Friday night, after a long week, decided to stay in, drink wine, and eat junk food. Had some friends show up, and more-or-less had a great time.
Saturday, I bummed around way too long before meeting up with Team Asses of Fire for their Idiotarod debut. While the afterparty was great, I missed the spectacle proper, which was too bad. I ran into some co-workers at the afterparty, which was very interesting. I also missed meeting up with
L.’s dad was in town, so I ended up splitting the Idiotarod scene early to head back uptown, and ended up spending the whole night up there! It was a really nice dinner (we had sushi) and drinks at the Marriott in Times Square (sweet pics here). I am really enjoying my new camera, and a flickr pro account.
Yesterday I was up early, and out the door before 10. Went to the UES to meet a friend who was in from Boston for the weekend. Had brunch in Chinatown, coffee in Little Italy, then walked down to the Fung Wah bus terminal, which was a spit away from the festivities for the year of the Dog. Lots of happy people, colored paper, and children in red. It took me almost an hour to get back across to a northbound west-side train. Met up with L. and we saw James Levine at Carnegie Hall. There was a piece from Bartok, an act from a German opera (I don’t remember it, and L. has my program), and the entirety of Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring”. Until listening to the piece performed live last night, I never realized how much John Williams was influenced by Stravinsky. I could almost pick some of his themes from Jaws and Star Wars out of the air in front of me. Very enlightening. The afternoon was incredibly enjoyable, but, unfortunately, I was not built for the balcony seating at Carnagie Hall. I was more-or-less hobbled for the remainder of the day with fairly intense knee pain, but despite that I pressed on.
We didn’t meet up with L.’s father, who got pulled into some business, so instead we wandered up to 51st street, took the train home, and had english muffin pizzas and watched Family Guy, American dad and the Simpsons. Walking through Times Square , L. and I bumped in to Mike Starr at 48th street. It was wierd, didn’t even stop to say high, I just recognized him from The Last Dragon, and he boogied off. He has apparently done a lot since then.
The only other things of note are that I think I have my server/harddrive/backup situations plotted out and set on the road to recovery. It took 38 hours to re-merge my MBR for my server. I am thinking of re-formatting, re-installing, and simply adding the data back in. I am intimidated by the time commitment.
Speaking of time commitments, I got an invite to the beta for Battle for Middle-Earth II. I downloaded and installed no problem. Part of the Beta is evaluating the install process. It blows. EA has hired a company to add DRM to the game (which probably drives up the cost of the game, while doing nothing but frustrate honest users), which is just plain stupid. The requiremens include disabling antivirus, firewalls, routers, as well as any “non standard” browsers (meaning, anything but IE). When a game forces that amount of shit to prove you are not a thief, the game does not get my business. According to the forums for the beta, hundreds of users have been locked out of the beta due to crappy coding on the part of the DRM group. Way to go guys, nothing like killing enjoyment and creativity with shit-spwan lockdown tech. I’ll lump EA and Safecast in the same category as Itunes and Audible – that is to say, corporate thugs who I will not finance.
This week I have a fairly manic pace set, and I am hoping I can make it through to the Super Bowl. I have two invites conflicting already (go fig) with more doubtless cropping up as the week moves on.
I haven’t slept well in four days. I was having anxiety attacks about moving at 4am today. What the fuck is that about? I don’t ahve to move for months yet. I need to turn off my brain.