protography.

Back in October, my friend Oleg was up at Castle Frostbite for a visit.  He took a bunch of pictures for a super-secret project, and a bunch more for the family album.  I just got a DVD in the mail with the photographic take of the day, and thought I’d share some shots.

(All photos courtesy of Oleg Volk.)

Wringing out Oleg’s suppressed Walther P22 with green Viridian laser.

Traipsing through the woods with my first and favorite rifle ever, a chopped-down No.4 “Tanker” Enfield.

The kids, assembling their List of Demands for Santa.

The Lord and Lady of the manor.

Quinn, pre-haircut.

Lyra, three and a half.

that’s what diplomacy is, isn’t it?

The Economist weighs in on the latest WikiLeaks “whistle-blowing” that tries to serve up vignettes from the standard global diplomacy dance with a hefty slathering of ZOMG TEH SEEKRITS clandestine sauce.  (Who knew that our diplomats don’t divulge the same information to all their foreign counterparts?  Shocking, that.)

Money paragraph:

At this point, what WikiLeaks is doing seems like tattling: telling Sally what Billy said to Jane. It’s sometimes possible that Sally really ought to know what Billy said to Jane, if Billy were engaged in some morally culpable deception. But in general, we frown on gossips. If there’s something particularly damning in the diplomatic cables WikiLeaks has gotten a hold of, the organisation should bring together a board of experienced people with different perspectives to review the merits of releasing that particular cable. But simply grabbing as many diplomatic cables as you can get your hands on and making them public is not a socially worthy activity.

RTWT.

the skull fracture engine.

I walked into the playroom this morning to find the following construction:

I see no possible way how this could go wrong at all.

turkey day recap.

We had a nice, relaxing Thanksgiving dinner with friends.  Like 81.7% of Americans, we had a turkey with approximately three dozen side dishes, and like 53% of Americans, we had leftover sides and turkey for dinner tonight.

(Like 43.9% of all statistics, these were totally made up on the spot, by the way.)

Hard to believe that 2010 is just about to draw to a close.  Where has the entire year gone, I ask you?  It feels like I got about zip-all accomplished this year.  I’m still putting the finishing touches on the novel I’ve been writing since before January, so this one is going to take a year and a half from start to finish when all is said and done.  On the plus side, I wrote a bunch of decent short stories this year, got some encouraging critiques and rejections, and had a ton of great ideas for subsequent novels.  From a technical standpoint, I’ve improved my writing a great deal this past year, so there’s that at least.

Next up: December, being the last month of the year and all that.  Maybe I’ll even get this 500-page turkey finished by December 31st, at which point I will throw my pen into Mascoma Lake, eat a whole box of Twinkies, and wash the spongy, delicious yellow bastards down with a fifth of Maker’s Mark.

one of the all-time great sf shows.

For my money, the high water mark for hard Science Fiction was the Muppet Show’s ‘”Pigs In Space”. Nothing will ever top its drama, character development, science fidelity, or special effects.

dispatch from the domestic front.

We haven’t had a functioning dryer in the house since before our trip.  The new one was delivered in our absence, but the Sears install monkeys couldn’t hook it up to the gas line, so we had to wait three weeks for someone from Irving to come out and do it.  (There was voodoo involved with converting it from natural gas to propane, so it wasn’t just “attach gas line to back of dryer”, and I let the pros do it rather than risk Ultimate Exploding Death.)  Then our canister vac’s motor died early last week, and I had to take it in to get it fixed.  (Hooray for 3-year extended warranties.)

Now the dryer is operational, and I no longer have to spend part of my Dadcation at the laundromat to dry and fold the weekly laundry for two adults and two kids.  And this morning, I’m driving out to West Leb to pick up our fixed vacuum, at which point our short, localized nightmare will be over. 

I feel like it has taken me this long just to recover from our trip.  Fun as it was to see friends and family again, it wasn’t exactly a relaxing experience.

Tomorrow we’re having friends over for Turkey Day…and on Saturday, I’ll chart a morning Dadcation course that doesn’t go anywhere near the laundromat, WalMart, or the regional Costco knockoff.

a comprehensive directory of rhodes scholars, entry #281.

From my former hometown’s crime blotter comes the report of an arrest for multiple snatch-‘n-run gas station robberies.  What makes this otherwise unremarkable entry worth mentioning is the picture of the young choir boy in question:

If there’s something you can do to yourself that virtually guarantees you won’t ever be employed in any sort of environment outside of an illegal chop shop, it’s a pair of freaking devil horns tattooed onto your forehead.

Also: grabbing a handful of $20 bills from the till at the gas station?  Not only is that a low-profit, high-risk sort of crime (he’ll be spending several years in the Greybar Motel for what couldn’t have been more than a hundred bucks or so), but it’s also not particularly evil.  Maybe he set his own bar a bit too high with that ink on his noggin.

*snert*

Courtesy of Allie Brosh at Hyperbole and a Half comes the funniest thing you’ll read on these here Intertubes this year.

evdo in the house.

We have a loaner EVDO USB modem from Verizon.  The mobile hotspot they gave us couldn’t pick up the EVDO 3G network, but the little USB unit with external hi-gain antenna gets one to three bars.  Download speeds are comparable to our current service, latency is in the same ballpark, but connection quality seems to be better.  With our current provider, we get regular lag spike disconnects every 15 minutes…the EVDO connection is stable so far.

I’m currently running a trial at the house, sending Robin’s night elf criss-crossing Northrend over and over again to see if I can get the connection to drop her out of WoW.  If I can stay connected for an hour or two without lag spike disconnects, I’ll call it a qualified success.  Still, the data cap and similar speed aren’t exactly tempting, since the EVDO contract would cost twice as much, and our current provider has no data download limits.

that’s a lot of water.

Here’s a snapshot from our vacation I rather like.  I call it “Little Girl, Big Ocean.”