Beautiful holiday weekend

Trillium. The flower starts out as white and then turns pink as it grows older. I caught this one at I think its most beautiful age.

This was a very successful and satisfying long weekend. I did not try to accomplish lots; instead, I did what I'd planned and spent most of the weekend playing video games. They weren't exactly the video games I thought I was going to play (I didn't finish Portal, but I got sucked into Marvel Ultimate Alliance), but there's nothing wrong with that. Blazing Birds was just released on XBox Live for $5 and is a wonderfully addictive tricked-out badminton game. It's very simple, and there are some difficulty curve problems (computer players go from relatively easy to extremely difficult five games from the end of the normal arcade mode for me), but it's a blast. They got the badminton physics right, and one naturally does strategic shots with the shuttle that are typical for real badminton matches.

(Don't get me started on the stupid XBox Live point system that doesn't match dollar amounts. I just convert in my head and only express the prices to other people in the converted form in partial protest. But otherwise, their online store is absolutely brilliant.)

Other weekend highlights: I did the one bit of work that I had to do and sent back my AUTH48 revisions for USEPRO. I still need to update my web site, but hopefully we'll have an RFC soon. I also wrote two reviews and posted several, which gets me back down to three awaiting writing again. Much more comfortable than seven, where I was a few weeks ago. And I baked bread, made peanut butter cups, and made soup tonight with fresh spinach and tons of vegetables, which is rather better than I've been doing with food lately.

This will be a bit of a weird abbreviated week, not only due to the holiday but also the upcoming conference. A very good friend is coming for the conference, arriving Saturday and leaving a week from Sunday, so I expect the first week of June to be extremely busy. Except for when I can get on during the conference, I doubt I'll be on-line much at all.