Monday, 29th day of the Leafy Moon, 937

“Wait!” you cry, “you must mean Horror Movie Month 2014!”

Earlier this year, I started going through my old game collection and selling what I could on Amazon. This was remarkably easy (especially because of Gloria’s endless help; she stood in line at USPS for me and send me snapshots of my tracking numbers; she deserves massive high fives) and surprisingly lucrative. My plan was to put the proceeds toward a next-gen system, but I found that nothing really was compelling enough to get me to buy one this year. It looks like 2015 will be the year for me. Instead, I started to think about getting a 3DS.

I made a vague offer to run an RPG for some of the kids in my family’s younger generation, and have yet to follow through. I have no doubt that I could just wing a simple D&D adventure and we’d have fun. I will do that sometime. I should set a date.

Last week, I was in Portland, Oregon for OSCON. I had a good time, as I generally do. Portland’s a nice place, and when I’m there, so are a lot of friends that I see only once or twice a year. I got some tasty pizza with Piers at Sizzle Pie, had a really nice long dinner at Farm with Robert, got a milkshake with Andy, went to Le Piegon with Piers and John, Shirley, and Sonia, got Indian and ice cream with David, Julie, Ovid, and Vicky, and went to Base Camp with a whole ton of people. I’ve probably missed something in there. Sorry!

I wanted to make an effort to learn some more languages, old and new, more or less continually as time went on. I started with Forth and Go, and did a tolerable job at getting the basics of each down. I didn’t do so well at writing anything of consequence, which isn’t too surprising for Forth, but I’m pretty sure I could be writing a lot more Go to get things done. I really do mean to get back to that.

A few weeks ago was YAPC in Orland, Florida, and I attended! I already wrote about the amazingly great video recording of the conference. It was great, and I was amazed. I watched some of the videos just today!

I went to YAPC::NA! It was in Orlando, Florida, and I had a lovely time. I’ll write more about it later. I wanted to say one thing as soon as possible, though, and I thought I’d say it in isolation from anything else, because I think it’s a much more important thing than some may realize.

For a few years, I’ve kept most of my “stuff” on a two terabyte hard drive in a little tiny desktop computer running Ubuntu. It’s got another 2T drive connected via USB, and once in a while I’d run an rsync job. This was basically my whole “storage solution” for my media files: ripped movies, ripped music, and books. Recently, I’ve been getting close to filling the drive, and I thought I should improve the whole setup with something less ad hoc.

It’s been over a month since I last tried to do anything on my still-crawling-along (re)playthrough of all of Infocom’s games. The next up, for me, was The Witness. I’m going to be straight with you: I didn’t play it.