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2013-05-09 09:14:00 
Spring, Steak, Rejection and Voldemort

One of those subject line words is not like the others -- that's right, spring seems to have left us again. It is cool and windy again today after two reasonably nice days.

I spent an interesting weekend in Fargo/Moorhead attending Corecon. I am not surprised if you have never heard of that little convention, but I enjoyed it. It is fairly small (at ~700 attendees this year - mostly local) gathering, but a very active one with lots of positive energy.

I got a chance to try some interesting shooters in the Headless lounge (a.k.a. the furry room, where I spent much of my time). We had our first taste of spring weather that did not suck on Monday and Tuesday of this week before things returned to the cool, late-winter feel that we have been experiencing hither-to. We took advantage of the situation and grilled a couple of steaks for dinner last night. I shot this with my phone, and did not notice until I saw the full-sized image that there was a smudge on the lens. There was a blue halo over the whole picture, with an especially pronounced appearance in the lower left corner. I managed to to fix the colours at the expense of some detail, but you can still see a bit of white halo in the corner of the plate. I submitted my first story to EQD and received my first rejection notice for the same. I am not entirely upset about the rejection - from everything I have heard about the site, I was expecting it. I learned from the pre-reader that I am a terrible writer with no concept of what is funny, and not even a minimal grasp of language and grammar.

Meh. I had thought it might be nice to get the broader exposure, but I had heard that they run a pretty exclusive club there; that is, to get a story accepted you need to already have work on the site, or be producing for the FOE universe. I will take the rejection for what it is worth and move on.

In other news, for the first time since we moved into this office, it is actually comfortable to work in here. It is 22 degrees by my desk this morning. After repeated complaints about the temperature in here, they finally shut off the baseboard heaters yesterday. When you consider that it was 27 and pushing 28 degrees in some parts of the office, that is quite a marked change.

I was chatting with the building manager about it this morning, and he said that they have received a complaint that it is too cold in here now. He said, "How do we weight a single complaint about it being too cold, versus the flood of complaints we had been receiving about it being too hot for the past few weeks?"
Tags: fail