July has not been a kind month.

Things started getting hectic on the week of July 4-10. That's when I was working on the iPhone book like a maniac so that we could get 100+ pages of text ready for online release. Since? Crickets. We expected Apple to release us from our NDA on July 11, when they rolled out the SDK, but that hasn't yet happened. As a result, that work was all .... well not quite for nought, but at least not required at that level of intensity.

Then, two days after I finished my work on the book, I got sick. I've been on-and-off fatigued for a week and half since, plus I've had varying levels of concentration problems, sinus pressure, sniffling, headaches, and all that sort of fun stuff.

Yesterday was actually the first time that I felt like I had any energy in a week and a half. Whereas I'd been spending most of my non-work hours previous to that on the couch reading, I actually worked up some energy to make a banner ad for a friend last night. Not much, but it was something.

I've still got a lingering hint of a headache today, and am going to go visit the doctor soon if it doesn't clear up, but my energy remains decently good.

Very annoying. I sometimes wonder if I'm a wuss about sickness because I don't get sick very often, but this last weak and a half I think would have knocked anyone on their ass.

Aaron was kind enough to bring in Way Out West today, so I got to play a Martin Wallace game that I really wasn't expecting to get to play this year.

It's one of his earlier works, and it was OK, but I generally wasn't as impressed as I am with some of his newer stuff. The game's got some nice economic modeling, with your trying to take advantage of what other players are doing, there's even a pretty clever setup for this: you build buildings that only accrue VPs based on what other people have built.

However, it's also random. Very, very random. Even for a Martin Wallace game.

I actually might not have minded the randomness as much if it weren't really drawn out. There are gunfights that just go on and on with dice being rolled again and again until someone is wiped out (or flees). I much prefer the system in Byzantium, where you only do one round of combat, and then determine a winner based on remaining troops afterward. There's still some chance for upset, but not as much, and it doesn't take nearly as much time.

And I have to ask, how can you have a western game with 6 different building types where none of the buildings are a saloon or a cathouse? OK, maybe I can understand the lack of a cathouse if you're trying to make a family-friendly game, but ... no saloon!?

In any case, it was great to try this out, not just a new Wallace for the year, but a totally new to me game.

I have been in heavy crunch writing mode these last couple of days.

Manning, you see, publishes early access electronic versions of their books called MEAPs, and we're trying to get them a top-quality version of the material that we've written thus far on the iPhone SDK for release on Friday, which is the day we expect the SDK's NDA to go away, and thus allow us to publish.

The result is that a ton of expansion, revision, and reworking of chapters is needed in a very short period of time. We got comments back on the chapters early last week and we've promised to revise things on Wednesday. It's going well so far, though I did 9 or 10 hours of writing today, writing about 10 new pages and revising another 20, which is a lot for a tech book.

And thus I've entered the writing trance where word after word goes down and nothing deters me from my single-minded work.

I was most humored today by how I could tell I was in a writing trance. It's because I was sitting here at my computer, and it would beep telling me that there was new mail. Then it would do so again in another 10 minutes, then again in another 15, etc.

And a few hours later I'd finally think, "Oh yeah, I got some mail, I should see what that was."

I mean, who doesn't run and check their mail as soon as they know that it's arrived?

I think it's pretty funny that when you search for my name on Amazon you get the following two entries:



Elves and iPhones. Hmm. And separated by precisely one year.

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The iPhone book continues. It's a lot of work. It's the most concentrated tech writing that I've done since I worked at Sun in 1997-1998 when I wrote and edited a whole series of technical documents for the network division of the solutions center.

This work has been stressful, because the technology is changing week by week. We're also on a short deadline, balancing new writing and response to current reviews. I think we're going to get a good book out of it, but I'm looking forward to things being easier next month when this book is at least completely drafted.

Our publisher is having a pre-order sale for anyone who picks up the book before the release of the iPhone 3G next week.

DVD Menus are often a pet peeve for me. Any producer that decides that it's cool to waste my time by showing worthless animations at startup or (even worse) when I make selections on a menu should be shot. Well, at least removed from making DVD menus. I've seen some pretty atrocious ones. I remember Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Scrubs as wasting my time in particular.

But, I have a new winner for all-time worse DVD Menu EVAR. That's season one of MI-5. It's a fine British spy show. No Sandbaggers, but still very nice, but the DVD Menu ... shudder. There's all the slow transitions that you'd expect from STOOPID DVD design, including a full minute to get to the first menu. But, here's the kicker:

THERE'S NO WORDS ON THE MAIN SELECTION SCREEN. Instead you have to pick among visual elements on a desk. For example, there's a pile of DVDs on the main menu, and so that's the episode selection. A pile of DAT tapes lets you change sounds. There's two bits of paper on the desk. One led to the special features, and I have no idea where the other went.

To try and help guide you there's an audio which instructs you which elements to click for each thing. You know, like those instructions you get when you call up some company and you get thrown into a hell of phone menus? That's right, someone thought that'd be great for a DVD. And it only plays once, so if you step away (say, because you always load up a DVD a few minutes before you're ready to see it, because of outrageously long startup graphics), you'll have no idea what to do.

Bad Spooks! No biscuit!

Kimberly and I went to a Rebecca Riots concert tonight at the Freight & Salvage. They're a local folk band that has songs on a wide variety of topics including political activism, mindfulness, and gay issues. Kimberly introduced me to them, and I quite like them. We hadn't been to one of their concerts in six years, since their 2002 show which was theoretically their last one ever.

(They started touring again two years ago.)

It wasn't the best concert I've ever been too. They had an opening act that I could have done without, and I would have liked to see more old songs rather than new ones, but I still enjoyed myself quite a bit. They have an amazing vibrancy when they're on the stage and they sing together really well.

I'd guess this is one of the last shows I'll go to at the old Freight & Salvage. It's a neat old building that used to be part of one of the railways that ran through Berkeley once upon a time. You can still see the shape of a railway building in its architecture, and thus you can feel that you're sitting in a little sliver of history.

Still, I've always found the venue small and hot, and it's about two and a half miles from our house, which is a fair walk. Conversely they're opening a new theater next year right in the middle of the theater district, which is instead just a mile's walk and should be a nice modern venue.

We also picked up the newest Rebecca Riots CD. It actually came out 4 years ago, but we kind of lost track of the band after they "broke up" in 2002. I'm very pleased because it's got a couple of the songs that I heard at that last concert and which at the time looked like they were never going to get recorded.

---

I'm glad we had a fun concert to go to, because it's been an icky week.

I was fighting off some sickness early on, plus sleep deprived after a few days of very hot weather. I was feel sufficiently down as a result of that and other stresses that I couldn't even bring myself to write my weekly review.

The cherry on top is the fact that I haven't actually seen the sky in three or four days. We've just had this gray gunk filling the sky all the time. Thursday was the worst when the sun filtered through in this really poisonous orange hue that made me feel like I was living through some nuclear holocaust.

The culprit is a ton of fires in California which are just filling the sky with smoke. It'll probably be a while before they're under control.

In any case, hopefully the concert will buoy my spirits and next week will be better.

Hot Days. We've had some very hot days lately. Friday it got up to 98 degrees, and it wasn't that nice Thursday or Saturday either. My office is set in the back of our 1906 house; part of it used to be an enclosed upstairs porch and the other part is a later add-on. The result is that none of it has good insulation, and it starts getting pretty hot when the temperature edges up about 75 or so. When things get into the 90s, it's unbearable.

Fortunately, a couple of years ago, I came up with my own way to beat the heat. When it looks like it's going to be way too hot a few days in a row, I haul my computer downstairs to the dining room and work from there. So that's where I was from Friday to Sunday.

As I was moving my computer downstairs this time, I was thinking, "What'd we ever do before wireless LANs?" And then I realized how short-sighted that was. It was just for a relatively few years that computers were truly tied to those little blue cables. I think I got my first DSL hookup in 1998 and had my main computer running wireless by 2002 or so. Of course that's just tracking the home penetration of the internet, as I was working with wired networks starting in 1989, and even before DSL I had to think about keeping my computer next to a phone line.

In any case, today the temperature was down to the point that it was actually cool. Typical wacky Berkeley weather.

Hawaii. I've been bemused that since my dad's moved to Hawaii it's been hotter here a couple of times that it was there. When San Jose (where they used to live) was 105 last week, it was about 20 degrees lower at their new home. I never think of the Hawaiian islands as being cool, but I guess that's true in the summer.

In any case, they seem to be settling in well, although it's apparently harder to get things (e.g., phone service, internet service) done correctly in Hawaii than it is here. They're also starting to learn the fearful facts of having to order things from the mainland.

Organization. On Saturday I went on a bit of an organization rampage ... at Donald's house. Before gaming I was reordering all of our D&D3E books so that we could actually find stuff from our campaigns, and I idly mentioned that it'd be nice if we had a bookcase for the books, right behind the gaming table. Mary immediately suggested that we clean out a bookcase that was down a hallway, and repurpose that for gaming use. We did, and I think it's going to be a lot easier to find stuff for the game from here on out (at least until Donald moves, at which point I need to figure out how to make D&D books available in my household).

I also spent part of the afternoon (while playing Donald's Eberron game) organizing all of my Descent pieces. I got two Plano boxes and they were just about perfect for cleaning up all the bits: one box for characters, one for me. I still need to figure out a decent way to organize the dungeon building tiles, but this is a great start that should work out well next time we play.

And that's all got me in the spirit of trying to clean up my office some. We'll see how far I get there ...

Wordle.net is very cute.

This is, apparently, what I've been talking about for the last month. You can click through to see it at a more legible size:

Over the last week I've played two new-to-me Wallace games.

Byzantium. This got played last Saturday after my normal RPG on Saturday fell through. The core conceit is pretty neat: there's a war going on between the Byzantines and the Arabs, and you simultaneously control armies on both sides, trying to (somewhat) balance your points between them. It was quite a good game; I'm glad I picked it up even after a general non-committal response from the board game world. To a large extent, it's a pure game of efficiency: you try and get the optimal points per turn. It's also got a decent amount of fighting, but in some interestingly constrained ways.

Among the elements I liked: the trademark Wallace alternative victory condition (here, a special Arab win if Constantinople falls); a very strategic resource management system, involving cubes and coins; and a fun combat system that let you empire build across the map.

I'm hoping to play it again relatively soon to get a better feel for it.

Tyros. Eric has been bringing this to Endgame for a while, and we finally got it to the table today. It's a trading and card management game as you build cities in trading empires, struggling for majorities in the most valuable empires.

I didn't have any problem with it, but I wasn't wildly excited either. This may partly be because we had a somewhat unbalanced game, involving (among other things) the other two players fighting, to my pure advantage. I asked Eric afterward what he liked about the game, and he said that it was a pretty unique Wallace German/abstract and that he liked how the game developed (meaning empires expanding and cities getting built, I expect).

This was published through Kosmos, not Warfrog, and it's the Warfrog games that I've liked best.

There's been lots of writing lately.

The iPhone Book. Chris & I hit our third milestone for the iPhone book on Friday, which was the two-third content milestone. To date we've delivered 167 pages of iPhone programming goodness, plus or minus. I took a few days off after that, as iPhone from dawn to dusk makes an Appelcline weary, but I started back in on the editing yesterday afternoon and back in on the writing today.

We're well into the SDK side of things now, with probably four chapters to go, or about 80 pages. I'm currently writing about view controllers. My current pattern is to start writing first thing in the morning. On a good day, I can get my quota for the day written by lunch, but if I'm working on a new topic (or otherwise distracted), it can run well into the afternoon. At the worst I tend to finish at 3 or 4, which usually leaves me with a little bit of time for other work-related stuff.

Except when I hit the occasional bug in the SDK. That can leave me tearing my hair out all day.

Tradetalk. I've heard from the folks at Tradetalk magazine recently*. I last wrote them a couple of articles very early last year, and it seems that the last of those should be coming out soon. So after hearing their schedule I committed to articles for the next three issues. Last night I wrote about half of an article on what other people think of the Thanatari, which I'll finish up over the weekend, then I'm going to unearth an old piece on the Vale of Flowers which I started for another publication that never came about (and is only about halfway done in any case).

* Funny story. I heard from them because one of the editors reads my LJ here, and noted one of my recent journal entries stating that I was ready to start writing stuff other than the iPhone book. Ah, the power of the information age.

The History Book. It's nearing the one-year anniversary of my book getting unceremoniously canceled, and thus I'm getting to point where I have enough distance that I can probably deal with the book again without the false assumptions I had in place because I thought I had a publisher who would do the book as I conceived it right.

Does that mean I'll be getting back to it soon? I'm not sure. I recently put out a proposal for a totally different book that would take up my free time if it were accepted. But, if that new thing falls through, I'll be looking at the history book again soon.

It's amazing to me how much the industry has changed since I last worked on the book. I mean there's big stuff, like D&D 4E, which will deserve a whole section discussing how it was rolled out over the last several years. But, there are numerous other changes. Paizo has totally reinvented itself. Palladium has apparently staved off bankruptcy. Chaosium has returned to its BRP roots. A multitude of companies have begun to branch D&D 3.5E. And of course a few notables in the industry have died, among them industry founder Gary Gygax and Judges Guild founder Robert Bledsaw.

I find it eerie that I have emails sitting around from Bob commenting on the book. I never requested comments from Gary, because I had so many interviews with him, and I also saw how his answers changed from year to year, leaving me to doubt the accuracy of more recent pieces. But I wish he could have seen the book and the huge lump of history that he ultimately created.

Dad. My dad no longer lives in the continental United States. He and my step-mom moved to Hawaii on Thursday. I've always seen how much my dad adores the islands, so I've been thrilled for a while that he gets to live there. However, when we saw them on Tuesday, and I realized that it might be the last time they'd ever be in Berkeley, and that we'd only see them every year or two from here on out, I was very sad.

Fresh Air. I've been listening to Fresh Air lately on my iPhone. They sucked me in when I heard that Mark Evanier was going to be interviewed about Jack Kirby a few weeks ago. Since I've listened to some terrific interviews. A talk with Michael Chabon got me to read The Yiddish Policeman's Union, which I started last night and has bowled me over with its amazing writing. I was also deeply moved by some interviews about Robert Kennedy that I listened to over the weekend.

4E. If a new edition falls in the woods, does it make any sound? From my local gaming group this weekend you'd have no idea that the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons had been released. Granted, we're a bunch of thirty-somethings entering middle age, so we're no longer Hasbro's core demographic, but looking back I'm surprised that no one even mentioned it. Instead we happily carried on with our 3.5E game of Savage Tide, having one of my favorite sessions of the year.

Tonight I played Brass, which is what really got me onto the Wallace kick, but which I hadn't played since late last year, so it hadn't appeared as part of my "year of Wallace".

At the time I considered it a very typical Wallace game, because it's heavy on economics, but I've since seen that it doesn't have another very common Wallace feature: alternative ways to end the game.

This is the first time I've played Brass since I wrote my article, Brass Tacks, and I did my best to apply my strategies from there, particularly by pushing on the high VP stuff late in the game, and ignoring coal and iron opportunities even when they looked very tasty. (Though I'll comment that I could only do this thanks to building a great economic engine early in the game.)

The results were satisfying: a 202-point win in a 3-player game.

At this point, I think Brass is my second favorite Wallace game, eclipsed only by Liberte, and that may well be because I've only played the latter just once.

Next up will probably be Byzantium, since I bought a copy a week or two ago.

In all my years of board gaming, I can't remember every playing a game where, after the game came to its definitive end, one of the players not only refused to concede defeat, but also insisted that they'd continue playing.

I mean sure, I've had games that kept going after the winner was clearly known, just because people felt we should play it out. And I've been accepting of that if it was a short game, and annoyed by that if it meant several hours more of play. But someone continuing to claim that they were in the game even after it was definitively done? Unheard of.

I suspect if someone did something like that, I'd have a hearty chuckle, and tell them that they could enjoy their game. Then the other players and I would head off somewhere to play without the player who thereafter would be known as the bad sport.

And I'd have to wonder internally if they were badly socialized or just insane.

With that said, maybe I'll be able to not write the article I was considering for next week's BoardGameNews, "What if Gaming Were Like Politics?" Because it probably wouldn't serve any purpose.

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Beyond that, I'm immensely happy that Obama definitively won the Democratic race yesterday--and thus probably the presidency. I could be bitterly disappointed, but this is a politician that I'm offering up hope to, someone who I really believe could make a positive change in our country and its government.

However, there was no great celebration last night because, as I've said before, I was pretty sure it was over the day he won Wisconsin, proving that he could appeal in more than just limited demographics.

(And honestly, I was confused why the race went on at that point, let alone last night.)

Writing. The folks over at Tradetalk just asked for some new articles. I haven't written for them in about a year. I gave them a couple of new articles right after I finished the (unpublished) HeroQuest book on elfs, and they're just getting to publish the second. In any case, I'm glad the mag's still going, and I need to get back into the sync of writing in my off-time (though probably not until at least next week, as things are pretty busy through Saturday). I should make sure to spend some time on these next Sunday-ish.

I've also got a neat proposal out to a publisher for a new book; I'm hoping to get a positive response soon. For now, I just know that they're taking it seriously.

Familia. My dad and sister were by today. We watched the season finale of Lost, which was good (after a generally good season 4). They usually watch the show together, but my dad was up in Oregon this last Thursday, making a visit to one of his Aunts before he retires to Hawaii, so they'd agreed to come see the show with us today. He and Mary are coming back on Tuesday to have lunch with us, then they are leaving on a jetplane this Thursday.

They've been talking about retiring to Hawaii for so long, and my dad loves the islands so much, that I'm really happy for them, even though I'll see them less.

Descent. My Saturday RPG group started a Descent: The Road to Legend campaign on Saturday. We're planning to run it for a couple of hours after D&D every other week or so. By the time counts I've seen on BGG that'll probably carry us into 2009, which will surely be the longest board game I've ever played. I'm hoping to get a good article out of it for BGN in a few weeks too.

I've been writing for a couple of months that I've been working on a book on the iPhone. I actually started it on or around March 31st, which means I'm 9 weeks into it (whew).

If there's one thing I've learned through my years of writing it's set a schedule and keep it when working professionally. My schedule for this book has been 15 pages a week, which is a modest amount, but an amount that gives me time to also write the code needed for the book and generally keep on top of everything else. At 9*15 I should be at 135 pages, and my current page count seems to be 140, so I'm happy with my current speed.

Today my publisher, Manning, announced the book through their early readers program. After some back and forth we've decided on the title iPhone in Action, and their page on the book is now here:
http://www.manning.com/callen/

They don't have the cover up yet, alas.

I have to say working with a truly professional company like Manning is a totally different experience from working with even a theoretically top-end game company. I'm used to game companies pretty much ignoring me until the manuscript is done, then handing it off to an editor, and I never hear from them again until I see a book at my local game store and have to query about where my money and author's copies are. Mongoose did me a little better than that last year, because I got to briefly see the manuscript in laid-out form before it went to press, but that was by far the exception.

Conversely, I've talked with folks over at Manning frequently via email and a couple of times via phone, and that web page marks the start of their marketing for the book, which is currently scheduled for February.

A game company actively marketing a book 9 months before its release and when they had only 40% of the manuscript in hand? Ha! It would be to laugh.

I recently started in on a new mystery series, the Sharon McCone books by Marcia Muller. It's a female-detective series, very much in the same arena as Sue Grafton's novels, down to the part where she starts off working for an insurance agency. However, Muller's first book came out five years before Grafton's first, so she presumably was the influencer, not the other way around.

Donald handed me a couple of Muller's books some time ago, and it wasn't until I read one of them that I discovered they were set in San Francisco, which made me very happy as it's been something I've been looking for in a new mystery series. Add that on with good characters and well-done mystery, and this is a series I'll read through.

I started off with _Leave a Message for Willie_ (#5), since Donald told me there was no real continuity amidst the books. After I find McCone in the middle of a developing relationship I then backtracked to _Edwin of the Iron Shoes_ (#1).

I expect I'll read the next two sometime soonish, and this LJ is mainly a note to remind myself where I am in the series.

It's funny how, when you move somewhere, the way that place exists on the first day you see it becomes to you the way it always was. So it has been for me with Berkeley, its history forever set down on that day in August 1989 when I moved to the City.

When I moved here there were two comic stories, Comic Relief and Comics & Comix. I have no idea how long C&C had been in Berkeley, but I now know that Comic Relief had opened in 1987, not too long before I started going there. Nonetheless, to me it's a permanent fixture, dating back to the founding of Berkeley itself.

Actually, I only went to Comic Relief infrequently during my first two years in Berkeley, because I lived in (or by) the dorms at that time, and C&C was closer. But as soon as I moved down to University Avenue in 1991, Comic Relief became my regular comic store. Even when I moved back up the hill in 1994 and even when I moved to North Berkeley in 1999, I always went out of my way to visit Comic Relief because it is, quite simply, one of the best comic stores in the world.

That was entirely because of the vision of Rory Root, gentleman proprietor, who envisioned the store not just as a comic-book store, but as a comic bookstore. He saw the trends toward trade paperbacks before they were obvious in the industry. I remember him telling me how he'd told Jeff Smith (of Bone fame) that he needed to break his trades by storyline, not by issue count, as Smith originally did. Ah, how immature the trade paperback industry was at the time, yet Rory saw what it should (and has) become.

Rory's Comic Relief is one of the few retail stores that I've ever respected and appreciated. It was run well with a lot of attention paid to its stock and its customers alike. Rory also did a lot of work encouraging aspiring artists, and though I saw less of that, I know what he did was important to many people. He was also a very friendly, generous, and loving guy. When I was briefly hosting weekly Poker games at my place in 2001, when life was tough, he was one of the guys that occasionally attended. I was always sorry that he didn't continue on when I changed my Poker games over to Eurogames, but his schedule interfered. He was always busy, always working to improve not just his business, but the comic book industry in general.

Rory passed away today due to complications from a surgery. He'd been in ill health for a while. The last time I saw him was at Wondercon a few months ago now. I can't even remember the last time I saw him at his store.

I was amazed to see that mention of his passing was plastered across every comic book bulletin board around. He was clearly a giant in the industry, the one retailer who everyone knew.

Your store and your friendship has made my life better, Rory; thanks.

I just got a copy of RuneQuest Monsters II and as I was very pleased to see that they'd incorporated monsters from many recent RuneQuest book. More specifically, I'm listed in the credits because it includes monsters from my RuneQuest Aldryami book. It includes my unique Aldryami Elementals, which I spent a very considerable amount of time puzzling over, as well as stats for all the Aldryami types I outlined in the book.

One of the reasons that I pushed really hard to write that book was because I didn't want the ideas I'd written for my (still unpublished) HeroQuest book to get lost. Now seeing those ideas "infect" another book, as they slowly spread out to become Gloranthan reality is great.

Getting a published copy of a book that you worked on is always great. Getting it when you didn't even know your content was in it is even greater (provided, I suppose, that the people in question had the right to use your stuff, which Mongoose did).

This makes me want to work on a RuneQuest book again. I should query on the two proposals that I sent in a while ago. Though I'm still daunted by the history book, I could easily write another RuneQuest book while working on my (workday) iPhone project; they're different enough.

A very hot day. The weather reports promised 91, but it apparently got up to somewhere in the 96-98 range. I, stupid person that I am, did some errands in the afternoon, as I'd scheduled a few hours to getting my ID updated. I was maybe successful (we'll see in a month when a new driver's license either arrives or not; it's been promised before), but overheated myself when I biked to Oakland and back.

Meanwhile EBMUD has declared a drought. Their solution to the problem? A 10-19% cut across the board for all residential customers. I was finding it offensive already because we use a pretty small amount of water given that we have no cars to wash, no lawn to water, and no pool to fill, but I was even more offended when reading an article today about a woman who apparently pays $1400 in water every bi-month and just Can't give up her pool and lawn(!) Assuming our rates are the same, we use about 10% as much water as she does, yet we're being asked to cut back in our minimal usage, while she just has to refill the pool one less time or something.

Feh.

There's apparently an exclusion for users who use less than 100 gallons a day, but I doubt we're under that. It was like financial aid back in college. My mom made too little money to actually pay for college, but too much to get any financial aid.

Oh, and EBMUD is apparently requesting that people turn in their neighbors to the "water police" who will try and seek you out doing "bad stuff" and turn off your water.

No joke.

A very busy weekend.

Saturday kicked off with a trip to our local notary public to get some paperwork related to our house notarized. Then, after a day of gaming at Donald's (where, thankfully, he was running this week), it was dinner with my Dad and Mary who had still more house-related paperwork for us. We're trying to get the house all the way transferred to us before they move to Hawaii, but modern bureaucracy certainly makes it difficult.

Kimberly is going to file some things with Oakland tomorrow, then we're both going into the city on Tuesday to talk with a lawyer and hopefully finish things up.

Today Robbie invited us to join with that side of the family for Mother's Day, which we did. They picked us up and we went in to Golden Gate Park and spent a few hours at the De Young Museum. I haven't been there in many years, and it was nice to see the exhibits. Afterward it was down to a nice restaurant just this side of Ocean Beach, then finally back home around 7.30.

I'm quite exhausted and feel like I haven't gotten any weekend to preserve me against the oncoming week. Still, it was nice to see anyone.

Unfortunately, I have a very busy week coming up too. I'm still working on the iPhone book, and this week I need to both edit much of what I've written to date and start getting into the programming of the iPhone SDK, much of which is a mystery to me right now. I may shelve my 15 pages of writing for this one week to try and make sure I have a grip on everything (though if so I'll need to write more through the rest of the project).