Artist Dining, Bloody Matlab, Important Gaming News :-)

I love my artist friends, I really do. Thus it was a great delight to recently join severina_242 with a small inner circle of friends at After The Tears. We were fed free vodkas all night as our table ensured that the entrance door remained closed. Knowing that said birthday girl is fond of such objects, I ponder whether she'd be able to create Homer's Snowglobe (hat-tip to talheres. Earlier this week also held a dinner with my dear artist friend of some twenty years, Khat Kerr who is a recent arrival from Perth and has just finished a long stint working as the stage manager for the Australian Opera. Also in attendence was comrade Jenne Perlstein, who has videos of her recent fiftieth birthday bash. Jenne is a doctor, social worker, a reform ger tzedek, practising witch and professional tarot reader (yes, they have a professional guild), an active member of ANTaR and has been President of the ALP's Aboriginal and Torres St. Islander Affairs policy committee, taking over from me at the end of 2002.

The bane of my working life over the past few days has been the installation of the parallel version of Matlab. It is only very recently that this proprietary software has even been allowed to be installed on clusters (pure licensing idiocy) and following a successful test early this year, work decided to purchase (at a very hefty fee) a distributed cluster server, 32 worker nodes and a parallel computing toolbox for a client. My esteemed systems manager (who incidentally has this excellent link to street photographers rights) and I battled our way through it to stupid o'clock yesterday and frankly it's (mentally) exhausting us. It's a damn shame, because the actual program itself is very useful for high end mathematics and engineering and, like many other examples of commercial software, its first incarnations were the results of public funding. After this experience I am tempted to become a GNU Octave evangelist as revenge.

In my last post I promised a major gaming announcement (no, not D&D 4th ed). I'm starting an free online rpg games journal, RPG Review. It'll be a modest publication aiming for 1,000 subscribers or so for its first issue, and has already found some interested parties including the delightful synabetic who is offering an "Ask Orcus" advice column. Most of the first issue has already been written. A extremely low-volume announce list for subscribers is also available; sign up! Tonight - most appropriately for Friday 13th - I'm doing a playtest of phasmaphobic's Cannibal Contagian and I've signed up to do the same with mtdesing's game Mythweaver. I must also take this opportunity to apologise to tzunder for the lateness of my comments on his labour of love, Gwenthia - they are coming, I swear!