CALC summit went without a hitch. The digital poster session went well, there is a lot of interest in the work Chris and I are doing with the Heritirx web crawler and DSpace.
When we got back from Denver Friday night, I went to a local Chinese restaurant for take-out dinner. While I was waiting for dinner, I ordered their specialty drink, a tropic themed Maui, Maui, that got me good and drunk for the walk home to my cabin. (I had walked to the restaurant) The next morning I had a medium hang-over but went away by noon. I went to City Market for groceries and purchased a big bag of ripe cherries and some other food.
I also stopped at Wal-Mart and bought a $10 game, Grand Theft Auto San Andres. I started playing and I while my arcade skills are not the best, I find this game's layered alternate reality California and game play one of the best I have played in a while. The keynote speaker at CALC was Alice Robinson, a post-Doc in media studies at MIT specializing in games and gaming. I have already heard much of what she said but I refused to raise my hand when she asked the audience if anyone is a gamer or if they have played games in the past. She didn't addressed a key concern I have with these large gaming communities such as WOW and the like, is that my avatar, character or whatever is not portable to other gaming platforms or systems. I want to be able to build a character and then allow this agent to play on other systems. IBM and Second Life are working on specification for portability between virtual worlds and I wonder if gaming companies could look at alternative revenue streams by licensing their characters for such intra-world gaming. GTA is a great game though and I will continue to play it through the next week or so. The GTA world is a joy to explore and I expect this type of linear/non-linear exploration game will continue to mature and expand.
Saturday night Jarrett called. He and Lance (a mutual friend) were driving up to fish Blue Mesa and I told him I would them around 7am. I woke up late and rushed out. I couldn't find their car initially and in my rush I forgot a few things including my camera. Blue Mesa Reservoir was beautiful, still low, but after hiking down the lake at a couple of places, I found Jarrett and Lance. Lance had already caught a lake trout and a salmon. Jarrett had just caught his own trout when I arrived. I started fishing with salmon eggs and after about an hour, caught my own rainbow trout. Later in the day, we moved to different section of the lake. I hooked a trout on a green Panther Martin, but about five feet from the shore, the fish spit out the hook and got away. Jarrett and Lance left around 3 pm and I drove home and baked the rainbow for dinner. I also got a deep red sunburn on my arms and neck.
On Monday, I did some cleaning around the cabin, played GTA, and ate those cherries I mentioned earlier. Bad mistake. Last night I was up every few minutes with trips to the bathroom. I am tired this morning and likely a little dehydrated. I was planning on riding my bike to work (I picked it up on Saturday) but now I plan on going tomorrow.
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