House cleaning (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

I have been cleaning house for Christmas and takayla's party today, and I am spent. I had to:

- Clean the kitchen top to bottom. I got the top, anyways. The floor needs mopped, but someone hid the Swiffer pads, which always look like maxi-pads to me anyway, so I giggle. Since I am the only one who cleans, I must have misplaced them, but I don't know where.
- Clean the downstairs rec room and bathroom. CR was supposed to do that, but he did one sweep and then tossed the dustpan littering out the sliding class door, missed the doorway partially, which caused a lot of it to fall back into the rec room, and he shut the door. He "cleaned the bathroom" by covering it with dirty wet towels.
- Decorate the house for Christmas. CR was supposed to help me, and he did do half the Christmas tree, but I had to string the lights, put on ornaments, tinsel, and take care of the rest of the decor in the house, which is a little scant due to lack of time. I wanted to do outdoor lights, but didn't have the time or energy.
- Wrap gifts. I got this done, and I didn't as crap a job wrapping as I normally do. I took extra time and slowness to do this, which wasted half an hour probably, but now my friends won't have crap in "gift bags" (well, Brain will, but I don't have his gift yet - it's late).
- Clean up the decor, which meant to put the stuff I didn't use in boxes, put 7-8 heavy boxes back in the attic, and then vacuum.
- Clean the deck. I swept the leaves off, and put the table out for sodas.
- Set up for the party. This was mostly accomplished by cleaning and cooking meatballs, but I am cooking hors d'oeuvres during the party for guests.

takayla and CR went to go see a play. I couldn't go, because I am on call for work, and I did get paged, so good think I didn't play hooky.

On top of that the police came by! Wheeeeee! They had a warrant for the former owner's dad (who lived here) for tax evasion and fraud. I told them he hadn't lived here for like 7 years, but they were pretty insistent on coming in. They wanted my ID, proof I had lived here and how long (I showed them some bank statements), and they searched the place. "They" were two cops and I think a sheriff (two men in blue, one in brown). I told them I still got mail for him from time to time, and I returned it "return to sender."

They were, to be honest, rather rude and insistent. They wanted to know who else lived here, and they really didn't like my dogs and insisted I keep them caged up while they were here. I detected they were trying to trip me up with trick questions, and they asked a lot of... odd questions like, "You going to have a party? Who else will be at this party?" and "You mind if we look in the attic? We gonna find anyone up there? Does anyone live there? Are we going to find anything up there we shouldn't find?" They asked about the guest room, and who else was living there. I told them someone was moving out, and they wanted to know who and what their address was. They focused on the guest room a lot. I think they were trying to see if my story was made up, and trip me up. "Your son works at Starbucks? He there now? can we talk to him? Oh he's seeing a play? What play? Where is it?" and so on. "Mind if we come back later?" they asked. Crap.

It was nerve wracking. I didn't do anything wrong and I was freaking out. They left me a card to contact someone at Loudon County Police if I hear from them. I feel like calling them up and complaining, but they'd probably come back and beat the crap out of me. That's how I felt.

This week has been awful. Posted in: christmas , party , police

So, I turned 40 on Friday, I had a party on Saturday. (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

The party was awesome, and there are pictures of it here taken with takayla's camera by gyspy_sylvin. I had a great time! I think we topped off at 35 people.

I want to thank takayla for all her hard work, from planning, to coordinating, to writing the whole murder mystery. I love you VERY much! I want to thank a lot of my guests who helped out, including tth, Chris R, and Chris... another last name (you know, MSD)... who worked the kitchen. I'd like to thank ironkite for working on my back with the same skill as he did on my door. Thanks to those that stayed behind and helped clean up, too. That helped so much, I hate waking up at noon the next day and having to clean up alone.

I Twittered during most of it. The costumes were awesome. stodgycat went through like 3 costume changes.

I... can't thank you all enough for coming. Really. I am truly blessed with the best friends anyone could ever ask for. Posted in: 40 , 40th , birthday , party

More on Community Building: Hosting a Party vs Building a Building (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

Following up my last post on how building a community is like hosting a party, I saw a great post this morning from Doc Searls, wherein he riffs on how companies come to him all the time, and say “we’ve built this great site, why don’t more people visit it?”:

The other day I was sitting in the company of leaders in one industrial category. (I won’t say which because it’s beside the point I want to make.) A question arose: Why are there so few visitors to our websites? Millions use their services, yet few bother with visiting their sites, except every once in awhile.

The answer, I suggested, was that their sites were buildings. They were architected, designed and constructed. They were conceived and built on the real estate model: domains with addresses, places people could visit. They were necessary and sufficient for the old Static Web, but lacked sufficiency for the Live one.

This goes RIGHT along with what I’ve been saying about how community building is like hosting a party. So many people come to me and say “we’ve built this great community site. Now how do we get people to use it?” They’ve built a building. A house for the party to happen in. It’s a usually necessary first step (the party COULD happen “in the streets” on Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. without a “house” of its own), but it’s ONLY a first step.

Once you’ve got a party house, stop worrying about the house, and start worrying about getting people to come to the party and have a good time!

Posted in: blog , building , community , party

Building a Community is like Hosting a Party. Don’t Be a Bad Party Host! (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

My job and my passion is community building. More specifically, exploring new ways of community building, and teaching them to other people. Quite often, I end up using the metaphor of hosting a party to describe what it’s like to build a community. A lot of what it takes to host a great party is the same as what it takes to build a great community.

My friend and Community Rock Star, Dawn Foster, has been posting a series of must-read posts over at her blog, Fast Wonder. If you work in online community building (and if you think about it hard enough, you probably do, even if you don’t realize it), you absolutely MUST subscribe to Dawn’s blog. She’s brilliant, and speaks the truth. Listen to her, and do what she says.

Her latest post is on who “owns” a community, and the tendency that companies have to sometimes act like dictators when they “own” the community (by hosting it on their site, etc.). They do things like delete any comments that they don’t like, or that portray them in a less than glowing light (rather than establishing a comment policy, and only removing comments that break one of the rules). It’s a great post, and the comment I left got kind of long, so, never being one to waste the opportunity to recycle my own words so more people will read them, I’m reposting here.

Trying to get “owners” to not freak out and do things like delete negative or critical (but otherwise non-rule-breaking) comments is hard.

The company that “hosts” a community should think of itself as en equal member of the community, with some special responsibilities. When you host a community, you’re throwing the party. Sure, you build and “own” the house (site) where the party will happen. You invite interesting people to come to the party, and hopefully have other interesting people for them to talk to, and interesting topics for everyone. You can provide amusements, but not stupid party games (no one likes to be forced into doing something they don’t like at a party). You’re there in case something goes wrong, and needs to be addressed. But if you’re a good party host, you want to make sure things go smoothly, and enjoy the party equally for yourself, NOT make yourself the center of attention the whole time.

Every time I think about it, I find more ways the party metaphor applies to community building. I think in this case, with ownership, you could say that sure, a party host COULD make and enforce abitrary rules, and act like a dictator, trying to control what people talk about, because it’s “their” house or “their” party. But that makes the party suck. No one will want to stay if you start acting like that. And in the end, besides defeating the whole purpose of having a great party/community, it’s really just embarrassing. No one likes an overbearing, self-agrandizing party/community host.

So, when you’re building an online community, or hosting a party in your home, don’t be “that guy”. Think about how to make the party/community more fun, more engaging, and above all, kick more ass. Everything else is just frosting.

Posted in: blog , community , hosting , howto , party

party girl (Never melts (meef)) by jen

Last Sat we went to a party. It was late in the day in CT. We were going to go to the beach afterwards but we would have had to do something with the dog. He doesn't have party clothes so we couldn't bring him. The kids were great, which is important to note because they've been... making up for it... the past 3 days. Right now they are outside like dogs ha ha. On the way home from the party it Posted in: party

I always forget how to spell this word (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

Soiree: A formal party of people assembled in the evening (usually at a private house) . From the French word, "soir," meaning "evening."

I just wanted to share that with you, because I ran across it by accident, after giving up a search years ago.

As a dyslexic, I find it hard sometimes to look up various words, even on the Internet, and it's frustrating when your head has better vocabulary than your spelling ability. When I was a kid, I got told, "Look it up in the dictionary," by some adults, which I recall the most idiotic thing I was ever told when I asked for help. I found saying, "you don't know either, huh?" wasn't always a good idea, but it was a passive aggressive sting to some adults who wanted to be unhelpful and yet look superior at being so (I only used that again on a former boss who believed in saying, "well, how can you find that out?" was an acceptable answer to any question I had). But English is not easy, especially with a lot of other languages creeping into it that use the same letters, but spell things radically different. For instance, take a word like "pneumonia." As a kid, how the hell was I supposed to know it started with the letter "P"? I was looking for "new monia" or something for DAYS. I thought I was pronouncing it wrong, perhaps, like it was really "anumona" or something (I had that problem with "allergic" when I was looking for the non-word, "allergent").

Many times I have wanted to use the word, "soiree" in a blog entry, but all I knew was it started with the letter "S," probably, and I could never find the damn word anywhere, yet I knew it existed. I knew it was probably French, too, and so "who knows how it's really spelled," crept into my frustration. It could be as nonsensical as "Sorieux," or worse, and I knew it was pronounced "swar-ray," but I doubted it started with "sw." "Swaret," is a package manager in Slackware, so I knew it wasn't that, but trying to use Google to spell it was nigh impossible, I am guessing, because I didn't know the "soir" part or the "ee" part at all. So I ended up with a less poetic phrase, like, "I so I was invited to this swank party..."

Soiree... soiree... now I will have to find an excuse to use that word. Posted in: party , soiree

Irvine, Bacardi, Subnetting (Eighty1 (Thallium)) by eighty1

I went up to Irvine yesterday to hang out with Mitchell. We went to a party at one of his friend’s house and had a damned good time. I had four Jello shots (Bacardi 151 sucks, by the way), four bottles of a rather decent oatmeal stout (forgot which one it was though) and a rum and Coke. We played darts, played some Rock Band and shot the shit. A great night overall, even if some dickhole called the cops on us at 9:30PM. I actually sobered-up before the drive back and made it from Irvine back to San Diego very quickly (I won’t comment on my average speed on the way back down). I really hope those people throw a party again; I had tons of fun and they were all incredibly cool people. Great times, and it was one hell of a save from what could have been a criminally boring Saturday night.

Matt, Steve and I are studying for the CCNA and if we can keep it up, I should have that cert soon. I’m also thinking of going for a VMware cert and that should seriously increase my value in the marketplace.  I make decent money but I feel I’m worth more; the trick is to get a better job despite the shithole that is the economy. We’ll see.

Posted in: ccna , fun , irvine , jello shots suck ass , news & such , party , vmware

Still sick (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

Well, I managed to pull off takayla's party yesterday. I mean, I had help. She did all the planning at Sakura, and CR helped me clean up the house (which was still pretty clean from MY party last month). I set up the decorations as best I could, but I was so weak and out of it, no amount of caffeine and sugar could keep me focused.

I managed to make it through the amazing dinner at Sakura, and then when we got home, I just crashed. I stayed in our bedroom, took more meds, and the evening became kind of a blur. I came out to serve cake, I remember that, and I recall Kenny made me a sort of hot toddy like concoction, but given my penchant for not drinking alcohol, whatever he put in there nearly knocked me out on the spot. I went to bed and don't recall how I got there. I woke up at around midnight to hear laughter and mirth. I got really sad I couldn't join anyone and watched SNL for a bit before I fell asleep again in a half-daze.

Sometimes when I get really sick, I hallucinate. I kept thinking some huge helmeted demon was looking for me. Like some bad graphic novel, this thin-headed figure with glowing eyes and no facial features was drifting about, looking for a place to settle and cause mayhem. But for some reason, my house had become invisible. My "guardians" had turned the house into some innocuous lumps of rock in a moor. The helmeted bad guy kept getting confused, and finally just left like some disappointed explorer. I felt sort of safe, but stayed quiet as I had visions of why this guy was here, and my guardians said what brought him here, but it's not nice, so I won't post it. I am getting really good at spotting evil lately.

I got paged twice, but the systems went up minutes after they went down, which usually means a network issue. I didn't have to sign into work, which was good. Why was I being paged so much this weekend? It kept me from getting restful sleep.

When takayla came in around 3:30am, one of the cats freaked out and ran around the bedroom in one of those "kitty krazies," taking out the lamp next to my bed. This took out a whole bunch of other stuff on my night stand, and spilled a lot of tea on my Linux laptop, but nothing got anywhere but the plastic cover, so I think I was spared. This scared me so bad (the noise) plus I had to search the floor to find my work pager, clean up the tea, and make sure nothing else was missing, I couldn't get back to sleep. I was awake until like 6:30am. I watched "Scrooged."

I woke up a few times to go pee (because Tad and Tammy's voice in my head about drinking lots of fluids will be with me until I DIE...), and then got paged for work. What is it with our incoming mail systems? Anyway, my lungs hurt, I still have a clogged head, but I actually feel about 20% better. I hope I am well by tomorrow.

I'd like to thank those who came to the party, and again apologize for being all sick and woozy and out of it. I am sure I said something awful and stupid to somebody, so if that's the case, don't take it personally. Posted in: party , sick

Out sick today (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

Whatever cold I got kicked my ass. I was sick Monday, then got better, then was a little out of it Wednesday and by Thursday evening, I was really starting to slide downhill.

Friday I spent trying to sleep, but work kept paging me. I didn't have to answer because people were there, but we have this customer with 4 servers and a monitoring station that had all these Windows updates, and they kept going up and down, up and down, up and down with each update. I'd be paged when the went down, when they came back up, and then the monitor would also page to say it hasn't heard from the machine that went down. On no wait, there it was.

On top of that, people kept calling the house. Over and over.

Then later, I had to go out and get party supplies for takayla's party tomorrow. And I need to set everything up, including house cleaning, decorating, and other preparation.

I am up at 2:30am because I got paged again, and I can't go back to sleep. I have a fever, my nose is running, I keep sneezing, and I ache all over. Posted in: medical , party , sick

Happy birthday Peter! (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Last night we got together with some friends to celebrate Peter's birthday, which was last week. It was nice to finally meet some people from Peter's WoW Guild.

As a present, we gave Peter a bottle of Drambuie, which is a whiskey-liquor with honey and various herbs. Opening the bottle immediately made me think of our Daro cough syrup :D While I usually loathe whiskey, I have to admit that I'm surprised that I actually -like- Drambuie!

Anywho: it was a great evening and made for a perfect distraction from my homework. ^_^

Posted in: birthday , drambuie , party , peter

Par-tay (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

So, my birthday party was this weekend.

It was a “Vicars and Tarts” party, which makes the third risque party theme I have held (previous ones have been Rocky Horror and Mardi Gras). Why do I do this? Anyway, while the guest list was supposed to be about 30, many people did not show by the end, and so I really had about 15 or so. But they were good, quality guests. I won’t tell you who they were, because some people may not want to admit it because it could affect future security clearance. But there was drinking. And boobage. No toplessness this time, so that makes the Mardi Gras the most risque party still, but this came close. Big on the bewbs. Two dildoes made their rounds. There was a Cardinal Rapture with some whores.

One of our guests had a permanent erection as part of his costume. Half the pictures took, I did not upload to Flickr. I still am debating on some I did put up there.

It became apparent that I screwed up the invitation list with Evite. Some people didn’t get invited like they should have, mostly because I didn’t have a current e-mail address for them. If you were not invited and think you should have been, it was definitely not a snub. It was a clerical error on my part. I profusely apologize.

That dominated my weekend: party prep, the party, cleanup, and crashing most of Sunday. Again, great thanks to those who came, stayed until 4am or later, and drained a lot of my remnant alcohol (the bottles less than half full). We downed so many bottles, our recycling tomorrow will look like a dumpster outside a bar. Posted in: birthday , party

Saturday - Part 2: Stodgycat's Party (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

I forgot how old he is, but he's sore about it, so I think... 50? 75? maybe even 80, that old fart. He's got like a bajillion kids, too. I was invited because they needed someone FAMOUS to attend, to get more draw.

Okay, enough with the ribs. Truth is, I was so tired when I got to his party, a lot of it was a blur. The night before, I babysat his kids, and I had some of the most amazing conversations with aksident until like 1am. I got to his party early and ended up helping clean as well (I did dusting and vacuuming). Then I went with stodgycat to pick up ninjacooter. We got food.

Then the party guests started to trickle in. There were a LOT of ex-AOL employees there. stodgycat said he pretty much emptied his address book. Many of them I hadn't seen for a long while. One of them was my former boss, "El Korbo," as we used to call him. He was a old-school computer geek (1970s tech) I think a fish out of water at AOL, but he's thriving as a photographer these days. I got him introduced to Anime conventions a while back, and now he's running Digital Cosplay. I hung out with the likes of Rich Anderson, Ray Catabay, Brian Symmes, Benu Bhargava, and even John Patterson was there.

But I was winding down fast. My feet hurt so bad, they were swelling. I got a ride back with moliarity and lohquesse, and had to leave during the cake part (I tried to take pictures, but my batteries died).

And spent Sunday sick. In fact, I am not well as a type this, and probably did not give the party a decent review that it deserved; I DID have a lot of fun, and want to thank stodgycat and cheesy_reads for having me. Posted in: aol , birthday , heares , party

An awesome wedding (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Man! I'm still knackered from yesterday's party =_=

On the joyous day of Friday the 13th, Marli's brother Peter got married to his lovely fiance Elke. I'm still trying to get to grips with the whole concept. For some reason it's still not sunk in ^_^

It really was a wonderful day, with the ceremony being held in the historic town hall of Arcen (a town down in Limburg, close to where Elke's live her whole life). It was great to see how many relatives, friends and colleagues had shown up for the occasion! The room was too small to fit everyone :)

After that the party moved to galerie De Hoeve. A beautiful and quiet location to have a party, with rather helpful staff. The food was a bit bland for my tastes, but everything was taken care of beautifully. The party itself lasted 'till around one and was a great success.

This morning, waking up was hell though, what with us only turning in around 0300. *groan* Breakfast consisted solely of coffee, just to get us all going again (and not a single drop of alcohol was consumed all evening/night). It didn't help that I'd gotten up around 0500, horrible nauseous.

Speaking of alcohol... I did have two glasses of a sparkling wine that afternoon, knows as a Clairette de Die. I now know that it isn't a champagne, but BOY! is it tasty! I was really surprised by that wine! :3

Posted in: brother in law , limburg , party , sister in law , wedding

New year's eve (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

God it feels weird to enter that date for this post: 2007-01-01. *sigh*

Last night's get-together was great and I can't help but feel sad that it's over. Four of our best friends came over for dinner and company, while three were unfortunately absent: Menno's working in Austria, Wesley had to work and Jeanine had to cancel :( Shame really, cause we missed them!

But still: the evening+night+day were great and we enjoyed ourselves tremendously :)

Harmen and Remco joined us around fourish yesterday, with Remco even bringing us a set of candle glasses as a thanks for having him over (it was his first time as part of our group's tradition). He's such a sweet guy :3 Peter and Wendy joined us about half an hour later, since they had had some trouble packing all their stuff.

After a few hours of chitchat we settled into dinner, starting off with a Clinton Cocktail (chicken, mandarin, lettuce and a mild curry sauce), followed by the table grill. We had a wide selection of meats, both standard fare (beef, chicken, hamburger, etc) and wild game (boar, kangaroo, ostrich, duck, etc). All this was accompanied by various greens, a big salad made by Harmen's mother and breads. Desert was arranged by Peter and Wendy: a selection of three ice creams, accompanied by exotic fruits. Yummy to say the least!

After dinner we had just enough time to watch a movie in order to be finished before midnight. It's remarkable how hard it is to find a DVD that all six of us could agree upon from the five hundred odd DVDs that we own! In the end we had settled for only four DVDs, out of which we finally picked The Craft, a classic thriller. The other three, that had to be dropped because the votes were rather dispersed were Constantine, Serenity and Mirrormask.

Naturally midnight included the requisite hugs, kisses and phone calls (or text messages) to relatives, friends and colleagues. I'd phoned Menno earlier in the evening, to ensure that I'd at least get to speak to him :) I'm glad to hear that he's doing fine and that his job in Austria agrees with him. Hang in there Menno! We miss you too!

Finally, before heading off to bed around 0200, we played a bunch of rounds of Mario Kart on the 'Cube, passing around the controllers.

I was the first to awaken again, around 0945. Since everyone else was still asleep it gave me the chance to prepare breakfast at my leisure: serving breads, cheese and cold cuts on neat plates, baking croissants, making coffee and tea, preparing all the fruit juices, cooking and frying eggs and veggies. All in all, it was a lot of food that would end up keeping us at the table for almost an hour. I really think we ought to get together like this more often, sleeping over and having breakfast together in the morning.

While working in the kitchen, Remco woke up and joined me. One of the things that occurred to us was the fact that we're a really diverse bunch of people all joined by coincidence and circles of friendship :) In random order we had: a sysadmin, a lab technician, an economist, a metal worker, a healthcare professional and a shop keeper. That's what I love about getting together with friends-of-friends: you really end up with a mixed bunch!

The day was closed off with a game of Mario Party, which Marli had to miss out on 'cause she went to visit some of her relatives. Everyone else left around 1630 and now the house feels very empty and silent ;_;

Now... I think I'll go clean up a little and try to wind down. Maybe play a few rounds of Mario Kart to push away any mopiness. And tomorrow's a new day at the office, so I gotta prepare for that as well...

*sigh* We really need to get together like this more often... Posted in: dinner , friends , new year , party

party recap (Never melts (meef)) by jen

aaaargh does everyone else stress out this much when it comes to party planning? I hope it works out okay. The decisions have been made, I need to forget about that and forge ahead, and just execute it. I will put the food out and when it's gone it's gone. No one will die of starvation. No one will complain to me about it. If someone does complain to me about it, I will muster up my self Posted in: party

party recap (Never melts (meef)) by jen

aaaargh does everyone else stress out this much when it comes to party planning? I hope it works out okay. The decisions have been made, I need to forget about that and forge ahead, and just execute it. I will put the food out and when it's gone it's gone. No one will die of starvation. No one will complain to me about it. If someone does complain to me about it, I will muster up my self Posted in: party

misc catchup (Never melts (meef)) by jen

I'm always catching up. Let's see. I cut my hair too short, but I'm still wearing it down. It's been bugging me since the boy was born. Right when he was born I wanted to get it cut and highlighted, but that never happened because he was too little to be away from me for any length of time. Then I blinked, and, poof, a year is gone. I've been hating having my hair back for a LONG time now but Posted in: hair , kids , misc , party

misc catchup (Never melts (meef)) by jen

I'm always catching up. Let's see. I cut my hair too short, but I'm still wearing it down. It's been bugging me since the boy was born. Right when he was born I wanted to get it cut and highlighted, but that never happened because he was too little to be away from me for any length of time. Then I blinked, and, poof, a year is gone. I've been hating having my hair back for a LONG time now but Posted in: hair , kids , misc , party