Well, I’m almost done with my Christmas shopping. I’m not falling for that “Right Before Christmas Sale!” crap this time. I also re-financed my car; finally realizing that I’m not likely to sell my beautiful baby, and that $550 a month is far too much to pay. One of my student loans will be paid off next month, and the fridge and stove are now also paid off. Combined with the $140/month I’m saving on the car, I now have $350 extra every month so I can actually start saving money again. I guess that’s my gift to myself for the holidays.

If you are reading this, welcome to the Dual PIII-850 in my basement. My setup was successful, and I can now fire my old hosting provider csoft.net. The new server is based on Gentoo, running among other things:

djbdns

  Name server software which offers a $100 bounty on any submitted security exploits that has yet to be claimed.  The author apparently emulates a gyrating penis, but being an asshole hardly affects code quality.

qmail

Well, the 2004 presidential elections are over. The dust has settled, the towel has been thrown, and aside from a few provisional and absentee ballots, George Bush remains the President of the United States. Though I voted for Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party, I had secretly hoped John Kerry would win the election itself. Though voting for one candidate and desiring the success of another appears contradictory, my reasons will be made clear in the next few days.

All Hallows Eve sweeps upon the world, dread and horror, chaos and fear. Perhaps to many, a commercialized source of confectionaries, a call for costumes and door to door begging. Such banality has no place on Halloween, where costumes transform imagination into manifestations of horrible, strange, macabre, exotic, weird and wonderful.

Well, I’m back from Anime Reactor, and I have to say that this convention has a much higher ratio of cosplayers to regular atendees than any other con I’ve been to. Counting Friday and Saturday, I easily took over 100 pictures, of which at least 80 are of cosplayers. I know I didn’t get all of them, and some were photographed multiple times, but that’s still a huge number for a con this new and relatively small.