Doctor L’s Neighborhood

All further blog postings will be happening over at http://www.nopurpose.org/blog/

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I have a work related rant going down over at the new blog location: http://www.nopurpose.org/blog/2009/08/17/why-even-have-a-spec/

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This, right here, is the kind of crap that's pushing me off Vox.

It's been kinda a low productivity couple of days here, even though I had high hopes that they wouldn't be. I'm still stuck with my mom's craft website design that I've been working on. I've been poking at it here and there still and I can't seem to find anything that works and doesn't look stupid. Still. I think at this point I might need to put some distance on it and come back refreshed.

The most productive thing I've done was to go searching for some fonts that might kick start the process. Finding a foothold to work with starting out seems like it's an issue for me with this project. I just can't find something to use as a base that I can work off of. I find a couple of neat fonts that should work well on a craft store type page that I've been playing around with, but nothing jumps out at me.

So I've been doing some more transferring of my blog posts over to my new blog at http://www.nopurpose.org/blog/. So far I've got all of august and September 2006 transferred over and about half of October. I posted a lot more back in the days when I first got my blog, so once I get pas the first 3-4 months, the rest should follow pretty quickly after that.

I've also been feeling in the mood to play some sort of RPG type game. There's been a lot of talk about Final Fantasy 13 that I've heard recently that's been influencing me. I borrowed Dragon Quest 8 for the PS2 (after going through my old blog posts and remembering that one of my now roommates offered to let me borrow it from them after they had finished in a couple days. This was 3 years ago) but it wasn't quite what I was looking for it seems. So I'm going to be borrowing Dark Cloud 2 for a while instead and hoping that scratches the itch for now.

If you recall earlier in my summer activities post, my family is having a little family gathering out at the family's favorite state park this weekend. A bunch of them are going to be camping out overnight and everything, but my particular branch of the family was just going to go out on Saturday for the day.

For a brief moment though, that plan had changed. I went out to lunch with my Mom yesterday and she asked if I would be interested in actually camping out. It'd been a while since I had gone camping (a loooong while) and I agreed. There were some holes in this plan though. First of all, we didn't have any camping equipment. She was going to try to borrow a tent from somewhere and some supplies...we were going to be borrowing the cooking implements of other family members, etc.

Then we started discussing it. Thinking about food storage and lack of showers. Then we thought about sleeping on the hard ground and not getting enough rest. It'd be annoying to have to borrow everything from everyone and it's pretty short notice. We had realized that we thoroughly talked ourselves out of the idea.

Not closing the door to camping out in the future, but for now...it's not really a good option

I've gotten a little tired with the lack of updates that have been made to Vox over the past several years. It's like Six Apart has totally forgotten about us over here.

And that made me think that there's just about 3 years of my life archived on this website and there's no way for me to get at it if the worst happens and Vox goes down. And I'd hate to lose a lot of these postings. So I've decided I'm going to start transitioning over to hosting my blog on my own website.

Back when I first started with Vox I tried wordpress hosted on my own site and didn't like it quite as much. It wasn't as smooth, didn't have as good support for multimedia stuff and I had to really deck it out with plugins in order to get it working how I wanted it to. But I tried it a couple days ago again and it's definitely come quite a long way.

Right now I'm posting in both places at the same time while I go post by post and transfer 3 years worth of posts over to my own wordpress. It's currently located at http://www.nopurpose.org/blog/, but that's not the final design at all and there's a bunch of fine tuning I need to do to make it work right. I'm still going to post both places for the time being...going to take me a while to transfer everything over. I'm 1/10th of the way done now.

Even if I don't make the transition entirely, I'll at least have a backup of what has become my online journal. I definitely don't want to lose some of these notes and experiences.

I swung by the local college that I'm going to be attending in the fall to see if there were any books to buy for my course (there wasn't) and if there was anything else I needed to do in order to make sure I could attend classes without trouble (nope).

The book thing, knowing the book store, is probably a result of somebody not ordering a book. And the second reply is probably somebody who didn't know what they were doing, knowing college administration.

But they say everything's set and I've got all my supplies (aside from a potential software purchase for the Digital Typography course that I'm taking) so I'll just have to see what happens. I'm really excited to be going back to school, which still amazes me because I didn't think that I would ever be excited after I graduated with my Computer Science degree. Hopefully this helps me find the path that I've been searching for.

Unfortunately, it's not all rosy on the design front. I've been trying to work up a design for my mom's craft business website but I'm having a very hard time with it. I have a bunch of ideas, but nothing seems to be working right. It started with fiddling with the color scheme but then that devolved into the entire idea I had for the look and I'm not sure that I can salvage the idea at this point. I'm getting the feeling that I'm just trying to force something that is destined not to work at all. Might have to switch back to a more conventional website design.

Well, as I mentioned yesterday, I went out to the Sterling Renaissance Festival with my sister on Sunday despite the threat of rain we were under.

I must say though, that it ended up being a fairly nice (although pretty humid) day. And what’s better, the threat of rain kept the crowd size down so we could actually move around easily and didn’t have to wait in line for very long which was good.

On the drive out there I had a bit of a “man, I’m getting old…” moment. My sister just got a new job and we spent a decent amount of time talking about health insurance coverage and, from her perspective as somebody who’s working in the health care industry, the differences between the various companies and how good they are about authorizing care.

The festival was a lot of fun this year. We did a little more wandering around and browsing shops than we usually do because a lot of the shows we had seen a number of times in the past and they don’t really change all that much over the years. But we hit a couple of newer shows which were quite good.

The first show we went to after the opening ceremony was Zilch the Torrysteller which is a guy who tells classic fairy tales but with letters reversed in certain words (see “Torrysteller”) which can create some unintended words and add whole new shades of meaning to the story. It sounds a little stupid, but first of all, it’s impressive how he can keep everything straight in his head and he pulls it off really well and keeps the audience involved. Especially funny were the tangents he got on.

After that we headed over to one of my favorite shows, the DaVinci Brothers. The premise of this one is the DaVinci Brothers had another brother (Bob) and he stages comedy operas. The twist is that audience members get pulled out to be the actors in the opera. It can be hit or miss, but if you get a good group of people, it’s simply awesome. And this time out we got the best group of people I had ever seen. These folks had no shame and they even had the guy running the show doubled over laughing at certain points.

After this we had a couple hours of downtime before the next show we wanted to see so we did some wandering. I went out and did the whole wine tasting thing and found an apple wine that I really liked (I bought a bottle on the way out so I think I will enjoy a glass of that this evening). I almost bought a bottle of cranberry mead too, but I ended up passing because I was trying to be a little frugal with my money spending.

We also did some wandering and I found a gigantic dragon statue/fountain that I always said I wanted to own…and this year we found a price on it. $14,000. I think that’s reasonable. Should be able to fit in the living room… Now I just need to take out a loan. There’s a picture of it, but it’s currently on my phone and I can’t get it off here…so if I remember to do it I’ll throw it up here.

This is where the rain hit us though. After threatening all day, it started to sprinkle while we were browsing some shops early afternoon and quickly turned into an all out downpour. Thankfully we brought umbrellas just in case (I finally got to use the $25 umbrella I purchased on one of my trips down to Washington DC) and it stopped pretty quickly. We heard a couple rumbles of thunder, but nothing too severe.

Every year that my sister and I go, we have a little competition at the archery game they have there. We assign point values to the various rings on the target and keep score. This year we were both kinda crap archers but I ended up winning two of the times we went and losing the third one horribly. In my defense though, the third one was after I had some mead and did the wine tasting…

Before we wandered back up the hill for the final shows I grabbed a couple of items that my friends had requested I bring back. Got a couple of bags of the roasted nuts that they sell which are awesome. The other item was a bit more difficult to grab and required some prior planning. Wassy wanted me to bring her back a turkey leg, slathered in BBQ sauce. Of course, this isn’t exactly portable, but I ended up bringing a big piece of aluminum foil and wrapping it up to go. Got a few strange looks when I was doing that…

After that we made our way up hill to see Danny, Lord of Mischief which is basically a silent comedy show. Kinda like a mime on steroids with various props and a lot of audience participation. It was kinda hit or miss and the best parts of the show were usually when he was accosting various audience members who either arrived late or were getting up to leave for various reasons. It was a solid 40 minute show though.

After that we got our viewing of Don Juan and Miguel which are pretty much the marquee performers at the festival. This year we went to one of their actual shows instead of the weird show at the end since we wanted something a little different. They didn’t disappoint and a couple of times were having so much fun they broke down laughing too.

Good festival this year, and looking forward to going back again next year to see what new stuff they add in the meantime. Getting sold to a new owner has been one of the best things to ever happened to the festival, I think. It really saved them from fading out of existence. The mood is revitalized and all the performers are having so much fun. If you ever get a chance to check it out, you really should.