Makes me sorry I missed the moustache formal. But everything I saw of your kids on the cruise was awesome, right up to the "anonymous" question at the Q&A about just exactly how awesome Ryan is. It was a great coming out party of sorts for them (in the traditional debutante sense, not the gay sense, not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Thirding VueScan. It doesn't rely on the native OS drivers, and knows how to talk to most scanners. I had the same problem as you with my old HP all-in-one and Snow Leopard - very annoying, since Snow Leopard was supposed to make scanning easier and more integrated. (And it does, with new scanners). But VueScan works great with it - well worth the $40 IMHO. I mean, I could get a new scanner for that, not necessarily one that works as well as my old one and with Snow Leopard. But why the heck wasn't that awesome picture digital to start with? :)

The Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of the books by the great Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and Matilda. My six-year-old and I just read the book last year (er, when he was five), and I'm looking forward to getting the film on DVD when it comes out. I knew about it when it was in theaters, but didn't have enough points in Babysitter Acquisition to squeeze it in, when there were movies like Avatar to be seen...

Yes, I know. I fail at TypePad comment searching...

I hate to be That Guy, but the shirt is actually wrong. The second word should be bIr with a capital eye, not a lowercase ell. Yet another text copying job borked by sans-serif fonts!

<pedantobear>Hanna-Barbera, hyphen, no -h.</pedantobear> My first exposure to anime was Speed Racer, when I was in kindergarten. Its main competition from the West at that time was Space Angel, with the creepy filmed real-person lips in the middle of the animated face (shudder). No competition. In fourth grade, along came Star Blazers and totally blew me away. I also liked Battle of the Planets, but it wasn't as coherent - which I later learned was due to the hacking and slashing of the folks who were supposed to be translating it. I missed out on the whole Macross/Robotech thing. I had friends who were way into it, but it didn't suck me in. Akira was incredible, but vaguely 2001-esque, in that I suspect I would have enjoyed the ending more if I had ingested some intoxicating substances beforehand.. Since then, I've discovered that my taste in anime mostly runs squarely along Hayao Miyazaki's filmography. Castle of Cagliostro is my all-time favorite, I think, but you can't really compare it directly to the more artistic movies like Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke..

I gather this wasn't a Tycho/Gabe/Kurtz/Wheaton session, since it's a longstanding group and those guys never played together before the podcasts. I don't think the "Mike" being discussed here is Krahulik; that Mike hasn't played D&D for that long, and AFAIK the only regular game he's in outside of the podcasts is one where he's the DM. @wilw: might want to clarify that, if I'm right. Talking about going to hang with the PA gang and playing D&D with your friend Mike might confuse more folks..

"Skin of Evil" isn't going to snark all over itself? Are you sure about that? At the very least, the snark seems much closer to the surface of the marble block than in other episodes... (Don't try this at home, kids. Mixing metaphors is dangerous.)

You're more than welcome; thanks for the awesome entertainment. Speaking of which, maybe it's just not been long enough since reading/listening to Memories of the Future(cast), but as soon as you said you wanted to share the "joy and gratitude" I got a flash of Troi from the end of "Encounter at Farpoint"...

One thing I've noticed about your podcasts is that you can't stream them directly to an iPhone from the URL - it claims the web server is misconfigured, but I think it's just that it's an old Apache version. Regardless, I infer that the actual technical problem is that the TypePad web server doesn't let you grab arbitrary bits of a file by specifying a byte range. If you could somehow get that to work, it'd be awesome for those of us who like to grab the podcast over the air while on the go and possibly other preposition the noun phrases. (We can use iTunes mobile to get to them, but only if the file is small or we're connected to Wi-Fi instead of using the cell network, otherwise no luck there either. And synching with the Mac to get content just feels so 90's... :))

I haven't done a show like this in years. Huh. What makes it "like this", as opposed to Leverage or Criminal Minds or The Guild or . . . ?