Last night was great fun as a lot of the seniors who are in town for the holiday, and many who are in town anyway, met up at Diedrich’s an later Katz’s. It was really enjoyable seeing so many people who I often talk to online but haven’t seen for too long. The “Winter holidays” sometimes politically uncorrectly categorized as “Christmas” coming up should be even better. If you’re interested the pictures are now up.

Speaking of pictures, have been flooded with emails, calls, and just general in-person complaining concerning the updates to the photolog, or rather the lack thereof. The team here at Photomatt.net was experiencing some technical diffulculties, but things are under control now and I’ve caught up with a couple of the days I had missed before. We apologize for the lapse in updates. You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Speaking of programming, okay, not really, but if you want a taste of how fast the new server is, browse over to mullenweg.com and click around. Isn’t that snappy? Also you may not have noticed, but the front page of this site used to take as much as two seconds to process, and now it is delivered to your browser less than half a second from request time. Other less heavy pages, like any of the jazz quotes the load time is neglibible. That just goes to show that the front page stands for quite a bit of optimization though, and I’m going to work on that a bit this weekend. Okay, that’s it!

Speaking of . . .

Well, now that it’s officially over, I must say that was a really excellent weekend that even the amazonian weather couldn’t dampen. It got started strong on Friday with a little car dancing, good food, a sarcastic ATM, and a trampoline.

Saturday got a late start, and it turned out the gig I was looking forward to got rained out. However I did get to meet some new people out in Spring Valley and had a wonderful homemade dinner. There are pictures too but someone *cough*Sarah*cough* absconded with my digital camera, so I’ll have to wait to see if any of them came out. Also got to help someone with their computer, which is always a good feeling. Sometimes I have bad streaks where people seem to come to me with the strangest problems that I really don’t have a clue how to take care of. Then I drove through the rain to hear “the group Mike sings with,” otherwise known as Lager Rhythms. The show was really technically excellent and entertaining, and I got to sit by Christine which was excellent because I got the feeling we both had been similarly exposed to Schoolhouse Rock, we were cracking up at the same times. Afterward I tagged along with Kathy, Elaine and Kenny, Hanna, Robert, and the blog-less Joe and Mandy to a neat place called Catbirds, where they had really excellent music. They were playing really classic jazz stuff, mostly stuff I had heard before but a few gems that were new to me, including one I know was Ella Fitzgerald but I forgot to ask the DJ what album it was off of. Our relatively large group was seated outside, which was fine for the cool weather but a little inconvenient once it started pouring again. I’d like to see them some more but unfortunately I won’t be able to make it out to the Renaissance Festival next weekend because of HPUG. However, if you are going to be in town though, be sure to check out the meeting at 1 PM next Saturday because we’re going to have almost every kind of Treo known to man and a ton of cool Bluetooth gadgets that Jason is bringing.

Where does that leave Sunday? Recovering. And it’s already almost four in the morning!