Not Asleep.

Once again I am not asleep when I would like to be. Bah.

Owie.

I couldn't sleep at all last night. It took until around 8:00 am until I finally nodded off. Of course, then I slept right through my alarm and didn't wake up until just a few minutes ago. As is typical for me, lack of sleep + sleeping in = migraine, and I woke up with one just starting. I've taken some 222s and a large caffinated double espresso and have hopes that it has been nipped in the bud, but even an avoided migraine makes me feel wobbly and delicate all day.

Better.

Emergency caffeine infusion seems to have worked. The incipient migraine is now in retreat. Its left me feeling a bit under the weather, but that is MUCH better than the head-splitting throbing, and the photophobia.

Its a Gazebo!

Here is a hilarious story that I first read in Dragon Magazine (I believe) years ago. Ever since "Its a Gazebo!" has been a favorite phrase of mine. Since I couldn't find a URL for it online, here it is verbatim, the Gazebo Story:

In the early seventies, Ed Whitchurch ran "his game", and one of the participants was Eric Sorenson. Eric plays something like a computer. When he games, he methodically considers each possibility before choosing his preferred option. If given time, he will invariably pick the optimal solution. It has been known to take weeks. He is otherwise, in all respects, a superior gamer.
Eric was playing a Neutral Paladin in Ed's game. He was on some lord's lands when the following exchange occurred:
ED: You see a well groomed garden. In the middle, on a small hill, you see a gazebo.
ERIC: A gazebo? What color is it?
ED: [pause] It's white, Eric.
ERIC: How far away is it?
ED: About 50 yards.
ERIC: How big is it?
ED: [pause] It's about 30 ft across, 15 ft high, with a pointed top.
ERIC: I use my sword to detect good on it.
ED: It's not good, Eric. It's a gazebo.
ERIC: [pause] I call out to it.
ED: It won't answer. It's a gazebo.
ERIC: [pause] I sheathe my sword and draw my bow and arrows. Does it respond in any way?
ED: No, Eric, it's a gazebo!
ERIC: I shoot it with my bow. [roll to hit] What happened?
ED: There is now a gazebo with an arrow sticking out of it.
ERIC: [pause] Wasn't it wounded?
ED: OF COURSE NOT, ERIC! IT'S A GAZEBO!
ERIC: [whimper] But that was a +3 arrow!
ED: It's a gazebo, Eric, a GAZEBO! If you really want to try to destroy it, you could try to chop it with an axe, I suppose, or you could try to burn it, but I don't know why anybody would even try. It's a @#$%!! gazebo!
ERIC: [long pause. He has no axe or fire spells.] I run away.
ED: [thoroughly frustrated] It's too late. You've awakened the gazebo. It catches you and eats you.
ERIC: [reaching for his dice] Maybe I'll roll up a fire-using mage so I can avenge my Paladin.



At this point, the increasingly amused fellow party members restored a modicum of order by explaining to Eric what a gazebo is. Thus ends the tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo. It could have been worse; at least the gazebo wasn't on a grassy gnoll. Thus ends the tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo. A little vocabulary is a dangerous thing.

The above is Copyright © 1989 by Richard Aronson. Reprinted with permission. The author grants permission to reprint as long as all copyright notices remain with the text

Displaying my Ignorance.

I have an Audio CD that I would like to make an image of, to distribute to some friends. Before anyone asks, yes I can do so. Its not copyrighted, its the audio tracks for denizsarikaya's memorial service. The individual tracks are already up on my server (when the server is working...) as .mp3 files, but I've gotten a request for an exact duplicate. I suppose I could just copy the individual tracks, but it seemed a better idea to make a .ISO to distribute so that folks can burn a whole image in one go.

The thing is, ISO9660 seems to be for data CD's only, not audio. None of the Image programs I've looked at will make a standard Image file that I could pass around. Nero will make a .nrg file but then someone would have to have Nero to burn a copy. Isn't there some standard Audio CD image interchange format that I could use? I've googled for one, but found nothing. Someone clue me in, please.

Get Fuzzy.

I'm not usually a big fan of the comic "Get Fuzzy", but this particular episode made me laugh out loud:

Revenge of the Migraine.

Its trying to make a comeback. I'm fighting it with more caffeine and more 222s. Its not usual for a migraine to come back after I've chased it away, but then again, before I was 25 I had never had a migraine at all, so its not like the condition is always the same.