bierfaristo blogs

The holidays have come and rarely have seemed so welcome. It's peaceful and quiet. The children are sleeping. I'm drinking a cup of coffee with Lucy and all's well with the world.

It was a long and busy semester. In the end, I was pleased with what we accomplished, although the fact that the semester was one week shorter than usual really showed in the posters the students made. We really needed that last week to pull things together.

I was pleased to be able to video-tape the Zamenhof Symposium. I ended up going into the office on Sunday and spending the whole afternoon importing the video and creating files I could post online. I discovered that Youtube doesn't allow videos longer than 10 minutes, so I ended up posting them at Esperanto-USA. At one time, I would have worried about the bandwidth -- we used to have a barebones hosting account, but at some point, it got upgraded. Now there's little danger of running out of bandwidth, unless we get slashdotted.

I used the drupal video module to post the videos, but ran into problems. I ended up having to hack the code in a couple of places to get it to work. At some point, I'll need to go back and figure out why it didn't work right in the first places. In any event, I was able to get the videos up for people to see them.

I also contacted our local cable access station and asked if they would like to run the speeches. They would! In fact, the director has encouraged me to stop in to talk about running something more regularly related to Esperanto -- I'm not quite sure what that would be, but it sounds promising. I burned a DVD and, when I dropped it off, I also became a member of the station. I had been meaning to get more involved in the station for years, but just haven't found the time.

Charlie has been using it a lot for Student News and other Riverwolf Productions projects. He took a blender course there last year that enabled him to do some neat special effects for one of the movies. It's been great to see him so engaged with something that's not just a game.

We had a quiet Christmas at home. We opened presents early and then spent the day relaxing. The adults read and watched TV and the boys played video games. I took Penny for a walk and the boys got out after dark to try out their new hats and swords.

I had already gotten my hat from Richard as a gift and Lucy got me a bottle of Crystal Head vodka. I had remarked on it when we were walking by the liquor store and saw it in the window. I told Lucy that John Hodgman had mentioned how odd the English were for storing crystal in their crystal heads (when he was visiting the British Museum). Lucy thought "Aha!" and promptly went back and got one for me for Christmas. It's awesome!