Category: Personal

I apologize for my scarcity. My company moved offices while I was in Austin, and as it turns out, YoYoNet will be unable to fulfill their end of the bargain in supplying us with a DSL connection. My boss was furious, since he signed the lease on the new office only after assurances that we would have a fast connection. Now, it looks like dialup until one of the DSL providers is ready to wire our office way out in the sticks. This sucks. We’re a WEB DESIGN company, working with dialup? It’s embarrassing! And we don’t even have that set up yet, so all the email I want to send will have to continue to wait. SXSW chums, I’m still here, and I’ll talk to you all soon.

Happily, we’ve seen the back of another wretched St. Patrick’s Day. I hate that day. I hate the way it commodifies my heritage, and reinforces all the silly stereotypes. And the worst part of all? Green beer! Whose idea was that?! News to all: Irish people are not all drunken leprechauns.

Well the big man of the house has returned from SXSW, and we’ll be enjoying a good curry while he tells me all about his trip. (We usually meet with Brooke over here at our pad for curried chicken and The West Wing on Wednesdays.) I’ll have to show him the website for Lionhead Studios, which is the best company site I’ve seen in a while. Plus the screens from their new game, Black & White, are spectacular. Now I just have the long, long wait for the Mac port. {bg}

As I’m suddenly afraid that no-one cares about me or my blogs, I was hoping that anyone who reads and has access to email would consider the following question: “What good are computers?” Answers have no requirements whatsoever, but I’d like you to send them to brentg@NOSPAMrogers.com Flames gladly accepted. Fun or clever answers get posted (when I figure out how to!). {bg}

Today I have to do my duty to cats and friends’ dads. Sammy and Suzie, James’s Dad’s cats, need some company and the usual other attentions while John is off in Eire, so today is my turn. I love the cats, but the trip to and from the place called
Don Mills, in the north end of Toronto, is somewhat bleak. Big, wide, half-empty roads leading up to a big hilltop where the wind scours your very soul. Then a pleasant elevator ride up to a cosy apartment saturated with ten years of cigarette smoke. But there’s usually beer in the fridge! And apparently there’s a ghost car somewhere in the neighbourhood…{bg}

I am happy to say I have found a kind of a home in cyberspace: as a member of a Quake ]I[ Arena Clan called [HEMP]. It’s named after the leader, veganhempman. I don’t know their smoking habits, and I don’t partake, if you’re wondering. For those of you not ensconced in the joys of frags and CTF and all that, you may like to have a peek at Planet Quake.

So I have found another book to read (in addition to The Making of the Atomic Bomb, The Ingenuity Gap, and various programming books for school): The Left Hand of Darkness. Of course I should have read it long ago. Then again, I sometimes think I have good luck at reading a book when I am ready for it. The opening essay had me fall in love with Ms. Le Guin immediately, and inspires me to write more fiction again soon. Or anyway to read more. But then I have all these software and computer game ideas… {bg}