Personal

Our new neighborhood, Brentwood, has a neighborhood mailing list. It’s awesome. Very friendly, lots of informal freecycling, requests for notaries, that kind of thing. Discussions of suspicious activity. It’s the back of the fence stuff you used to see all over the U.S., just on Yahoo groups. For the last week or so, there’d been this ongoing duck saga. “Duck sighted in our front yard.” “Duck seen waddling down Woodrow.” “Oh, thank you so much! That’s our daughter’s duck!” “Duck crossing Justin.” So on. ...

We have been in Austin a week and a half. In that time I have started my new job, we’ve found a house to rent, we opened a bank account, saw two movies, caught De Danann (or at least Frankie Gavin and a band, there’s some dispute there), and I’ve eaten more Mexican food than I have in the last five years. So that’s all good. This is a neat city. The brown is not bothering me; I had years to get used to brown nature in the Bay Area. It’s a bit browner here, drought and all, but that’s life. I had forgotten a lot of little differences that come with living in the middle of the country. There’s more elbow room for the houses, and the spaces between neighborhoods. The city has room to breathe, which I like a lot. ...

Not that I saw too much of the city. My business contacts took me to Pasta e Basta on Friday, but Saturday I was laid out with a nasty cold and it’s still bad enough so that I don’t feel like going into the city. Sad. The pasta was pretty good, though, and the singing waitresses were keen. They ranged from Mozart to Dolly Parton. Musically, I mean. Now I’m faced with entertaining myself for 9 more hours in Schiphol. Sad again. Changing the flight would run upwards of $300 and it’s just not worth it. I wonder if Starbucks would let me sleep on their couches?

I was in Frankfurt less than 24 hours so I don’t have a lot to say about that. Le Meridian Park is conveniently close to the central train station and my corporate hosts took me to a very nice Italian restaurant. Frankfurt Airport is a pit of hell. In retrospect I should have figured out how to get to Amsterdam by train. Perhaps other gate areas are better, but D is an endless corridor with no waiting areas or shops; these things have been replaced by glassed up smoking areas that smell, even from the outside, like stale ashtrays. Bleak as anything. ...

Some people blog from planes, some people blog from trains. I feel awfully civilized. Cologne was great. The Excelsior Hotel Ernst, not a great business hotel, although possessed of quality service – but the location was unbeatable. Great food. Very nice beer. GDC was also quite useful; lots of vendor meetings, a few really good talks, and so on. Gamescom really is that enormous. To put it into the context of my tribe, take the Gencon dealers room and fill it up with computer game booths outfitted by companies with money to spend instead of printing debts. Keep the 30 foot ceiling; you need it to fit the booth displays. Yes, that is a 120" HDTV. Now turn up really loud techno from every booth. With me so far? Make the room a bit bigger. Good. ...

It’s the sweet taste of jet lag! I had plans to sleep as soon as I got on the evening plane out of Dulles, but with a lean-all-the-way-back traveler in front of me, that became untenable. So I watched Thor instead, which wasn’t half as bad as I expected it to be. Not a super-bright movie, but man, it’s got science fantasy vision in spades. Schiphol Airport was huge. This is not an original observation, I know. But it’s worse than O’Hare! So that was interesting and new, even though the half an hour walk between gates was lengthy. But if you gotta do it, might as well do it at 4 AM body time, right? ...

This post may trigger. On September 28th, 2008, my life changed. That was the day Wyatt killed himself; that was the evening Susan and I found Wyatt’s body on the third floor of our communal house. A year later, the grief has abated somewhat, although there are sharp moments of pain. The anger’s still pretty strong. So is the determination. In 2006, 33,000 people killed themselves in the United States. Suicide is the fourth leading cause of death for adults between the ages of 18 and 65 years in this country. (15 to 24 year olds? Third leading.) Last year the rate of military suicides increased for the fourth year running. More than half of all violent deaths are suicides. ...

As always. Thank you, countries of the world.

Getting Things Done. Anyone tried it? Does it work for you? Tips and/or tricks? Do I have to drink the koolaid? (Regardless of the answers to these questions, my next PC will use GTD as an organizing scheme. Possibly this promise excludes Jess’s Exalted game, but I’m not sure.)

Quote from the weekend, from S.: “It’s like cow-tipping, but with endangered species.”