Made a gamble last night. Time will tell whether it pays off.

The last time I went to Universal Studios Orlando was nearly 20 years ago for Rock the Universe 1999. It was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done - enjoying the park by day with all my close friends and then a series of concerts at night. Despite getting soaked by the night-time storms we had a blast.

Dan and I started a website called Comic POW! Where each week we go over the best comics of that week.  It’s been going for approximately 3 months and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.  The main feature is posted every Friday, but we occasionally have content on other days.  I’ve also started writing for Player Affinity.  They saw my work and invited me to write for them.  My news articles are posted on Wednesdays and my reviews on Fridays.  (With extra reviews sometimes appearing on Mondays and Tuesdays) Here’s one of my latest reviews.

So, I started working on my Nanowrimo partway through November.  I quit partway through because I fell too far behind.  So I reworked the story to have a better ending than the rambling mess it had become and tried to get some people to edit it for me.  They’ve been busy and I’m sick of seeing it on my TODO list.  So here’s my Nanowrimo Entry for 2010 as reworked -> NanoWrimo 2010 Reworked

I love to write so when I started the 2010 NanoWrimo competition 9 days late I thought it would be no big deal to get caught up.  I really under-estimated the effort behind writing over two thousand words a day.  I think I probably could have made it if I had an idea ahead of time, but I ran out of steam somewhere around 15 thousand words.  I’m nearly at 18 thousand and nearly everything I’ve written has been complete and utter crap.  Being very trope savvy has made it hard for me to just make stuff up as I go along because I’ve been trying to avoid plot and logic holes.

Today I went to the funeral of my wife’s uncle.  It was a Catholic Mass, so it was pretty interesting trying to match up the Vietnamese with what I knew from English mass.  It was also interesting to hear how the priest pronounced “amen” and “hallelujah”.  So far in my life I’ve been to two Cuban funerals and one Vietnamese funeral.  One of the Cuban funerals was a masonic funeral.  The other was Protestant.  Really the only difference in my limited experience is that the Vietnamese take photos and video to document the event.

Since apparently I’m a crazy person who thinks he has so much free time, I’ve decided to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month.  The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month.  Oh yeah, and I waited until 9 Nov to start.  I’d heard about it on NPR and on Linux Outlaws and I thought - why not?  The website seems to have a Lomography vibe to it - just write and don’t worry about editing until later.  I love working under constraints.  I feel that my 365 Project really pushed me to learn a LOT more about photography and techniques - especially lighting.  Anyway, you can follow my progress on the NanoWrimo site here.  See if I can make it or not.  Whatever I have at the end of the project will be posted here under a Creative Commons license and probably also posted to lulu.com.

Last year was Dina’s graduation Tiki Party.  This year it was Daniel’s turn.  We arrived the night before (no hospital visits this time) and so we had plenty of time to help cook and set up.

Danielle and I recently went to see " Peter and the Wolf" at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.  Danielle and I both grew up watching the Disney animated adaption of “Peter and the Wolf” and we loved the idea of being able to listen to the music as performed by the BSO.  I don’t care how amazing the speakers are in your home theater system, nothing sounds as amazing as the orchestra.