Having fested at the Temple of Castor and Pollux for several days, I just got Rygel setup back at the Laser Fortress again (after some cleaning and slight rearrangements to the space he occupies).

I attempted to document the bulk of the fest (along with a few other things) earlier this morning before I went to bed. But alas, it was not to be. After I had finished around 85% of the content in my rambling, the power unceremoniously flickered out in Jaeger and Kiesa's entire building. I had made no intermediate saves, so my fest-documenting content was lost. After that, I fell asleep on their couch in the darkened apartment, and had several dreams that the power came back on before waking up at around noon, when I discovered that, in truth, power was indeed back again.

(If that is but a tiny taste of what it's like to live in Iraq right now, I truly empathize with our brethren and sistren over there -- Salam Pax, Riverbend, and the rest of them.)

Now, I contemplate attempting to reproduce what I already wrote earlier, and it just feels silly. Perhaps an abbreviated version will do.

The fest consisted of many activities for each of the participants. Some were programming-related, in keeping with the traditional festing ways. Others consisted of pure entertainment and amusement, which can be great fun as well. And sometimes, it consisted of just hanging out and talking.

After a couple of aborted ideas which didn't inspire me sufficiently, my big project for the fest ultimately ended up being the huge undertaking of converting the html in Bitscape's Lounge into 100% xhtml strict adherence. In the process, I also did away with my antiquated table-based layout scheme, and got rid of the mostly compliant but nasty soup of inline styles, redundant presentational markup, and a bunch of other crap.

However, I didn't get quite finished before the fest ended, so it's not out there for the public to see just yet. (Actually, if I did things right, there won't be much of anything to "see" at first glance, except for those with grossly non-compliant browsers. Everything will look pretty much the same to the casual visitor, until I get around to putting together a few css-based alternative "themes". Mwahahaha.)

Besides programming, we also played some kohan, watched some West Wing episodes, made an outing to see Paycheck, and Jaeger and Humblik had altogether too much fun with my GameCube.

Between driving back and forth between the festing venue and my sleeping location, I also spent some time playing with the midi device I was recently gifted with. (I contemplated bringing it to the fest, but space would have been an issue.)

The one-sentence version of the review/rant I wrote about it earlier: I think the engineers designing it made some rather dolt-headed decisions with the interface (too much focus on making useless parts super-easily accessible with a single button (i.e. the big yellow "demo song" and "dj" buttons), while more useful features that I need frequently are buried beneath piles of menus), but it's still lots of fun to play with, has a nice big sample library, and you can do some sweet stuff with instrument blends and whatnot.

I want to get it hooked up to my PC soon. I need to find an appropriate cable to wire to my sound card, and then figure out the kernel options, software, and all that goop. The goal will be to build a full-fledged amateur electronic music composition laboratory (albeit on my less than shoestring budget). Haha!

(Or, on less ambitious days, ham-handedly poke notes by ear along to random pop songs, Britney Spears's Outrageous being the most ultimate braindead favorate. D, D#, D. D, D#, D. D, D#, D. D, D#, D. Am I sensing a pattern here? Maybe throw in a measure contaning F# and G once in a while for flair.)

During the last afternoon today, Jaeger, Yanthor, and I played a hugely epic kohan game on Wild Triangle. I was the Ceyah player, and fended off their well coordinated attacks until finally going down in a blaze of glory. (I built and played well, but they did the best job of coordinating I've seen on that map to date, and didn't attack each other at all until I was completely wiped out.) It was a huge game. After Jaeger finally wiped me out, Yanthor beat Jaeger.

I just realized that the start timestamp on this rambling is probably going to be screwy, since I realized Rygel's clock seems to have drifted by several hours during the trip from the fest. Doh. Time to fix my ntp server settings.

Better now.

Yanthor and Humblik left at around 1700, and I depearted the Temple shortly after.

Now I think I'll fix this rambling's start time and retire for the night.