I haven't done a great job posting more than links lately, so here's a quick little post about this weekend.

Friday night, Jennifer and I pretty much just hung out and watched a couple of episodes of the '90s X-Men cartoon on DVD.

Saturday, we visited my parents, and my little sister Corie was visiting as well. We went out to eat at Fulin's Asian Cuisine in Decatur, and that was good. I had my favorite Chinese dish, General Tso's chicken.

Today at church, we were both there early for practice -- even earlier than our usual practices. I ran the lyrics/service slides on the projectors, and Jennifer sang and played violin. She was lead singer on one song, and did a really good job. After lunch (Cazadores, where else?) we went to look at a house my parents found for her, that might have made a good business property for her music lessons and other teaching. Her dad came out to look with us, and he was a big help. Unfortunately, the place had major foundation problems, and the yard had a known history of flooding. Also, renovating it would have been a huge effort. (In other words, improving it would be polishing a turd.) On the plus side, we also looked at a small office she could rent in an ideal location, although the rent seems pretty steep.

This is funny and scary, and also explains a whole lot about the "Wild, Wild West" movie: Kevin Smith explains what happened to his Superman movie

In honor of Independence Day, but a day late, here's Muppet Stars and Stripes Forever...

Friday night after Jennifer got done with band practice, we watched "Labyrinth". It had been ages since I saw that one.

Yesterday afternoon, I took Jennifer to see the Wolverine Origins movie. It was pretty good for most of the movie, as long as you ignore a few of the liberties they took with comic book continuity. The childhood stuff was relatively close to what I remember from the Wolverine Origins comic series. There was the occasional stupid stuff in the movie. Jennifer and I were both annoyed by the BS claim that killing the bad guy would make a good guy character just as bad. No, actually, unless you did things that I don't know about, that were much worse than killing this guy, you can't possibly be as bad. Save human- and mutant-kind a lot of misery and execute the bastard.

After the movie, I stayed at my house to finish filling out something I needed to do for work, and that took a while. I finally finished and got to HAAS around 8:45. I was glad I got a chance to see drmindfunk for the first time in weeks. After the meeting let out, I went to dinner at Mellow Mushroom for the first time. The meatball appetizer was very good, and the slice of pizza Basil gave me was really good, even though it was covered with veggies and I'm a veggiephobe.

After church today, I had lunch at Jennifer's parents' house with them, Jennifer, and my Mom and Dad. Excellent food and company. We got some more wedding stuff figured out. We've figured out a date for the wedding (November 7), but I realized that I'd forgotten to tell Mom and Dad. Wow, I suck! Must be distracted... Today, Jennifer and I both learned that the wedding time is also set. It will be held at 3 PM, so that the musicians Jennifer picked out can get done in time for a concert they'll be playing later that night. The musicians are significant because they were Jennifer and Amy's violin and cello teachers.

As for location, we're currently planning to hold the wedding at Covenant Presbyterian on Drake. Jennifer and I will go over there Tuesday afternoon to check it out, and make sure it will work. The other job I've been assigned is finalizing a count for the groom's side of the wedding guests.

Friday 5/1/09 through Sunday 5/3/09

Last weekend, I was a groomsman in silphion and tomanywolves' wedding at the Georgia Renaissance Festival. It was a great experience. It was great hanging out with folks, I liked my costume, and it was awesome seeing the Faire with Jennifer, Amy, and Brent. It was a good-sized dose of the sense of belonging I crave. tomanywolves has some pictures in her post. I'm in the next-to-last picture. You can also read more about it in a post by chocogaz, and another by gaiamyles. If you're on Facebook, you can see where I've posted my own pictures. One of these days, I want to write my own real post about the weekend, and get my own pictures up where people outside Facebook can see them.

Th 5/7/09

At the Bailey Cove SF Book Club, we discussed A Spell for Chameleon, the first Xanth novel by Piers Anthony. It was a fun book to read, but unfortunately, there wasn't much meat to discuss.

( One-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eaters and programming language parts of speech. Yes, it's that geeky. )

Friday 5/8/09

Friday night, I took Jennifer to see the new Star Trek movie. We both thoroughly enjoyed it. When I get more time, I'll probably write a review.

Saturday 5/9/09

During the day Saturday, I helped Jennifer put on a recital for her music students. The little ones were consistently cute, and many of the kids of all ages were just incredibly talented. Jennifer's parents helped put on a reception for the participants and families, then we all helped clean the church where it was held, and put it back the way we found it. I was exhausted, and I didn't even do nearly as much as Jennifer and her parents. I'm glad I could be there to help.

When we were all done, I felt like spending the rest of the evening with Jennifer. We both had a hankering to see the original Star Trek, thanks to the new movie. She suggested that we watch the movies with the original cast. So, we put in the Star Trek: The Motion Picture DVD. We were reminded of why it's one of the least popular of the Star Trek movies. It was still worth watching, and I had fun rattling off the trivia I remembered about the movie.

Sunday 5/10/09

Sunday morning, I ran the Pro Presenter presentation during the church service. After that, I took Jennifer to Hartselle with me for lunch with my Mom and Dad, my little sister Corie, and her new husband Pat. The food was excellent, and Jennifer got to hear my Dad's story of dealing with the 1960 hurricane in the Florida Keys. After we got back into town this evening, we talked a lot about what to do with our stuff, and what we'll need to have done to my house before Jennifer and I are married, some time in late October or early November. This is not an easy problem, because we're both major packrats, and I'm even worse. We have a pretty good idea about which furniture we're keeping, and which we're getting rid of. In the next few months, I'll need to put a lot of effort into getting rid of stuff, and deciding what to keep. We have decided we'll need plenty of bookshelves, because Jennifer doesn't want to box books up into storage any more than I do.

This is freaky. The Twitter feed GetEngaged posted a link to my LJ post about proposing to Jennifer on their site.

When I installed Google toolbar on my Mom's laptop this afternoon, "hsvscifiguy" was the first thing I thought to to search for as a test. The Twitter link showed up on the first page of results.

On the day I proposed to Jennifer, I took her to the Cirque du Soleil show "Saltimbanco". We had front row seats, on the right side of the stage. Characters were constantly walking by us on the way to the stage. The costumes and makeup were baroque, very colorful, and very French. The sets were ornate and colorful, and dominated by a large circular stained-glass roof made of interconnected circles. The athleticism and sheer strength was incredible.

( Saltimbanco details )

We looked at our programs as we waited in the car for the garage to clear out enough to leave. One character in pajamas, sporting a tail, was named "Sleeper". I noticed that the character's name "Sleeper" translated to "Dormeur" in French. It occurs to me that that must be why the Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland was always asleep. I never knew. Plus, since the Saltimbanco character had a tail, he may have been an allusion to the Dormouse.

Today's xkcd shows the exact problem I've been trying to solve at work the last few days. I'm trying to improve an old graphics library, and whoever wrote it back in 1995 used signed short integers for all the counts of vertices, polygons, normals, etc. That means it can only have about 32 thousand-odd of each of those things in a file. I'm sure that was plenty back in 1995, but now it's too small. So, I'm changing the variable types all over, while still trying to keep it working correctly. No sheep, though... unless things go really wrong.

Tonight, I asked Jennifer to marry me, and she said yes. I plan to write more about today's events later on, like the Cirque du Soleil show, and my accidental encounter with too much wasabi. That will be later, though.

The music video is funny and surprisingly touching. Best use of the Enterprise theme ever.

Space Bat Memorial

I particularly like this excerpt from BoingBoing that got quoted on many of the other sites: Bereft of his ability to fly and with nowhere to go, a courageous bat climbed aboard our Discovery with stars in his weak little eyes. The launch commenced, and Spacebat trembled as his frail mammalian body was gently pushed skyward. For the last time, he felt the primal joy of flight; for the first, the indescribable feeling of ascending toward his dream—a place far away from piercing screeches and crowded caves, stretching forever into fathomless blackness.

( Ridiculously Adorable Illustration )

( Space Bat all suited up )

( While I was reading Amazing Spiderman #589, I was amused to see this little easter egg at the bottom of page 3 )
Apparently, the Real Ghostbusters cartoon characters volunteer at the Coney Island FEAST center. While refreshing my memories of the cartoon characters, I found this interesting analysis of the reasoning behind the cartoon's character designs, and this nice photo of the real fire house used in the movie.

Today, I woke up with a full-on stomach virus or some kind of food poisoning, so I skipped work. On the plus side, I got caught up on the TV shows I'm following, and managed to finish Macross Frontier, which I really liked. Jennifer brought me an excellent chicken dinner with mac and cheese from Publix. Taking good care of me as usual.

Wednesday 2009/03/11

( D&D silliness )

( Overly oppressive neighborhood rules and a double entendre )

Thursday 2009/03/12

Thursday night, Esther measured me for my Ren-Faire groomsman costume. It should look pretty cool.

Friday 2009/03/13

( Witch Mountain )

Saturday 2009/03/14

At HAAS, I made no attempt to register for the fighting game tournament, so there was no chance I'd get my ass handed to me... that time.

Thursday 2009/03/19

Thursday night, I had a fun dinner at the relatively new Santa Fe Steakhouse in Hampton Cove with Jennifer and her parents. I liked the nacho appetizer and chopped steak I had.

Friday 2009/03/20

( Cheap purchase at the VBAS member meeting -- any artist types want to borrow an opaque projector? )

Saturday 2009/03/21

( First time DMing )

After my game let out, I stuck around to watch the other session. Josh played a gnome bard. He was hilarious, because he sang everything in and out of the game, in his awesome tenor voice. He was slinging insults at other people and characters, telling wacky stories, and narrating everything going on in the game, all in that voice.

( NASFA meeting )

Sunday 2009/03/22

Sunday morning was the beginning of some stomach bug. I went to Sunday school, church, and lunch with Jennifer before I went home, and I didn't feel too good.