After an unexpected shortage of chalk at the last (e:strip) chalking and having found sidewalk chalk a whole lot more difficult to come by in your average grocery/office supply store, I've started doing some research into making homemade chalk and found a decent-looking site detailing some of the recipes



I really want to try this, but I'm going to have to wait till the weekend; it seems messy and the last thing I need to being doing is cleaning up chalk residuals at 3AM before work the next day (which, left to my own devicing, I would gravitate towards doing).

I really wanted to go to BarCamp is Rochester, but they start the thing on Friday morning (I goofed and thought it was a saturday). By the time I get out of work (~5:00PM) and spend the next 1+ hours driving to Rochester, probably no one's gonna be there; it's such a small group, they'll probably get bored to tears and leave before 11:30AM. Damn, I wish Buffalo could support an unconference.

Luckily, I have a backup thing I want to do this weekend--see "Pirates Of the Carribean II". I looks like a fun movie, and after missing the Black Pearl and getting all these "are you living under a rock" responses from people who saw it (I eventually did see it, a year or more later), I want to be able to keep up to speed with everyone else.

I meet Steve.

I show him my program that downloads all the NCSU online course registration web pages and searches them. The program I stayed up two days straight working on to get finished before he arrived and which caused me to receive an F on my Anthropology paper the following Monday.



No intercession from Steve whatsoever.

He comes back to visit NCSU again a year later to get his honorary doctorate. I show him my Shakespeare note-taking program. He tells me "that's what computers were meant to do!".

Again, no intercession of any kind.

After reading the posting by (e:Twisted) and the comment by (e:Zobar) , I realize the error of my ways; I was petitioning the wrong Steve. I guess I'll have to e-mail the other Steve if I want a job in Apple's social software division or their super-secret death-ray department.

(p.s. I'm kidding. I'm actually quite happy with the way things turned out, for the most part).

I was all set to go to the Great Blue Heron festival. Then last night, I totally ruin the whole thing by hanging out with a coworker at Goodbar and getting really wasted and waking up late in the afternoon when half the day's Blue Heron acts had already finished.

I suppose that my choice of activity last night was actually more healthy (mentally, not physically) than what I had originally planned. I got a large dose of outside-of-work human contact with people my own age, which isn't something I've had a lot of these past several months. And at the end of the night, I had some of the $20 I withdrew from the ATM left over in my pocket; going to the festival would have cost me at least > $50. Having walked to Goodbar and back got me several miles of walking, too.

To make up for my sin of not seeing the Avett Bros, I went to Taste Of Buffalo to get my local activity fix for the weekend. The food was overpriced, but still tasty. My favorite part was all the Indian food, which IMHO is the bestest kind of food there is (I really need to learn how to make a decent saag paneer).

Tomorrow is going to be "The Mother Of All Housework" days. There will be no sleep till everything is in its appropriate place, all the laundry is done, and every room in the house smells "pine fresh".

I've decided to stay late at work tonight. More done now means the less I have to worry about later. I'm kind of on a roll, and I might just have located a significant show-stopping bug. The way I figure it, if I get something major accomplished tonight, I'll be less stressed over the weekend.

I'm not totally voluntarily giving up tonight, however. The PHP group that I was supposed to hang out with tonight cancelled again for the second time in a row. Given that the Buffalo PHP folks are continually cancelling at the last second and that Buffalo Geeks never got off the ground, I'm gettng the feeling that if I really want to participate in an honeset-to-goodness technology networking organization, I'm gonna have to freakin' start one myself.

I've considered going to the Great Blue Heron Festival, which I've really wanted to catch for the past two weeks since I found out that the Avett brothers were playing there. I really wanted to see them at one of the local venues (e.g. Cat's Cradle) back home but never got the chance to because I came up here. They definitely do some interesting things with bluegrass. If I make significant progress tonight, I could feel a lot more laid back at the festival.