Finally! My car is gone! Sure, I had to basically pay someone to take it, but I wasn’t having much luck otherwise, and simply getting rid of it saves me major cash. How much? I pay $415 monthly for the privilege of simply possessing the car. Then there’s the $160 per month just in case fee. I won’t count gas, because I haven’t filled the tank for three months; further proof a car is unnecessary in Chicago.

Acen was fun this year, and aside from being extraordinarily tired, I’m none too worse for the wear. I have about two and a half hours of film to go through and encode, as well as a couple interviews with some interesting folks from Artist Alley. Unfortunately there were some issues this year I didn’t enjoy. I’ll begin by first noting the planning folks had to contend with the amazing Acen 2005 experience, which was very hard to top.

There is no man on the mountain, no guru wise or otherwise experienced in the tumultuous rigors of life. Scouring the world through countless eons would reveal no monk or hermit overflowing with enough inner peace to admit True Knowledge. Here, there is only silence from beginning to end, Alpha to Omega, creation to oblivion. So speak the words on the Night’s Watch, that sense fretful questioning. Be those blessed with infinite abundance, so are they cursed equally complacent and unfulfilled.

There are currently a few fire trucks, police cars, and a helicopter outside my apartment right now. Not sure what’s going on, but it can’t be good… I’ll post more if/when I find out what the hubub is about. Update: It appears that the abandoned hospital next to my building is on fire. There’s some smoke coming out of some upper floor windows, and at least a couple firefighters are crawling around, as evidenced by the blue lights hovering inside.

My 3-year-old laptop, until yesterday, was still running the pre-installed version of Windows XP. After years of upgrades, driver changes, codec updates, and so on, it was getting somewhat crufty. I decided: enough is enough, time to reinstall! Since I was formatting everything anyway, I figured it might be time to attempt installing Ubuntu on a laptop. It didn’t go so well. While Ubuntu itself installed with little effort, things started going badly when I tried getting my wireless card to work.