Rannie Turingan is a completely kick-ass photographer in Toronto. He was one of the Zap Your PRAM crew, and spent a whole lot of time chasing down the other attendees and taking our pictures. He’s now finished up processing and posting the formal portraits on his website: Zap Your PRAM portraits. It’s a really nice record of the event, so @Rannie: many thanks for taking the time to do this. You rock.

Extra bonus this trip is that I got to see my other friends phik, blizzard, and zab. A good time was had by all.

In a somewhat random moment, I managed to hit an Apple store this afternoon. I wasn’t expecting to make it to one this time, but blizz and zab and I were looking for somewhere to have a quick bite, and lo, there was one right there. I picked up copies of Diablo II, NWN, Dungeon Siege, and iWork. Hooray! Lots of geeky-good RPGs for the lappy, and a nice new word processor as a bonus (I have yet to need presentation software, but I guess it’s good to have anyhow). I will post reviews of all of these sometime after I’ve had a chance to play with them a bit. I’m pretty excited about Diablo II being Mac-friendly now. So much silly fun to be had!

Off home tomorrow (it takes basically all day to get from here to there, what with the time change and stuff). If I’ve got my wits about me, I’ll remember to hit the Duty Free at the airport before I head back across the border (which means Chicago, I guess). For now, a sedate evening at this strange little hotel.

Good times.

The Pope, it is now known, passed away today. I’m non-religious, but I do have a great deal of respect for people who can and do devote their lives to their religion.

I’m linking to this article because I had no idea what the procedure was for picking a new Pope. It’s not nearly as cool as picking a new Dalai Lama, but hopefully the world won’t have to worry about that one for a while.

Read David’s journal as well. He writes about things most of us will never have an opportunity to experience as if they were everyday occurrences. I think he looks good with grey hair.

“Keep fighting against the uninformed who think writing – here or anywhere – is a waste of time and effort. If anything will save us, it’s the imagination – and there’s no way better way to keep the imagination alive than to write or to read. My mentor, Thorton Wilder, once said that cruelty is nothing more than a failure of the imagination — and all I can say is that there’s a lot of that going around these days…”

If you’re out there with a drink in hand, give a silent toast to Hunter, TIFF, and Elliott Smith tonight, would you? So much brilliance, too soon taken from us.