[Bitscape presses play to begin hearing freshly ripped tracks, which were quietly being written to Rygel's hard drive while the last rambling was entered.]

In the car, I opened the package from the post office, which had been plastered with many stamps and marks from a distant locality. Enclosed with the shrinkwrapped disc was a brief hand-written note from the artist. Nice touch.

(And to think that even after shipping and handling had been added, the total price was less than most mass market titles at Best Buy. Sweet.)

I drove through the rain to the still-not-moved-out Laser Fortress Apartment, jumped online, chatted with scott, made a couple server tweaks and looked up some info for him. Before leaving, I double checked the mailing list announcement to make sure I knew where I was going (not the Dark Horse), and headed out the door to meet for supper.

At Fiasco's Grill, I saw some of the usual people, plus Jaeger this time. This marked the first occassion in which I have seen Jaeger in attendance at a pre-BLUG dining event. Could this have been caused by the fact that he was scheduled to give the main talk, the change of venue, or just some random coincidence?

I ordered a burrito, along with a liquid substance known to be a leading cause of obesity, tooth decay, hypertension, and probably countless other unknown maladies. As a special bonus, this venue happened to feature unlimited refills free of charge!

I sat down at the table, where much rousing discussion was had, although as usual, I don't remember any specifics at the moment.

I noted that my burrito seemed to be taking an excessive amount of time. When the rush died down, and it appeared that the employees had gone on to other things, but still no burrito was visible on the counter, I wandered up and asked about it. I showed my receipt with the number, and the Mexican-American worker at the counter pointed to a table where nearly a dozen people we sitting, and said, "Those guys took it."

Great. For a moment, it looked like he was half-expecting me to go try to procure it from the thieving party myself (probably already half-eaten), and then said he would make me another one. Much better.

I ate my burrito with the BLUG people. As the meal neared a close, a couple of guys in the restaurant started playing live acoustic guitars (with amplification) and singing. They weren't bad, actually.

With rain still pouring, the BLUG crowd trekked over to the Fleming Law building.

There was no demo, but Jaeger was the featured speaker of the evening. He began his talk by showing a clip from a movie which included an onscreen appearance by yours truly, and proceeded to describe all sorts of hardware and software that can be used to capture, edit, convert, and burn video, audio, and dvd content under Linux.

There was a fair amount of audience participation at all stages of the presentation (a generally encouraged tradition at most BLUG talks). Even though I was already at least vaguely aware of most of the tools and techniques discussed, I found the presentation quite inspiring.

After the meeting, we hung out and talked both in and outside the bathroom. (Zan Lynx theorized that by flocking to the bathroom as a group, we might be starting to behave like members of the other gender.)

Chris, Zan Lynx, and I decided it was too early for things to be "over", so we each made our way over to Caffe Sole and drank hot beverages, joining a small group of other Hacking Society regulars who had not been present at BLUG, but were already well ensconced in their positions, as the official closing time of 22:00 came and went.

(The Caffe Sole employees seem to be almost ridiculously tolerent of the BLUG/Hacking Society crowd. We rearrange their tables and chairs into clusters to fit our designs, sit and talk well past closing time, and what do they do? Give us free leftover bagels and coffee. Go figure. (I guess it never hurts to follow the instructions on the bucket that says SPIT, with a helpful subheading about how the spelling is reversed.))

Eventually, after much fascinating discussion on speech recognition and many other related and unrelated topics, we departed the cafe and everyone headed off in different directions.

I went home, and began to write. Now, on to getting some real work done!