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Sat in on some cellular biologists' weekly(?) lunch to show off my HTS-viewing Web application. Refinement of earlier observation: even when I have an idea of what the biologists want, I don't have an instinct of what they'd find important. I can show them some pretty sorting methods I made, only to discover that, yes, they think that's nice and all, but what they really want is a button that turns everything purple, or something similarly trivial from my point of view... but which is the one thing their current software can't do. Have been adding "one thing"s of this type for the last few days, as they've so far been all easy and fairly elegant operations, and thus making happy biologists. Good work if you can get it.

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Last week, after telling a mentor about volity.org, I received a letter from one Dan Brian, inventor of the Glass Bead Game Network, an Internet-based game based on the Hermann Hesse novel, and (it seems) still in a conceptual state. I'd link to it or him, but he seems to have yanked down his whole website sometime in the last week, redirecting everything to a blank login page. However, he said he was starting a new business, so who knows. I accepted his offer to send me a DVD, so we'll see what happens.

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Has anyone read The Glass Bead Game? I first heard of it by finding a tattered cover of an old paperback edition, left behind on a table at Your Move Games a couple of years ago. I held onto it for a while because it was intriguing, and furthermore seemed to me the perfect size and attitude for an Icehouse stashpad, even though I don't play Icehouse. I have long since lost it, unfortunately.

For all that, I haven't read it yet, but am now thinking that I might like to.

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Weekend RPG highlight: my character's identifying a Silmaril by poking it with salted snackmeats. Nod to the GMs for describing this moment exactly as they should have.

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Visiting Waterville this weekend. To Ricky, I shall deliver the oscilloscope I got off eBay last week. He needs it for his shortwave radio hobby. I wouldn't know why or how, but look forward to seeing him set it up, and hope it works for him.

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Scored a (legal!) copy of Illustrator from work, have been farting around with it at night. Have a pretty good idea how those mysterious path tools work now, helped by my recent study of SVG. That's nice; I like when things connect like that. However, I'm under the impression that it takes a lot of practice before anchor-point and direction-line manipulation feels anything other than clumsy, at least to a dabbler such as I.

Haven't really created anything worth sharing (or even really saving to disk) yet. Too goal-oriented in my doodling (as with my scribbling and my hacking); even when I fancied myself a would-be comics professional, I had sketchbooks but didn't diligently fill them up for practice and pastime; I more used them for rough drafts. So, I have some comics ideas I might apply this to... we'll see. Not anything soon.