[caption id=“attachment_6755” align=“aligncenter” width=“400”] This blog was on the server on the right, the left is a server for Phi Sigma Pi[/caption]

Nine years ago today I started blogging using Wordpress.  I’d been blogging for a little bit before that on Tripod (and I’ve been copying those posts over to this blog, so that post might not appear to be the first one. Those are the posts that start with [1.0]) , but this was when I took blogging into my own hands. I just can’t believe it’s been that long - it certainly doesn’t feel like I’ve been blogging for that long.  The blog has moved from a server running Fedora Core 1 in my apartment in college to a server running BSD in my first apartment after marriage to being hosted on ServInt.

More on this later. For now:

[caption id=“attachment_7722” align=“aligncenter” width=“533”] I’d gotten OK at drawing with a mouse[/caption]

My first attempt with the pen had me getting used to pressure controlling thickness:

[caption id=“attachment_7723” align=“aligncenter” width=“299”] Drawing with pen for the first time[/caption]

I got a little better the second time around:

[caption id=“attachment_7724” align=“aligncenter” width=“282”] Drawing with pen for the second time[/caption]

Given the way humans work, this episode of You Are Not So Smart probably won’t change the mind of anyone who’s deep into the alternative medicine world, but I think it’s important to listen to and strongly consider if you’re on the fence.

Key quotes to me:

“There’s a name for treatments that are proven to work. It’s called medicine”

I was inspired to ruminate on this from this Boing Boing article featuring a Dust & Grooves interview with Sheila Burgel. The series seems to use interviews as an excuse to photograph people’s vinyl listening rooms. Many of these are quite beautiful, even if the beauty is just in the size and organization of the collection. I thought of my childhood.

Growing up, my mom always had music playing when she was cleaning the house. Ninety percent of the time she didn’t listen to the radio or tapes. Mom listened to her records. In fact, I only really remember tapes ever being played when we were in the car. Even when I was in high school and we had concert DVDs and CDs (and I was starting to get into the MP3 scene), mom would put on her records. That hiss and pop and then BOOM when the record goes from the non-audio grooves into the record mean “something’s coming” to my brain.

It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

Lots more Scarlett.

It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

I think this is the first time her face looks really similar to the way it does now. (Only it had more fat back then)

Back on 4 Jan I posted my 2013 gaming post. Raptr created their own graphics based post here. It’s pretty neat.

Here are some of the things Scarlett has asked me to draw. There are a few themes I think you may notice.

[caption id=“attachment_7569” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] FIF Concert (Nov 2013)[/caption]

On 6 Nov I went to my 2013 concert. Because of time and money concerns, Danielle and I typically go to a maximum of two concerts a year, and usually just one concert. I was completely unable to resist seeing Five Iron Frenzy in their first tour since breaking up nearly a decade ago. I didn’t really care for Reel Big Fish and I hoped that Five Iron Frenzy would go first as Co-headliner so I could leave early. In fact, although being a fan of ska, the only Reel Big Fish song I’d ever heard was “Everbody’s Doin’ the Fish” because it was the Florida Marlins’ theme song for a season or two. A large part of that comes from the fact that when I got into ska, in the 1990s, I was only into Christian music to the exclusion of secular music - as was encouraged by my middle school church. (My high school church actually shied away from Christian music, which I thought was weird, considering how good it had gotten by the early 2000s) So I listed to Five Iron Frenzy, The OC Supertones, and The Skadaddles. This was going to be my first Five Iron Frenzy concert in nearly 15 years when I saw them at a festival in Florida (and actually filmed a pretty decent video bootleg)

I know this was months ago, but I started writing this back then and just got the opportunity to finish it recently.

[caption id=“attachment_7634” align=“aligncenter” width=“427”] Scarlett Trick Or Treating at Ellicott City[/caption]

This year was Scarlett’s second Halloween, but the first one where she had some kind of a clue about what was going on. The previous year we’d dressed her up as Toad, but other than the giant head-piece, I don’t think it was too different from any other day in her life. This time around, although she didn’t really see a point in collecting the candy because she doesn’t eat it - she did present her basket to each person giving out candy.