Music of Early 2011

Here is a simple list of the recent songs that I am obsessed with at the moment (usually Becky is obsessed with the same songs, but not always):

• "Civilization" by Justice - you've probably heard it in the latest Adidas commercial with Katy Perry in it. Good god is this song good! Listen to it on YouTube here.
• "The Golden Age" by The Asteroids Galaxy Tour - From another commercial, this time a Heineken commercial. Got it stuck in my head so decided to buy it and have been enjoying it. Music Video on YouTube.
  
• "Tighten Up" by The Black Keys - Amazingly I actually heard this one first on DC101 (really shocking, I know), very good stuff! Music Video on YouTube.
  
• The new album "Wasting Light" from the Foo Fighters
• The Tron: Legacy soundtrack from Daft Punk

Enjoy!

Reading Update: I finished A Game of Thrones in almost exactly a month, and have already jumped in to book 10 of Wheel of Time - Crossroads of Twilight and am now 12% into the book. If I read one WoT book a month I will be caught up in the series by August/September.

April Update

It's been just shy of a month since my last post, and at that time I was just starting A Game of Thrones and only 6% through it, now I'm 74% through the book and progress is picking up quickly (as it usually does) towards the climax of the book. I am really thoroughly enjoying GRRM's style of writing in contrast to many of the things I've been reading a lot of lately (specifically Wheel of Time), and though at first I didn't plan on reading the later Song of Ice and Fire books they are definitely on my list now. However, after this book I will be going back to Wheel of Time so I can continue to tear through that series before the end of the year.

I have been going to the Bushikai dojo and training in Nihon Jujutsu almost every Tuesday and Thursday since mid-January. I am loving it 100% and though I get quite sore from being thrown around and beat up, the exercise, energy, confidence, and extremely interesting things that I'm learning are all so positive that I can't believe I had been putting off joining the dojo for so long. I really can't thank Becky enough for getting me started there as a Christmas present, without that who knows how long I would have waited. So far I've lost between 5-10 pounds and I know that I've put on a lot of muscle (which means I have some muscles, rather than none) so I'm very happy with how it is changing me physically. The dojo also has regular Kenjutsu (sword) classes but I'm trying to keep my attendance limited at the moment because if I start going more I find that my free time becomes a LOT more limited.

PAX East 2011 and Springtime

March has pretty well flown by because the first week was essentially preparation for PAX East, then the convention itself, and a return home to allergies + a cold and then here we are today! By March 9th Becky and I were up in Boston for the first time (for either of us), and although it was cold we spent two awesome days around town with Becky's friend Jon who lives in Jamaica Plain near the South End of Boston. I'm not even going to pretend that I learned how Boston divides itself up, but suffice to say it seems like there are multiple south parts and multiple north parts that are all quite different from each other.

We spent the majority of our time in the harbor/convention center area because we were staying at a hotel there for PAX East, which took place from March 11th-13th. PAX itself was amazing and we had a lot of fun, especially so with meeting a bunch of people including Josh's friend Bryan that lives really freaking close to us but we had to go to Boston at the same time to finally meet! We also had a lot of fun running around town with Jon and then with Chris Tulach who acted as our tour guide for the majority of the Freedom Trail on the Monday after PAX. Boston is easily one of Becky's and my favorite cities now. Pretty much all of the food we had while in Boston was amazing, so that helps.

I think it was a great idea for us to spend a few extra days both before and after the con in town, and hopefully we get to do the same for PAX East next year which we're both already planning to attend. I wish that we had gone last year because then we could totally make PAX East a thing for us to attend every single one of, but alas last spring was not exactly the best of times for us and doing things like going on vacation (I was unemployed at the time).

Then pretty much within a few hours of returning to Maryland my allergies flared up and I quickly caught a cold, which I was happy that it waited until I got home where I could be more comfortable while sick, but it resulted in the next week after vacation going by relatively uneventfully and so here we are in late March and it feels like time has just flown by. Becky got sick also, but I think we're both coming off of our colds now so hopefully we'll be feeling better just in time for April!

I didn't get nearly as much reading done on the train up to and back from Boston as I thought I would. Turns out riding a train from 10pm to 8am is disorienting and left us both in a strange state of limbo during the travel because we couldn't really sleep well but it was clearly the time for sleeping. That said, reading progress has been going well especially in the last two weeks and I'm now 80% of the way through Wheel of Time book 9, Winter's Heart, and expect to be finishing it up any day now. I'm still planning on tackling A Game of Thrones before April 17th when the show starts on HBO, so hopefully I can accomplish that without many problems. After that it'll be back to WoT for the home stretch of books before the last book comes out early next year.

Oh, and I absolutely have to mention that I finally, FINALLY, finally got to buy the new Battletech boxed set which I've been dying to get my hands on since my first GenCon 3 years ago when it was out but I wasn't really in the position to buy a bunch of things while I was there. Even better than that, I got to buy the new boxed set and it hasn't even been released yet! Yay! Now let's play some F'ing Battletech!!!

End of February Update

Two days ago I finally finished reading Wheel of Time book 8, The Path of Daggers. I've started into book 9 - Winter's Heart and hope that I can finish it pretty quickly because I am eager to get into the first Game of Thrones book before April when the TV show comes on HBO, and I also have the first Dark Tower book that I've borrowed from my friend Josh that I am very excited to read. Of course after Winter's Heart there's still 5 more Wheel of Time books, but those will be handled in the rest of 2011 I think.

Just over a year ago Becky and I were both greatly enjoying being home all day together and watching the Winter Olympics, but we were also quite stressed with my unemployment situation. This year there's a bit of stress due to the government supposedly cutting a lot of funding for programs and even potentially not passing last year's budget which would cause gov't wide furlough days. Either way this is an issue for my line of work and I'm concerned but trying to stay positive and not let the stress get to me that much.

Other than those things life has been going really well and pretty steady lately. I'm enjoying doing web development and programming work every day as much as I enjoy doing architecture and design so my job satisfaction at the moment is very high. I'm also looking forward to using the knowledge I'm gaining on personal projects developing web-apps and other things that I've wanted to work on for a long time but until recently didn't have the knowledge to do it.

On the gaming front we've slowed down on how much we have been playing WoW but hopefully will keep playing it enough that it is worth while as an expense. I've gotten into the beta for the game Darkspore which I hadn't heard about until last week and it's incredibly fun, and will hopefully be getting into the early closed beta for Rise of Immortals which looks interesting as well.

1 Month of Employment

Things are going incredibly, no actually I'd say insanely, well for us lately. My new job has done quite a bit, but I think the root of everything is that despite all the stress, pain, and anguish that being unemployed caused us - Becky and I were still pretty damn happy during that time. We spent 7 months pretty much the entire time being together 24/7, and we enjoyed it a hell of a lot. Possibly the most fun was in the beginning of the year when the 2010 Winter Olympics were on and we both were home all day. We watched nearly all of the events and it was awesome! So after that 7 months, despite the job and money concerns, we were happy and I think that is the root of why things are going so incredibly well right now. We were happy, and then a large amount of stress was relieved for us and I feel like we're finally able to use all that positive momentum we were building up over the first half of the year.

It really doesn't feel like that was half a year, and it's very nice to have so many good things that happened (with Becky for the most part) to look back on and not have that period of my life be a tarnish on things. A few other things that I enjoyed during that period of time:

• hanging out with Matt on random week days while everyone else worked
• Hanging out with our friends Andrew & Amber, and the birth of their baby boy Maddox on May 31st - also being free to spend a lot of time at the hospital and keep them company / bring them food during those stressful few days
  
• getting to play a few times in Dave's D&D game
• the last season of Lost
• working with our friend Ben on random house jobs for his home improvement company - installing insulation, doing (badly) drywall, painting - I quickly became comfortable walking around in attic spaces, which is a useful skill and helped with installing the ceiling fan for my home office
• working for Becky's dad the last month of my unemployment - doing drywall plan take-offs - it got me back into the idea of working every day of the week (haha)

I'm sure there are some other things, I may add onto this list later on.

Nerd-time: One of the things I'm really enjoying right now is running my D&D campaign more often since Becky has gotten a lot more into it and doesn't mind (or even encourages) me to run more often now. Just a year ago she was considering quitting the game, but now she's such an enjoyable part of the game for me when I run and an incredibly talented role player. With her and Dave in my party, it's clear everyone else is quickly improving in their roleplaying as a result. I started this campaign on July 4th, 2008 and after two years it's a treat to see how things have changed and relish a bit in the world Dave and I have built. His party (in the past of my game) is in the upper paragon tier and he will probably wrap his game up by summer or fall of next year. My party is just hitting level 14/15/16 but I'm hoping to speed things up and run more regularly so that it doesn't take another two years to wrap everything up in my campaign. Then again, if it keeps going strong and everyone is enjoying it - what's the problem with it running for 2 more years? We'll have to see how it goes...

Onto the reading front, you can see that things are going well because I'm 70% of the way through the first Harry Potter book and 5% through the entire series. Everything I do before July 19th is a buffer, once that date hits I'll need to have 25% of the entire series read by August 19th which evens out to just under 1% or 41 pages a day. Getting through the first book before that date seems reasonable, which would bring my requirement down to 38 pages a day which isn't much but it helps. The only reason this is even possible for me is that the books are easy to read and each page is relatively short on words, otherwise I'd be doomed because I like to read slow and enjoy my books (at least that's the excuse I use).