Weekend Report

It's late, I know, so sue me. The highlight of the weekend happened during (and after) NOVA. I was visiting with Alan at the meeting when Tom arrived. But he had some folks in tow. With him were Eric, Max and Brian, whom I'd met at Anime Expo 2001. These folks are good friends of Tom, and involved in running Sakura Con up in Washington.

Since Max worked at Sakura Con, she was able to 'network' the convention organizers at Expo and get us into some events I wanted to attend that are hard to get tickets for. But that's not why I like her .

Max is a very energetic, cheerful and funny young woman, and totally extroverted. I'm an introvert, but respond well to friendly (but not bubbly, bouncy or cheerleaderly) extroverts. So we hit it off. Her husband Brian is more of a quiet sort, like me when I'm among people I don't know well, so I liked him even if I didn't get as verbal with him. Anyway, they're a cool couple.

Eric was working for some anime company at the time (Gainax?) and is a young 'hip' dude with a great sense of humor. We had dinner with him while we were there and he told a lot of goofy anecdotes.

So anyway, there they were at NOVA! And Max and Brian had brought the little addition to their family, a 3 month-old boy. Wow. So we talked for awhile and then they headed out with Tom to fix dinner.

After NOVA, Alan and John and I headed over to Tom's place, and we all visited. It was great seeing these folks again, and I realized I'd actually missed them, after only getting to know them for four days at a convention! Brian is still the quiet sort, but I did notice a glint in his eye a few times, so maybe he's opening up a bit around me.

So that was the highlight of the weekend. Jean and I spent some time on math, me tutoring her on logarithms, trying my best to get out of my rut and be a better teacher, but I'm not really good at that, so I tend to say the same things over and over. Still, Jean is getting better, perhaps in spite of me. We're going to do more during the week after I return home from work nights.

Sunday we went to Borders for a break from chores and study (and to get Kelly out of the house). I went specifically looking for two things:

• Photography (7th Edition) by Barbara London, et. al.


• Any album by Cake, who are compared to Camper Van Beethoven

I looked for the book, didn't see it, and tried their online help system. It said 'in stock', and gave a specific shelf. I checked, and no such luck.

I looked in their music section, found a slot labelled 'Cake', empty of course. So I tried to use their online music help system, but the 'a' key on the keyboard wouldn't work, and searches for 'Cke' turned up nothing.

I was able to look it up on a terminal at the front of the store, and it said 'in stock'. I've of course had clerks tell me that the inventory system is not able to tell if a book has been sold in the last few hours/days, but come on, how hard is it to link the database for your inventory system to your POS system? Fix it, folks.

So, long story short, I went to Fry's yesterday, and they had a Cake album, Prolonging the Magic. I bought it, and I'm listening to it now. I'll let you know what I think after a few listens.