calm ere the storm

i'm taking a few quiet days before the 10 days of aKademy and lug radio live. cleaning the house, putting together the travel list as well as the "what i want to accomplish at akademy" list, updating the laptop to the most recent kde svn, popped another gigabyte of ram into the laptop as well so now i've got a more hack-fest-worthy 1.5gb to work with, booked a hotel for lug radio live, started in on my presentations ... i have 14 things on my pre-travel todo of which i have thus far accomplished in full only 2 (with another 3 in part).

tomorrow will be busy, but today its nothing taxing and pretty calm (i'm not even all caught up with email =), though it means a bit of a lull in plasma development. though a three day lull seems a bit of a funny concept =) sort of speaks to the pace of things recently?

p. and i picked out his first strategic board game yesterday: battlelore. since he can read pretty fluently and has no problems with the strategy of things like wesnoth, i figured it was time to introduce him to the grand tradition of real strategy games. you know, the kinds with pieces and cardboard maps. ;) we've played three games already, two of which he won. the game is pretty driven by the luck of the draw and roll of the dice but that keeps it interesting. it's a little simplistic for my taste, but perfectly within the upper band of p.'s challenge level.