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Such a Party!Saturday night my friend Syd threw himself a big birthday party, and Debbi and I were invited! It was a combination birthday party and wedding reception, I think, as he and his spouse, Jade, got married in Hawaii and weren't able to gather all their friends to celebrate until now. The party was at Casa de la Vista on Treasure Island, San Francisco, which, as you can see from the link, features a stunning view of San Francisco. We figure the house must have been an officer's club (but I haven't looked it up). Syd set up catering and hired the jazz band he plays in for the music. Mix in dozens upon dozens of guests, and it turned out to be a pretty marvelous evening. I saw some of Syd's friends whom I haven't seen in a while, and also met Syd's Dad, who flew in for the bash. Debbi did pull me out on the dance floor a couple of times, though we're divided on whether what I did was actually "dancing" ("swaying" seems more descriptive to me). But all-in-all we had a really good time, and - more importantly - it sounds like Syd did, too.
 I've been home the last day and a half nursing a cold. It snuck up on me yesterday morning, and by mid-afternoon I was feeling hammered enough to come home and convalesce. The cats have been happy to have me, of course. I've played with them some, slept like a dead person last night, and gotten some reading done. I've also been learning to program in Ruby, mainly so I can process baseball statistics (particularly those from the excellent Baseball Archive database). I like Ruby quite a bit: It's object-oriented, and unlike Perl its object model is a natural part of the language, not an ugly appendage bolted on a decade after it was created (my last experience with Perl - writing many of the scripts for this journal's current "look" - soured me on that language). The syntax makes sense and the language doesn't feel over-decorated with crufty features. It has its quirks, like any language does, but I've gotten a class model up and running and producing some results for a problem I wanted to study in only a little over a week. That's productivity. Oh yeah, and of course it runs on Mac OS X.
Our other weekend outing was to the Japanese Tea Garden in Central Park, San Mateo. It's small and feels a bit too much like an undermaintained city park, but it has a nice koi pond and a few nice decorations. I bet it's prettier later in the spring, when more things are growing. Oh, and we had our book discussion for Alastair Reynolds' Chasm City. Happily, everyone liked the book (my friend Cliff loved it). Unhappily, only four people showed up, so maybe that means a bunch of other people didn't like it (wouldn't surprise me, as there are a few in the group with very different tastes in SF&F from me). Still, it was a fun discussion. I'm feeling better tonight, and expect I'll be back at work tomorrow, catching up on everything I'd hoped to do yesterday and today and wasn't able to get to. Busy busy!
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