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Better latent than never - happy new year to

unseelie23 who is now one year closer to the future.

Abandon All Hope

is what my Pirate T-shirt said. Took the 65-mile drive to Vallejo's waterfront, a place I have never been, for the NorCal Pirate Fair, and it was worth the trip. Lots and lots of people in costume, some piratical, some not. Much eye candy (aka Pirate Booty), including the lovely and talented jadecat9 and sinmix, neither of whom recognized me although I spent maybe 10 minutes shooting at them.

There was some good music, sea chanteys, celtic, general renaissance period, etc. with a huge stage tricked out to look like a ship and another for the kids. there were two other stages and a couple of informal areas where the official pirates had pitched their tents which also had random musical things happening. I didn't catch any performances except a Jack Swan look-alike, who juggled an apple, a bowling ball and a large knife, while eating the apple. Very impressive, especially in a 25-knot wind. Both he and his talented sidekick guy stayed in character for the whole show.

There were some stars from POC3 signing autographs when I arrived at 1:30, but they were gone soon after. Not a huge line to meet them, I suspect they were not main characters.

Definitely a coup for Vallejo, well-attended, free, lots of good food, though the lines were waaaaay long -the longest being for, of all things, burgers. I had the obligatory turkey drumstick, and some really bad ice cream. I really don't get gelato - to me it has no flavor.

The drive up took 2 hours, thanks to more than 30 minutes on the 4 miles leading to the 680 bridge. Coming back only took a little over an hour.

Took lots of photos, which I will upload to flickr Real Soon Now

Abandon All Hope II

On my way home tonight I stopped in at MicroCenter and bought a pair of hard drives, one spare for the RAID array and one to be a boot drive. The lesson learned is if you make your RAID array yor boot drive, if something happens to the array you have no way to fix it, because it needs an operating system to run the maintenance tools. At the BIOS level all you can do is nuke all your data and build a new array.

So I'm hosed. A 4-drive array can rebuild when one drive fails, but not two. So I have lost tons of stuff. All the Baycon 2007 photos which were not uploaded to Flickr are gone, except for the low-res ones on my web site. In fact, most of my high-res photos. I have my UK and Thailand trips on DVD, and previous cons, but that's about it.

I'm going to take one stab at installing Windows on a separate drive and seeing if I can rebuild the array that way, but it's a shot in the dark with almost no chance of success. If that turns out to be the case, I will probably nuke XP and install Vista. At least then I'll be able to use all 4GB of RAM - 2GB of which are useless with XP.

But I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.

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Speaking of Vista, jschonbr recently posted that "getting to know you" meme on his site. I may or may not get around to posting it here.  I may or may not get around to filling it out on his site.As with most of these types of memes, there are many q's which Just Don't Apply™.

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iamradar and scendan, I got you a souvenir at Pirate Fest. Radar - email me your snailmail address so I can send it to you, please. It will arrive either in a small-ish padded envelolpe or in a box about the right size for a videotape. No, it is not a video. On a scale from 1 to squee it's about a 5, I think.

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The CD of highlights from the Tony-winning musical Spring Awakening arrived. It is in the car player, and so far I am not impressed by the music. The first number is boring and repetitive, the second one tries for the shock value of the word "bitch" which, in 2006-7 is about as much shock value as the word "hello".  But I won't judge till I hear it all, and  hold out hope - after all, it was voted the best musical of 2006.