I went with a few buds to the Renaissance Fair in Florence today. It was quite a nice time. It sorta reminded me of DragonCon, with a different breed of nerd; instead of looking to the future, the focus was to the past. And, of course, there were dealers out the yin yang just as there are at D*C. After watching that episode of Home Movies a couple of years back, I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder waiting for the sci-fi convention to come invade 🙂

After that, I went back to play some games–just a wee bit of UT2004. Refreshing to have a nice lil 21st century bout on the LAN after going back to the days of armor and broad swords.

Tonite, I went with my brother and dad up to Monte Santo. David Levy gave a talk at the planetarium on his experiences with amateur astronomy and his discovery of comets, such as Shoemaker-Levy 9, which slammed into Jupiter in 1994 in 20 or so fragmented pieces. It’s amazing to me, the energy released by such an event; thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons–around one Hiroshima bomb per second going off with each impact. It was a really nice nite.. Unfortunately, go figure; being Astronomy Day, it was totally cloudy and rainy.. So, no observing *sigh*

I was thinking.. I haven’t had an astro log in quite a long time. Perhaps I will put one on my website–I was thinking of making a whole new LJ for it, but perhaps just making it on my own–storing entries on my own server in a DB or XML file–complete with comments. I don’t know.. A little weekend pet project to be pondering and programming. I’m glad that my hobby of computers just happens to also be my job; it definitely makes life and work much kewler. Plus, I can tie in my love of astronomy into my love of computers, as well..