Yes for both, I think. (Though if I think about it, I'm not really sure what either of those phrases means.)

I'd say that axegrrl  and I are truly in love. Though I've got a crush on another woman, that doesn't change the true love axegrrl and I share. (And, no, the other woman doesn't yet know I've got a crush on her, but she's beginning to suspect. And, yes, if she's also got a crush on me, we're both being pathetic. Why is it so much easier to tell the whole world rather than just tell her?)

Which brings me to love at first sight. I think I'd call a crush on somebody love at first sight because you're in love with each other before you've gotten to know each other. And, though I didn't have a crush on axegrrl until the second time we met, I'd still call that love at first sight.

I think true love has to be based on friendship and, to a certain degree, trust. While it helps to completely trust each other, if you really are friends and you really are attracted to each other, that's enough to work through anything but the most fundamental trust issues. Two friends of mine (they know who they are) are currently having trust issues. If they love each other enough to work through those issues, I'd call that true love.

axegrrl  and I got together for New Year's with a number of other GR folks (ashtalet , jcw_da_dmg , pensnuggles , wendyzski , and John-who's-account-name-I-do-not-know). We arrived a little late, but were able to jump into one of the better dungeon crawl games I've played (a Fantasy Flight game called Descent). I was a little annoyed that the game went on so long (Pen and Wendy arrived after us, so they got left out of the game), but overall the game was quite fun.

After that we all watched Stardust which I really enjoyed. Hadn't read the book, but I'm going to now.

We then took the El to downtown Evanston to see the fireworks. Ananda got a bit of an asthma attack from trying to hurry in the cold weather (she hasn't had an attack in years), but Wendy came to the rescue with an inhaler.

The snow clung to the trees wonderfully and just glowed in the streetlights. It was also fun to watch people goofing around with a snowball fight and toys from some party crackers that barely made a pop. And then watching the fireworks, almost as an afterthought, was kind of nice.

Most of the pictures I took didn't turn out (since I was trying to capture the glow of the streetlights and had trouble holding the camera still enough for the slow shutter speed), but I've posted the ones that did.

For pictures look at the album in the GalaxyRangers Yahoo group (For those of you who are not in the group, I believe it's adults only, so you have to log in to find the group).

I've still got room for one to three more players for the role playing game I'm going to run starting next month.

I'm running the game using a unique fantasy world that I've been tinkering with since the beginning of role playing in the late 70s. The campaign is a complete rewrite of a storyline called "The City of Light and Science" which I ran for bijili , dragonbane , and kittykatkatja  (when I was running before, I was using D&D 3.5 with some Spycraft and GURPS rules mixed in). I characterize the story-line as heavily inspired by Jules Verne and the Indiana Jones movies, with a bit of "filmed in New Zealand " style sword and sorcery mixed in.

This time I'm using GURPS rules. (Don't let that scare you away. When it comes down to playability, GURPS is not really any more complicated than d20 3.5.) The plan is to meet at my house in Mount Prospect on Saturday or Sunday approximately twice a month.

Right now I've got four players: axegrrl , oneleggedman , George (who some of you may know from Thursday gaming), and David (who I found on Steve Jackson's GURPS BBS).

If you are interested, send me an e-mail, post a reply, or talk to me when you see me.

For more details about the game, ask me or see my posting on the Chicago Gamers LiveJournal list.

Letter from Thilina Heenatigala, General Secretary, Sri Lanka Astronomical Association

Wish Sir Arthur C. Clarke happy birthday

See Sir Arthur's birthday video message

BBC: Mars robot unearths microbe clue

San Francisco Chronicle: Gimpy rover has turned up a surprise on Mars

Slashdot: Mars Rover Investigates Possibility of Ancient Microbial Life

FOX: NASA Tries to Save Mars Rover Before Batteries Run Out

----
Hmm. I think one of these news outlets missed the point.

Happy birthday urban_firefly and wendyzski

Herman's part is written by sisyphusx
I wrote Alex's part

---

Snagged from sisyphusx and
uofirob

Career Cruising Meme

1. Go to www.careercruising.com.
2. Put in Username: nycareers, Password: landmark.
3. Take their "Career Matchmaker" questions.
4. Post the top 10 results.

( My results )

That one was kind of fun. I was thinking I'd either get this or the %d (I haven't seen anybody get that yet).

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

On the way to the train station the effects of the storm were worse. There was only one stoplight that was working. Some of them were blinking red, others were completely dark. There were patches of blackout all over. As I was waiting to cross Euclid just a block from the station my wife called to tell me the trains were running 15 to 20 minutes late. It turned out that's about how long it took me to drive that one-block stretch between where I was and the station.

I watched the clouds some more. Something that looked suspiciously like a wall cloud moved over my head and on its way toward the North Northeast. There was no rotation in this wall cloud, so it wasn't going to spawn a tornado yet.

When we eventually got home the power was still out. The basement had about 3 inches of water across the entire floor. This was above the boards we'd stacked boxes on to keep them out of the water if the basement flooded. We waded in and carried all the most valuable stuff upstairs. The power was still out.

Eventually, at about 11:30 we went to bed. The water had risen another inch or so. The power came back on about 2 hours after that. We checked that the sump had come back on, set the clocks and went back to bed.

In the morning I emailed my boss about the events and that I had not been able to get the work for the deadline done. He hit the roof. He had to be able to say my work was finished in a meeting at 2:00 that day. I believe, either money for the current contract or the subsequent contract was riding on the success of that meeting. I scrambled, took a few shortcuts and got my stuff done by 1:00, which was enough time for QA to quickly check over my work before the meeting. My boss was still grumpy about the close shave, but the meeting was a success.

The next day (Saturday), work sent me a high priority bug in my work to get fixed. About the same time, my landlords son came by and asked to get into the garage to get the ladder. I opened up the garage and went to work on fixing the problem in the documentation. It was a time consuming replacement of about 20 screen captures in the documentation. When I got that done I was feeling extremely anxious about my job. Not only had I almost screwed up delivery on the project, but the work that I'd done looked as rushed as it had actually been. Not only that, there was still a bunch of soggy stuff and pools of water in the basement.

I stepped out side, and there's my landlords son on the ladder cutting the last few branches off the wonderful pine tree we used to have in our back yard. He said they'd wanted to do that for years because they thought it was ugly, and thought they would take advantage of the State disaster area declaration to get the city to haul the branches away for free. There was nothing wrong with the pine tree. It was a nice, big tree. It had survived the storm. But, they cut it down because they thought it was ugly.

While we had been hauling stuff upstairs the night before, we had remembered to unplug all the filters and stuff that leads to the fish tank we have in the basement. I went downstairs with a power strip we'd had upstairs and plugged the stuff back in. Everything seemed to work. I started to reach into the water to fish out a feeding cone that had sunk to the bottom and zzzzot. When I touched the water I got a small shock. I quickly unplugged everything. All the wires were coated with salt from the tank, and because there was so much moisture in the air, condensation had formed. Salt+water=electrical conductivity. The electricity was traveling up the outside of the wires and electrifying the surface of the water in the fish tank. Fortunately, it was low enough amperage that it was a mild shock and the fish was unaffected.

About 9:00 that evening my boss pinged me again on chat. He had a different emergency. The client had suddenly come up with a last minute request for some documents that were going to go out to customers on Monday through email. I came up with a plan of attack and we got them finished and approved this afternoon (Sunday).

I've begun to clean up in the basement, and except for the stress, a bunch of soggy boxes with unknown stuff that we had packed away, and a nice pine tree that the landlord had turned into logs and kindling we got through it all relatively unscathed.

For the next faze of the documentation project I've been working on as a consultant, I had an absolute Friday morning deadline. I was planning on putting in 10-15 hours on Thursday, then calling it good enough wherever I got to by Friday morning.

The Windows computers I'm using for work are old and underpowered. So, I decided to work from home Thursday afternoon so I could switch between the small-screened Windows laptop, and my newer faster Mac with a larger screen. I took a quick walk in the park, did a few essential errands, then got home at about 2.

At about 3:30 I was chatting with another co-worker who was also working from home. I could hear the storm building outside.

8/23/2007
3:21:00 PM
Hawkshadow: Uh-oh Tornado sirens

3:21:04 PM
Tim Gunderson: REALLY ??

3:21:14 PM
Tim Gunderson: it does look nasty out to the west a bit !

3:21:21 PM
Tim Gunderson: SAVE EVERYTHING !

3:21:25 PM
Hawkshadow: Yeah. Mount prospect

3:21:25 PM
Tim Gunderson: ha

3:35:37 PM
Tim Gunderson: the storm is hitting down here now... WOW !

...

Then the light went out and the computer connection went dead.

The lights flickered back on. I went to put the car in the garage. Opened the garage door with the remote and was about to step outside. A wall of rain and blown leaves, hit me in the face. I decided I didn't want to put the car in the garage that bad. I Closed the door, and grabbed the remote to close the garage. The doors went two feet down and the power went out again.

The storm continued.

With no power, a flaky laptop battery, and a house-current-powered cable modem, there was no way I was going to get work done at home. I waited 20 minutes or so and watched the rain blowing into the garage where we've got furniture and other stuff stored. The storm let up. Still no power.

I decided I absolutely needed to get this work done. And, it was before 5, so people were probably still in the office. I figured out how to manually close the garage. The stuff stored there was not nearly as wet as I imagined. I drove to work.

Normally it takes 10 minutes. Stop lights were out. Trees were down. Fences were blown over. It took me half an hour. When I got there, the office was dark. There were still people in the downstairs portion of the building, so I was able to get in, and the power did work here. So I started in on the work. It occurred to me, I should probably tell my boss that the power went out at home and I was here at work. I was just composing an email, when somebody came upstairs and knocked at my Boss's office door.

"No one's there", I say.

"I'm about to close up", says a voice from the hall. A grumpy looking man, who I'd judge to be in his 60s walks into the room. "You're lucky I checked up here", he says.

I look at him quizzically.

"You would'a gotten locked in." He says.

I pack up and leave, and he follows me out and locks the door and the gate to the parking lot behind me. It's about 5:30.

On my way home, more violent storms. I watch the roiling clouds as I'm at a stoplight. It looks like a storm that might produce a tornado. My wife calls. She's taking the train that arrives in Arlington Park at 6:15. It takes me 45 minutes to get home. The power's still out. I check the basement. (Our sump is electric.) No flooding yet.

I head off to pick up my wife from the station.

... I'll write more later ...

It looks like my extroverted score has increased dramatically over the past 10 years or so. (I was close to 100% introverted last time I took a Jungian personality test.

For the Fourth of July Ananda and I went up to Lakeside MI to visit my parents. It was the first time I've been up there in about a year (I think we went for last year's Fourth of July too). My second cousins (or whatever you call the daughter of your great uncle and her husband) have built a huge house in what used to be a semi-wild prairie across from Mom and Dad's house. Though it wasn't as bad as I imagined, its still a big house (sort of a modern-looking ranch style rather than a McMansion).

Unfortunately, as I was getting out of our car, my arm got wrapped around a huge poison ivy plant (poison sumac also grows in this area, but that produces a rash that looks worse, but itches less). This is the worst I've ever gotten poison ivy. However, thanks to frequent use of a paste made out of baking powder and a little vinegar, it is going away fairly quickly. I still have lots of red spots and patches, but most of them are no longer being actively irritated by the poison ivy oils.

The night of the Fourth was great fun. All the little summer-home communities (who typically have lots of money) spend tons on fireworks. So, as you're sitting on the beach you get a view of 10 or 20 communities shooting off big, colorful rocket from dusk (about 9:30) until about 1:00am on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th (and, presumably some on the weekends before and after). We bought a little portable grill, so we were able to roast marshmallows, veggie dogs, and turkey brats on the beach as we watched.

I took film pictures of the woods and house and some of the fireworks, but haven't gotten the film developed yet. I'll post when I do.

My new job is going very well. They seem to like my work and want me to continue on to their next project. I might even get paid eventually (they said they will send the last 3 checks on the 13th). The work took no time at all to get used to. Since I'd been working for myself on my own projects for the last 3 years, I was a little afraid it would take some time to get back into the swing of things. It has, however, taken me a little bit to figure out when I can fit in my daily walk in the woods. I'm now leaving directly from work, going to the woods, then coming home after my walk. I still haven't made any significant progress on my programs during the week, but I have been making some progress on those over the weekends.

The Cougar Here's your results! Your spirit animal has a Nobility ranking of 13 out of 18.

Your spirit animal is the cougar. It is a stealthy and deadly protector. With a cougar as a spirit animal, you have nothing to fear in this world. Your life is blessed and you are on the right path. You will still have hard times, but you will pull through them, always stronger for your travails. Congratulations, few are fotunate enough to have such a spirit animal! ***Wondering how this animal was chosen for you? These questions were carefully thought out to see how important you hold certain virtues such as: humanism, self-knowledge, rationalism, the love of freedom and other somewhat Hellenic ideals. Some of the questions were very subtle. Your score was then matched with an animal of corresponding nobility. However, you shouldn't think this was a right/wrong sort of test, but more of an idealistic values test. It's ok to not hold these values, you'll just get an animal spirit of lower stature if you do!***

This test tracked 1 variable. How the score compared to the other people's:

Higher than 85% on Nobility

Link: The What is Your Spirit Animal Test written by FindingEros on Ok Cupid

This is just a weird idea I've been thinking about for a loooong time...

Every person has some degree of self knowledge.

You can represent the inverse of self knowledge on a scale somewhat similar to an IQ scale where 100 is the average of people in your cohort (people who are approximately the same age as you). On this scale, better self knowledge is a number below 100 and worse self knowledge is a number above 100. Call this number ISK (Inverse Self Knowledge).

When you have a relationship with someone, the complexity of the relationship is the product of the the individuals ISKs.

So, the complexity of an average couple's relationship is 100 * 100 = 10,000.

The complexity of an "average" menage-a-trois is then 100 * 100 * 100 = 1,000,000. And, if you add in a fourth it's 100,000,000, and so on.

Just a thought.

Well, I managed to send my SanDisk key drive through the laundry again. This time it fell off the key chain in my pants pocket and it went through both the washer and the drier. I'm quite impressed that the drive and the data survived two trips through the washing machine, however, if I keep doing this, I suspect it will eventually fail.

I'm thinking I might wear the drive around my neck rather than on my key chain. Anybody have any suggestions about where to get a good cotton or synthetic fiber lanyard for hanging keys or key drives around the neck?

Jeff, you have your drive attached to a lanyard. Where did you get yours?

Lately I've been way too anti-social, and it's been months since I've posted to LJ, so I thought I'd stop working for a while and ramble about what I've been doing, some of the stuff I've been thinking about, and show off a preliminary sketch for a scene I'm working on.

As part of my effort to re-enter the corporate world, I've been brushing up on some of my programming, project management, and web2 skills. In case I didn't mention this to someone on my friends list, I'm looking for a job as a technical writer for a software or technology company. I'll also look at Java or Objective-C++ programming jobs, and some QA or business analyst jobs for technology companies.

This, in turn, has lead to substantial progress on my 3d art program and a much clearer idea of where I'm going with my internet gaming program. Right now, assuming I get a day job within the next few months, I'm looking at an early availability release of the 3d software some time between November of this year and the middle of next year. The gaming program is going to require some substantial features I didn't initially plan on including, so now that I've mapped out what those features are, I'm putting off further work on it until a later time.

I've been regularly running games in my own clock-punk high-magic fantasy world. If you've never heard the term before, clock-punk and steam-punk are genres that typically combine a gritty near-future attitude with fantastic technology that runs off a mixture of anachronistic machinery and magic. Steam-punk tends to use machinery from the mid 1800s through the early 1900s, while clock-punk uses machinery from the early 1700s through the early 1800s.

This time, rather than working up my own, unique adventures that end up turning into a never resolving fantasy opera of interrelated NPCs and events, I've been using a pre-packaged campaign from Shadowrun. Surprisingly, the adventures translate almost effortlessly to my own world.

I've also been using Spycraft as the basis for the rules along with my own d20-derrived magic system. This mix of rules is familiar enough for people used to d20 that they can pick it up fairly quickly, but more flexible, so it appeals to people who prefer systems like White Wolf, or GURPS, or Shadowrun.

Happy birthday amiee_darling from axgrrl and me.