Odds and Ends

I spent most of the day yesterday at thread_walker's games party. Cleaned up the map on a couple rounds of Settlers of Cataan, learned some new railroad games, and declined to enjoy "Munchkin Chthulhu", which ended up having more vociferous arguing over minute details of the escessively complicated rules than actual play time. (As I understand it, arguing over the rules is a design feature. I just don't find that fun.) Overall, much fun and I'm grateful for having been invited. (Oh, and yummy food, too.)

On my way to the games, I swung by the "electronic waste collection day" (an Earth Day event) being held in the IKEA parking lot. This enabled me to get rid of an old intermittently-malfunctioning tv, two old printers (which might or might not be convinced to function again), a wireless phone whose battery would no longer hold a charge, and a flat-bed scanner that made horrible gear-slipping noises when you tried to run it. I'd been planning to offer up several of the items on Freecycle, but my tendency to write excessively honest descriptions ("25-year-old TV set, reception is lousy except when I'm testing it to verify that it needs to be thrown out, at which point it will work reasonably well.") tends to undermine people's interest in my more marginal cast-offs. So the opportunity to get the stuff out of the house was not to be missed. Further progress on the life-cleaning!

I sent off the requisite form to the IRS inquiring about the fate of my refund check, but I've developed a suspicioun about it ever since I noticed that somehow my tax accountants had filled out the forms with my residence being on "X Avenue" rather than "X Street". That just might have been enough for the Post Office to have sent it back as "no such address". If so, getting it redelivered should be a lot simpler than it would be if the check had been stolen out of my mailbox.

Today is another work-party day at Ed Levine Park which may or may not get rained on. (It was bright and almost clear when I got out of bed, but now it's clouded up again and it was raining fairly constantly yesterday afternoon and evening.)

I also need to do some website work since I've decided to post a short story in honor of the recently-proclaimed International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. (For those who don't want to follow links and untangle the backstory: one of the officers of SFWA, the sf writers' association, made some incendiary comparisons between authors who post their works for free on the net and scab laborers. There immediately emerged a grassroots movement in support of a contrary position -- that posting material for free reading is a reasonable part of a comprehensive career-buildling program by an author and doesn't undermine either one's individual potential financial gains nor the overall economic basis of professional writing. International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day is planned as an implementation of this position, celebrated by individuals making selected items of their own professional-quality writing available for free reading online.) I can see points on both sides, but from a purely pragmatic point of view, you deal with new technologies by making them work for you -- not by railing against the ways in which they change the old paradigms.