natter natter natter SQUEE!

Is it just me, or does nothing happen when you go plug numbers into the Zokutou word counter these days?

Last year a World Wildlife Fund event called Earth Hour got Sydney, Australia to turn out many, if not all, of its lights for an hour at 8pm on March 31st, to “to deliver a message about the need for action on global warming.” This year, Earth Hour is going global on March 29, and invites everybody to turn off the lights for an hour at 8pm local time around the world.

I remember this happening last year, and I thought it was cool then and I think it’s cool now. I read some articles the next day where there were interviews with people who’d gone out to watch the city from a distance, and I remember one family who were kind of surprised that it didn’t all go dark at once, but that it faded out, and a little disappointed that it didn’t go entirely dark. Still, the site says, “…more than 2.2 million people participat[ed] in an effort that darkened icons such as the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and resulted in a ten per cent drop in energy usage – double what had been predicted.” That’s fairly awesome.

I’m going to be in Dublin being a GoH at P-Con on March 29th. Not sure I can convince the hotel to turn off the lights, but it’d be neat if Dublin was participating at all.

This is also neat: my…ok, I think he’s actually my second cousin or something, since he’s my cousin’s kid, but in the interests of generational tidiness, my nephew, Duke, got to meet Barack Obama yesterday and had his picture taken with him:

I think I may have just fallen one step further down the “not maintaining my own server email/photo gallery/etc, because this is a new computer and it hasn’t got the Gallery Remote software set up on it, and it was just so much easier to upload the photo to the Picasa gallery. Damn. I used to have geek cred, man. Stupid Picasa gallery wouldn’t do what I wanted, I ended up uploading it to my own gallery anyway. Pptltltlbht.

(…actually, downloading Picasa and waiting for it to drag in all the thousands of photos I’ve taken took a lot longer than it would’ve to download GR, but I need Picasa to resize the photo, so I’m kinda screwed. Watching it pull in all these photos, and realizing a lot of them are really pretty *good*, really surprises me. I don’t know why, but pretty much every time I look at my own photographic work I’m surprised at the quality.)

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! ZOMG! I just got two boxes full of HOUSE OF CARDS in the mail! ZOMG! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! I am SO HAPPY to have gotten this book! After last year’s absolutely hell revision process on it, and finishing not so very long ago at all in the scheme of things, having it *in my hands* is maybe the most exciting book I’ve held since URBAN SHAMAN came out. Wow, wow, wow, YAY!

Quick! Speak unto me the reason you, yes, *you*, should recieve a shiny new author-signed copy of HOUSE OF CARDS, to be sent out on Monday, and I’ll send a handful out to the best answers! :)