You have dishonored my dog! (Why? because it’s fun. Apologies to those on dialup.)

I’ve gotten pretty used to the new Movable Type at this point, though there are still a few tweaks I need to do (like adding internal site navigation again). Expect those back up sometime in the not too distant future, but in the interim, I’ve re-uploaded my Online Communities essay[PDF], so if you missed it the first time, feel free to check it out.

I’m actually a little irked about that essay. The PDF as it stands is just the core essay and the bibliography. The cover letter, the cover page, the table of contents, the appendices… are all gone. For some strange reason, I didn’t manage to save them last time I reformatted my hard drive or something, because it’s all GONE. I only have the PDF that used to be on the website left, because I had it in a tarballed archive I’d made of my site prior to the last major housecleaning. This is extremely upsetting, and I’m not quite sure what to do about it. The only idea I have is to borrow the copy the school has next time I’m on campus, and scan it all in as text. (This might involve an intermediary step of photocopying it all, since they’re not willing to release those essays from the building.)

Of course, what prompted the digging around for said essay in the first place is that an Avatar player approached me asking if I had any resources available for a course on cyberculture that he is working with a professor to develop at his university. I say more power to them, and I hope it goes quite well!

Moving right along, life has been interesting the past few days. It has been FAR too hot, which has hindered really anything more productive than sitting in the pool until all hours of the night (I’ve been reasonably sane and heading back to the house around 11 or 12… Eli and Chris stayed out there until 4am the other night). Eli’s in town for two more days, though he may be back in town soon (on Microsoft’s dime, for an interview), so we’ve been trying to get in some good hang-out time while he’s here. Chris has been working pretty heavily (full day at work, and then several more hours each night unbilled), but has been actively doing anything else this weekend, since he managed to forget his work laptop at work.

Last night, finally, the heat broke, becoming pretty darn close to PERFECT out today (clear, 72-76, light breeze), so we all piled into my car and went over to my friend Randy’s house, snagged him, and went for Dim Sum. While we were at Randy’s, he showed us a digitized version of a tape he and I had made for Junior year English class, involving various and sundry Monty Python skits. I turned six shades of crimson as everyone chortled at our mumbled, poorly filmed, poorly choreographed segments… Mickey’s opinion was that 1) I looked VERY much like Weird Al, and 2) I had cool hair.

Dim Sum was tasty as ever, but simply not the same without Sam around for it… he’s in the process of moving the rest of his stuff and his fiancee out here from Chicago. I’m looking forward to doing dim sum with them later. After that, we wandered around in Pioneer Square (the historic district of Seattle), and went to Elliott Bay Book Company, which is this huge old building filled with tons of books. VERY nifty. Even niftier (in my opinion) is the fact that I found two extremely topical books to my semester, one of which (Amano) I’d been looking for since the beginning of the semester.

So, Chris and Eli are off drinking for the evening, apparently (they just called), which means Mickey and I are on our own for the evening… we’re thinking of snuggling up on the couch and watching a movie. With that, good night!