The furmeet this weekend rocked, so much fun

There were a few snags, though, like the fact that I was concentrating so hard on finding lodging (many thanks to lurene for taking us in at the last minute) that I forgot to figure out the other aspects of the trip, like where things were being held. We managed to get things sorted out, but we made more U-turns than I can count. Also, Joe was unable to make it, leaving only two Harrisonburg attendees instead of three.

The Land Rover did exceptionally well, the previous owner, while being a rich dumbass with more money than good sense, did sound-proof almost every interior panel in the vehicle, giving it a much quieter highway ride than any other vehicle I’ve driven. It still needs some work, but I’m planning to have it done by the next furmeet.

Friday, we didn’t do much except watch movies at Lurene’s house. We saw Life of Brian, which was pure crap in my opinion (I’ve never been a Monty Python fan), and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was…interesting. The movie was well-made as far as the drug scenes and simulations, and the actors were decent, but the storyline itself was crap.

Saturday, I had gotten almost no sleep the night before, and my back was aching from sleeping on the floor, but I was still ready to go do stuff. Kjatar and I were the only ones who wanted to go to the zoo, and neither of us were very familiar with driving downtown DC (I planned in advance to take loads of furs around with me), so it took almost two hours to get from McLean to the zoo, and I got honked at a lot. Upon arriving, we realized another hurdle: We had no clue who would be there, and had no one’s cell number. Thankfully, we stumbled across a few people with tails fairly quickly, so we weren’t lost for long. Had lots of fun squicking the zoo-goers, especially the Amish family reunion [evil grin]. And, of course, we saw lots of cool animals, including big cats and a Mexican wuffy! Yay!

After the zoo, I took a group out to eat at Fuddruckers in the Rover, and found out that even though that truck seats seven, when it comes to people my size or larger, the effective capacity is closer to five. Thankfully, most of the people I’m planning to bring to Megaplex in it are relatively small, so it shouldn’t be a problem. We then went to Dave & Buster’s for arcade-ness, which went on FOREVER! We must have been there four hours, it was insane. Played some good games though, and I got to watch Kjatar do some karate-stuff in the middle of the mall :). There was also a 2AM McDonalds run in the Rover, and then to bed we went. I brought in my dying air mattress this time, and slept a bit better, though my back still hurt in the morning.

Sunday, we all went to the picnic, including Lurene’s friend George, who’s not a fur. The picnic was lots of fun, there were two kid’s birthday parties going on at the same time in the same general area. The kids were hilarious, they flocked to the fursuiters (though Sharky almost got pushed down by them), and a couple parents brought their young kids over to say hi (one even named my wolf plushie for me), and one lady commented “I think it’s so cool to see adults playing with stuffed animals!”. It rocked

The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful, I got to meet lots of cool people, like Huskee, Quentin, Panda Guy, Hiromi, Freaky Lynx, and lots of others whose names I can’t remember. Overall, a fun trip, and worth a return journey next year

I LOVE MY TRUCK!

I picked up the Land Rover on Tuesday morning, finished signing the papers, and drove it to work. This truck ROCKS! I took it out on an onsite call today (had to test someone for wireless internet access), and I’m glad I had this vehicle because five miles of his street was unpaved, and I basically had to mudbog to get to his house. Plus, due to power requirements of the equipment, I was working out of the tailgate of the truck, and I had to park in the guy’s yard to get to the spot facing the peak where the towers are mounted (Massanutten). It was pretty cool to just open the tailgate, make a few connections, and start taking readings, if I were to use the Integra for that I’d have to go in the person’s house to test, and I’d end up spending more time loading and unloading equipment than actually taking antenna readings.

While I was at work I read through the owner’s manual twice, which was oddly entertaining. Learned some interesting things, like the fact that there’s almost a 10-pound difference in front and rear tire pressure, and “Land Rover recommends [expensive-as-fuck] petrol with an octane rating of 90-92 for use in your Discovery”. Also, not only does this truck have full-time 4WD with 4-HI and 4-LO on the transfer case, but it also has an option to lock the center differential, giving solid-axle performance, like older 4WD systems. Haven’t had the opportunity to play with that yet, since I’m not supposed to engage it on dry pavement, but I’ll be testing its off-roading capabilities soon enough. For being stereotyped as the truck of the California yuppie, this thing has some serious balls!

One of the things I like most about this truck is its uniqueness. Being different is always a selling point for me, or at least something to catch my interest, and considering how rare the older LR Discoverys are, I’m very happy with it.

Ever have an experience that made you think you’re the victim of a sadistic higher-power? That pretty much sums up my week.
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I tend to bitch about money a lot. Current status: Broke.
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I GOT MY NEW MONITOR! After waiting a fucking MONTH for it, my 21″ Trinitron finally arrived. I’m still working on getting it adjusted, but it seems pretty nice. It’s older than the one I ordered, and not as high resolution as I anticipated (only 1800×1440 instead of 2048xwhatever), but considering how many problems I had to get this, I’m happy with it. It looks nice and gives lots more screen space than I had before (especially with dual monitors).

I updated Lupinia with my writings, too, check the forum for more info.

In just five days, I got all the necessary files transferred from Fusiontech, installed all this PHP stuff, and built a decent site for my new domain. Aside from a few broken links, things seem to be working wonderfully.

The new site, Lupinia, will take the place of my personal website, and it is now launched. I’ll be using the forum’s gallery for my images, and my writings will be linked from the main site. I’m still waiting on an artist friend of mine to get some characters drawn to insert into the site’s pages, but other than that, it’s good to go. I’ll be adding a couple new sections as I go, too, but that’ll come later. So, check it out and let me know what you think

Special thanks to trlovejoy for the photography used throughout the site.

I decided not to follow my usual political theme and content focused on me because that isn’t me anymore. I still love politics, and I enjoy a good protest, but I’m a bit tired of that being my only focus. The new content I plan to add to the site should outline that as I upload stories I’ve written, art I’ve made/commissioned, etc.

Also, I’ve moved all my images to this site, so any old links I posted may not work. If any of you see a link I’ve posted anywhere that points to fusiontechva.net, please click it lots of times. I’m using the error logs from that domain to fix links before it expires. Thanks

When I came up with the name Lupinia for my new website, and consequently the name for the setting of my furry stories (which didn’t have a name until now), I pretty much literally pulled it out of my ass. I’d never seen it before, it just sort of materialized in my brain while I was sleeping. Now that I’ve registered the domain and it’s starting to actually work, I decided to Google the word “Lupinia” to see if anyone else has it in use.

I found about ten pages of results, but nine of them were written in other languages, so I don’t count them. I found some guy’s photography page that hasn’t been updated in over two years (lupinia.com), a Cpanel-default page (lupinia.org), and a LiveJournal that’s updated twice a month at most (someone who actually goes by Lupinia as her character name), linking to a free-host website that’s more ad-laden than Tripod and Geocities combined, plus it hasn’t been updated in a LONG time from the looks of it.

Those were the only relevant hits I got, so I think I can keep going without hordes of angry fans attacking me

Something actually happened today! Woohoo!

I got a lot of running done in the early afternoon, deposited two paychecks, put gas in my car, etc. I was about to go get a disposable camera for my planned trip to Skyline Drive, but then I got a better idea and called trlovejoy, my uber-talented photographer friend. Much to my suprise, he said he could come up with me, and he could bring his digital camera! So, off we went, and after grabbing a late lunch, I decided to let him drive my car (which is a rare honour, NO ONE drives my car ) up the mountain. He’s a much more careful driver than me :-P. I bought a one-year pass to Shenandoah National Park, which is actually more like a 13-month pass since it expires 9-30-2005. We headed south first, towards Loft Mountain, where I spent much of my childhood camping, and stopped at almost every overlook along the way, taking oodles of pictures. I need to take Skippy up there

We got to Loft Mountain, and I got some of the more specific shots I wanted for my Lupinia website project. On the way back, I got my keys and took over driving, and I was going rather fast (park speed limit is 35, I kept about 50). Saw a couple rangers go by, but none of them acted like they wanted to stop me. We went about 35 miles north of Loft Mountain trying to find the tunnel near Mary’s Rocks, but we ran short on time and couldn’t get up to it. We got a couple shots of Big Meadows on a whim, and headed for home. A few miles down the road, a ranger heading the opposite direction finally blue-lighted me and pulled me over. He gave me a written warning, but thankfully no ticket. I have the worst luck with cops on these private mountain roads, which is another reason why I prefer the western mountains. Those cops (if there are any) don’t give a damn how fast you’re going, as long as you’re in control of your vehicle. TRL had to be back by 8 to get to work, and I dropped him off there at 7:58.

Speaking of Lupinia, my domain is finally starting to get to DNS servers! Yay! I’ll give it ’til the middle of this week before emailing all the Fusiontech customers I’ll be hosting. The main site for the domain will hopefully be finished this week, I can’t wait to unveil it

Well, I decided to do something quite different for my Lupinia website, and for that, I need some rather specific photos of certain spots on Skyline Drive that Google didn’t find for me. So, since tomorrow is my day off, I’ll be picking up a disposable camera and attempting to take good pictures with it on the east mountain of the Shenandoah Valley (the west mountain is free to access, and closer, and generally prettier, but the east mountain is the one I’m most familiar with, and I’ll probably be pressed for time, so I want to know what I’m looking for).

I need a decent digital camera :-\

For those who didn’t hear about this already, Fusiontech Consulting (my hosting provider) went out of business recently. Since it was run by close friends of mine, and I was using 90% of their system resources, they offered to turn control of the domain over to me.

I had planned to keep fusiontechva.net up and running as long as possible, mostly because I hate changing email addresses and stuff, but the account is up for renewal in mid October, and the cost of renewing the domain and hosting account for another year: $160. Now, in case it’s not obvious, I’m a very cheap wolf, and $160 is a lot to spend on a domain for a company that doesn’t exist anymore. So, I looked at the homepage for iPowerWeb (the hosting provider for Fusiontech), and once again, they lowered their prices while raising services (1,000mb disk space, 500 email accounts). Still, the price was still higher for renewal than for a whole new account, so I bought a new account

The new domain is Lupinia.us, an idea that came to me in a dream last night, and I will be transferring all the current Fusiontech customers (since most of ‘em are people I referred anyway) to Lupinia directories this month, and then Fusiontechva.net will be allowed to fade into oblivion. This wasn’t my desired course of action originally, but this is a domain I’ll actually want to keep, with the same reliability I’m used to.

I’ll be giving out my new email address as soon as they activate my account.