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Even Irish Girls Can Tan...A Little

What I'm playing right now: Eagles of Death Metal, 'Chase the Devil Tonight' (check out the cool sketches drawn to accompany the music.)

Told Frannie and Lisa I was gardening. They both went into a panic.

First marriage, now this. Next thing you know, they said, I'd be knitting and taking cooking classes.

Not to worry. This is the kind of thing that happens when the guy who moves into your house for the rest of your life spends half of his time on a book about how we are nearing the point of no return on climate change (the point beyond which it doesn't matter what we do to fix it; it's already too late) and the other half talking about how the people who DO get it have to set living examples for all of the people who DON'T get it.

There is a lot of work involved in this, because almost no one on our block gets it. It has been opening a few eyes.

We were the first to not only go completely solar for our electrical power, but also to have batteries for storage and for power outages and brownouts. People noticed that during our last temporary blackout, when the whole neighborhood was dark...except for our house.

Almost everyone pays someone to do their landscaping. You know, mow the lawn, trim the hedges, cut those neat edges around the sidewalk and the walkways. They also pay gym memberships and, from the look of many of them, don't bother to go there and work out.

We're also in a drought here in California, the worst one I've ever seen. (Yeah, we know: no money, no budget and now, no water either). But still, every morning and night, people are running their yard sprinklers, and doing a great job of irrigating their concrete walkways and driveways.

We've turned off the sprinkler system and installed a drip system instead. It works as you might imagine, dripping water, and only where it is needed, instead of the mini-monsoon thing the rest of the neighborhood is still doing.

We dropped the gym memberships, except the brand new YMCA downtown where Jules can swim. We fired the gardeners. They were pretty bad anyway. No sense of fine touch at all, like their last gig was maybe burning out the Brazilian rain forest or something similar.

We've ripped out the lawn ourselves, and oh my God the work involved in that was amazing. We're down to a little part of the front yard that remains to be done. It's like the lawn is this sentient thing trying desperately to remain unrooted by holding on with millions of little fingers. I now think that the guy who invented velcro was someone who had to dig up his lawn, and wanted some payback.

The back yard is all garden. Everything is organically grown. No pesticides. Only the side yard on the south side of the property is still grass, to give Jules and Roy and Jules' friends a place to play catch or whatever.

The front yard is all fruit trees or fruit bushes like blueberries and blackberries. And it's been really quite amazing to walk out into ther garden, barefoot, feeling the cool soil between my toes, and see that things have grown...by huge amounts.

When I was pure geek, building my first computer, I took pictures at the end of every work session, so I had this photo library of the building process.

This is completely different. I don't know how anything is going to look. And, like snowflakes (still remember those from college in Ohio), everything rising out of the ground is unique. No two things are alike.

So, we have eliminated most of the cost of gym memberships, the cost of gardeners (who were always using those awful gasoline powered trimmers and blowers anyway), cut our grocery bill, reduced our electrical bill to zero, cut our water use by about 75%. And we're feeling like we are at least doing our part and living by example.

But the most amazing thing is something else.

As a critically pale Irish American girl who uses Sunblock 900,000 and usually goes straight from white to burn in less than 60 seconds, with no tan in between, it's a little hard to believe.

I actually have a tan.

Spend as much time in the yard as we have and even someone like me, who uses a sun tan lotion that also blocks x-rays, gamma rays and nuclear radiation, will get a little brown.

I have proof, from my man with the leg and foot fetish.

At least it's MY legs and MY feet that he's crazy about.

Wowzers.

A tan.

Now, watch me start to peel like an onion starting tomorrow just cuz I bragged about it.

Geek Chic Wallpapers

The worst thing about working 14 hour days for 14 straight days is that your brain and body are still in that manic mode the first morning it's all over. So, today, I woke up at 5:40 a.m. Sigh.

I think one of the coolest thing about marriage is waking up next to your man without any of those lingering doubts that your eternal soul is going to burn in the firey pits of hell.

I'm going to have to burn this out of my psyche...this stupid sense that I should be working. Really hard workouts might do it. Then maybe I'll finally crash afterward...and sleep for 24 hours.

In the meantime, you have to see these cool new wallpapers I scoured the web for. Well, I hadn't seen them before, so there are at least new to me.

Former hackers and total geeks like me just can't settle for any wallpaper. And while I adore sunsets, I get those by turning my head to the right and watching the sun go down over the Pacific, or better yet by strolling down to the beach and finding a good spot in the sand. I don't need them on my 23-inch 1920 x 1280 resolution flat screen monitor.

And to get truly great geekiness, you really have to look, because most of what is out there is just complete crapola. It can take an entire evening, while I'm listening to SOMA-FM in the background.

I'm going to be interrupting this post because my son is awake. But I'll throw in the two wallpapers I found and finish the post later. Ah, my busy, busy new life...

The top one, 'geek,' is by Derek Prospero, whose work can be found here. Fortunately, I've yet to find anything deviant on the Deviant Art site, which is good since I have an eight year old running in and out of my office. I think I would have called it 'Different Art.' Anyway, Prospero is a terribly talented guy. Look at some of the work he is doing with notebook, phones and portable game players.

The second one is from a guy who calls himself Pengo1 and is also found on Deviant Art. His comment about it: "Was bored and made this for fun. Not the best wallpaper but thought I would post it anyway. "

That's funny since it's the wallpaper I'm using right now. I'm going to have to see some of the work he's done that he really likes.

Neuromancer Meets Reality...or How I Built My Cyberspace Business

My first client nearly freaked me out with what appeared to be a terminal case of corporate paranoia.

Thank God I didn't just throw him off of my property like I wanted to. I'm not even exactly sure how he found out about my new computer server farm, and I considered it not a little unnerving that he kept muttering about whether he might have been followed to our home.

But, oddly enough, he became both my first and now my longest runner customer to date, and once I calmed him down enough to get an explanation out of him, his virtual state of panic began to make a little sense.

I can't tell you who he is or exactly what he's trying to do. That would violate the terms of the longest goddam contract I've ever had to read and sign. Suffice it to say that he is an inventor, the maker of a kind of green or environmentally friendly energy technology that might just revolutionize the manufacturing industry. And he's got, on his side, one of the most prominent patent attorneys in the U.S. The latter was very important to me from the standpoint of the believeability of his whole story.

He also had massive problems: One, his business partner had gone rogue on him and was allegedly trying to both claim the discovery as well as steal it outright. Two, a very large corporation was trying to claim that it was not, in fact, his discovery, but THEIR intellectual property that he had been working on, even though he had not begun to work on it until AFTER he had left his job in their research department. Third, some unknown party was actively trying to sabotage the whole thing. He figured that it was someone who stood to lose a whole lot of business if his energy producing method became commercialized and was put into widespread use.

It was this poor, beleaguered and paranoid guy who gave me the idea of turning my business into something more than just a small change game server operation like the kind I used to run in San Francisco into, instead, a discreet remote server firm for small businesses and entrepreneurs who needed to safeguard their intellectual property from thieves, saboteurs, and carnivorous corporate giants.

Some of my clients' offices had been raided by lawyers representing competitors, hoping to find the server that contained the technology they were trying to claim as their own. Others, like this first guy, were involved in vicious patent fights. Still others were trying to fend off hostile takeovers. More than a few had suffered acute forms of industrial espionage, losing months or sometimes years of technologically advanced headstarts to rival firms because some unknown person in their business was selling secrets.

So, now, at their own offices and headquarters, they maintain dummy servers that only appear to hold important information. Their other computer systems also store routine things that are not essential and do not need to be protected. But the really sensitive stuff they are trying to protect, they store remotely, and secretly, on MY servers.

It's like living out a little of the William Gibson Neuromancer sci-fi trilogy, where brutal, hi tech corporate wars and break-ins were waged via computer system intrusions.

The beauty of it, my clients say, is that my location is the last place that anyone would think to look for vitally sensitive corporate material. The place just looks like a small cottage behind a main house. The two employees I've recently hired to monitor the servers are listed as my "tenants." We even have a dog out front in the yard (rented from a local pet store) for that added sense that there is nothing here but a little rental property for a charming couple with a pooch.

I still have a lot of friends in law enforcement from the days when I had my real life stalker who, aside from really wanting badly to date me, are happy to run criminal background checks and court record searches on all of my clients, for a reasonable fee. This is just to make sure that no one is trying to store the plans to the next 9/11 style terrorist attack on my servers.

So far, the word of mouth between the first patent lawyer and his colleagues in the legal profession has been awesome. It's gotten me all of my clients to date, whether they are in the U.S., or in another country.

Most importantly at the moment, however, is that a marathon 14 straight days of work, necessitated by six new clients in the past two and one half weeks, is about to end in the next...drum roll please... TWO minutes.

In two minutes, I am giving myself four days off. I'm not even going to think about work. I'm going to game. City of Heroes and Villains, World of Warcraft and Lego Batman and Lego Indiana Jones (with my son...lol) here I come.

Well, after a nap, anyway.

The New Work Etiquette

In case you hadn't noticed, the worst and most persistent global recession since the 1930s has radically altered the way we are allowed to discuss our jobs, IF we are still fortunate enough to have them. If you have been unlucky enough to have missed this radical shift in sentiment, chances are good that you have suffered some bruising verbal retorts, or soon will until you figure it all out.

These changes have been written in stone since mid-2008, when the global economies went from floundering to free fall. Save yourself some grief, and read on.

Example one. You announce to your friends that you have worked 14 days straight without a rest, and still have at least another week to go before you get some time off from work.

The Old Way that friends viewed that kind of statement: commiseration, shock, anger, exhortations to have your boss sued or offers of help in finding you a new job, or both.

The New Way: Your friends consider you extremely fortunate. Not only do you have a job, you're apparently so valuable that your bosses or clients constantly need you.

Example two. You see someone working at a job that looks grimy, tedious, difficult, smelly and low paying. Perhaps a job like underground sewer line inspector.

Old Way of viewing it: You would rather be homeless than accept a job like that.

New Way: You are worried about becoming homeless, and you ask Mr. Grimy Sewer Guy if he knows of any job openings.

Example three: health benefits.

Old Way: If it wasn't perfect. If it wasn't free. If it didn't cover everything including non essential care, if every doctor in America didn't accept it, you were free to complain about it, a lot.

New Way: It costs way too damned much. You have to fight to get covered for essential things, like breast cancer screenings, and it takes you weeks to find some unimpressive physician who will take your insurance. And you are thrilled, because half of your friends have no health coverage at all.

Example Four: The old way of viewing "So, how's work?" as a conversation starter. Perfectly reasonable. The new way--a really bad idea, since so many people seem to say now that they have lost their jobs.

Other new rules: Never complain about having too little vacation time. A lot of people are on extended, and unwanted 'vacations' from work. Never complain about having to take a 'Staycation,' staying at home on your time off. Again, if you have any type of paid time off, it means you still have a job.

Your response when you are asked any of these kinds of questions about how your job is going? 'No complaints' is a good standard answer. I have one old friend who works at an office that has been decimated by cutbacks and layoffs. He puts this big silly grin on his face when he is asked and says, in this ridiculously cheery and sarcasic voice: NEVER BETTER!

So, tonight, I've got it all down. Spotted a couple of my unemployed friends at the coffee shop. They asked me how the new business was going. I was circumspect and quickly changed the subject. Relatives called who had been looking for work for months, asking me how I was doing. I talked about anything that did not involve money--either having it or spending it.

I have been wondering when I would know when this recession is over, that the recovery is fully underway, that we were on our collective way back from this awful brink. I think I know now. It'll be when I start to hear people complain about their jobs again.

I can't wait.

A QUIET Fourth of July

Really, it's all I want right now, having again been reacquainted with the provincialism of American culture and the fact that NO ONE outside the U.S. gives a whit about this being Independence Day.

So, it's been another work day for me, except for the parade down Main Street this morning, which was really cool because of all of the classic cars and all of the new electric vehicles that were included this year. Julian and I went down the hill to watch while Roy got to sleep in this morning.

But other than that fun time at the parade, I'm just a grump today. Funny how old 27 can feel when I've worked for nine days and nights straight without a rest on new clients and a server overhaul. My next day off won't be until next Saturday. People might just die if they come at me the wrong way between now and then.

Like that poor fellow at the Del Taco the other night. Late night taco run for me, for nacho fries and a cherry coke. All very bad, bad, bad stuff sure to go right to my hips and my complexion but oh such good comfort food when one is tired and harried and feeling put upon.

I saw the guy who was about to hit on me from 20 yards away, grinning and leering and swaggering his way across the otherwise empty parking lot toward me. He got within 15 yards, then was hit with such a sonic salvo from me that he literally seemed to stagger.

"I've got a stupid conference call from Denmark in three hours, where it is LUNCHTIME. You are about to interrupt my nacho fries within that thin window of time before the Velveeta turns from a hot and wonderful treat to a solid, inedible sludge, and I am NOT IN THE MOOD!!!!!"

He backed away as if he had surprised the wrong undercover cop and slunk off into the night. Smart boy.

When I have no down time from work, the slightest things set me off, but at least I don't take it out on Julian and Roy. They are now happily on their way to a relative's house for a proper Fourth of July, not a working one like mine: barbecue, fireworks, and even a pony.

Me? The house is blissfully quiet right now. I have a window of about five hours before I have to check the servers to see if my overhaul worked. Ordinarily, I'd hop on City of Heroes or World of Warcraft, but I am spent. I'll start playing again next Saturday at the latest. It's even possible that this brief flurry of business activity will conclude a couple of days early, and I can give myself a four-day weekend. Oh...My...God that would be sooooo nice.

My phone is quiet, finally. Blew off my nice mechanic who wanted to change the tires on my car this afternoon because they need replacing. He at least makes an effort to not constantly stare at my legs when I am there. More importantly, he's an honest and great mechanic, but I just can't do anything this afternoon. Too tired. Too irritable.

So, I'm running myself a bath, thinking about what lovely thing I'm going to put into the water to make it luxurious...maybe just the eucalyptus oil. Lots of that. Steaming hot bath on this unusually chilly day in L.A. Yes... Reading The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye for awhile and feeling those amazing jacuzzi jets.

I will post parade photos later. Hope to see you all soon, game wise or real life wise, in about a week, maybe less.

Until then, remember one important thing. Never ever interrupt a redhead on a late night nacho fries run. You could die.

Summer 'Soul'stice

We live is the coolest place in America. Today was the Summer Soulstice event, about a block and a half from our hillside home. Six bands playing for free all along Main Street. Sidewalk sales from all of the cool little boutiques. Amazing food. Petting zoo, with Llamas. Yeah, Llamas. We are just too fricking cool here. Other places have horses, goats. We've got Llamas. Little Jules wanted us to bring one home with us.

Listening to: Nickelback, If Today Was Your Last Day

Worked in the garden all day today with Roy and Jules. The little one is out with the babysitter right now, having dinner. I'm blogging. Roy is is grading papers and sipping one of our fine California wines. Buy our wines, please, people, because our state is damn near broke and we have really stupid politicians who can't seem to do anything right.

My freckles are coming back because I'm out in the sun so much with the garden, around my nose and along my upper cheeks. It's changing the color of my hair, too, in the most lovely goddam way. It's a lighter shade of red now.

In case any of you have been wondering what Roy looked like, there he is and there we are.

We have begun to climb out of our financial Black Hole as we come to grips with the fact that we have  one very expensive little guy to raise.

Jules has lots of serious allergies, like animal fur of all kinds, all dairy products, all nuts, to grasses and various pollens, and more. He is also dyslexic, and he has attention deficit disorder, NONE of which our mom had ever realized in his first eight years of life, but that we have managed to learn in less than one year. Go figure. Well, she was a good mom to me, at least.

So, in addition to a very expensive private school, little Jules has special medications and a private tutor. Essentially, he accounts for almost every free dime we get, but he is so worth all of it. He's the most amazing little man who somehow manages to stay in very good spirits in spite of it all. I cannot help but thing that all of this is making him stronger in some very important way.

We had cut back on virtually all of our entertainment spending, but that has begun to ease up a little bit. We have reinstated our two World of Warcraft game accounts and today I reinstated my City of Heroes - City of Villains account and played for the first time in about 75 days.

I hear Jules and the babysitter coming up the front steps. Gotta go. Bye for now. Love you all. Oh, and I hope you like the new design. I was eating olives from the garden and they were very yummy. So, it became a theme. I like olives. lol.

The relatives seem like they are a little less irritated with us for eloping. Maybe they have finally begun to understand that they were driving us crazy by not being able to agree on a single thing about our wedding. It's the love that's important, nothing else.

Like the song says: Each day's a gift and not a given right. Leave no stone unturned. Leave your fears behind...

Live each moment like it's your last.

Gardening in Bare Feet

What I'm listening to now:"Push It," by Garbage.

Wow, has it been that long since my last post? Of course it has, I suppose. Everyday begins in a blur, runs on at a highly caffeinated pace and does not end until I can no longer force myself to stay awake.

Being a mom, being a wife (okay, now that is going to have to WAIT in terms of explanations), appointments with the endless number of experts on our son's attention deficit disorder, which isn't quite like any other case they have seen, and his dyslexia, which (of course) isn't quite like anything anyone has ever seen either.

Running the new business, which was supposed to draw California customers only but has drawn people instead from as far away as fricking DENMARK and MANILA and even RUSSIA. The fricking guys in Denmark schedule meetings with me at 2:30 a.m.They thought they were going easy on me. They said it was near their lunch time.

The only peaceful time has been the garden, which was begun with sheer economics in mind, since EVERYTHING we earn disappears down that financial black hole known as our son's needs. It has been my quiet time, my exercise (try hauling a 25 pound bag of chicken poo...yes...chicken poo...up a flight of stairs and a hill to the garden and not break a sweat), and my recreation time.

We don't have soil this close to the beach, you see. It is a fine mixture of sand and dirt that sifts right through your fingers when you hold it. So, in nouveau home organic gardening technology, the soil has to be "amended." Dug up. Wow, menial labor is a GREAT calorie burner.

A few layers of newspaper laid out at the bottom on your garden plots. Generously soak them with water, then break up clumps of alfalfa (yes this is a blog by Veronica Dunbar White in case you were suddenly wondering where you made the wrong turn looking for Redhead Girl Geek Chic) and organically grown hay. Toss in a few other ingredients and the chicken poop and the whole thing eventually Vulcan mind melds into a better approximation of garden soil.

Did it all barefoot, which was really stupid, and even the pedicure I slept through yesterday did not correct all of the damage, but they don't look too bad for a pair of soon-to-be 27 year old feet. Yep, birthday coming up on the ninth. Quite the month, this technically being my first Mother's Day, too.

Supposedly, I'm being taken out some place special, so I managed to find nail polish that matched my favorite pair of shoes, for when it's time for those shoes to come off...haha. Color is called cryptic cardinal. Gotta love it.

More soon. I promise.

Scream, Chris Cornell, The Lyrics

This is such an awesome song...Friday the 13th is not going to be a bad luck day when I have this floating me along to work. Turn it UP!

"I take a minute to tell you right
And you can say what you want
You turn around every night
Somehow you're always going off
It doesn't matter what I've done
Or if I even crossed the line
You start to holler, going for blood
Girl, it doesn't have to be a fight

Throwing out the blame when you know it ain't my fault
Messing with my brain when you want to see me fall
There may come a time when I don't bother you at all
It isn't my call, it isn't my call

Hey, why you keep screaming at the top of your head?
I say hey-ey-ey, why you keep screaming at the top of your head?
I say hey, why you keep screaming at the top of your head?
I say hey-ey-ey, why you keep screaming at the top of your head? (I hear you I hear you)

Take a minute to tell you now
And I don't have to raise my tone
Take the level and bring it down
I just want you to know
I got no trouble with what you said
I don't even think you're wrong
It's how you say it
You lose your head
Girl I'm standing right in front of you

Throwing out the blame when you know it ain't my fault (ain't my fault)
Messing with my brain when you want to see me fall (see me fall)
There may come a time when I don't bother you at all
It isn't my call, it isn't my call

Hey, why you keep screaming at the top of your head? (at the top of your head)
I say hey-ey-ey, why you keep screaming at the top of your head? (at the top of your head)
I say hey, why you keep screaming at the top of your head? (at the top of your head)
I say hey-ey-ey, why you keep screaming at the top of your head? (HEY)

(I hear you I hear you) Silence is golden
I used to think that silence was golden

Silence is golden
I used to think that silence was golden (I hear you I hear you)

Hey, why you keep screaming at the top of your head? (at the top of your head)
I say hey-ey-ey, (HEY-EY-EY) why you keep screaming at the top of your head? (at the top of your head)
I say hey, (hey-ey-ey-ey-ey) why you keep screaming at the top of your head? (at the top of your head)
I say hey-ey-ey, why you keep screaming at the top of your head?

(HEY) I hear you I hear you
 

--chris cornell; scream; watch the video and hear chris here; chris' career timeline; chris' blog; myspace page; facebook; chris cornell gallery

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to The Depression...

...like working longer hours, and weekends, more often than I ever have in life at a time when there is supposed to be so little business activity out there to speak of. Then again, perhaps that is precisely why this has required so much time and effort. Maybe all of it would be a whole lot easier if we weren't trolling the economic depths on a global scale right now.

Our efforts to build a first class web hosting service continues apace. It's what Roy and I decided to turn to when the product testing gig collided headfirst with everyone's decision to rein in all new projects spending and almost universally decided against putting new products on the market.

We will be offering a full range of Web hosting services, including domain name registration, shared Web site hosting, private game server hosting, application hosting, virtual private servers, dedicated hosting and fully managed outsourced technology solutions. We are offering a completely green, fiber optic bandwidth, solar-powered hosting solution with a 100% guarantee of up time (gulp).

Three of the servers I built are already up and running. Two more to go once I finally feel like looking at a Tyan motherboard again. I swear this is mind numbing work and if I break another goddam nail I'm going to scream. Maybe I should just file them down to nothing for the duration.

I promise to write more later, perhaps this weekend.

Game-wise, we've had little time for anything. I've been on CoX exactly once in the last few weeks and then only to apply my 42-month vet reward to a few of my toons. Roy made 80 on his Night Elf Priest and has been flying me around the new continent of Northrend, which is about all I can manage before I start falling asleep on his shoulder.

Roy and I have decided to take Julian to SXSW 2009, the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Texas, to give ourselves a little break. We're really looking forward to it.

SXSW Official Music Showcase Venues

SXSW Official Music Party Venues

SXSW Film Theaters

SXSW Interactive Party Venues

SXSW Hotel Map

Maybe we'll see you there. :)

SXSW 2009 in Austin,

March 13-22

Double XP Weekend Tally: City of Heroes, City of Villains

Better than I would have imagined. For those of you who have no idea about what I'm referring to, it's one of the bonuses that Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, better known as MMORPGs, use to reward subscribers for paying a monthly fee to play their offering. Experience, otherwise known in this case as XP, is what you earn to "level up" your character from Level One, where they begin the game, on up to 40, or 50 or 80 or even higher top levels. Double XP simply means you receive double the usual credit for completing missions, task forces, battles, etc.

Some games, like World of Warcraft, offer a more or less constant way to earn double XP. In WoW, it builds up to a certain amount depending on how long you remain offline. Once you begin to play again, you get double credit for a limited period of time. In CoX, the usual abbreviation for the City of Heroes (CoH) and City of Villains (CoV) when you are referring to matters common to both games, it's a far more rare weekend event that draws huge numbers of players, usually beginning some time Friday morning and not ending until sometime late Sunday night.

Some servers, like Freedom and Virtue, get so busy that they are full and cannot allow anyone else online.

So, my tally for the weekend was better than I could have possibly imagined. Hard to say which was the best part of it:

Indigo Ronin, dual blades - regeneration scrapper, Level 47 to Level 50 (done, second level 50 scrapper. My eighth level 50 toon); Arakhn, arachnos soldier - bane spider, Level 14 to Level 24 (getting her to level 24 unlocks the Bane Spider set of powers, which are AWESOME); Floating Dragon (remake with a better secondary power pool for endurance draining Martial Arts than endurance draining Dark Armor. This version of Floating Dragon is martial arts - willpower, and she moved from Level 1 to Level 10; Radical Art, rad emissions defender, Level 21 to Level 22; Nyx of Chaos, electric melee - willpower brute, Level 41 to Level 42.

More fun times to come. Bye for now.