Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Up to speed

Wow, it's been forever since I wrote a blog entry. Well that's what happens when you are A.) Finaling a massive project years in the making, B.) Organizing two meetups and assisting with a third, C.) Being a husband and father and D.) obsessed with following everyone ELSE's social media updates. But today I have been given an extra day of the weekend because my son's school has decided to give them all one more day of rest, and Karen and I split being home with him on those days (as best we can) throughout the year.

There's a lot to catch up on, so I'll just get right into it. First, I wanted to cover my "Your Day Without Shoes" event which took place this past Saturday. It was not a total failure on my part, but not for lack of trying. The only saving grace of the day was that two very gracious individuals came out to join me, and we turned my failure to put together any sort of organized event into something fun for us. The mistakes I made were good learning experiences, at any rate so if I decide to do this type of thing again, I will already know what not to do. ;-)

In the end, it was a lot of little things that went wrong, and taken together, they conspired to make the morning a complete disaster. Things like forgetting to charge my cell-phone the night before, or checking the schedule of the venue I chose. But perhaps the biggest blunder of the day was mis-remembering the layout of Greenlake park, and as a result scheduling an event for an area I was clearly unfamiliar with. As a result, it took a while our attendees to find each other, and when we did we had no really good place to be to hand out fliers and spread the word about barefooting. In the end, we went for an impromptu barefoot hike instead, and that was great fun! So I'm really thankful that I have some awesome and understanding folks in my meetup!

In more exciting news, I was recently given the chance to be featured in a story about barefoot hiking and being a barefooter, that will be published in the Seattle Times very soon! When it comes out, I'll come back on here to talk more about that experience - it was really super positive all around, and I'm excited to see the article, both in print and on the web. My feet are going to be more than just internet famous. :-)

I will also just lay this tidbit out there - I am trying to plant the seeds of something potentially really exciting, but this is something that only has a remote chance of happening so I won't say anything more on it right now. Wish me luck, though! :-D

I've been playing Diablo 3 and really, really enjoying it. With one small exception. My account was hacked last Friday, and all my gold taken. I guess I consider that a lesson learned for thinking "Oh I don't need an authenticator to play this game!" - if you're playing, and you haven't picked one up for your smartphone or tablet device, do it. Trust me. I've got two characters to around 35-ish (monk and barbarian) and working on my third, who is around level 12. It's a fantastic looking and sounding game, and really satisfies with its astounding character progression. Monk is my favorite class, of the three I've tried. I might sample Demon Hunter as well, but I don't think Witch Doctor will be a class I go for...really not my play style. Anyway, I've posted it elsewhere but if you want to hit me up in game, my battle tag is barefootmm72#1858.

In Guild Wars 2 news, we just announced our next BWE which is June 8th-10th! We've all been working really hard, both based on the feedback that we got from the first BWE (in addition to the rest of the game's content) so I can't wait to see what people think. Best of all - you can continue the characters you were playing from the previous play session, so no starting over (well, unless you want to - nothing is stopping you from starting on those alt characters!).

It's been such a hectic past few weeks and months that as I sit here typing now I can think of three hundred things I could type, and none of them that seem worth typing at the moment, so I guess I'll hold onto those thoughts and try and put them down later, in more frequent blogs.