Now, go enjoy your weekend.  Go!  It’s going to be nice out.

Yet Another Way To Keep Up With My Boring Exploits

I started up a Tumblr blog about a year ago because, well, everyone seemed to be doing it, although I admitted I didn’t have the first idea what I was going to use it for.  So it sat, and sat, and then one day I joined Instagram, and then I noticed than an update to the Gowalla client for iPhone allowed you to post your updates to Tumblr, and something clicked in my brain and I realized I could use the Tumblr as a stalker blog.

I freely admit to ripping this idea off from the DaveStalker page on Blogography.  If you visit my own stalker page, you’ll see that it’s Instagram photos tagged with my location at the time, or else photos cross-posted from my Gowalla check-ins.  Every once in a while I might post a check-in from Gowalla if it’s someplace cool (like the Space Needle!  Or the San Diego Zoo!) but probably not if I’m just going out for Mexican food (again).  The page looks pretty boring right now because I haven’t modified the CSS or anything, just pasted in some code to make the last ten Tumblr posts display.  Most of those photos will be posted on Flickr anyway, and if you want to follow the actual Tumblr blog itself it’s here, and isn’t the reason blogs are falling by the wayside because we all have about nine different services we use these days?  No doubt this is a matter for another post entirely but I remember back when I started this silly blog of mine we all just used Bloglines to keep track of new posts, and some of us spent a lot of time commenting on Flickr, and these days there’s Twitter and the Facebook and Tumblr blogs and Goodreads and Foursquare and everything else and I’m having trouble keeping track of what I have out there, just remembering as I write this that I think I have a Friendfeed set up someplace.

But I digress.  I have a stalker blog set up and I will try to make it a little prettier later.

As you were.

Dave is a pretty cool guy.  And here’s something you should know about Dave: he doesn’t really celebrate his birthday, hasn’t done so for quite a few years now.

I can appreciate that.  I tried to give up celebrating my own birthday but people just kept buying me beer and cake or even making me tortilla soup so I pretty much gave up on giving up.  Still, I can appreciate not wanting to celebrate one’s own birthday, and so, on this day, which (depending on when you read this entry) may or may not still be the anniversary of Dave’s birth [edited to add: definitely not now, thanks to our sucky cable internet service being down most of the night], I do solemnly declare this to be the Dave Appreciation Day, wherein I shall let the aforementioned (and above pictured) Dave know how much I appreciate him.

Dave, I appreciate you, you big lug.  I appreciate that, in true Buddhist fashion, you non-violently threatened me with non-harm if I didn’t cough up a story for the premier issue of Thrice Fiction.  I appreciate that, thanks to you, I got to see my first ever published story.  I appreciate that one time you let me stay with you in a swanky New York hotel, then helped me play tourist all over town, including going to the Brooklyn art museum (again, look at the picture, you dopes) wherein you talked about Murakami and all the influence he had on your own art.  I appreciate you letting me crash with you during Comic-Con that one time, and that other time you came out to Seattle so we could catch the premier of Watchmen.  I appreciate most of the times we had a lot to drink together, but not the times that led to hangovers the next day because I am not fond of hangovers.  Well, I guess I appreciate those times a little.  I have some pictures indicating we probably had  a good time.  Also I appreciate that you let me share my vast nerdy knowledge of science fiction with you by pushing books off on you constantly.  I’m at least twenty percent gay for you (that’s an estimate, I haven’t done the math yet).

In short, I appreciate Dave.  If you, the non-Dave reader out there, have something you appreciate about Dave, do be sure to let the dude know.

Back then WordPress was only at version 1.5 or thereabouts.  It didn’t support tags, or threaded comments, or widgets — in fact, I think I modified the code on this theme myself to make it widget-capable.  I’ve had my issues with this theme in the past, and so just stopped fiddling with it after a while, as some widgets or changes to the CSS would just make my whole blog crap out.  So, while this theme looked pretty sweet, it has been borderline obsolete for years now.  All of this is to say, this update is long overdue.  And, while I’m at it, I might as well roll out some ACTUAL! NEW! CONTENT! (I know!  I can barely believe it myself.)

So please bear with me while I finish tinkering with my new theme and bringing everything up online (I might even have working archives and a real contact page soon).  Leave me a comment and let me know what you think, and while I’m at it — if you’ve been lurking for a while, now is as good a time as any for you to de-lurk and say hi.

Crap.  Looks like I was too distracted by visions of sugar plums dancing in my head (also: copious amounts of regular sugar) yesterday to throw up a Christmas post.  But!  That doesn’t mean I wasn’t totally thinking really hard about it.  Anyway, I thought I’d throw up a few holiday-themed photos that I’ve taken over the course of the last few weeks, including an obviously artificial but no less festive Christmas dog:

I hope you all had a great holiday, and that you’re enjoying Boxing Day today, doing whatever it is one does on Boxing Day, and if it’s something other than drinking a bunch of coffee and thinking about how much you ate yesterday I suppose I’m doing it wrong.  Oh well.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Today finds me on the road to Vancouver with Sarah and Jenny and Dave and Dustin, where we will take in the sights before completing the preparations for TequilaCon.

For those of you are going to be there — can’t wait to see you!  For those of you who aren’t — d’oh!  Hope I can see you soon!  And for those of you who are all, “Are they still doing the SHARK EXTREME thing?”, look at it this way — it means we’ve stopped making jokes about herpes and goatse.

My coworkers, being both lazy and not very good at keeping details straight, decided to recycle the half dozen Mylar birthday balloons gifted to our accounting manager on her birthday at the beginning of the month by taping them to my cubicle walls.  This is pretty annoying, but they got bent out of shape when I took a scissors to the one they had tied to my monitor so I left them up.

Towards the end of the week one of the girls across the way in another department asked when my actual birthday was and how old I was going to be.   “This next Monday,” I said, “and…thirty-two?”  I scratched my head.  I can’t keep track of these things.  “Yeah, that sounds about right.  Thirty-two.”  I shrugged.

“Cool.  I’m turning thirty-one in a few weeks.”

“Oh, sweet!  Stop by my desk later, I’ll give you some pro tips.  I’m pretty good at this thirty-one thing.”  And you know, I guess I am, though this is more by accident than design.  It’s been a pretty good year.

Anyway, here I go around the sun again.  Thirty two, here’s looking at you.

Right now, for example, I find that I am dripping in sweat from the normally low aerobic impact task of typing out this blog post.  So much so that this is probably as far as this post goes.  So in case anyone gets to wondering what it is I’m up to this week, the answer is:  sweating, profusively and unattractively.  That, and eating strawberries.  If any of you take pity on me and want to send a frozen margarita bucket my way, I will definitely not object.

Just, you know, busy.  The sun has been out and I have been soaking up as much radiation as I can.  But I admittedly have been slacking off here, even for me.  So, here’s checking in.