Imported From Livejournal

• Last weekend, I head judged a Magic PTQ with 161 players, which is rather large for this type of event, and the second-largest event I’ve ever head judged. There was a lot to do (including dealing with a table collapse), but our staff dealt with it rather well.
• A few weeks ago, we signed up with Netflix, primarily to continue watching Star Trek past the Next Generation series. I’m quite impressed with the service so far.
• We’re continuing to go monthly to Scrabble night at the Charlton Library. We may look at going to a more competitive event at some point (primarily for Jessi’s benefit).
• For the Shards of Alara prerelease, I’ll be head judging at some store in New Hampshire (I don’t know the name or specific location offhand) on Saturday the 27th, and at Rising Phoenix Games on Sunday the 28th, as part of the TJ Collectibles network of prereleases.
• I have Jury Duty in 4 weeks.
• Hannah is growing quickly. She can stand with support, and smiles when she sees me, and I’m sure that before long she’ll have the run of the house. She started sleeping in her own room last week.

Due to a last-minute cancellation by the person who was going to be there, I’ve just been contracted as the Head Judge of the PTQ this Saturday run by TJ Collectibles in Hartford.

FiveMinute.net: Five-minute summary parodies of various sci-fi episodes and movies. (Note that there are spoilers in there for episodes and series that aired later than the one that you’re reading, so you may want to not read them if you haven’t completed watching everything produced under a brand and intend to some day.)

Apparently, I work for the 3,987th fastest-growing private company in the U.S..

As a followup to my prior post about in-home electricity distribution, it has occurred to me (as we’re implementing it at work) that the standard method for transmitting DC for electronic devices may be Power over Ethernet.

As asked last night by my wife…

Why are some food items used as terms of endearment, while others are not?

Pumpkin? Yes. Potato? No.
Honey? Yes. Syrup? No.
Etc.

Apparently, Smart Shopper has chosen to ignore my prohibitory order, as I received mail from them yesterday. (This is really exactly what I expected, since the type of discounted mailing permit they’re using requires mailing to all addresses in the town.) So, I forwarded the mailpiece off to the Prohibitory Order Processing Center, where if all goes well they’ll get a court order requiring compliance, and if they continue to mail me they’ll be in contempt of court. (39 USC 3008 (d), (e))

Tonight is the monthly Scrabble night at the Charlton Public Library (6:00 to 7:45 p.m), if anyone else is interested in coming.

I find it interesting that while all the electrical wiring in my home is typical AC at home-use voltages, the very first thing that almost everything plugged into it does is concert it to DC. I wonder if it would be feasible/logical/more efficient to have just one AC-to-DC converter per house, and distribute DC throughout the house (in addition to the couple places where things actually want AC), with a different connector and standardized voltage (9V?) and so forth.

A few weeks ago, I placed an order with MCM Electronics for several things, mainly related to upgrading my wife’s computer as our DVR setup, including a 500GB hard drive, a cable distribution amplifier, a gigabit network card for my computer (which had an on-board gigabit NIC that broke), some cables to wire everything together, and 2 GB of memory for my wife’s computer (to add to the 1GB it came with). (They were having a 20% off sale at the time, so they seemed like pretty decent deals.)