Brian's Journal

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Congratulations President Obama and Vice-President Biden!

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I have been up for 20+ hours.  Post will be continued once I actually get a chance to sleep.

But suffice it to say, YES. WE. CAN.

After careful consideration, we have decided that it is time to retool and rebrand Ohayocon.  I hope everyone enjoys the new focus!

It's almost Normal View time again!  For the 7th year in a row, we will be watching a weekend of bad movies in Champaign.  For those who haven't attended one of these, either the main festival, or the Anime Edition that I've hosted at Ohayocon for the past few years, Normal View is an annual festival where we watch 7 or 8 bad movies over the weekend and heckle them mercilessly.

This year's schedule has just been released, and it promises to be a good one.  So if you happen to be in Urbana-Champaign over the weekend of March 28-30, join us for:

NORMAL VIEW DOUBLE 007: ATTACK OF THE THE DOUBLE FEATURES

Remember: when movies bite, we bite back.

Super Tuesday has come and gone, and it looks like things are still undecided for our nomination.  (And just to summarize, I'm a Democrat, and I'm supporting Barack Obama very strongly.)  This is also the first time I've been on a ballot, as a candidate to be an elected Precinct Committeeman.  (And for those wondering what that is, I posted some stuff about that on beamjockey's journal.)

The next few months are going to be interesting.  Obama's got more cash on hand than Hillary right now, and the next few contests will favor him.  This thing's going to drag out until March or April.

On a more local note, I noticed some very interesting trends for my home county of DuPage County, Illinois.  DuPage has long been considered a Republican stronghold; there aren't any Democrats in county offices, and while numerically, DuPage has been provding more Democratic votes for statewide offices than any other county in Illinois except for Cook County (Chicago), we haven't yet been winning on the local level.  I think that's going to start to change, though.

With all 732 precincts in DuPage County reporting, Democratic voters cast 131,635 ballots,while Republican voters cast 108,582 ballots.

So dispite the fact that we had a lot of races with "No candidate", we still got 23,053 more votes than the Republicans.  I've looked at the past data that the election commission has on the website, and we had over TWICE as many votes cast as in the 2004 primary.  (In that race, Republicans cast 86,993 ballots, while Democrats cast 63,951 ballots.)  And this is the first race that we've ever had more ballots cast than the Republicans.  Now, to be fair, there are a lot of factors in play here, including  the Obama factor and the split within the Republican party between McCain, Romney, and Huckabee, but I think this is incredibly good news for us, and will really help to build momentum and excitement for the election in November, no matter who the final candidates end up being.

This is going to be a very interesting year.

I have been in Dallas for the past week attending LISA, the annual Systems Administration conference.  I had a really good time - I actually learned about some new stuff that I want to look at when I get home, got to talk and exchange ideas with a number of people, and generally just had a good time meeting people, networking, and learning more about systems administration. But enough about work stuff. :)

It's very interesting to look at a professional/trade conference from the perspective of running a fan-run anime convention.  It's a whole different world (and price range ;) ), but it seems that drama is universal.  It wasn't on display much, but I've gathered that there's some behind-the-scenes drama between some individuals and organizations.  Fortunately, the attendees can avoid that entirely.  It was also nice to be at a conference with older attendees, since among other things, the elevators and escalators worked all week, and there was no physical damage done to the hotel. :)

On Thursday night, they had the conference reception, which I decided could have been called "Texas Stereotype Reinforcement Night".  It was cowboy themed, with plastic sheriff stars and straw cowboy hats on the tables, and they had shooting games, a mechanical bull, and something that I never would have believed I'd see at LISA: armadillo racing.  But they also had some really good barbecue, so that made up for it. :)

Currently, I'm staying for a few days at skylon's place before I go home on Tuesday.  Getting my rental car to drive here was interesting.  I decided to rent it at the airport since I'll be dropping it off there, and decided to go the cheap route to get to the airport.  I took the commuter train from downtown Dallas to a station near the airport, where I was picked up by a shuttle servicing the remote parking lot.  From the remote lot, I had to take another shuttle to a terminal, then a third shuttle out to the rental car facility, which was close to the south parking lot, but separated from it by a huge fence.  But I eventually got it, then met up with a coworker to go out for a great steak dinner.  Tonight I am going folk dancing with bitpig and mundeemo, which should be ... interesting.  I don't dance at all, so I'm sure it'll be hilarious for everyone else. :)

Pictures will be posted when I get home.  Oh, and I wanted to see if I can bait Tom Limoncelli, who said he has a Google filter looking for people talking about him.  Hi, Tom.  You're in my pictures. :)

A local theater group is putting on "Manos: The Rock Opera of Fate" this month in Chicago.  I would really like to go, but I haven't been able to convince any of my friends that it would be fun.  I figured I would post here in case anyone in LJ-land might be interested in going.

It's playing every Friday and Saturday night at 10:30pm at the National Pastime Theater, which is on the north side of Chicago, until November 3, 2007.  The best nights for me would be this Friday (the 19th - tonight) or next Friday (the 26th).  If anyone might be interested, please post here or contact me.

There's more information here: Manos: The Rock Opera of Fate

So I realize I haven't posted to this journal in, oh, four years, but after a few failed attempts at starting a blog on my own site, I figured that maybe I'd try to occasionally use this again.

The big news for me is that I'm DONE.  I turned in my final exam yesterday morning, and am officially done with graduate school (unless I really blew the final, but I think I'll be ok).  Graduation is on Saturday, and then I can get my Tuesday evenings back. :)  Unfortunately, because of graduation and the fact that I'm currently on travel in California for work, I'm going to miss most of ACen - but I *will* be there on Sunday.  I'm looking forward to seeing folks I haven't seen in a while!

Other than that, things are going pretty well.  I've actually got a number of interesting projects at work right now (including finally getting some funding for an anti-spam initiative I've been pushing for for a while), I've managed to continue to do a lot of stuff with the Chicago crew, and Ohayocon is going pretty well right now.  We're working on ironing out the bugs from last year, and hope to make things go much more smoothly in 2008.

We'll see if I continue to update this, but if not, look for my next post in 2011! :)

Wow. One whole post for the entirety of 2002. Although I guess I am posting again before my next scheduled post in 2004.

However, I'm mostly posting to point out that I've set up a new journal on my personal site. Feel free to take a look: Brian's Journal

Will I update it as often as this? Probably. :) But who knows, it could be more often.

Since it's been about, oh, eight months since I've updated my LiveJournal, I just wanted to report that yes, I still do exist, and yes, I am really bad about updating this. :)

Let's see, what's been going on since the last time I updated...Well, I went on vacation this summer, first to Hawaii for two weeks for my stepbrother's wedding, and then to LA for a week for Anime Expo, where I met up with most of our IRC group. Both were fun. I'm also starting grad school this fall; I'm going for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Should be ... interesting. I'm a little afraid of going back to school, but hopefully it should be ok since A) I'm only taking one (maybe 2 some semesters) class at a time, and B) work is paying for it. :)

Other than that I've been keeping busy; work occupies a good chunk of my time, but I still have been hanging out with friends, etc.

By my exponential posting style, I'm guessing I'll post again around 2004, so be sure to check back then! :)