that you can feel when people really enjoy working together on stage, and this group did just that. We even got to hear a couple of new songs out of them, Airship Pirates and the Emperor's Wives. It was a good show all the way around.

Then we arrived at game with 20 minutes to spare. The Nos were having a meeting about something. We do that, get over it. And I had a lovely time roleplaying with sylvan's new tremere. We even came up with a plan to over throw Sabbat domains. It's simply genius! ;)

I should probably get started on my day which includes heading out to Lowman Beach Park in Seattle to shoot an image or two for the Edge of Propinquity, which had 2,200 unique pairs of eyeballs looking at in the month of July. ;)