I think that every feature of the USGL site is back in working order except for SSL (https) support.  So if I'm wrong, you can start filing bug reports now.  Given I've had to deal with my day job as well, I'm pretty pleased with a three-day recovery time from the worst disaster in oto-usa.org history.

SSL is proving to be a harder nut to crack than ( Read more... )

Brace for a Proud Dad Moment!


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It's been a great weekend, mostly spent in the company of OTO folks.  Saturday we got most of a long-overdue LVX work project done; Sunday I attended a great Gnostic Mass at Blue Horizon featuring
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madelineusher's first-semester grades came in the mail yesterday:

Japanese III: A+
English III AP: A
Chemistry AP: A
Art III: A
US History AP: A-
Calculus B/C AP: B

Of all of them, it's that B in Calculus of which she is proudest, and with good reason.  She's been working very hard to succeed in that class, especially after suffering a mid-semester slump that had us ( Read more... )

We're safely home from our visit to the northern-California family for just-after-Christmas festivities.  A mysterious phenomenon occurred during our visit involving large amounts of water coming out of the sky, which was filled with strange grey-white objects the locals called 'clouds".  Pretty spooky!  Fortunately this "rain" stopped south of ( Read more... )

It's been a good holiday so far. Midnight Mass at LVX was wonderful; it was Tony's first time as Priest (working with the divine magdalena_lvx as Priestess) and he was very nervous beforehand. But you'd never know it from his performance, which was fervent and nearly letter-perfect, marred only by an unfortunate loss-of-headgear incident caused by his over- ( Read more... )

Yesterday I took one of my rare complete time off days. I noodled around with a couple of things on the OTO site, and caught up on a little bit of email, but mostly I engaged in blissful detox, which largely consisted of sleeping late, reading, playing yet more Space Empires (the same game I reported on weeks ago, now down to three nations left in ( Read more... )

I just made laurellady a very happy camper, and I'll bet madelineusher will be tickled, too -- we're going to see Theatre of NOTE's production of "A Mulholland Christmas Carol" on December 8.  L.A. history meets Dickens as a musical -- how can it go wrong?

And speaking of the brilliant daughter, I can't resist adding that her ( Read more... )

madelineusherand I attained geek father-daughter Nirvana this morning.  We had ( Read more... )

Some time ago, I posted a link to one of the funniest things I've ever read -- a scathing critique of the lazy, boring, useless element vanadium. Recently I finally found the front page from which this and all the other Michael Swanwick elemental pieces are linked. Have fun poking around, and be sure to read the vanadium (V) entry if you haven't ( Read more... )