For anybody who was planning on seeing me this weekend at the Hartford prerelease, the location has been changed to the University of Hartford, Gengrass Cafeteria. See the TJ’s web site for more details.

Interesting events in January, past and present:

• January 1: While at the annual New Year’s party and my aunt and uncle’s large house in Middlefield, MA, my wife tumbles down a flight of stairs while carrying our luggage. “Luckily”, she landed mainly on her head and shoulders. She and Baby seem to be doing just fine despite the experience, although Jessi did suffer a pulled rotator cuff in her right shoulder which is slowly healing.
• January 8: I stopped by the town hall on my way home from work to get information on an upcoming public hearing on the town’s contact with Charter Communications. I would like to send in my comments ahead of time, as well as attend the hearing. I may even try to get on one of the Cable Committees in town at some point.
• January 19-20: The Morningtide Prerelease. I’m scheduled to be the Head Judge on Day 2, which will be the largest number of players I’ve ever head judged for at once.
• January 29: The aforementioned public hearing on Charter.

Generally, while driving my car to and fro, I’m listening to the radio on 90.1 FM WYCM, a Christian radio station located in Charlton. (Their web site is down at the moment.) Now, I’m not thrilled with wireless technologies for the most part, but the radio receiver is built into the car and I enjoy and support their programming, and the signal covers the majority of my travel area.

A trend I’ve noticed lately is that more and more people tend to want to bring their own music/talk/whatever with them in their car, which is certainly fine. However, for backward compatibility with the sound system integrated in their car (which only supports radio signals and cassette tapes, which nobody uses anymore), they hook up their portable audio player to a low-range FM transmitter, and then tune their car’s radio to that frequency. Thus, they get to hear the audio from the portable player without needing to replace the car’s integrated sound system.

Today is the tenth anniversary of publication of the HTML 4.0 as a W3C Recommendation.

Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3

The pictures don’t show the baby nearly as well as seeing the screen in person.
Unfortunately, the baby did not allow us to see his or her gender.

Yesterday, I headed down to New York City for the Magic World Championship, where I helped judge the Worlds Team competition day, and tested to gain Trainer status (and passed), meaning that I can now certify level 1 judges.

Tip of the day: Ladybugs crawling around inside your smoke detector may make said smoke detector go off.

• This Saturday, October 27: Head Judge of 2007 Standard Connecticut State Championship
• November 3: Judge at a PTQ in Milford, MA
• November through February: Running Rising Phoenix Games City Champs Qualifiers (Where you can qualify for Worlds if you’re really good: Top 8 in the City Champs Qualifier series get an invite to the store City Champs Finals, top 2 from that get an invite to the Boston City Champs Finals, top 1 from that gets an invite to Nationals and 2nd through 8th get byes at Regionals, top 4 from Regionals get invites to Nationals, and top 4 from Nationals get invites to Worlds.)
• November 18: Running a Northeast Challenge Qualifier at Rising Phoenix Games (Where you can win a car: Top 2 from this event qualify to play in the Northeast Challenge at Worlds, top 8 from that qualify to play in the Win a Car Tournament at Worlds.)
• December 1: Head Judge of PTQ in Stratford, CT
• December 6–9: Worlds. I’m not planning on judging at Worlds (partly since it’s the busy season at work, and partly since I don’t want to pay for staying in New York City). But, I would like to test for being a Level 2 Area Trainer Judge (That is, gain the ability to test judges for Level 1), so I may show up at some point and connect with judges and try to test for that.

There is a bug crawling on my monitor… on the other side of the glass. Really bizarre to watch.