No, it’s not because of a layoff. It’s because of a poweroff.

Twice a year, on a three-day weekend, IBM powers down the whole Almaden site for major maintenance, and this year, Memorial Day weekend is one of those weekends. So I have to shut down my computer so it doesn’t have problems when power bounces; I also had to shut down and clean out my refrigerator so my office won’t stink on Tuesday morning.

In previous years, I also lost Internet connectivity on these weekends, because IBM was my ISP. But now I have my own Internet service at home, so I don’t necessarily have to disconnect for the weekend. But we’ve got lots of other plans which don’t involve sitting in front of a keyboard, so I hope to be mostly disconnected anyway.

One of the firmer plans is a return trip to Battlebots, which is filming their Season 5.0 this weekend at Treasure Island. We’ve bought the tickets, so we’re committed.

And other than that, we’ll see.

Shabbat Shalom!

So I lept up from the seat, washed my hands, and went to the computer to check Sci-Fi’s schedule. Sure enough, there’s a showing of The Star Wars Fan Film Awards at midnight tonight, so I zipped to my TiVo to program it to record the showing, and I’m looking forward to watching it this weekend.

Technology is wonderful, but sometimes, there’s no substitute for paper.

Speaking of TV

We watched the season finales of both Smallville and Enterprise last night. At one point in one of the shows (I won’t say which one), I was afraid they were going to pull a Dallas by declaring the whole season to have been a dream, but fortunately, they didn’t. Both did follow the Dallas tradition of ending with a cliffhanger, though! Next season should be fun on both shows.