I still have a livejournal.

Haven't posted anything in ages.

I keep thinking about posting something again, but meh.

You've given back something a lot of very cynical people thought they had lost. I happen to be one of them.

I can't speak for everyone else, but I promise to try and be realistic with my expectations.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that one of the most villainous acts a person can commit is to squander the hope of so many. Please don't screw this up.

It's not just "Yes, we can," but "Yes, we must."

... but I'm SO CLOSE to the two-year mark!

We bought a pack of Listerine dissolving tooth whitener strips at Costco for thirty bucks.

They worked very well. My teeth are whiter than they have been in years.

They also gave me VIOLENT AND PAINFUL DIARRHEA.

Sometimes I guess that's the price we pay for beautiful shiny white teeth.

Week 1: zero pounds. That's to be expected.

Week 2: zero pounds. Frustrating. I started to wonder if I'm doing it wrong.

Week 3: six pounds. Damn skippy. Had a rough go sticking to it. Might try even harder next week.

54 left to go. Seriously. I've done this before and can do it again.

Somebody cheer my fat ass on!

A few hours ago, I saw the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Holy crap. It was just amazing. A surreal kind of modern-disco production that I swear has to be at least a little bit Burner-influenced.

I'd hate to give away why it seems that way, because I think everyone should get out here and see it (it runs until November!).

Just... wow.

Why are you people not reading Dresden Codak? WHY?

After a little drama earlier in the week, it's nice to have the kind of night we had last night.

As I write this, it's 7:43 PM and we just got home about two hours ago from Lucent L'amour, which was the previous night. I brought back a couple of important lessons from the night:

1. You can never be too dressed up for something like this.
2. If it's too far away for a cab ride, a hotel room is a must, so some poor sucker doesn't get stuck having to be sober.
3. Always get a print-at-home ticket

The venue completely sold out with 100% more people standing outside waiting, who eventually (1am) had to disperse.

The generators cut out at some point, leaving it painfully obvious how much less interesting an event like this can be without music.

Bathroom lines were insane.

Bassnectar rocked my face.

I've had bad experiences going to LA Burner events and not knowing anybody, and was thrilled that so many wonderful friends of mine showed up to this. I think we should try to bring the same network of folks around to more events like this.

I can't believe how unbelievably great a time I had.

Yesterday, it sounded like a great idea to get a Gargamel tattoo. Today, I'm really glad I'm not that impulsive.


Kind of.

I talked to Dad this morning. He sounds like he has much of his strength back. Getting up out of bed is still tough if not impossible, but he's getting back to normal. They're going to let him out of the hospital as early as tomorrow.

Lara says the minute he's released, she's going to take him out for a steak and a beer

You know what's really cool? Bose-Einstein condensate, that's what. And not just because it has a temperature approaching absolute zero.

Dad's in intensive care. Apparently his potassium levels were very high, and he was so weak he couldn't get out of his chair. The doctors said that the ambulance ride saved his life. Now he's on some kind of dialysis. I just got off the phone with him, and he sounds physically weak but mentally fine.

[ insert bitchy rant here ]

Here's a graph of the CPU usage on my linode:



You can see where I moved poorsquinky.com over, then how the feed cache slowly built up, and finally sometime yesterday when I converted the pagination script from bash to perl.

I don't know why I insist on doing so much text parsing in bash. I think it's fun because it's so wrong. Apparently forking out several hundred instances of grep and sed isn't exactly efficient, though. Go fig.

It looks like I'm just not going to make a proper post, so I'll write this as quickly as I can to get it out of the way.

The buildup to Burning Man was very stressful. It always is. I want that to stop being the case.

On the way up, 30 miles North of Bishop, CA, two young wild ruminants (elk or deer... I'm not an expert) wandered out into the road. I slowly changed lanes to miss, but when one stepped ten feet in front of me, I swerved to miss, skidded off the pavement and rolled my car. I was doing 80 miles per hour. The CHP officer said that under the circumstances I should have been seriously injured or killed, but I didn't have so much as a bruise or scratch. My car is totalled.

People keep telling me I should have hit the animals, without realizing I drove a compact car, and the physics involved in striking a 500 pound animal at 80 MPH.

Burning Man was wonderful. C had the time of her life, and I had mine. I would really like to cut back on how much work it is for me to have my vacation, though.

Colleen, Mike, Kay, Keith, Jason, and Alla have all been a big help in making sure I could get out of Bishop (I was stuck there for 15 hours) and that this transitional time while I first catch my breath, and then get my affairs straightened out, goes well.

I put a memorial for Mom at the Temple of Forgiveness:

Lydia Karpov Stambaugh
1938-2007
Beloved mother and grandmother
Stolen from us by cancer

Underneath, it read "She wanted to be here." Mom and I talked often about me taking her to Burning Man.

I cried very openly at the Temple, and several other times when I had a private moment to reflect.

I feel closer to my friends now than ever, and it's wonderful.

Work has been rough. My recovery period from Burning Man lasted longer than usual, and at the end I had a terrible fever that further incapacitated my tiny little brain. It's only this week that I've felt up to working efficiently. Ugh.

If anyone has been trying to contact me by email in the last couple of days, the dasbistro.com email server has gone insane, and I'm trying to dig it out of the pit it's in. Right now it's sporadic at best. Hopefully tomorrow it'll work.

If you really need to contact me, either call me on the telephone or send me an instant message (check my livejournal profile for details), or wait till September when I get back from Burning Man.

As a lifelong procrastinator, I get a certain kind of rush by shirking my duties. It feels like danger, like leaning over the railing on the roof of a tall building. Tonight I still have two big projects only half completed, and they're giving me the calm stare of a predator restrained by a glass wall.

But here I am on Livejournal. Hooray.

Hey, but there's a lot of work that's been done since my last update. All of my brewing is finished, thanks to Colleen. The fabric for most of what I still need to sew together is also all cut out because of her help.

I get ahead of myself, though. There are a few new flavors of beer this year, plus one of my experiments from last year that turned out well, as well as a couple of my old weird standards. If you want to see the full manifest, come to Bad Idea Theater in the 3:00 plaza the week after next. I have a couple of really weird ones I made this year. I'm heartbroken that I couldn't find blood oranges in time. Guess I missed the season by a week or two.

One yurt roof is finished, and the other sits on my floor at about 50% complete. I've made two new sets of Thai fisherman's pants, and have about three more I could make. One half-finished pair of Colleen's boot covers sits on the table as well. Those things are harder to make than they look! Probably about two more beyond that to finish.

More than one project has already been put off for this burn, and there are tons more work to do. I'll have to promise myself not to be stressed out by all of this. The burn's going to be great no matter how much of this stuff I get finished (as long as the yurt roof is ready in time), and I just need to accept that.

I typically have a rough time getting to sleep and staying there. After making a good faith effort to go to bed at a reasonable time before I have to get up in the morning, my first dream came almost immediately. It lasted a second or less and showed a very detailed view of the esplanade at night. There might have been music.

I woke up with my heart racing. Part of it was excitement, but much of it was fear of the fewer than three weeks I have to get all the rest of my work done before I leave.

For those of you playing along at home, that's:

* Two 20-foot-diameter conical canvas roofs
* 45 gallons of beer
* Lots more clothing
* Cooking and freezing some food
* The touch screen

I really felt like this year I'd get an earlier jump on my projects, but it feels to me like I have a good excuse considering how the holidays went for me. I wonder if every year has those kinds of excuses. Still, I plan to take care of my major projects earlier next time.

Tonight I'll have the same dream. It's all panic from here out.

New yurt roof #1 is coming together. I devised a pattern using what little math I absorbed in school (augmented by wikipedia, of course) and the measurements for the constants in the yurt's roof: circle diameter, rafter length, and center ring diameter. Took me about an afternoon to figure out the overall shape with measurements, producing a page full of gratuitous uses of 'cos', tiny drawings of what appear to be pac-men, and my thrice-recycled variable "r" (I need to learn to be more creative).

It took another afternoon to puzzle together how to build it out of 46-inch-wide strips, then cut those strips out using only rulers, markers, and scissors (hint: it's sort of like graphing a function, but borrows techniques from finger painting).

C did about 75% of the cutting, and she did it marvelously, with me barking out incomprehensible measurements like some kind of jerk. A jerk with an incomprehensible plan. In incomprehensibly brilliant plan.

Hopefully I can figure out how to do all of the sewing correctly before Burning Man starts, and after it's over, I want to write a HOWTO (maybe) on sewing big giant chunks of canvas together. I should wait until at least a month after the event, of course, otherwise the doc will consist of references to time travel and self-transforming machine elves, punctuated by the occasional "Sorry, I guess I fell asleep again."

The trick so far appears to be folding the seam flat and sewing it down. It's kind of like serging but it's quicker and won't actually stop anything from unraveling. Normally this wouldn't count as a well-thought-through plan, but for a tent that I only spend two weeks out of the year in, I'm going to pretend it's adequate.

So far I have sewn five seams on this first roof, and it feels like it's mostly done already. That's five quick seams out of (counting, counting) um... forty. That's for one of the two roofs. Oh, and the other seams are a lot longer. Yeah, I'm making a lot of progress. Someone should put me out of my misery.

And I have nine more batches of beer to make too!

In other news, this year: best burn ever. I'm calling it now. See if I'm wrong.

I finally started making my beer for Burning Man. This is a perfectly adequate lead time, as half the batches last year were finished and kegged the day before I set foot on the playa. For these first three batches, I thought I'd try a couple of new things.

( boring details of beer production behind the cut )