On Friday I met plumtreeblossom after work (see her weekend write-up here) and we took the train to Quincy Center together. We had dinner at Outback Steakhouse. I don’t like their corporate politics, but I love their food and sometimes I just need a hunk of cow. As it turned out, I’m very glad we did, because I ordered an Australian beer I wasn’t familiar with — Cooper’s Brewery Sparkling Ale — and it was so good I ordered a second, and then went looking for it at the liquor store later in the week. (If you are wise enough to follow my example, be cautioned that it’s fermented in the bottle, so there’s some sediment in the bottom; you want to pour it into a glass.)

After a yummy dinner, we went to my house and watched Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical, which was very funny, and a little bit of the original 1930s exploitation/propaganda movie, which was a bonus on the DVD.

( Another few meals, another movie, some geekery, and some games with darxus and cathijosephine. )

At some point in the weekend, plumtreeblossom took a whole bunch of pictures of grim warrior beowabbit, including the one that I eventually munged into my new userpic, and I also took some pictures of her cats, who were sleeping together on her bed looking especially cute.

The one bad thing about the weekend is that towards the end of the workweek I’d been having little twinges in my hip, and they got considerably worse over the weekend. I’m going to need to drive to the T tomorrow (where parking is $7); there’s no way I can do the normally 15-minutes walk to the T station with the ice that’s on the sidewalks. I’m not sure if this is a return of my sciatica or if I did something to my hip slipping on the ice. But if a hurt hip is the price for all the joy and fun I had this weekend, it was worth it.

Many thanks to plumtreeblossom for taking the userpic I’ve wanted since I created this account. (And for a lovely, lovely weekend!)

Howdy. Just wanted to mention two Firefox plugins I’ve started using lately and find extremely useful:

It's All Text! lets you edit text-entry areas (like LiveJournal post and comment fields) with your favourite real text editor. (So you can search-and-replace, load prepared files, and use whatever convenience features like abbreviations or filters your editor provides.) Works on Linux/Unix, and I gather it works on Windows; evidently it doesn’t work on MacOS X. "Remember, with great power outages come great responsibility outages."

Aardvark lets you interactively delete things from the page you’re looking at (or alternatively, select an element and delete everything else). It’s especially useful when you’re printing, because you can print out that one recipe that’s in the middle of a long string of comments, or print out the map and directions to the hotel without including the hotel’s banner, navigation sidebar, and list of reviews. Presumably you could also remove that one wide image that’s messing up your whole Friends page, although I haven’t had to try that since I installed it. It’s also useful for web developers or HTML/CSS geeks to see the structure of pages they’re looking at.

I can’t believe I haven’t posted about this before! In fact, I’ve sort of been observing radio silence here, just because I’ve been so busy. But next Wednesday through Saturday, the 29th through 1st, I will be performing in the Post Meridian Radio Players’ performance of Tomes of Terror III. Live radio drama is basically people standing up at microphones with scripts and performing radio-style audio stories, along with life sound effects and music. This particular event is three separate radio dramas, a Hallowe’en-themed episode of The Baby Snooks Show, “Reyndardine”, an original adaptation (by PMRP’s Renée Johnson) of a short story based on an old English ballad, and Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, as adapted for radio for the CBC’s Nightfall series.

I’m playing the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and plumtreeblossom is doing foley (sound effects) for “The Tell-Tale Heart” and for the Baby Snooks episode. It’s tremendous fun for us, and it will almost certainly be tremendous fun for you, too. All shows are at 7:30; if you want to come see it, I strongly recommend you make a reservation at http://pmrp.org/, since we have lots of reservations already and some of the shows may be sold out. You can reserve tickets online and pay for them when you arrive for the show.

I highly recommend this, and not just because I’m in it.

OK, must go sleep now.

PS — And tomorrow night at midnight (Friday night) you can hear me and lediva, with plumtreeblossom doing a tiny bit of foley, doing a couple minutes from the show on WBZ’s The Jordan Rich Show on 1030 AM. There will also be a section from Baby Snooks, and our director(s? Not sure if the Baby Snooks director will be there) and sound designer/technical director will be interviewed. If you happen to be able to record that, I’d love a copy; I’m not sure whether the radio station will make it available for download.

I’d been on the fence about whether to participate in the LiveJournal content strike, but after reading this post about it by sunspiral, I will be participating. Since I don’t post every day anyway, you wouldn’t know unless I told you, so I’m telling you. ( Some explanation, but not enough :-) )

sparkymonster and several other wonderful people on my Flist have called my attention to International Blog Against Racism Week. From starkeymonster’s post:

It's International Blog Against Racism Week! YAY!

How to participate? oyceter says...
1. Announce the week in your blog.

2. Switch your default icon to either an official IBAR week icon, or one which you feel is appropriate. To get an official IBAR week icon, you may modify one of yours yourself or ask someone to do so. Here's a round up of IBARW icons.

3. Post about race and/or racism: in media, in life, in the news, personal experiences, writing characters of a race that isn't yours, portrayals of race in fiction, review a book on the subject, etc. (Linking back here (ibarw) is highly appreciated!)

For inspiration, here are last year's IBARW posts. You can also check out this post for further resources.
...

PSST: It will help a lot on del.icio.us if you title your entry something topical, as opposed to just "Intl. Blog Against Racism Week."

I’m unlikely to manage to actually manage to post anything appropriate, since I’ve been busy enough lately that I haven’t even found time to post about the important stuff that’s happened to me personally¹, but I think it’s a great idea and I wanted to point people at it.

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¹ F’rinstance, I twisted my (other) ankle on Saturday and fell down in the middle of the street. Got an awesome bruise on my thigh from the curb. I’m fine, though; the nice drivers stopped and didn’t hit me, and I’m back to walking almost normally now.

So, it has occurred to me that now that I’m growing my hair out (albeit frustratingly slowly), none of my userpics looks like me any more. So, here’s a new userpic, and at least one of my userpics looks like me now.

Also:

Hi! I’ve just created the quincy_ma community, “for those who live, work, or play in Quincy, Massachusetts”. The userinfo page has more about what it’s for. I’m probably going to shop it around in South-Shore related communities soon, but thought I’d give y’all a heads-up now.

(There was already quincy_losers, but it seems like its populace was pretty exclusively high-school age and it seems like it’s been quiet for a while, so I don’t think the new community is superfluous.)

Hi. I’m about to prune my lj Friends list. If I take you off, it’s not because I don’t love you any more or don’t want you to read my protected entries, it’s just that I’ve had to mess with my friends groups lately (creating new groups and changing old ones), and the more people I have on my Friends list, the more tedious that is. (Actually, if anybody knows of Unix or OSX software that makes managing custom friends groups easier, I’d be interested in hearing about it. What I’d like is a grid with all my Friends down one side, and all my custom friends groups along the top, filled with checkboxes, so I could compare at a glance who was in what group and compare the memberships of different groups. Extra points if it let me change the ordering of the custom friends groups, so I could put two columns I wanted to be similar-but-not-identical next to each other.)

Anyway, the reason I’m posting this is (1) to let you know that it’s not personal if I take you off the list; it’s just about convenience, and (2) so that if I take you off, but you actually would like to be able to read my protected posts, you can let me know so I can add you back on. (I’m guessing most of the people I’m going to take off don’t read me anyway, but I thought I’d mention it just in case.)

[Edit: I’ve just done that pruning, so if you can still read this locked entry you are in no imminent danger of not being able to read my seekrit stuff.]