Steve Tries Not to Bore People

The they're there their test

2009-10-11T22:21:13Z

Your result for The they're there their test....

Grammarphile

You scored 100% grammarphile.

Take The they're there their test. at OkCupid

I just finished helping my parents move my entire guest bedroom set, both sets of planetarium seats, and the bookcases on either side of my TV to Hartselle, to make room for moving in Jennifer's stuff in the near future. I'm tarred!

Science Without the Norman Invasion

2009-10-10T02:49:18Z

What would English look like with only Germanic words, and none of the Latin words that came with the Norman French? Science fiction writer Poul Anderson wrote an essay called "Uncleftish Beholding" ("Atomic Theory"), where he lays out the basics of chemistry using only German-derived English words. It kinda makes my brain hurt, but it's pretty cool. It starts to make sense after a while.

Who knew a water binding was made of two waterstuff unclefts and a sourstuff uncleft?

(binding == molecule, waterstuff == hydrogen, uncleft == atom, and sourstuff == oxygen)

Don't mess with Indian farm girls

2009-10-03T17:03:29Z

I got this link from Gautam Mukunda, who I know from the David Brin email list.

Farmer's daughter disarms terrorist and shoots him dead with AK47

Apparently around the India/Pakistan border, militants are constantly demanding food and lodging from the nearby villages. They tried to demand it from one family, and the father said no. They thrashed him with sticks while his family watched. 21-year-old Rukhsana Kausar ran out of hiding toward her father's attacker, struck the terrorist with an axe, grabbed his AK-47. She shot him dead, and wounded another one as he tried to escape.

Random Links

2009-09-30T03:40:41Z

Just stuff I had open, mostly from the Larry Niven email list...

Jedi religion founder accuses Tesco [grocery store] of discrimination over rules on hoods Amazingly and amusingly, the store didn't immediately whip out the lawyers, but instead used examples from the Star Wars movies to show Jedi not wearing hoods.

Philip K. Dick letter praising "Blade Runner", which was adapted from his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

The Empirical Evidence Against Big Government was a YouTube video that uses actual statistics to back up its point.

A couple of plots showing trends in science fiction/fantasy TV.

Read Any Good Records Lately? An old Time article about a man who could recognize certain classical pieces from the grooves on their phonograph records.

An article about a British linguist who knew 44 languages.

Home from Con†Stellation

2009-09-21T03:54:20Z

I'm back from Con†Stellation, not that I went far, and I had a blast! Granted, I was a little bummed that it was on the same weekend as Anime Weekend Atlanta, but Con†Stellation gets my first loyalty. This year, I served as assistant guest liaison, helping take pressure off of Sue as she handled both guest liaison and dealer liaison duties.

Friday morning, as part of my guest liaising duties, I took Jack McDevitt and his wife Maureen, and David Weber and his wife Sharon, to the Space and Rocket Center. (I really like them, BTW, even though I've never gotten around to reading a David Weber book.) I then drove them to lunch at Grille 29, where Baen Books publisher Toni Weisskopf bought all of us lunch. (Toni is originally from here in Huntsville, BTW, and spent much of her teenage years going to Con†Stellation.) I spent lunchtime hobnobbing with most of the pros in town for Con†Stellation. I even talked some of the time.

I got to spend Friday evening of the con with Jennifer, which was good. Saturday, she had a ridiculous number of music gigs piled on top of her, so she couldn't come that day.

I got a grand total of about 8 hours of sleep Friday and Saturday nights, because I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning hanging around with the usual suspects from the dance (in no particular order, Marie, Manda, Jeff, Tim, Ben, and Sean) and laughing my ass off. I stayed for the whole dance each night, helped put the room back the way we found it, and hung out in Mike, Marie, Jeff, and Manda's hotel suite for a while.

Because Saturday was Talk Like a Pirate day, I recycled the shirt, boots, and pants from my groomsman costume at Mike and Esther's wedding into a semi-decent pirate outfit, and wore it most of the day. I helped out with the Masquerade this year, so I was in costume in view of everyone as Tim and I helped people on and off stage.

After Masquerade, I went to a panel local SF author Travis Taylor and his coauthor Bob Boan were recording for YouTube, describing some of the contents of their Planetary Defense textbook. Like the rest of the audience, I actually had to sign a release form for them to possibly use my likeness in the final video.

About 10:30 Saturday night, Sue called me up, asking me if I'd drive Lou Anders (Pyr Books editorial director) and John Picacio (award-winning illustrator, and our artist guest of honor) somewhere. They wanted to meet illustrator Stephan Martiniere's daughter. She was in Huntsville from Atlanta, to attend a big meet-up of Makers Local 256. I'd only ever vaguely heard of it, but apparently, there's a growing movement of mostly young people who get together in a shared space, with shared equipment, and build gadgets and technological art projects they think up, sometimes in the middle of the night if the inspiration strikes. A lot of the raw materials are donated by various companies. Huntsville's group has a small warehouse downtown, and I headed the three of us down there. It was fascinating. In a way, it's like seeing a little bit of the future being born. We found her, and she took us on a tour. While we were talking, Sara from VBAS walked by, and I said hi to her. I'd heard she's joined the "Makers", so I wondered if I'd see her, once I finally figured out that what Lou and John were describing was the same thing she said she'd joined.

After I got us back safely, I briefly went back to the room parties, but since I rarely drink, there wasn't much to interest me, so I headed for the dance, and helped them set up.

During con take-down, I usually help take down the art show panels, and take their component parts out to the truck, along with tables and other stuff. This year, I also helped pack up art show items for return to the artists, which was actually pretty fun. Later that afternoon, I attended the Dead Dog Party, a tradition where the con feeds its helpers. After It wound down, I headed for home.

Another thing was unusual abut this year's con. Con†Stellationis known for its great con suite, but I've never eaten better at a con than at this year's Con†Stellation, with more hot meals served. The credit goes to Judy and her staff. They did an excellent job this year.

Con†Stellation attendance was up this year. Apparently, they will be making a little money this year. That's good news, because they've lost a little money in each of the last seven conventions.

Con†Stellation 28: Vulpecula

2009-09-16T01:09:04Z

I know a lot of my friends list will be at AWA this weekend, but in case you aren't, I'm inviting you to the local science fiction convention this weekend. This year's constellation is the fox. I'm looking forward to it.

As a promotion, Barnes and Noble is running a book fair thingy. (Why yes, that is the technical term.) Basically, if you buy stuff at the Bridge Street Barnes & Noble using the bar code behind the next LJ cut, they will contribute money to the convention.

Haven Ghost Town

2009-09-05T23:14:02Z

Wow, it figures that the one time I manage to get to HAAS in about a month, it's not actually happening. Oh well, back to the house...

Another Fictional, Artificial, Big-Ass Object

2009-08-24T02:32:43Z

While on the subject of enormous artificial worlds, here's an excellent visualization of Larry Niven's Ringworld. This is something I really wanted to do back before I got too busy. I got as far as making model sketches on graph paper before I konked out.

Since there's nobody flying the Lying Bastard in the close-ups, I can only imagine that Speaker to Animals has taken a quick trip to the litterbox, and he'll be right back... ;-)

Oh, and I think I just found my groom's cake...

Rendezvous With Rama

2009-08-24T02:04:55Z

Here's a short film inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's novel Rendezvous With Rama, about exploring a large alien spacecraft from outside the solar system:

Here's someone else's project, showing a good view of the interior. It's not entirely accurate, because in the novel, the things that looked like Earth buildings weren't, and (with one exception IIRC) had no doors or windows. Still, it gives an excellent idea of the scale. In my imagination, it seemed nowhere near that big.

I thought about creating a model like that once upon a time, to help me visualize it, but I never got around to it.

How big is big?

2009-07-29T04:16:31Z

Prunes

2009-07-29T00:56:00Z

Believe it or not, well-known science fiction author Ray Bradbury was in a cheesily futuristic prune commercial in 1968. It actually has better production values than some of the original Star Trek... ;-)

This Weekend

2009-07-13T03:07:06Z

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.

Wow, Hollywood folks are stupid

2009-07-13T02:40:14Z

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

Lego Defenestration

2009-07-06T23:44:52Z

The most famous exit from a window in history, the Defenestration of Prague, as reenacted in Legos.

Have a Muppet Holiday

2009-07-05T12:19:10Z

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

MTAC 10 Trailer

2009-06-15T23:32:13Z

I don't know if I would actually get around to going to MTAC in 2010, but I like their preview video...

A Quick Weekend Review

2009-06-08T03:29:24Z

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.

Classic Rock Lyrics quiz

2009-05-28T00:12:12Z

Your result for The CLASSIC Classic Rock Lyrics Quiz...

Classic Rock Fan

You scored 81% on Classic Rock Lyric Mastery. That's a pretty good score, but you're not a diehard rocker. That's OK -- it's good to have balance in your life! Good job, please rate the test at the bottom of the page, and keep on rocking!

As a reminder, here are the answers:

1. Here come old flat top, he come groovin' up slowly, he got joo joo eyeball, he one holy roller (The Beatles: Come Together)

2. When we called out for another drink, the waiter brought a tray (Procul Harum: A Whiter Shade of Pale)

3. Many have I loved and many times been bitten -- many times I've gazed along the open road (Led Zeppelin: Over the Hills and Far Away)

4. Ground control to Major Tom: Take your protein pill and put your helmet on (David Bowie: Space Oddity)

5. I rode a tank, held a general's rank, when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank (The Rolling Stones: Sympathy for the Devil)

6. Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train, and I was feeling near as faded as my jeans (Janis Joplin: Me and Bobby McGee)

7. Outside in the cold distance a wildcat did growl -- Two riders were approaching, and the wind began to howl (Jimi Hendrix: All Along the Watchtower)

8. Hope you have got your things together, hope you are quite prepared to die. Looks like we're in for nasty weather (Creedence Clearwater Revival: Bad Moon Rising)

9. But if I stayed here with you, girl, things just couldn't be the same. 'Cause I'm as free as a bird now, and this bird you cannot change (Lynyrd Skynyrd: Freebird)

10. Layla, I'm begging darling please, Layla, darling won't you ease my worried mind (Eric Clapton: Layla)

11. In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream -- At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines (Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run)

12. Love me one time, I could not speak -- Love me one time, baby, yeah my knees got weak (The Doors: Love Me Two Times)

13. Something calls to me, the trees are drawing me near, I've got to find out why. Those gentle voices I hear, explain it all with a sigh (The Moody Blues: Tuesday Afternoon)

14. Mama, just killed a man -- Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger now he's dead (Queen: Bohemian Rhapsody)

15. They'll stone you when you're riding in your car -- They'll stone you when you're playing your guitar (Bob Dylan: Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 and 35)

16. Remember what we've said and done and felt about each other -- Oh babe, have mercy. Don't let the past remind us of what we are not now -- I am not dreaming (Crosby, Stills, & Nash: Suite: Judy Blue Eyes)

17. Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street -- Chicago, New York, Detroit and it's all on the same street (The Grateful Dead: Truckin')

18. Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash. New car, caviar, four-star daydream, think I'll buy me a football team (Pink Floyd: Money)

19. Let's bungle in the jungle, well that's all right by me -- I'm a tiger when I want love, I'm a snake when we disagree (Jethro Tull: Bungle in the Jungle)

20. We come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow (Led Zeppelin: Immigrant Song)

21. Like a true nature's child, we were born, born to be wild. We can climb so high, I never wanna die (Steppenwolf: Born to be Wild)

Take The CLASSIC Classic Rock Lyrics Quiz at HelloQuizzy

Writing Systems Test

2009-05-13T02:29:29Z

Your result for The Writing Systems Test...

Tolkien

You're awesome like Tolkien. You've got quite an interest in languages and use your (magical?) powers for totally cool purposes.

Take The Writing Systems Test at HelloQuizzy

COMPARED TO OTHER TAKERS

You scored 79% on Knowledge, higher than 85% of your peers.

Awesome Week and Change

2009-05-11T03:32:00Z

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.

That night, I had a great phone conversation with Jennifer. We looked up the origins of the names of the months, both Gregorian and Jewish calendar. I decided that the "one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater" song really needs parentheses. Which adjectives describe the creature, and which describe the people it eats? All we really know is that the dude the people eater is talking to is "too tough" compared to its usual diet.

Parentheses are used much more effectively in programming languages than in natural languages. This led us to ponder if computer languages have adjectives and adverbs. They have very obvious analogues to nouns and verbs (values and variables are nouns, and functions/subroutines are verbs), but I couldn't think of any really good adjectives or adverbs. The closest thing I could think of for adjectives were class members that describe the class, and adverbs might be like variables that affect how a function does what it does. Those aren't very satisfying answers, because their use as adjectives or adverbs isn't an inherent part of the language, just something the programmer might come up with.

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.

"GetEngaged" Twitter Found Me

2009-05-11T01:51:57Z

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.

Linguini Test

2009-05-06T11:41:22Z

Your result for Basic Knowledge of Linguistics Test...

Linguist in Training

You would have passed a linguistics final easily, may know a second language or two and probably have a strong interest in language.

Take Basic Knowledge of Linguistics Test at HelloQuizzy

Saltimbanco

2009-04-27T02:55:12Z

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.

One of the acts was a mime who made all his own sound effects. It was very reminiscent of that "Whose Line" game where Colin would perform something while Ryan made the sounds. Anyway, he was really good. At one point in the show, he was tossing imaginary balls back and forth with the audience, and he pulled a guy from the audience onstage (I'm fairly sure he wasn't a ringer) to perform with him. They had an imaginary Wild West gunfight. That was funny.

One man did impressive bicycle tricks requiring expert balance. Another did a juggling act. A man and a woman did a percussion act with drums and things called Beleodoras, which are South American balls on strings that they would swing around to rapidly and repeatedly hit the ground in perfect rhythm. Jennifer wants to try those.

A massive number of people performed on the Chinese poles, each holding him/herself up one-handed on a vertical pole in horizontal poses. One performer even used some sort of bungee to tie one leg to the pole, and "stood up" horizontally from the side of the pole for a long time. I can't imagine being able to do something like that. They were all in similar multi-colored, gender-hiding leotards, so they reminded me of a swarm of ants as they climbed up the array of poles in perfect synchronization.

In the Russian Swing act, acrobats were getting flung high into the air to land on trampolines. I would love to be able to fly like that. The Ringleader pointed at me, and gestured a question of whether I wanted to try it. I shook my head no, because I have too much sense and not enough guts to try that untrained. It was probably an empty offer anyway. However, despite common sense, I still regret my answer a little.

The Ringleader reminded me a bit of Teal'c from Stargate, because he had a similar build. As a fellow big guy, I wanted to see him do some impressively athletic thing during the show, but he did just one act with another character played for laughs.

There was a bungee act, with four women bouncing and swinging and flipping end over end, suspended from the ceiling high over our heads. They were on safety lines, which was a good thing, because one of them made a mistake. She was perfectly fine, but she was so flustered that she couldn't synch up to the others for what felt like forever.

At the show, we ran into Mrs. Wiederecht, the mother of two of Jennifer's school friends, and Jennifer introduced us. He's getting married to a girl from (Singapore? I don't remember for sure), and his mother is flying out there for the wedding.

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.

More on My Proposal

2009-04-27T01:35:50Z

Here's the story of how I proposed to Jennifer last Saturday night.

A few weeks before, I went to Osborne's to order an engagement ring. According to her sister Amy, that's the store that her mother and Amy's engagement rings both came from. I had Amy along for moral support, because I was intimidated by the idea of going to order jewelry at a store, which was part of the reason why I took so long to get the courage to order a ring. I made most of the actual suggestions, including the idea of using sapphires. I ended up with a very nice ring, with a central diamond flanked by a sapphire on either side. (I didn't know at the time, but I somehow picked the mirror opposite of Amy's ring. I think hers has a sapphire with diamonds on either side.) We already knew Jennifer's ring size from several months before, back when I was considering getting her a ring for her last birthday. They took a little over a week to finish it, then I hid it in the nightstand drawer in my bedroom, where Jennifer never goes.

For Jennifer's birthday three Thursdays ago, I gave her front row tickets to the Cirque du Soleil "Saltimbanco" show on the afternoon of Saturday, April 18 at the Von Braun Center. She's a big fan of Cirque du Soleil, and also "Kaleidostar", the anime based on Cirque du Soleil.

I also threw together this incredibly geeky homemade card to give her:

I'm proud to say that she laughed hard at that one.

Friday the 17th, Jennifer's father was having a birthday dinner at Casablanca. I arranged to meet her parents there before others (especially Jennifer) arrived. I asked for their blessing to propose to her. They asked me a few questions, gave me some advice, and they were happy to give their blessing. Jennifer arrived, and we had a good dinner with her parents, and Brent and Amy.

The morning of Saturday the 18th, I went to my car to check that the ring case would fit in my car door's cup holder/storage bin, and that it would be invisible from both the outside windows and the passenger seat. I called Mom, then my sister Corie, for ideas for places on Monte Sano to take Jennifer to propose. Jennifer loves being outdoors there, and she has family living there. Corie suggested I take her somewhere we could see the city lights. She also suggested that I take a blanket, so we could sit. I wanted a place with enough light to see the ring. Anyway, I waited too late to call Corie, because it was suddenly time to go.

At the arranged time, I went to pick up Jennifer, and we headed for the civic center. (I'll write about the show in a separate post, because that section got a lot longer than planned.) After the show, we headed to Mikawa for dinner.

We were both really hungry from skipping lunch, so we ordered big Tonkatsu dinners. I didn't talk as much as usual, because I was nervous about proposing later on. (Plus, their live HD feed from Japanese TV is very distracting.) My relative silence worried her, since it took her so long to get me talking much in the first place.

EDIT: During the course of the meal, I noticed a brownish lump on my plate. I assumed it was extra breading from the pork chop, so I popped it into my mouth and swallowed. It turned out to be the wasabi! My mouth burned a little, but I didn't really chew enough to taste it. My lips were numb for a while, and my face got red, but otherwise, I felt okay. No allergic reaction like Jennifer feared.

After dinner, we headed up Monte Sano. I was wanting to find a private place there with some light, and I told her so. I decided to go to the VBAS planetarium grounds during the weekly planetarium show. We parked in the parking area, got out, and walked down the trail to the building. I realized that to get light, I'd have to trigger the building's motion-activated security lights. I didn't want to do that, because it felt kinda tacky, so we headed back up the trail to my car.

I got out the blanket (while hiding the ring case under it), started the car, turned on the headlights, and laid down the blanket in their beams. I asked her to sit down. I pulled out the ring case and opened it, got down on one knee, presented it to her, and asked, "Jennifer Allen, will you marry me?" She asked to go back in the car to talk. (She was relieved to realize why I wasn't talking much, BTW.) As I drove us to my house, she thought about the question, and asked me some questions. By the time we got to my house, she said yes, and we started notifying family. I called my Mom, Corie, and my brother Dean and his wife Alissa. Jennifer called her mother and Amy. We spent a while talking and making out before I drove her back to her house, then I posted my status updates to LJ and Facebook. (Which reminds me I should update my status on MySpace, not that I actually log in there very often...)

My exact problem

2009-04-21T00:02:05Z

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.