Guess who I heard from this afternoon?
jellybeanzulu (Doug Grim), a student who used to work in our group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), was auto-googling¹ when he came across this entry from 28 Feb 2003 (only the second LJ entry I ever made). He looked up my user info and shortly thereafter, I got a surprise AOL instant message. We reminisced briefly on how Peter Johnson, another student who worked in the lab, brought me back to rec.arts.books.tolkien and introduced me to teunc with this thread, which led inevitably to this one.²

Doug also brought me up to date on where he is working and showed me photos of the G4s in his office, complete with dual 23" cinema displays - a scene inspire jealously in friend, foe, and stranger alike. :-)

Anyhow, please welcome to my LJ friends list:

• jellybeanzulu - a former student programmer who worked in our group at UIUC-NCSA


• masteralida - a friend of vretallin and phawkwood who wanted to see what the fuss was all about


• spaced_oddity - a young musician with her own band and a penchant for hobbity scribblings


• dashamus - teunc's Duck of Unusual Size


• shmeepster - to call her a hobbit fan would be a catastrophic understatement


• auriam - a briliant and prolific poster to infojunkies

shmeepster has been campaigning, as it were, for the canonization of St. Banazir of Hobbiton, and who am I, his namesake and descendant, to argue?

Edit, 03:15 CST: deire has such nice icons. Yernow wot I need? A Simon icon from Firefly reading no power in the 'verse can strop me.

Twelfth Day of Christmas:
It Came Upon A Midnight Clear - Richard Willis and Edmund H. Sears


¹ It turns out that you can even automatically auto-google, but I think this is stretching the bounds of cybernarcissism, poisonally.
² I must admit that I am somewhat alarmed to learn that I started writing about "shaven ewoks" before Ermanna ever equated ewoks with hobbits, nor indeed before the actual shaving of any ewoks, hawwy or non, commenced.

--
Banazîr