So this quarter has been…interesting…if nothing else.  Certainly the busiest quarter I’ve had in a long, long time.  And that’s saying something, considering I’m rocking a schedule sans-MSE this quarter.  I suppose I’d better try to break down recently goings here in one giant chunk, because infrequent and massive content dumps seem to be my status quo.  So it begins…

In the interest of readability, I think I’ll attempt to organize this somewhat to avoid a narrative-style rambling that would likely go on for pages.

Class #1:  HCDE 411 – Visual Communication
This class is really solid.  I’ve learned a ton about what we see, how we see, and why we see what we see.  See?  To be honest, the only real weak point of this class is the textbook: “Basic Vision: An Introduction to Visual Perception”.  It’s not bad necessarily, but it tries way too hard to be witty to the point of tackiness.  I’d honestly rather read a really dry but concise explanation than a book full of bad puns and cartoons.  But that’s just me…

The quarter-long project in this class is great, too.  We’re designing an informational poster targeted at students living in the dorms talking about how to prevent the spread of Swine Flu (hey, remember when that was relevant!?!).  Expect to see the final product here at the end of the quarter.  Err…not here as in here.  Here as in my portfolio, and probably linked in a new post.  Whatever.

Class #2:  HCDE 419 – Concepts in HCI
Ah, remember good ol’ 411?  Seems like so many lines ago now.  It was good.  This class?  Not so much.  It’s kinda terrible.  I guess that’s not really a fair statement, though.  The class itself is good.  I’m learning a ton about ethnography, fieldwork, use scenarios, etc., and I actually have enjoyed the barrage of readings over the first two thirds of the quarter.  The problem comes from the class’ quarter-long group project (that’s right, this one has one too!).

My groupmates and I were tasked with working on an aspect of an already existing project from the CSE department called the “MDPhone.”  As envisioned, it would be a program that runs on a smartphone (android-based at first) and can take input from medical device peripherals.  Want to take someone’s blood pressure?  Plug a special MDPhone blood pressure cuff peripheral in.  Want to measure someone’s heart rate?  Hook up a stethoscope and bam.  If you’re having trouble picturing it, just think *tricorder with less snazzy sound effects that you can’t just magically wave over someone*.  All sounds well and good, right?  It is, to an extent.  There’s just one small problem.  Project’s cursed as shit.  I’m not talking slightly problematic cursed.  I’m talkin’ this project is clearly not meant to be and every force of man and nature is conspiring against it to ensure its continued failure cursed.

Let me elaborate.  First of all, I wasn’t even supposed to be on this project (I have a Clerks moment at least once a week, and no, not one that involves a dead dude).  It was the last item on my preferred project list.  But that’s just bad luck more than evidence of a curse.  Then, the night before my group’s first presentation, we find out that one of our group members dropped the class.  That was fun.  Then, about 36 hours before the group’s first progress meeting with the instructors, another group member got hit by a stolen car and wound up out of commission for a few weeks.  But there’s more…a couple days before our second presentation, group member #3 came down with some nasty stomach virus.  Finally, and this is more of a cumulative bit of evidence, all but one of our efforts at carrying out fieldwork (which is…like…something like half our grade) were complete and utter failures.  No one would answer our calls, no one would respond to our e-mails, no one would meet with us.  Even one of the instructor’s friends who was one of our contacts wait until the absolute last minute to give us what we needed.

Fortunately, the instructors know what’s going on, and they aren’t really blaming us for the sad-ass state of our project.  By the end of the quarter, we’ll deliver *something*, but it sure isn’t going in my portfolio.  That’s fine, though.  At this point, all I’m worried about is getting out of this class in one piece with a decent grade.  Any after that is just icing on the tricorder.

Class #3:  HCDE 437 – Web Design & Publishing
This one’s really just a matter of going through the motions.  I’ve done so much web work over the years there’s not much left to learn, aside from stuff on the technical end, and this class is all theory.  I did end up having to give an impromptu lecture about assistive technology, though, which was…well…random.  Not much else to say about 437.

Research
This has been a super-productive quarter for research.  Last quarter was just a lot of e-mail-tag and scheduling (for me), but this quarter we got to do some actual data analysis.  In the end, we put out two solid papers.  The first, a shorter one, was accepted to HRI 2010 and is being presented by Sarah on Tuesday at the conference’s HRI and the Arts workshop.  The second one was more in-depth, and we’re still waiting to hear back whether it’s going to be accepted to CogSci 2010.  Fingers crossed…

Now, we’re starting to work on the next HRCL research offensive, which involves making Bucky look a bit more like a cool robot and a bit less like a monitor sitting on a ladder (sorry Bucky).  Exactly what that’s going to involve remains to be seen.  I put out a nice proof of concept test showing that we can produce fairly high-quality animated facial avatars lip-synced to dialogue using Steam, so it looks like that’s definitely going to be what we do for him from the neck up moving forward.  ‘Course, we can’t very well use Barney or Alyx, so we’ll need a custom model.  That’s a ways down the to do list, though.

In late October, Alexander Stern filed a lawsuit in the California Central District Court (case # 2:2009cv07710) against the “Sony Corporation of America et al.” — to be more precise, though, his target was Sony Online Entertainment.  You see, Alexander is blind.  He’s claiming that Sony’s games, specifically Everquest 2, are in direct violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) because they discriminate against the visually impaired in the sense that you can’t play them if you can’t see.  Furthermore, the lawsuit makes the claim that Sony is directly costing Stern money.  Sony offers an official action service through which players can exchange in-game stuff for real money in a sort of player-run micro-transaction economy.  Since this service exists, Alexander basically argues that farming for items in EQ2 would, if not for the fact that blind people can’t play EQ2, be a perfectly viable income stream to him.  If you follow that train of logic, it implies that Sony is, through inaction, preventing him from making a living.  Solution?  He thinks Sony should pay him a big ol’ bucket of cash as “lost wages” for lack of a more descriptive term.

Across the ‘net, most everyone seems to be taking the exact same position on this: the lawsuit is frivolous and will be promptly thrown out.  And while I concede that this particular lawsuit will most likely get the boot before it moves too far in the courts, I think that most people are echoing this position/opinion for the wrong reasons.  Most are saying that it’s simply ridiculous to apply the ADA to video games.  I think the real reason it’s going to hit a judicial roadblock, though, is its fairly transparent goal of an easy payday.  Not to go all reductio ad absurdum, but this seems like suing some firearms manufacture for not building in an auditory cue when the gun is trained on a potential target because, hey, if it weren’t for their refusal to comply, competitive big game hunting would be a practical career choice for the blind.

Once you push past that, though, I believe it can be argued that the basis of the lawsuit in the application of the ADA to games is potentially sound.  Not necessarily a good idea and course of action, mind you, but sound nonetheless.

While the ADA does not yet have explicit compliance requirements in place for video games (i.e. explicit naming of electronic entertainment as the target), I think it could potentially be argued that the existing form of the ADA coupled with related rulings and opinions contain implicit coverage of such games.  You see, when most people think of the ADA, they say “oh, that’s the law that says that public buildings need to be handicapped accessible.”  This simplification isn’t wrong per se; to the contrary, Titles II and III of the ADA are dedicated to precisely that sentiment (as well as covering other public facets, such as public transportation).

When the issue of accessibility in video games is discussed, people turn to this simplified assumption and use it to argue that video games aren’t “public” and therefore don’t need to be accessible to the disabled.  One can see how this position could be reached, too: video games are initially developed and released by privately owned companies, and upon their release are generally only made available to a select subset of the population (i.e. people that buy them).  This is where game developers generally stand when forced to give a concrete stance on the issue of practicing accessible design.  They’ll make some limited efforts to accommodate when it suits them, but they feel they’re legally in the clear.

There’s only one problem with that concept of the ADA: it’s limited and outdated.  The first three acts of the ADA originate from a time when the information age was in its infancy.  When they were passed, the so-called “public space” was strictly that: physical, public locations.  The Internet had not yet become the dominant interaction and communication space that it is today.  Within a few short years, though, that had all begun to change.  The first judicial acknowledgment of this was in the early 90s when the ADA was amended with Title IV requiring that the telecommunications industry take reasonable steps to make their services accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing.  Once the telephone was brought into the defined public space, it was only a matter of time before other forms of computerized communication were brought into the fold as well.

This position was further built on in 1996 when the Department of Justice issued a ruling that the Internet itself fell within the purview of the ADA and that its accessibility standards could be extended to the design of webpages.  In a September 1996 letter to Sen. Tom Harkin summarizing the ADA’s relevancy to website accessibility, Assistant Attorney General Deval Patrick stated the following:

Covered entities under the ADA are required to provide effective communication, regardless of whether they generally communicate through print media, audio media, or computerized media such as the Internet. Covered entities that use the Internet for communications regarding their programs, goods, or services must be prepared to offer those communications through accessible means as well.

As one can imagine, this was really more symbolic than a firm declaration demanding immediate cooperation.  While government websites were quickly retrofitted to comply, the rest of the net (even back then) was far too large  and ungoverned for this requirement to be enforced to any practical degree.  Only in situations where the time and money is invested to actively pursue forcing a major website to comply does the issue attract legal attention.  An example of this was the landmark suit versus Target, finally settled in 2008, which ultimately forced Target to completely redesign their online presence from the ground up to be more accessible.

Now, we’re at a point where — at least “officially” — the online presences of covered entities are required to effectively communicate with their customers.  If the customer may be blind, then it’s up to the entity to provide reasonable accommodation (such as screen-reader compatibility).  What’s a covered entity, you ask?  Well…um…it’s…  Yeah, there’s no way I’m getting into that here.  Suffice it to say that Sony is most definitely an entity of the covered variety.

Here’s where I think game developers such as Sony could potentially find themselves forced to drastically improve accessibility, *IF* a lawsuit was properly structured so as to follow this logic.  Sony Online Entertainment “generally communicates” via “computerized media” — particularly in the case of their MMOs, where the product/service itself can be identified as the method of communication with the user.  By reasonable extension of Assistant Atty. Gen. Patrick’s statement, Sony must be prepared to, at the very least, provide an alternative accessible method of said communication to those users who require it.  But providing a true, complete alternative would not be practical.  It would essentially mean creating an entirely new build of each game from the ground up capable of meeting the needs of each potential user subset.  When an accommodation is deemed unreasonable, covered entities are not legally bound to make it, and therefore the above option would never be enforced.

There can be, however, major improvements to the accessibility of almost every existing and in-development video game whose implementations are by no means unreasonable.  In fact, most of these improvements can be made completely transparent; that is, they should be completely invisible to all users except those actually using them.  Examples of such improvements are the inclusion of subtitles, complete control customizability, the ability to run a game in a window and at any resolution, and the inclusion of APIs capable of outputting in-game text for reading by external applications.

So finally, I answer the question I initially posed in this entry’s title: do video games really need (in a legal sense) to be accessible to disabled gamers?  Quite simply, my answer is no.  I don’t believe there is any concrete grounds on which legal action can be taken to force a video game developer to make a title completely accessible to every foreseeable player.  It’s simply an unreasonable expectation from the disabled gaming community, and in my opinion rather unfair to demand.  However, if so inclined, the Department of Justice would have more than enough precedence to require developers to take reasonable steps to implement accessibility features which directly address the most common needs of disabled gamers.  But frankly, I’m not sure if this would be beneficial.  The paradigm is ever shifting, and more and more game developers are actively working with groups like the AbleGamers Foundation to implement the features that we disabled gamers want and need.  Outreach is the way to get what we need, not legal action.  At best, all a ruling confirming the ADA’s relevancy to video games would do is make developers bound to do what most of them already are.  At worst, frivolous suits like Alexander Stern’s create a massive negative stigma for the game accessibility movement, not only in the eyes of the game development community but also in the wider public.

Regardless, I’ll be actively following this case.  As obvious as the outcome may seem to most of us, the final resolution of this suit could potentially have a drastic impact on the game development industry.  Let’s just hope it doesn’t mark a major step backwards for the accessible gaming movement…

The idea was that, at the end of the evening, each of us mentees would have hopefully met with at least a few potential mentors with professional interests similar to our own.  After we got home, we had this little web form to fill out where we were to name three people that we would potentially like to have as our mentor.  By some mysterious system unbeknownst to us, these top three lists will be gathered and a mentor will be assigned to each of us.  Slightly disconcertingly for me, a significant portion of the potential mentors I talked to were purely tech writers or editors — fields I really don’t see myself going into into the long-term.  Fortunately, there were enough IxD / UX people I was able to talk to to have some solid possibilities.  No idea when I’ll find out to whom I’ve been assigned, though.  Hopefully sometime in the next month or so.

Carry on…

There is no better way to kick off a season than by finishing up the third of three consecutive games (by which point one would assume a team might be starting to fatigue) with a 111-55 dominant demonstration of kickassery.  Seriously, by the end of the game, I was actually starting to feel bad for Portland State’s head coach.  Undoubtedly not the way he intended to start his first season at the helm.  That said, there was a certain satisfaction in seeing Phil Nelson start relatively strong before ultimately proving completely ineffectual when it really counted.  Nelson began his college career as a Huskey, but transferred to Portland State where he felt that he wasn’t getting enough playing time.  It was clear that he really had a chip on his shoulder last night and wanted to go crazy on the court to show us what we lost.  Instead, he just came off as whiny & pouty.

I just can’t wait to see what Isaiah & Q do as we edge closer to Pac-10 play.  Frankly, if they both perform like they did this weekend, I really doubt there’s going to be another team in the conference that can shut them down on the offensive end.

Fast forward five years.  It’s Friday the 13th, a freak hail storm is in full swing north of Seattle, and I’m on my way to see a band I never thought I’d have the opportunity to catch live.Now, I’m not generally one to buy into the whole bad luck on Friday the 13th mythos.  Quite to the contrary, Friday the 13th if anything tends to be better than average for me usually.  Yesterday, though, I was about ready to take a different position.  The weather had been decent all day in my neck of the woods, but less than an hour before we were going to hit the road Seattle-bound, garbanzo beans of ice started coming down at a respectable rate.  We ended up bailing out a bit early, because arriving late simply wasn’t an option.  Arriving on time wasn’t even an option, because there was a major ticketing SNAFU that needed resolving before we could get into the theater.

Fortunately, unlike my previous concert experience, this wasn’t my first time at this venue.  I’d been to The Paramount Theatre back in August to see The Dead Weather, and it was a fairly positive experience.  The Paramount has a respectable quantity of wheelchair slots and accompanying seats down either side of the main floor which are marked as “ADA Reserved.”  They offer pretty decent reviews of the stage, considering that their tight up against the side walls of the venue, and can usually be easily claimed so long as you arrive early enough (the main level is all general admission).  For this show, however, the situation was slightly more complicated.

You see, we’d ordered tickets during a presale through the venue’s ticketing partner tickets.com.  While on the phone with the sales rep, it was explained that this presale only applied to the balcony seating.  Although the show was general admission, the balcony level and lower level were still distinguished.  As far as I remembered from my previous visit to The Paramount, though, the only access to the balcony was by stairs.  Call me crazy, but with this in mind it seemed as though tickets.com was holding a presale which directly discriminated against the disabled.  The rep was very, very quick to vehemently deny this.  The tickets he was about to sell us on the balcony were specifically marked as wheelchair accessible, he explained.  We had nothing to worry about.  My dad — a bigger Pixies fan than even I, by the way — was suspicious of the situation, but figured we should go ahead and jump on the tickets before they sold out.

Well, the tickets.com rep’s blatant lie took all of about 10 minutes to unravel after we’d placed the order.  A quick call to the venue confirmed that there was, in fact, no elevator or ramp access to the balcony and therefore there was no such thing as a “wheelchair accessible balcony seat.”  Don’t you just love knowledgeable salespeople?  We quickly called back the ticket place and confronted them.  With a slight tinge of disinterest in their voice, the new rep said that our previous order had already been put into the system and could not be altered.  We could cancel it and try again, but that would risk losing a chance at any tickets if they had sold out since our previous call and cost an additional service charge.  Quite simply, the rep verbally washed their hands of any involvement and said that we just needed to take it up with the box office on the day of the event and let them handle switching us to main floor tickets.

So that’s precisely what we did.  Having survived the impromptu blizzard on the freeway and made it down to Seattle with plenty of time to spare, we got over to the venue’s box office about 20 minutes before doors opened.  Yet the awesome luck of Friday the 13th attempted to continue.  Upon explaining the situation to the dingbat behind the window at the box office, we were fucking lectured for waiting until the day of the event to resolve the situation.  Yes, indeed.  How dare we do precisely what we were told was the proper procedure to straighten things up!?  “You see,” she said, “we’re sold out now.  That’s just the risk you take when you choose to wait until the last minute with this sort of thing.  If you’d like to wait between 20 and 30 minutes, we can see if we have any return tickets.  What I’ll try to do if I can is get one of you and the wheelchair (yes, I was not a valued customer — I was the wheelchair) down on the floor, and the other will have to stay up on the balcony.”

Needless to say, this is not what I considered an acceptable solution.  First of all, seriously?  Splitting up a group of ticket holders is your first idea?  Not acceptable.  Secondly, the entire argument that it was the sellout that caused the problem may no sense.  She claimed that the venue had a very limited quantity of wheelchair seating.  Now, this is true, but even those seats are technically general admission.  They aren’t sold any differently than tickets that give you the right to stand in the pit, so the main level could theoretically be completely sold out without a single wheelchair user occupying one of those spots.  Clearly, this lady didn’t really have a flying clue what she was spouting off about.  While I don’t know for sure, something tells me that the people in the box office were actually employees of tickets.com.  It certainly would have explained her incompetence.

Seeing that arguing wasn’t really going to be a productive path, we took the one choice she gave us and entered the venue with our balcony tickets to wait in the lobby for a half hour at which point she may or may not be able to do anything for us.  One of the venue staff (who seemed like he was somewhat in charge) let us through the doors a few minutes early so we could get out of the cold.  Perhaps the not yet melted hailstones on my lap were what caught his attention?  Fortunately, he asked us where our seats were, which served as an opportunity to explain the problem and that we were waiting for the numbskull to get back to us likely at some point during the opening act.  Confirming the theory that she was clueless, the guy just shook his head and said “no, no — we’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”  He disappeared somewhere for about five minutes, came back and got us, and walked straight to one of the wheelchair sections.  Thus ended the potential disasters, and the night was awesome from there on out.

The Pixies put on a great show.  They sounded awesome, they played a much longer set than I anticipated (including all of Doolittle, which was the purpose of the tour as it was the 20th anniversary of the album’s release, numerous B-sides, and most of their other big hits), and most importantly they looked like they were having fun.  Visually, the show had a real surrealist thing going on in the content projected on the screen throughout the duration of the performance.  Aside from various bizarre shorts and visuals that accompanied various songs, their performance was preceded by a screening of a chopped up cut of the Un Chien Andalou, the avant-garde French silent film that supposedly inspired much of the album.  Having seen it before, I have to applaud whoever edited it for having managed to make one of the strangest films ever made even more bizarre and erratic.

My favorite moment, though, was their performance of the B-side version of “Wave of Mutilation.”  I’ve preferred it to the original ever since I first heard it in Southland Tales.  Considering they played the original version earlier in the show, it was quite a pleasant surprise to hear them bust it out.

The Paramount Theatre accessibility grade: B+

We got down about a half hour before the doors opened.  Since it was my first time at the venue, and their website is suspiciously vague about accessibility other than to simply say “accessible: yes”, I wanted to make sure we’d be the first ones in the door to scout the area and claim a good spot.  The problems started before we even parked, though.  You see, the Showbox SoDo has one handicap parking spot, and the knuckleheads in charge apparently thought that side of the building would be a perfect place for one of the acts to park their RV.  Sideways.  That little logistical morsel meant that rather than having to drive my chair about 20 feet through the rain, I had to drive it about three blocks.

Once I finally got to the front of the venue, fought through the zombielike masses, and arrived at the doors looking not unlike a drowned rat, things were starting to look up.  The staff was very friendly and helpful — just like they were at the other Showbox — and let us in about 10 minutes before everyone else.  Once inside, I realized that the layout was not really what one would consider well suited to wheelchair users.  The guy who let us in said I had two options…

Option one: I could park in the “wheelchair zone,” which is just a nice way of saying parking on the fucking ramp along the side of the venue that leads to the adjoined lounge/restaurant.  Seriously.  This is a rickety-ass wooden ramp, barely wide enough for two people to walk in opposite (but not a person on foot and a wheelchair), that starts in the corner of the building farthest from the stage and goes up to a little landing outside the door into the lounge.  There are also super steep stairs coming up to the same landing, for those sans-wheels.  Parking my chair there would have meant I would have been elevated enough to see over people to the stage, but I would have been really far away, jammed up against the wall with bad acoustics, and would have had to back down the entire ramp (yes, that’s right, the landing wasn’t even big enough to turn around) if another wheelchair showed up and wanted to get by me and into the lounge.  Frak that noise.

Option two: I could fend for myself on the main floor like some sort of small mammal amongst the tall grasses of the plains.  As I was feeling stupidly optimistic, I went with this option.  Ideally, I could have just taken the opportunity to dig in my heels (err… rear wheels?) right up against the stage, ensuring nothing could come between me and a clear view of the Johns.  TMBG fans don’t strike me as a particularly rowdy bunch, even when compounds of questionable legality are factored in, so I wasn’t really concerned about such positioning resulting in death by mosh pit.  Since I was with my folks, though, and they had no intention of standing for upwards of four hours, this wasn’t really an option.  Instead, we staked a claim to two chairs and an open space directly in front of the mixing station.

At first, it seemed great.  I was dead center, perfectly aligned between all of the speakers for perfect acoustics.  Even as people started to flood into the venue, I could see the stage.  It was elevated enough that I had a decent view over the top of the people that were accumulating up at the front.  As time progressed, though, the situation went south.  By the time the opening act started playing, my view of the stage was completely obscured by a wall of human flesh in front of me.  People were actually foregoing openings slightly to either side of me to stand directly in front of me as if completely oblivious to the fact that there was a large piece of heavy machinery behind them.  At that point, I couldn’t have even made a break for the weaksauce “wheelchair zone” even if I had wanted to.  The place was sold out, and they don’t exactly leave breathing room.  Despite the fact that the wall of people had drifted back so far that it was directly butted up against our position, everyone still decided that the ideal way to cross from one side of the venue (where the bar was) to the other was to walk along the front edge of the barricades surrounding the mixing station and literally step over me.  Before the opening act was done, I had a nice endorphin & adrenaline cocktail going thanks to a severely twisted ankle.

Then, though, everything changed.  Not because the pulsing ache in my ankle stopped (though it did, eventually…), not because the sea of humanity parted before me and I was finally able to see the stage (that never happened), and most certainly not because the opening act suddenly stopped sucking.  Quite to the contrary, things started looking up when they left the stage and I realized I was finally going to see…or just hear, technically…one of my favorite bands of all time.  TMBG stepped up, and put on an epic performance.

The show itself had too much going on to bother attempting to recap.  Suffice it say that it lasted well over two hours and included the entirety of Flood, some other old stuff, some new stuff, and back-to-back performances of the original Why Does the Sun Shine? and its new revised version.  Oh, and sock puppets.  Can’t forget the sock puppets.  It was one of those concerts where you don’t really realize that you’ve been grinning the whole time until you pick up on the fact that your cheeks hurt afterwards.

So in the end, it was again both epic and terrible, yet the degree of the former far outshined the latter.  While I was able to enjoy myself despite the pathetic “accommodations,” the venue certainly left a negative impression on me.  It’ll take a major, major show to motivate me to go back there again.

Showbox SoDo accessibility grade: C-

I feel like it has a ton of promise as a versatile alternate input system for the mobility impaired, but the only ones who seem to be tapping that promise at the moment are attempting to cash it in for everything it’s worth.  Case in point: someone is selling a control "package" that supposedly will allow disabled individuals to control their computers via head tracking for roughly $300.  What does this package actually include, though?  A baseball cap with a velcro strap on the brim to attach your own Wiimote (that’s right, you need to provide your own…), a small applet that presumably uses freely available libraries to translate Wiimote motion to cursor control, and a little "dwell to click" program.  Sorry, but I need to call shenanigans on the ridiculousness of that.

So, I figure this would be a good longish-term project.  If I can develop some small programs that translate various bits of Wiimote functionality into specialized input — something like controlling the cursor’s y-axis with the camera for improving access to FPSs — that would be something that a lot of people would be able to take advantage of.  Without taking advantage of them.

I’m not exactly sure where to start, or when I will for that matter, but I’m going to try to keep a detailed account of my progress here.  Stay tuned.

I really haven’t had time to frak with any of the customization options yet, so it’s straight out-of-the-box for now.  Hopefully, with moderate tweaking at some point in the next week or so, I can make this mesh well with the rest of my site.  As for actually, y’know, blogging…I anticipate I’ll be considerably more prolific now that I’m not using a service of questionable stability.

I’m going to be trekking down to campus momentarily for two different research group meetings.  Didn’t make it in at all on Wednesday on suspicion of coming down with Swine Flu.  Considering I’m still kicking at this point, it probably wasn’t, but I’m laying relatively low for the remainder of the weekend to ensure I’m fully functional by Monday.  Sleep, some moderate MSE reading, and moving forward with the custom CMS I’m building for the HRCL website are in my future.  And possibly cookies…

I wonder if Paul Allen is going to try to get some of the big ticket items, like the oil painting of the First Cylon War or the full size Viper Mk. II, for the museum here in Seattle.  I certainly hope so, because it’s SERIOUSLY lacking BSG stuff.  Right now, all they have is one of the Cylon suits from the original series.