Odds n’ ends n’ black powder

The honeymoon is over
I’m lonely. I’m bored and lonely. Well, I was bored and lonely back home, but in a place where I had been all my life, knew people, knew places, etc. But now… I’ve kind of hit a wall of lonlieness here in San Jose, where I know two people. It’s silly of me to expect them to solve that problem for me, but still — they’re always busy and here I sit with that strange affliction of shyness, a syndrome that won’t let me go out anywhere alone or meet people, despite telling myself months ago that I would do just that. And every day I get up and go to work — upstairs in my home office, doing the same things for the same company, but without being there in the office to socialize with the people I worked with for 12 years.
This move thing is not proceeding like I’d hoped.

Truth in advertising?
Got this spam message today:

Sweet virgins love hard sex:)

Rather than delete it immediately, I puzzled for a moment: if they’re virgins, how do they know they love it?

With a bang
I didn’t forget that I promised a video of the fireworks. If you’ve got a broadband connection and Quicktime 7, here it is. The original is in high def, but cripes — I don’t know what’s wrong with my G5, but it’s slow as molasses encoding an HD movie into the vaunted H.264 codec that Steve-o keeps touting at every opportunity. Like, two days to encode a 4 minute HD video, and I didn’t even have the patience to let it go any longer. It might have taken another day to finish.

Gene Cowan, Your Webhost
For years now, my websites have been hosted mostly free of charge by my friend Jann. All that’s about to change. It’s time to relive him of that burden and move my websites in house — literally. Sometime soon, my sites will move to the high tech area of my bedroom closet, where the network box resides. For all you geeks interested in this sort of thing, my sites (and my friend Sara’s) reside on a Mac Mini, running OS X Server. Sometimes they can be a bit slow, I know, but I think this is a function of the Comcast connection, really. The Mini seems to be pretty darned snappy.
So anyway, soon my little web universe will be home, and I’ll be playing around and launching renovated sites and whatnot. Wheee!! It reminds me of when I was a kid and would create and draw imaginary cities and such; now I’m doing the same thing but with the web.

Hunger abated
It turns out that there is a Pizza Hut — of a sort — close by. In the parking lot of the grocery store at the foot of our hill is a Taco Bell with Pizza Hut Express. You can get personal pan pizzas there; but not regular pizzas.