The IFF starts today! As usual, the festival is happening at the Somervile, Brattle, and Coolidge Corner theatres.

Check out the complete film list. Sadly, Ravelry ate my life and I didn't have time to put together a little site like I did last year, so you'll have to Google and IMDB and YouTube on your own...

Sometimes the description is all you need to make your decision. For example: "Blood Car: When the price of gasoline becomes too steep, mild-mannered vegan Archie Andrews discovers a gory replacement for petrol." ...or maybe "Song Sung Blue Captures the unexpected victories and tragedies beset upon Milwaukee's favorite Neil Diamond and Patsy Cline tribute band, 'Lightning and Thunder'."

Boston, MA - March 9th

It is FAR too cold for Vespa riding.

Jess, you were right. Thanks for being a good sport and not punching me in the back much.

We'll try again in May.

Things have been quiet over here at nerdle lately, but I have been blogging regularly in a couple other places:

• unraveled - I post about Ravelry.com related stuff a few times a month
• code monkey island - a newish blog where I dump my computery thoughts. Hopefully of interest to the geeky crowd.

..and I'll continue to write here. I'll will be nice to keep the work and technical stuff on those other blogs.

Jess and I just finished packing, labeling, and shipping the 3200 Ravelry T-Shirts that we sold in Sept. and Oct. Oh my god. We are never doing that again.

(Don't ask about Cafe Press - 1. I'm an ornery bastard, 2. we preferred to support a small printing business, 3. we were particular about our merchandise and 4. they charge a lot) Next time I'll look into the Shopify + Shipwire combo.

We've been working on Ravelry full time since June-ish and many folks from the press have asked us what our biggest challenges, obstacles, mistakes etc were. We didn't have a good answer until now. Seriously, this shirt thing was ridiculous.

Oh - and for Bostonites - here is a little something that I learned. Did you know that there is a 24 hour post office at South Station? They even let us back up to the loading dock on the rare nights that we arrived before 8 PM.

Damn, I had no idea that these 2 clubs were shutting the doors for a big time remodeling. Dropkick Murphys (with the Horrorpops and Everybody Out) are playing at Avalon's last night - I would have liked to send the place off with some sweat and some beer but I was too slow and scalpers got the only remaining tickets.

I hope that the new place is cool - "35,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art live music facility" sounds kinda ominous to me - I won't hold my breath.

See you all at the Middle East and the Paradise.

I like to decorate birthday cakes. They are still a little sloppy (the one below is a guinea pig, if you couldn't tell), but I get better each year. I hope to be a baddass cake man by the time that we have kids that are old enough to understand that it is their birthday. I just put some of my photos up on Flickr for all you cake voyeurs out there...

This song could very well be all over MTV and the radio - I have no idea. I'm a hermit these days - I spend all my free time working on Ravelry! Anyway - here it is: Speaker - by David Banner with Snoop, Akon, Lil Wayne. This is the clean version - the durty version is on YouTube.

Whoa - I was checking out the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim site 'cause David Banner has a cartoon about Mississippi and it looks like there is a Drinky Crow show? Nice!

Random enough for you? Gotta break the silence somehow.

Gogol Bodello has a new album - it's fun and energetic as expected. Side One Dummy has a stupid flash player with 2 free tracks. Edit: If you are in DC, Philly, NYC, Detroit, Chicago - GO TO THE SHOW. It's fun.

Tim Armstrong has a new album out. It's pretty good. here is a track. There are more at Epitaph.

There is a new one from Tiger Army. Try listening to Afterworld. More info at HellCat.

Hell, I might as well admit that I was looking forward to Reggae Gold 2007. That's out too. Don't laugh.

What are you listening to this summer?

• Words that I love to hear when they are said with a thick Boston accent: "Martha", "heart".
• 3 cool word sites: Wordie, Online Etymology Dictionary, OneLook search.
• What do you read, my lord? Words
• I'm the lyrical gangsta (word'em up)

I just put up a *ton* of screenshots of Ravelry. For all of you who have been wondering what Jess and I have been working on for the past few months...

http://www.ravelry.com/tour/peek

Enjoy!