Catching up: work, software and sushi

I’m apparently lapsing back into the less frequent updating style that I had a few years ago. (In the pre-LiveJournal days I did have an online journal, which I only updated a couple times a month.) I’ll see if I can lump a few quick updates together.

Two weekends ago, May 6th and 7th, I spent more time getting the Excursion Society MUCK (ESM) together, and it’s ready for what I’m calling a “soft opening.” More information will be available shortly for interested parties.

Last week was the last one for B., the guy I’m replacing at work, and he was sent off with a little retirement party Friday at lunch. Today I’m on my own, with a few things ahead that despite the three weeks of training I really haven’t done. They should be interesting, in the double-edged sense of the word. I have possibly unduly grand ideas about changing the web site’s back end, but I know that’s not something I should devote a great deal of time to, yet. (On the flip side, I really consider the web site as it exists now to be in need of some serious reorganization to improve maintainability.)

The last few days of last week, I was starting to get a definite craving for sushi. On Saturday I made an expedition with a friend up to San Mateo to visit Sushi Sam’s Edomata, which has a reputation as one of the best sushi places in the Bay Area. I’d certainly believe the reputation now. I ordered a couple of my stand-bys, like a spicy tuna roll and unagi (fresh water eel), but had a few things I’d never tried before as nigiri: arctic charr, conch, and toro tuna, as well as a fried yellowtail roll. Sam’s is unusual in that many of the pieces came with light sauce or seasoning; it’s not a place you’ll be dipping your sushi pieces into the soy sauce very often. I’ll definitely be back, and next time might try the omakase (“entrust the chef,” more or less).

There’s a couple other sushi places on my list to eventually try, including Sushi Ran in Sausalito, and Sakae in Burlingame. (There is also Sawa Sushi in Sunnyvale, both famous and infamous in the Bay Area, but his price level is well over several other restaurants I’d spend the money at first, even if I could break through his “for regulars only” attitude.) But I’m going to have to find more friends who like sushi!

In non-food issues, I’ve been having trouble with freezes on my laptop, which appears to be a software issue—which I suspect may in part come from having a lot of crap that ties into the OS at a low level, some of which is from previous versions of the operating system. After some unsuccessful debugging attempts I decided to drop the tactical nuke, in part as an excuse to add a Linux partition to the PowerBook. It’s been years since I’ve spent time with any version of Unix other than Mac OS X and I figured I wanted to see what the “state of the art” was now. (I installed Ubuntu Linux, a release candidate-quality beta of their upcoming release.) I may write about that sometime soon; for now I’ll just observe that I’m writing this in OS X.

Currently, I’m at a Panera, likely for the next couple of hours to chill out and work on a couple other things (and get dinner, of course). Despite my de facto neglect of my journal here, I have multiple things I’ve thought about writing that are more essay-ish in nature. Something about Linux, perhaps, as mentioned above. Thoughts about why merely mentioning Apple Computer in an approving way gets flames. And, probably to be posted very soon, a long-delayed survey of furry fanzines I’ve been working on as a followup to earlier posts of mine.

The state of furry zines

A few months ago, I mused on reviving Claw & Quill and later on furry writing in general. At the end of that article I threatened to do a follow-up. It’s been a moderately long time coming, but it’s also—well—moderately long. This is a talk about “zines” both online and off, what’s good and bad about them; a survey of what exists in furry fandom specifically now (at least, what I’m aware of); and finally, a few thoughts about the future.

What it doesn’t have is a description of just what I’m thinking of for C&Q’s potential revival. In part this is to see what other people’s comments are on this, and what suggestions they might have. In part it’s also not to tip my hand openly, either—after all, I don’t have anything built yet, and I neither want to give people great new ideas for features to implement on their sites, nor to make promises for things I discover I can’t deliver. (A few of the ideas in the back of my mind are, as programmers would say, non-trivial problems.)

( Long essay: get coffee. )