Wherewithall and Without

While Kaia naps away the tiredness resulting from a combination of late-night and early-morning festivities with an out-of-town friend, I've been chipping away at the various items on my personal to-do list. The sink is yet again clear of dishes, the apartment is cleanish and vacuumed, the homemade PC is humming along at a crisp, cool 26 degrees Celcius, and I'm listening to one of several new Led Zeppelin concert recordings that streamed to my PC courtesy of other like-minded mongo Zeppelin fans out there on the good ol' InterWeb.

In the meantime, the apartment is chilly and winter is out there just waiting to arrive. Granted, it's early December and the weather hasn't been awful thus far -- thank you, global warming -- but it would seem to be inappropriate to lament winter's impending arrival even though that's, more or less, what I'm doing.

I also have been doing some homework and research for work; now that we're a remote network, I can VPN over to our server without having to plug in, unplug, pray, or wait with anticipation. Everything is pretty much instantaneous. Granted, there are some miscellaneous delays, but they're largely transparent and insignificant. I 'spose we could increase bandwidth on the network -- by both upping the speed on the network and on each of our remote PC's -- but thanks to the 'Net, the technology is heavy on the upside with little or no downside, other than the cost involved. But even then, the TCO is pretty reasonable given the aforementioned upside.

In the meantime, on non-PC matters, as I indicated via FaceBook, I was disappointed that tonight's fiesta had to be postponed. I'm still putting some finishing touches on where, when and how (much), but for the most part, the pieces are fitting together, albeit slowly. It looks like it'll be a January bash, and most of the likely attendees are cool with that, but I'm sure some of the out-of-towners will not be able to swing it. In the past -- at least the last two or three years since I've been re-actively doing these parties every three or four months -- the main obstacle has been the date(s) of the parties. Peoples' schedules fill up really quickly -- even months in advance, natch -- and finding a date is hard enough. But now, considering all the economic issues everyone's facing these days, and accounting for airfare, hotel reservations and the other ancillary NYC-related costs and you've got a pretty tough sell for a weekend in NYC just for shits n' giggles.

Guess we'll see how many people actually manage the trip, especially given how many people near and far are interconnected via Facebook and all the other social/viral techno-connections out there.

More later.