another misAdventure

52 Pickup

2011-06-16T22:46:00.005-05:00

For those of you who care: i.e. my friends who read comics.

Here's my thoughts on the 52 re-launch titles that DC Comics will be, um, re-launching in September.

I don't dread the re-launch. I don't celebrate the re-launch. It is what it is. We've gone through this before and it's hardly the end of the world, and eventually we'll accept the re-launch characters as the status quo. I'm not sure yet how much that status quo is even changing in Sepember.

The bottom line is that my DC consumption will be going down, but only slightly, and mostly because DC is providing me a jumping OFF point for several titles.

I'm looking for comments on these because I'm on the fence about a dozen or so titles, so you could sway my choice one way or the other.

Full lists of "buy" and "don't buy" titles after the jump:

OK, first the obvious, will-absolutely-get-regardless Superman and Legion titles: Superman, Action, Supergirl, Legion of Super-Heroes, and Legion Lost.

I'll include Superboy in that, but I'll may need to hold my nose a bit.

Also a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned is Static Shock. I'm still complete on the Milestone-derived titles, and it's also written by a frequent Milestone writer.

My biggest surprise in the list of new titles: Resurrection Man. It's back with it's original writers, and I enjoyed it a lot during it's short run. So, that's a yes.

Ditto Animal Man.

The rest of the list I'm getting I don't have a lot to say about, other than I've picked most of them based on the writer or because something about it seemed intriguing. The rest of my "buy" list are: Batman, Batman and Robin, Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, Justice League, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Justice League International, DC Universe Presents, Stormwatch. OMAC, Blue Beetle, Suicide Squad, Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE, Green Lantern: the New Guardians, and Justice League Dark. The last three on that list were the closest to not making the list.

And here's the cut-off line:

OK, so I'm buying Batman and Batman and Robin, but not Detective or Batman: the Dark Knight. Why? I decided to add back a Batman book (I'd only been getting Batman and Robin), and decided Batman had more appeal to me. I may add the others, or I may drop Batman eventually. We'll see.

I'd dropped all the Bat-books about a decade ago because there were too damn many of them to keep track of (same reason I'd earlier dropped all X-books). That still seems to be the case, so these are all on the "don't buy" list: Batwing, Batgirl, Batwoman, Catwoman, Nightwing, Birds of Prey, Red Hood and the Outlaws.

OK, so why all the Lantern books except Red Lanterns? Well, that one probably came closest to the buy list of any of them. In the end, I find the Red Lantern Corps to be the least interesting of any of the rainbow lanterns, and I'm figuring this may be along the same line as the worst of the old Lobo books (all the gore, none of the humor). However, I have a harder time dismissing Milligan out-of-hand, so this one will probably get tried either digitally (when the price drops) or in trade paperback. I'll be looking for reviews.

I will not be looking for reviews of I, Vampire. Teen vampire fad pandering. If it had been the classic Andrew Bennett instead of a sparkly hunky teenager I may have given it a thought. No, probably still not.

I won't be getting Flash because I have little faith that Manapul can make the leap from artist to writer, and I think that Wally is the Flash they should really be using while Barry remained safely dead. I haven't been interested since Barry's return.

I think Brightest Day pretty much killed Swamp Thing for me, and little can live up to the Moore or Bissette runs.

I can't work up any enthusiasm for Fury of Firestorm, Green Arrow, Mister Terrific, Captain Atom, Savage Hawkman. They may get sampled, though.

Demon Knights - really? We needed another Demon story?

Teen Titans is pretty much dead to me. Maybe when Lobdell leaves they will get a decent writer.

I also don't care about Hawk and Dove, and even less about Liefeld. My bet is that this will be the lowest-numbered book to be cancelled, though maybe not the first.

No to All-Star Western. As long as we're just doing titles for trademark purposes, why not make this Weird Western Tales? That's the traditional Jonah Hex title, and a western set on the east coast is certainly weird.

The stuff that I have zero affection for the characters, and can't get excited by the creative team or the description: Grifter, Voodoo (who?), Deathstroke, Sgt. Rock and the Men of War, Blackhawks.

If something becomes a breakout critical hit, I'll have the cheaper digital issues to fall back on, or trade paperbacks.

So, "Yes" (initially) to 25 titles. I figured the other day that as of a few months ago I was probably getting around 30 DC titles per month. Hard to say since there were limited series in there, but those pretty much always come and go anyway. I can't count a more recent month since there have been so many recent title cancellations. I figure I'm either close to the same ballpark or down just a few titles. Sounds about right right now.

OK, Comments please! Convince me I'm wrong on some of these, one way or the other!

Happy Belated Birthday, Narf!

2009-04-19T21:59:00.000-05:00

Aha! Now I know when Narf's birthday is!

Live blogging April 1st

2009-04-01T09:55:00.006-05:00

Live blogging (sort of - at least as live as I manage) all the attempted April Fools jokes I note today. Let's see what I get caught by, what gives me a minor WTF moment, and what is caught immediately.

The default reaction is almost always "WTF?" until the right brain cell engages to remind me of the date.

I got a notice from my Cubs Fans group on Facebook that Wrigley Field would be renamed "Trident Field". Brief WTF, but that was my first reminder of the date.

Daily GizWiz podcast talks about a device to record MP3 files to vinyl records. I didn't get it when I first saw the title of the podcast because it loaded last night. When I listened this morning, though, they mentioned the date early on and I realized it was a gag. No foolin' here.

A Facebook friend* announced she was married. She set this up well by announcing she was engaged a couple days ago. I'm assuming the former is a gag, and maybe the latter, but I don't know 100%. *Friend in this case meaning friendly acquaintance, as is often true on Facebook. Later update: both marriage and engagements confirmed as gags.

Someone posted a printed note on the restroom door at work, saying that due to budget cutbacks the company would no longer stock supplies and so everyone should bring their own towels, toilet paper, soap. Caught immediately, of course, but I would have impressed by the commitment to the joke if they'd posted this on every restroom door. Nope.

Yet another notice from a Facebook application saying Barack Obama had confirmed that I was a cousin. It rated a WTF.

Pretty much all of Slashdot, as usual.

Gmail Autopilot - Google always has April Fools jokes; this one probably isn't the only one.

... and it wasn't. CADIE on the Google home page.

Happy Birthday, Ellen!

2009-03-29T15:24:00.001-05:00

It's another birthday post. Happy 28th to my lovely wife, Ellen!

Don't Touch the Green Beer!

2009-03-17T14:48:00.002-05:00

Happy St. Patrick's Day! I've had my corned beef and cabbage (lunch), and so I'm satisfied for the day. I celebrate any holiday that has a traditional food associated with it!

As for the green beer, I'm with Frazz:

As for dying the Chicago River green, that's probably the most natural it looks all year.

This post is also a test to see if the post shows up automatically, and in a timely basis, as a link on Facebook. The applications I've used before all were very slow to pick up blog posts. We'll see now.

Happy Birthday, Kalen!

2009-03-09T21:16:00.001-05:00

Almost late, but I made up for it by wishing Kalen "Happy Birthday" a day early on Facebook, and then repeatedly through the day today in person.

Quick, spoiler-free, Watchmen review

2009-03-06T23:22:00.003-06:00

I saw Watchmen tonight.

It looks great. And it is a reasonably faithful rendering of the graphic novel. Probably as good or better than anyone could have expected.

But, it still has to deal with the limits of a motion picture, and of a reasonable length for a film. So, it sacrifices a lot of the depth. Everyone should read the graphic novel either before or after seeing the movie. Probably better before, or maybe both!

The acting ... was not great. It was pretty stiff at points. Malin Ackerman looks perfectly like Laurie Juspeczyk, and is often pretty adequate acting, but has off moments. Jackie Earle Haley does a very good job as Rorschach. I always like Matt Frewer (Moloch) and Danny Woodburn (Big Figure). Others aren't quite so good, seemingly reciting more than acting a lot of the time.

The production values were terrific at times (Rorschach's mask in particular, and Archie, and Blake' apartment), and cheesy in a few others. In particular, some set pieces (doors in particular) don't seem very substantial, like they are the foam pieces that they probably are rather than anything with weight. Bubastis wasn't a convincing as he could have been. And the Nixon nose prothesis was a bad joke, but may very well have been intended that way.

They did keep the meat of the story, though, and it more than carries the movie. I think it's well worth a watch for anyone, but again, read the graphic novel sometime in there as well.

I look forward to the planned extended version on DVD as it sounds like it will restore a lot of the bits that are sorely missed (in particular, the newstand scenes), and fold in "Under the Hood" and particularly "Tales of the Black Freighter".

Happy Birtday, Ryan!

2009-03-01T22:57:00.000-06:00

Happy 22nd Birthday to Ryan! A late entry, but he was wished happy birthday earlier, we had dinner last night, and he got cake tonight!

Happy Birthday, Cody!

2009-02-12T18:57:00.001-06:00

I'm slow getting this up today, but happy birthday to my future son-in-law!

Sitting in the Imax theater right now. The Dark Knight is starting.

On vacation

2009-01-15T21:02:00.002-06:00

I'm on vacation in chilly, only partly-sunny Florida. I thought I'd get some more blog posts in before leaving, but I'll have to do a few trip report posts when I get back.

It may be chilly here, but it's nothing compared to the -15 in Aurora today, so I certainly can't complain. I actually wore my coat to Hollywood Studios today -- and Ellen bought gloves!

In Orlando through Sunday afternoon. I'll check back, hopefully on Monday.

Wakeup, Tim!

2009-01-02T10:57:00.003-06:00

My alarm clock woke me by name today.

I've stil got the same old clock radio, set to "wake-to-music". This morning it went off and said "Bon Voyage, Tim".

It was a dedication on WBEZ (NPR), as it turns out, which I figured out about 2 seconds later when I really woke up. But I'd had weird dreams about conspiracies and cover-ups last night, so that was just a weird capper. It succeeded in jolting me awake.

I wonder what it will call me tomorrow.

Twas the Night Before Election Day

2009-01-01T22:07:00.002-06:00

OK, here's my pre-election night story. Obviously, I've been way behind in writing in my blog, so I've been meaning to post this for a while.

This year, for the first time in my life, I did some campaign work. I was helping out Tony, canvassing a couple neighborhoods for his campaign. I didn't think he had a chance in hell of winning, but I did want to support Tony.

About a month before the election I handed out brochures in the neighborhood just south of here, leaflets for the whole Democratic slate in DuPage county, but I was talking up Tony. It was a nice day, a couple hours worth of work, and overall pretty pleasant. I talked to a few folks who were definitely voting Republican, a few who definitely voting Democratic, some ambivalent/apathetic, and several that were genuinely interested in researching candidates lower on the ticket.

Then, the night before the election, I was demolishing the family room -- tearing out the carpet so I could get it out with the next day's garbage. I'd also promised Tony that I'd do some Get Out The Vote work with him - just hanging door hangers. He called late in the afternoon, we got the hangers prepped (adding a card specific to Tony's campaign), and Kalen, Ryan and I headed out to do the deliveries. We got a couple short streets done, but then it started getting dark. We took a break to get some flashlights and some water, and then headed to the next neighborhood. Which was an apartment/townhouse complex. Alas, this section turned out to be the assignment from hell, because the apartment numbering scheme skipped around so much that we couldn't find half the numbers we were supposed to hang. It may have made sense in the daylight, or if we'd seen a map showing the layout. As it was, we'd find a few places, and then the numbers would skip. Or the numbers would continue on the other side of the building, with no easy way to reach that other side without going around three or four other buildings. Not fun.

Eventually, we ran out of hangers that we'd carried with us, so we retreated to the car to get more, and to give up on the apartments and go to the next neighborhood (which made more sense). We also met back up with Tony, and the four of us finished out the hangers. We then retreated to a local pub for dinner (it was past 9pm at this time) and a couple beers.

Tony was kept from dinner for a while because he got a call on his cell from a constituent who was doing last minute research, and wanted to hear Tony's opinion on EVERY name on the ballot, top to bottom, all parties.

When we settled into the beers, we discussed Tony's chances - which seemed pretty slim. For one thing, DuPage county hasn't elected a Democrat to the county board in 20 years. For another, in this district (as in all of them), it was a "vote for two, elect two" ballot. And Tony was the only one on the Democratic side of the ballot, with two Republican opponents including one incumbent. Even in a year likely to have Democratic coattails in Illinois, if voters generally marked two candidates the two Republicans should pick up a good number of votes from people splitting ballots. The math seemed to make the race impossible for Tony.

So the next evening came the shock. Obama's victory was definitely more relief than shock, so that wasn't it. As the ballot returns got posted, Tony wound up in second place and was elected. There wasn't a huge margin between any of the candidates. I'm still not sure how that happened, but the best I can figure is that a lot of people, either by design or by missing the instruction, voted for only one candidate. I knew I'd voted only for Tony, and he'd tried to do some voter education beforehand asking people to do just that. I'd still love to see a study of how such races go in general, whether people tend to ignore/miss the "vote for two" instruction in elections where none of the other races work that way. (Hey Tony, if you ever need a research paper topic for your degree, that may be a good topic).

On December 1, I was able to attend and enjoy Tony's inauguration, and the little cheer that went up in the room when he was announced. He was actually one of three Democrats elected to the county board this year, with both of the others with similar electoral circumstances (only Democrat in their vote-for-two district).

So, congratulations Tony, and good luck for all the elections in your future! Do us proud.

Tomorrow, more backlog clearing (?).

Happy New Year -- and a return

2008-12-31T22:42:00.005-06:00

Hey, it's been two months since I posted anything here. Happy New Year everyone!

I'm going to try to actually use this blog again. This isn't a new year's resolution, though. Just a re-commitment to post regularly - with luck daily for at least the next week (until vacation).

Right now, I'm working. Stuck on a boring conference call while watching to see if anything is going to go wrong in the cellular network around Times Square. I'm not even convinced it's all that crowded there this year, and the call statistics are holding up very nicely. I'll be doing this until 2am our time (three more hours), watching as the new year sweeps through all four time zones, and until my relief (in the UK) comes online.

This is just a check in. Tomorrow, a bit about the most amazing story of 2008 (as far as I'm concerned).

Update near midnight EST: watching "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve" to see the countdown in Times Square (so I can see when the call surge is going to hit), and Dick Clark is really showing the effects of that stroke he had. But, still not bad for his age. And it's midnight!

And a bit later update: it's almost fun to watch the flood of "overload" alarms come it. I may declare it officially fun if everything recovers properly when the surge subsides.

Annual Halloween Post

2008-10-31T23:59:00.001-05:00

I have to blog on Halloween, because that's how I keep track of how many kids came to the door.

This year, about 35, maybe a couple less. About the same as last year.

Which meant, I really didn't need to send Kalen out to get more candy. On the other hand, the candy will keep and eventually get eaten (half of it currently in the freezer.

Once again, some kids remembered. "Hey, this is the house that sells comics!".

Well, "sells" in the same way that all those other houses are selling candy. And we "sell" candy too. But it's good that they remember and appreciate the comics.

This post is back-dated, so I can find it easily next year. Otherwise, I'll think we have hundreds of kids show up.

I Blame Crane Kenny and Eddie Vedder

2008-10-06T21:32:00.004-05:00

The Cubs choked in the post-season. There's no other way to put it. When you see a multiple Gold Glove-winning first-baseman have an easy groundball bounce off his glove, on the potential third out of the inning, that could just be bad luck. When it's the third error of the inning, third of four for the night, one for each infielder, it's choking.

That was game two.

In game one, it was the 17-game winning pitcher, 13 at home, who winds up with pitches all around the plate but walking seven batters. That's choking - can't get the ball across.

So, back to my title. I mainly blame Crane Kenney. Kenney is the president of the Cubs. He decided that he needed to try to remove the curse of the Billy Goat -- even though it has been "removed" at many times in the past. So, he hired a Greek Orthodox priest to remove the curse, sprinkling holy water around the dugout and the locker room.

OMG, I am SO tired of hearing about that damn goat! Get over it, people! It's talk of curses, and the pressure of breaking a long streak, that gets players tight -- at least these players.

And, I also blame Eddy Vedder for writing the maudlin "Someday We'll Go All The Way". I first heard that when the Cubs clinched the division, though I didn't know it at the time since I couldn't hear over the cheering. I heard it later in full, and it's more of a lament rather than a fight song or anthem. Something written for a last place team, not for a division champion that has designs on the World Series. God, I hate that song.

But, in the end, it was the total lack of any timely hitting, and particularly the totally dead bats of Soriano and Ramirez, that did in this Cubs team.

Wait 'til next year. Bah.

Cubs clinch NL Central Championship

2008-09-23T23:52:00.002-05:00

After the break is a link to my Picassa album of the pictures taken on Saturday, after the Cubs game where they clinched the NL Central Championship.

Cubs clinch NL Central Championship

Happy Birthday, Matt!

2008-09-22T10:36:00.002-05:00

Happy Birthday to my remote son. Enjoy your day off!

Man, I really have to take the time to update here more often. I didn't think it'd been three weeks!

Coming soon, pictures from the Cubs clinching game on Saturday.

Don't Bring it to a Gnu Fight?

2008-08-30T01:05:00.002-05:00

The cafeteria at work has a new utensil for us to use. There are bins at each station labeled "KINFE".

There's some comments on the past couple of Cubs games after the break.
Wrigley was really loud Thursday night, and it was that way even before the late rally. I wasn't counting on the big rally, but Fontenot's lead-off homerun made me think it was possible, if maybe not likely. Aramis Ramirez's grand slam was just majestic -- and the Philly outfielders didn't even bother turning around to give chase. At that point, Wrigley just got insane. It's just going to be more and more that way as the season progresses and we get into the playoffs. I can start saying that without thinking I'm going to jinx anything now -- even if they fall behind the Brewers somehow the Cubs still have an 11 game lead on whoever could challenge for the wildcard.

Thursday night I was sitting by a drunk-ish guy from Minneapolis (and by Bob, but that was the other side). He kept asking me if this was in the top ten most important games for the Cubs this year (I think so he could validate his trip), and ... I didn't think so. The game was way more important for the Phillies. The Cubs had more important games in the series that they swept from the Brewers, and several others earlier in the season where they proved that they could come from behind to win. They had that stretch of home wins where they were coming from behind every game -- I think at least 7 games straight winning like that.

However, that game on Thursday may energize them for this home stretch, and for the final push toward clinching the division. It certainly energized the fans.

I'm certainly enjoying the SportsCenter guys wondering if the Cubs will ever lose again.

I was Googling the phrase for the title of this entry ("Bring a knife to a gun fight"), and the third entry, by coincidence, was a chat log from a Phillies fan site talking about Thursday's game. It was fun to read, as they thought they had the game in hand and then suddenly the tone turned. They were getting near suicidal at the end. I could empathize.

Gencon 2008

2008-08-25T22:32:00.003-05:00

Here's the report of my Gencon - 2008 version. Your Gencon may vary!

Tuesday, August 12 - Gencon Day -1: I took the day off from work, having completed packing up my office for its move that would happen the next weekend. So, I could spend the day getting things packed for Gencon, finishing preparation of materials for judging, and getting housework done (lawn, dishes, laundry). For once, I got everything done before I wanted to start driving. Kathy and Ryan and I got the car loaded and left for Indy a bit before 4pm. I was all set to listen to the Cubs on the drive down, but the game was rained out! We wound up getting into Indy a bit before 9pm, met Cody in the hotel lobby, and got checked into our room. Ellen and Kalen got in later that night, since they didn't leave until they were both off work, around 6:30pm.

Wednesday, August 13 - Gencon Day 0: I'd originally reserved the hotel for Tuesday night so that I could set aside the whole day Wednesday for Verbobonc Pre-Gencon Madness, as I had the previous 3 years. I'd put my name in as willing to run some Verbobonc mods, but there was no VPGM this year, and the meager amount of organization that was offered apparently either got few takers, or the orginizers lost interest. Anyway, no Greyhawk to judge. So, instead, I tried to use the time to play -- trying to get in a couple of Living Forgotten Realms zeroes. I went to the designated spot at 9am and met with several prospective players. Unfortunately, the judge we thought we had never showed up. Instead, I re-read yet again the D&D championship preliminary round module, and then met Ellen for lunch.

At 2pm, I again went to the designated spot and, yay!, we had players and judge for a zero. So, I played the first East Rift module with my now-second-level dwarf cleric, Durgrum Stoneshield.

We got done with the adventure in a timely fashion (and I enjoyed it a lot), and went directly from there to RPGA judge check-in. That was quick and easy, and I got my spiffy new judge shirt and DM shield (much heavier duty than older ones, and it had the one table I really thought it should have - the conditions chart). Then, just hung around until the judge's meeting, which was brief (yay!).

Then, an Adventure Hooks dinner, at least sort of. We met with Rob and his friend Ralph, and they and I joined Ellen, Kalen, Cody, and Ryan for dinner at Champions. Kathy was doing a volunteer meeting for True Dungeon and wound up joining us a bit late (and finishing Kalen's french fries).

Thursday, August 14 - Gencon Day 1: Thursday was judging day. I tried to keep my volunteering this year to all day Thursday plus Sunday morning. That gave me four slots of volunteering, and left two full days to enjoy everything else at the con. So, Thursday I judged three slots of the Dungeons & Dragons Championship, entry round. I had all the maps pre-drawn, figures picked out that were good-enough, and my scheme for tracking initiative and conditions set out. Everything worked very well. The first team that I had was more concerned with bickering among themselves, second-guessing their teammates. I'm not sure if they were a pre-formed team or they got thrown together that morning from the people without a previous team. Anyway, they didn't work well together and it wasn't surprising that they barely even got to the third encounter.

The second team I judged was very much together, and knew the characters they were playing. I gave them good marks for teamwork, and if they'd had a little bit more time they probably would have even finished the third encounter, something few teams did. I wasn't too surprised when I saw them again on Sunday in the final round.

The thrid team I judged had not read any of the 4th edition rules before sitting down at the championship table. On one hand I could have been, and maybe should have been, ruthless. On the other hand, why make their first experience with 4e a bad one? I'd gotten used to running extended demos of 4e in the delve at Wizard World, so this was just another example. I explained to them the action types, and the power types, so that they could make some basic use of their characters. On the other hand, I didn't try to explain every power they had -- because I didn't know their characters that well. So, I didn't explain the Warlock's curse to the Warlock -- and he never found it on the sheet so never used it. This was the only table where I killed a character (the Warlord). I did point out the healing that one character had, but he used it before I dropped the Warlord, and the Warlord counted make a saving throw to hold on until the encounter was over. The team (sans the Warlord) just barely began the third encounter, enough to see that it was going to tear the rest of them apart. The "time's up" signal was more of a relief for those guys. They had the nerve to then ask me if I thought they would advance (um ... no, but I didn't tell them).

Friday, August 15 - Gencon Day 2: Slept in a bit on Friday and let others get through the shower first. I also logged in to work as I got a call that said one of the things I support had stopped working. That was quick enough to fix (though that reminds me I should charge work for the hotel internet fee).

At 10am I went over to the Ram (restaurant/microbrewery) for a beer tasting event they offered through the Gencon spa program. I got a chance to sample their entire stock of beers they were currently offering. They poured about four ounces of each beer, but I think I only drank about 2 ounces of most of them (a bit more of some of them). 20+ ounces of beer was probably still plenty before noon! Anyway, I didn't care much for the two special beers that they had brewed for Gencon - the Apocalyse Ale was a Scottish style that I thought was too yeasty, while the Underdark Stout had way too heavy a coffee taste. The ones I really liked (and finished!) were their amber ale (Buttface Amber) and their porter (Total Disorder Porter), but I tend to like more malty beers like these anyway. I also liked their India Pale Ale, which was much more balanced than most IPAs I've tried. Really, I liked their whole selection other than the con specials! After the tasting we got a tour of the brewery, which was really only a couple of rooms, but both rooms were bit enough for about a dozen vats. We also saw the kegs that were tapped for the restaurant, and saw that they were more than halfway through their supply of the con specials even though the con was just over 1/4th done.

I then toured the dealers hall, including getting a brief demos of Hollow Earth Expeditions (HEX) from Cody (so I could harrass him a bit). I walked the entire hall, back and fourth, and didn't find anything too exciting. The Wizards of the Coast area was maybe a tenth of the space they would normally have, and they had very little going on in the way of demos -- nothing like previous years.

After relaxing in the room for a while I went over to the True Dungeon area for the bard's contest. Cody was the emcee/guildmaster of the bards, and Kalen and Kathy were both judging the contest. I wasn't really all that interested in the contest, but I knew what was coming -- at the end of the contest, after the prizes were awarded, Cody upstaged them all by proposing to Kalen. Everyone in the family knew this was going to happen except for Kalen. She should have been tipped off by the fact that Ellen and Ryan and I were all there, but I guess we managed to convince her that we were all very interested in the amateur bards.

Afterward, Ellen, Ryan, Kalen, Cody and I went to Houlihan's for dinner, and experienced some truly bad waitservice. They guy never came back to the table after the first round of drinks was delivered (other servers brought the food), and Ellen practically had to tackle him to finally get some drink refills. Then he was very apologetic as he brought the bill, so we would be sure to not hold it against him when I calculated the tip (to no avail, I already knew how bad I tip I was leaving).

Saturday, August 16 - Gencon Day 3: I was able to sleep in a bit again. Tony and I then cruised the dealer hall again for a while, but I was only sort of into it, mostly just showing Tony where some things were. I met Ellen for lunch, and then we all headed back to the True Dungeon area for our True Dungeon run. Team was me, Ryan, Ellen, Kalen, Kathy, Cody, Tony, and Rob. We did quite well I thought, with only one puzzle stumping us (and that was a bit of a stretch to put together the clues we had). We did our part through the last room, but in the end we did not survive because we were dependent on the combat-side team beating the last creature, and they were playing at nightmare-level, and had four fatalities before getting to the last room. Since they couldn't beat the creature, and we then only had one round to attack (after we finished the puzzle part) we all died in that last room.

We did some hanging around in the tavern, and another quick trip to the dealers room, and then decided to head to dinner. Ellen, Ryan, Tony and I went to dinner at Buca di Beppo and had a very nice meal, even though we had to wait around nearly an hour for a table (not their fault - I hear there was a convention in town).

Finally Saturday, I went back to the RPGA hall to collect my judge rewards (mmmm - Forgotten Realms Campaign Book), and then went to the Knights of the Dinner Table Live Reading for a bit (about 45 minutes). I sat with Amber #2, and then Tony joined us for a bit, and we got to see both Amber and her fiance get a chance to read. I then went back to the room to finish drawing my last map for the D&D Championship final the next day, pack, and get to bed as early as I could manage.

Sunday, August 17 - Gencon Day 4 plus post-Gencon: This was an early day as I needed to be in the RPGA hall about 7:30am. I showered, got the rest of my stuff packed so the others could check out of the hotel and load the car, then headed over for my game. The championship ran fairly smoothly for my table, although I had to switch at the beginning as I initially was assigned to judge the team that I had in the second slot for the entry round on Thursday. The table that I switched to was very organized and worked well together, and my dicen were incredibly cold. Also, my tactics were a bit lacking a few times -- I should have better studied the player characters rather than just study my "monsters", as the PCs had some powers I should have anticipated, and some things I would have known had I played some 4e at a higher level (paragon level) beforehand. They managed to get a good way into the last encounter (though they still had a ways to go before bloodying the final bad-guy). Their team managed to get 2nd place overall. The first place team was one I'd judged last year in the entry round (when I was judging the D&D Open with zero preparation -- see last years blog entry for the story of that debacle).

Ellen met me in the hall when my slot ended, and we waited around for the Championship award ceremony (well, winner announcement). We then took my stuff back to the car and we went to meet the others at Victory Field, the AAA ballpark next to the convention center. We all watched the ballgame (Indianapolis Indians handily beat the Durham Bulls), then divided into our respective cars (Ryan with Ellen and I, Kalen and Kathy taking Cody home, and Tony off by himself), and drove home.

I took the next day off, slept in for quite a while, and worked on getting our laundry through from the previous week. I was still feeling convention fatigue for pretty much that whole day.

So, a good Gencon overall!

Happy Birthday, Kathy!

2008-07-23T00:50:00.002-05:00

Kathy is a quarter century old today. Yay, Kathy.

Hmmm, in the next few weeks she'll be exactly half my age (she is now, counting only by whole numbers).

Arch Deluxe

2008-07-10T22:01:00.002-05:00

Ellen and I enjoyed a nice weekend in St. Louis with Bob and Diane.

Friday was, of course, the 4th of July and Ellen and I had the day off. I took the morning to mow the lawn and get a few other simple jobs done. Bob and Diane got out here about 1pm and we set off for St.Louis in Bob's car.

First stop was at Abraham Lincoln's tomb, since Diane hadn't been there before, and it had been years since Ellen and I had -- but it's not the kind of place where you need to visit frequently, it hadn't really changed. At some point I'll have to make another trip to Springfield, though, to visit the more recently opened Lincoln presidential library.

It took us a little bit to figure out how to get the Lincoln's tomb because there aren't good signs to it from the interstate. We made it between my looking up the directions on Bob's iPhone and Bob remembering that the turn had a Walgreen's on the corner -- but there's a Walgreen's on EVERY corner (we passed at least four in Springfield on the way in).

After that minor side trip we completed the drive to Fairview Heights, IL, a suburb of St.Louis, where Bob had booked rooms at a very decent hotel (where most of the rooms seemed to have been booked by a family reunion). We had dinner, then decided we were tired so skipped trying to take the train into St.Louis for fireworks and instead bought a deck of cards, a few beers, and spent the evening playing Hearts.

Saturday we slept in a bit, I took a good walk, and we hung around the hotel a bit, as we didn't have anywhere to be real early. We got lunch at Red Robin, then drove in to Busch Stadium to park (at the garage nearby). We walked down to the arch to buy tickets to the top for the next day, since we didn't know how busy it might be on Sunday morning. We knew that by the time we tried to get there on Saturday it would be too late for a ride to the top without conflicting with the ball game. We then took the train back to the stadium because Bob wanted to figure out where it ran, though we discovered that we would have just walked back just as easily.

Then we settled in for the Cubs-Cardinals ball game. A good exciting game, but it didn't end well as Kerry Wood gave up 3 runs in the 9th inning allowing the Cardinals to come back to win 7-6.

We went back to Fairview Heights, had dinner at J.Buck's (steaks all around), then Ellen, Diane, and I took a short dip in the hotel pool before retiring for the night.

Sunday, we got up early, drove in to park near the stadium again, walked down to the arch and took our ride to the top. As it turned out, since we got there before 10am we wouldn't have had any problems getting tickets just that morning -- I think they were selling tickets for an earlier time than we had at the time we actually arrived. We browsed the museum for a while, took our ride to the top, and got pictures from there -- a bit different view than the previous time I was there since the new stadium has been built. Another change in the view, temporary, was that the river was very high, flooding the deck below the arch (up to at least the first few stairs, though the base of the arch and the museum are far above that level). It was also flooding the docks of the riverboats along that section of the river, so the riverboat McDonalds must have moored elsewhere, and the others just were closed to business since people couldn't get to them. At this point in the river, there weren't other residences or businesses to flood, though I know there has been a lot of problems both upstream and downstream.

We walked back to the stadium and had lunch, and watched a game that was fun, but much more one-sided than the previous day -- Cubs won 7-1 -- and we ditched the last inning because Ellen, Bob, and Diane were getting too hot (game temperature in the 90's).

We took Diane to the St.Louis airport for her flight back to Omaha, stopped at Hardee's for a quick dinner (and I certainly DON'T regret not having Hardee's around here anymore), and drove home, getting back arounf 11pm.

And, that was it for a very nice weekend.

Bob and I also went to the Cubs/Reds game on Wednesday night -- another Cubs win, 5-1, but it got a bit tense in the 9th as the Red got the tying run to the plate before Wood managed to finish it up.

Ellen, Bob and I (and maybe/probably Kathy?) will be back at Wrigley on Sunday for the last game before the All-Star break.

And, that's it for now.

Last Weekend

2008-06-25T14:43:00.003-05:00

A post about last weekend, and "Last Weekend", and zeros leading up to "Last Weekend".

OK, I spent last weekend judging at "Last Weekend in Verbobonc". There, does that clarify my opening sentence any? Not that much?

"Last Weekend in Verbobonc" was the mini-convention last week in Champaign which wrapped up the regional storyline for our region in Living Greyhawk (D&D). The LG campaign is closing out, basically ... NOW ..., in favor of 4th edition D&D and Living Forgotten Realms.

LWiV also ran much nearer to home at College of DuPage, but I committed to judging in Champaign to allow the more local con to happen -- long story.

Anyway, we had around abouts 50 players, maybe a smattering more, and mostly judges from the Chicago area (part of that long story above). And I judged four slots of games leading to the end of the story: "A Mother's Love", "Quisling", the battle interactive (title now revealed as "Assault on Castle Greyfist"), and finally "Noble Ambitions". And ... I can't say a lot more, both for spoiler reasons and because there isn't that much more to say. I really enjoyed playing and running "A Mother's Love" the best as there was a good balance between story and fitting encounters. The interactive had way, Way, WAY too many layers of complicating mechanics -- all good ideas but with everything thrown in there was just too much. And, over the weekend I judged too much at APL 14 with groups that were overpowered, not at all at APL 10 where I would have been comfortable (and where I ran one of the zeros), and otherwise at APL 12 which was OK.

The zeroes, the previous weekend, were cool. I was happy at the end of the storyline that my character Aelorin, paladin of St. Cuthbert and protector of the people of Verbobonc, got to stand toe-to-toe with the big bad guy at the end -- the only one of our group to actually be in that position and one of two who dealt damage. Even if, as he was standing there, he was considerably more half-orcish than when he started the module. He died in the first encounter in the mod, was reincarnated going from half-elf to half-orc, but at least he still gets to continue taking levels of Outcast Champion as a result.

That's enough about that.

Sunday was my birthday, so after the morning slot at LWiV we (Kalen, Ryan and I) took off from Champaign to head north to get to the Cubs game. We met Ellen and Kathy at the L station in Forest Park, then rode in and met Bob at the stadium club. So, my birthday was capped by a nice buffet dinner and a Cubs win, completing the sweep of the White Sox.

D&D, family dinner, and baseball. Who could ask for a better birthday?

As for the coming weekend: I'm going to switch into full 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons mode and run the dungeon delve at Wizard World Chicago, all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I'm foolish like that. I hope the swag is worth it. It does get my into the con free, when I was very iffy about attending otherwise.

Flag Day Eve

2008-06-13T20:28:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow is Flag Day! Yay. I have to remember to put out my flag.

I hope you all find true love!

"Wuv .... Twue Wuv ... wiww fowwow you .... fowevew."

Anyway.

So, I got the 4th edition D&D books today (whoo hoo, Flag Day Eve!). I've spend some time looking at them, but tomorrow is going to be all zeros for "Last Weekend in Verbobonc". Then I'll likely run a zero for LWiV for Kalen and Ryan on Wednesday night. And finally, next weekend is the aforementioned Last Weekend in Verbobonc, where I'll judge all day Saturday plus Sunday morning.

After the morning slot next Sunday Kalen, Ryan, and I will drive back and get to the Cubs game Sunday evening, meeting Ellen and Kathy somewhere (at home? on the way to Wrigley? Depends on how the timing comes out).

Then maybe I'll turn a lot more of my attention to 4e D&D. By the time late-July rolls around I should be playing zeros of 4e/Living Forgotton Realms in preparation for Gencon.

You Will Find True Love on Flag Day (again)

2008-06-10T10:50:00.003-05:00

My 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons books have finally shipped from Amazon, with an expected 4rrival date of Flag Day (June 14).

I'd guess they'll get here a day or so earlier, though.

By the way, Flag Day was my in-laws wedding anniversary.

Happy Anniversary, Ellen!

2008-06-08T21:57:00.004-05:00

OK, I'm in trouble. I can't possibly write as wonderful an anniversary post as Ellen did.

I guess I can only wish her "Happy Anniversary" yet again, though I think I did it enough times this morning.

And then there's this:

A couple other bits of note, this is the 300^th post in this blog, which was started three years ago as of a week ago (June 1, 2005).

Happy Birthday, Bob!

2008-06-03T09:35:00.002-05:00

He's probably not looking at this blog, but I'll wish my brother a happy birthday. Maybe it'll remind me to call him tonight.

For the next 19 days, we are the same age again (technically).

The Cubs are in San Diego, so we've got no ballgame to go to today. Bob and I (along with Ellen, Diane, Kathy, and her former room-mate Liz) went to the game on Saturday and saw win #6 of the current eight-game winning streak.

All Japan Watches

2008-05-28T11:14:00.005-05:00

This post is not about a store selling timepieces.

Ryan and I went to the Cubs game last night with Bob and Diane. It was cold and very windy, with the wind blowing right in our faces. And, due to scheduling (mainly with Ryan's work) we arrived just at game time, so we didn't get to the stadium club buffet.

But, that worked out just fine -- we just decided to watch the first two innings from our seats and then head to the club to get sandwiches for dinner. We were then able to watch the next 5½ innings in the warm comfort of the club, watching on the HD TVs while we ate and lounged around. Ryan and I went back to the stands for the last two half-innings, but we just grabbed a couple seats down the right field line rather than go back to the regular seats. Thus we were positioned to get right out to the train station when Kerry Wood got the last batter to ground out to Derek Lee. Cubs won 3-1.

Someone on ESPN said "All Japan watches", probably around the first fourth inning, because the game had two big, recent signings from the Japan playing, the Cubs right fielder Kosuke Fukudome and the Dodgers starting pitcher Hiroki Kuroda. I said I thought "All Japan Watches" was a little shop down the street. Then throughout the rest of the night, anytime anything major happened, especially with Fukudome or Kuroda, we'd just way "All Japan watches!".

Hey, I could have named this post "Stinky Mattress Weekend", but Bob would have to tell that whole story.

I was also at the Cubs game on Memorial Day, that time with Ellen, Kalen, and Cody as well as Bob and Diane. The Cubs won that one by the identical 3-1 score. It was warm that day, and we could get to the stadium early enough for the stadium club buffet, so no side trips out of the stands on Monday.

One other small note from Monday -- in the 7th inning Chin-lung Hu pinch-ran for the Dodgers. After he was announced, Wayne Messmer (Cubs PA guy) followed up with "Hu's on first". I'll bet he gets a lot of that. He did from us.

This is a Test, this is Not ONLY a Test

2008-05-23T15:58:00.009-05:00

It's time for another quick update, but this one is more motivated by a new feature added to Facebook, that should pick up the blog post and add it too my notes automatically. I've had an application that did that (a couple different attempts), but they haven't been totally satisfactory and this new one is more integrated with Facebook. We'll see.

We're making a quick trip to Iowa and back for part of the weekend. We're doing the ceremony committing my mom's ashes for burial Saturday afternoon, some business at the bank earlier, and then dinner with Beth's family a bit later. Then we'll drive back Sunday and go to the Cubs game on Monday afternoon.

I finally caught up with the last three episodes of "Smallville" for season 7. My main thought throughout was how we were never going to get a satisfactory resolution to the storyline, what with the creators/story editors leaving and Michael Rosenbaum not returning to play Lex. I've also heard they we're bringing back the girl who played Kara, so we've got two cliffhangers where the actor is not returning: Kara probably stays <spoiler>trapped in the Phantom Zone</spoiler> and we'll probably get a poor excuse why we don't see Lex again (because, for the mythology, they have to at least be able to hint that Lex is still around). This shos is probably going to get demoted OFF the Tivo list next year, maybe to be caught occasionally if nothing better is on -- and it competes with both Survivor and 30 Rock most of the time.

Random Notes - 5/19/08

2008-05-19T23:08:00.002-05:00

Something small I noticed today: a newer building on my way from home to work (and vice versa) is named CityGate Centre. With the "Centre" spelling obviously meant to make it a bit more exotic and or sophisticated. But I don't think the same thing happens in reverse -- no place in England, Canada, Australia, etc, are likely named "Center" to give it that exotic American feel.

(yes, I know that it does happen in Japan, but that's a bit different)

It's happening: I just got e-mail notice from Amazon that my order had shipped -- the first D&D 4E adventure. So, I'll be able to read a bit and run a game shortly after we get the core rules. I've got LG to play and then prep for first, though, for Last Weekend in Verbobonc.

It's happening: Wizards of the Coast is sponsoring GenCon, so there will certainly be RPGA events there after all. Now to see when they plan to open RPGA event registration, and see if they're ready for a new surge of registrations.

It happened: Ellen and I bought 200 points in Disney Vacation Club on Saturday. We get 200 bonus points that have to be used in the next year at Saratoga Springs Resort (our home resort is Animal Kingdom Villas), so now we need to get into vacation planning mode. Probably (almost certainly) two trips to Disney World in the next about 8 months. I certainly can't complain about that.

It didn't happen: or very nearly didn't. I didn't get any real problem calls when I had the hotline this weekend. The phone rang once, but it was for an issue that wasn't in my area, so I got dismissed from the call quickly. Pretty damn cool.

You Will Find True Love on Flag Day

2008-05-19T13:25:00.006-05:00

Random bit of fun I found today, after we ate at F&R China Buffet yesterday:

Not that xkcd ever lets me down.

It's Like a Whole Other Country!

2008-05-16T15:27:00.003-05:00

The long delayed post on Ottawa.

The trip to Ottawa was brought up on short notice. I'd hoped NOT to be doing as much traveling, or as much STUPID traveling (for no point). But, this one was for an assignment that I very much wanted to do, to spend more time on. Plus, I knew I'd actually be meeting with people there. Interacting! Unlike my trip to Philadelphia earlier in the year.

Anyway, not so much to report on the work -- both because it was fairly unremarkable and because I probably shouldn't post much about it on an open forum. Not that any of the stuff I was working on hasn't been announced, just not as good a policy. The week was productive, though, and the colleagues pleasant to work with.

The hotel they put us in was too-fancy by half for my taste. Too upscale, but it was right next to the office. This is the kind of place where they charge $200 a night and then also charge for parking, and for internet access. I can get free internet in any Super 8 in the world, but they can't do it here? They can, but they also know they can get away with charging. And, since I was doing some work from the hotel at night, Alcatel-Lucent will just have to put up with paying for it. Another colleague, who is traveling this week, decided to go down the road a ways to a Days Inn because his taste runs about the same as mine.

I was up there with another co-worker, Kris. He and I went downtown in Ottawa on Tuesday night of that week, to the Byward Market. The density of restaurants in about six or eight square blocks was pretty astounding. The only type of restaurant that I didn't note in that area was a Greek restaurant (later, I saw one a couple miles away). One the other hand, there are a LOT of Lebanese restaurants. We wound up that night at a seafood restaurant, upstairs in their grille areas (three separate restaurants? or three separate brandings of basically the same restaurant in one building? -- upstairs, main floor, and cellar).

I also spent a night where I went back downtown and met my friend Dwight for dinner, at a pub in the large mall near the Parliment. I love pub-style food, and that's one thing that I've never seen replicated well in the U.S. In Ottawa there were a number of pubs (and, in fact, Kris and I ate in two others), no doubt due to the far-longer English influence in the country. Just in general, being in Ottawa was far more like being in England than like anywhere in the U.S. Other than driving on the proper side of the road!

And, since the timing put us there right at the beginning of the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, there was hockey everywhere in the evening. On the TV in every place that we ate. One three or four channels on my room TV. And, instead of being parked on ESPN as I often am when on the road, the TV was most often on TSN. TSN was pretty obviously owned, or part owned*, by ESPN since the graphics are the same, the music the same, the style the same. Only it was "SportsCentre" rather than "SportsCenter". And, hockey took about 80% of the broadcast, with baseball tucked into the corners, so I had to work a bit harder to get the Cubs score each day.

* TSN is 20% owned by ESPN, I see from Wikipedia.

I need to force myself back into more frequent posting, as I have ideas back up in my head that I never get committed to bits!

Springification!

2008-05-06T04:09:00.002-05:00

It's Spring! (no, Ellen, it's not summer quite yet)

I finally got a chance to start "springifying" around the house (or whatever the opposite of "winterization" is.

Mowed and trimmed the lawn for the first time this year (probably could/should have done it last weekend, but I was busy and it was rainy), put the screen in the storm door replacing the glass, got the fountain set up, got hoses back out to their stations, uncovered the patio table and got the chairs re-set around. And I fired up the grill for the first time tonight to grill some vegetables (not entirely successfully).

Slightly late in the spring for all this -- I probably would have done all this two weekends ago if I hadn't been in Iowa. But, it's done now.

Besides that, I got the leak from the shower in the kids' bathroom fixed, finally, and it was not IN the wall as I thought, but a back-flow from a bad connection with the hose from the hand-held nozzle. The bad news is that I figured that out AFTER I knocked a couple holes in the wall -- that'll just hasten the bathroom remodeling that we were planning anyway.

And, I got some stuff moved around in the garage to begin to make a dent in the mass of stuff brought back from Iowa, and I cleaned out the area that Matt had claimed (now that he's in Florida) and started moving some of my stuff back into there.

All in all, a busy and productive weekend. I'll see how well I can keep that up over the next weeks.

Delays, Delays ....

2008-04-28T14:21:00.002-05:00

It took a bit longer getting back from Ottawa than planned...

I was booked on a 7:35 United flight to Chicago on Friday night. That got canceled due to weather in Chicago (it was beautiful all week in Ottawa).

When I confirmed that the flight was canceled, I called my travel agency, and they got United to shift me to a connecting flight that went through Washington, DC, first on an Air Canada flight and then on United.

When I went to check in Air Canada had my name for the flight be didn't have ticket information so that they couldn't check me in until they knew they'd be able to get their money from United for that flight leg. It took about 45 minutes for the Air Canada check-in agent to get the right information from United. It was clear that she knew what she was doing, the United agent didn't seem to understand what the Air Canada agent was telling him. Meanwhile I got to see her deal with a few more minor crises -- the Chinese couple who were en route from Saskatoon to Boston and were not yet reunited with some of their bags, people to took off in entirely the wrong direction after she pointed them where they were to go, etc).

Finally, the ticket situation was cleared up and I got through check-in in time to get some souvenirs for the family at the airport shop and get to my gate a bit early.

Flight to Washington/Dulles went smoothly. It got off essentially on time, and landed maybe a few minutes early.

The flight to Chicago boarded about 20 minutes late, but then after we boarded we sat on the tarmac for about 2.5 hours due to a ground-stop in Chicago. Big storm front that was still moving through Chicago.

Landed in Chicago about 1:45am on Saturday morning.

They didn't tell us which area (conveyor #) the baggage pick-up was, and when we got to baggage claim they had our flight number listed in one area, but the bags actually came off in a different area. That delayed things about a half-hour while I figured out where my suitcase was. At least it arrived - I wasn't confident given the reshuffling of the flights.

Then, when I went to the transit train station to get to the remote parking lot, the trains were all "delayed". It should have taken me 15 minutes to get to my car, but it took more than 45. Got to my car about 3:15. I got home at just before 4am. But, I did get home that night.

And, the trip to Ottawa was very nice and productive. More on that in the next post.

World(-ish) Traveller

2008-04-19T22:54:00.006-05:00

On the road again.

Right now I'm writing from Beth (Ellen's sister) and Don's house in Iowa. I spent the day dealing with some minor repairs to mom's house that were demanded by the FHA inspector.

Add a tube to 6" from the floor to the relief value of the hot water heater -- got the tube made for that purpose from Lowe's, and then I just needed to borrow a hacksaw from Don to cut it to length

Loose wire ends in basement need to be terminated and put into a wiring box -- well, I could tell right away that the reason these wires were loose is that they were disconnected FROM the main panel, so they certainly didn't have live AC to them. But, to be fully compliant, I added wirenuts and a box to contain them.

Garage door doesn't reverse when met with resistance when going down -- This is sort of the trickiest one. If I lower the down pressure too much, the door doesn't go down at all. Increase it to get the door to go down and resistance doesn't reverse the door. I think I have it adjusted now where it needs to be. We'll see if it passes the next inspection. If it doesn't the opener may need to be replaced, and I really don't want to have to pay for that. The opener is probably 25 years old, and it's 1/3 horsepower when it may really have needed a 1/2 hp opener. This is the item I'm not going to be 100% certain is finished by the time I leave.

Flaking paint on garage door and back stairs needs to be scraped and re-painted -- done and done-ish. Scraping was pretty easy, and I still had the shop vac at the house so I could clean up the chips. A coat of white paint is on. I'm conflicted about putting on another coat. If it was going to be my house I probably would, but as it won't be my house by the end of the week I'd rather be lazy. I'll see what it looks like tomorrow after the paint has dried (and I can see it again in daylight). If it looks bad I'll go ahead and give it another coat

And, while I'm here I got the sale papers signed and ready to take to Bob to sign. The house closing is now tentatively set for Friday.

Tonight, Beth, Don and I went to Famous Dave's for dinner and relaxed for a while.

Tomorrow, I need to finish loading stuff for the last stuff to take back home, and I'll sweep the garage real quick. Maybe paint. The rest of the house is ready. Then, drive back home.

Monday morning I fly to Ottawa for a week, which I guess I'll talk about later. Tomorrow??

CODCon Report

2008-04-15T23:01:00.005-05:00

Yay! Seven slots of gaming in a six slot convention! (now edited to fix the errors/omissions caused by finishing the post at 2am while working -- not guaranteeing I got ALL the errors)

I'll have another blog post tomorrow, probably, but this one is the CODCon report -- while it's moderately fresh in my mind.

Friday:

Slot 0! Really, really slot 0, as it occurred immediately before slot 1 rather than days or weeks before the con. Matt, Ryan and I played VER 8-03 "Darkness is Unbound". This was done so that all four of us would be free to judge in slot 4, when we'd planned to play this. Also took the four of us out of the player pool that slot -- so the slot could require fewer judges. It was kind of an odd mod, but pretty interesting throughout. The end had a twist I was definitely not expecting. Who knew that .... well, that would be telling.

Slot 1! I judged VER 7-09 "Jinxed". A very fun mod, by one of the more fun authors. The players were all good, and I managed to kill the character of a player I really like. He took it fine. I'd tell you how I killed him (well, the mod killed him, I just rolled high), but again ... that would be telling. What I can say is that everyone thought it was hilarious.

Then I came home and hit a few hours of work (!!!!), since I got called just before slot 1. I got to bed at 3:30am.

Saturday:

Slot 2! I judged VER 7-08 "Race the Spirit's Lightning". Another fun mod co-written by the author of "Jinxed" mentioned above. The table included Kalen, Suzanne (another player I enjoy playing with), her daughter, and two players that I had in slot 1. As a spectator noted it was something that is rare to see - a table of 5 female players with 1 male. The mod tends to run long, and it did this time as well, but this is the third time I've run it so I'm getting better at pacing it. The climax wasn't quite as exciting as some of the times I've run this because one of the players here (Aisling - Suzanne's 9-year-old daughter) could outdo one of the bad guy's main tricks.

Slot 3! I PLAYED! Played VER 8-02 "Crypt Things". Played with Ryan and Matt again, Ryan and I with our Cuthbertines. I can't remember much about what we faced here other than the climax, which was major and has a lot of repercussions for my character (if only the end of the campaign wasn't approaching so rapidly). Ryan and I got to play off part of the Oath we'd previously taken -- we'll see if that comes up again or whether this was it. I'm guessing "again, but in a lesser way".

Slot 4! I judged VERS 7-03 "From Hextor With Love". It's much more of a freeform mod, better suited for home play (which it will never see, since it's a special). The problem here was with the players. Well, not so much with the individual players (or sets of players), but with the mix. Three of the players were tween boys, who just had way too much energy bouncing off each other. Two more players were a couple who I've judged before who are prone to anxiety attacks. And, of course, the boys just wound up triggering those attacks, and they had no idea they were doing it (or probably that anything was going on). I managed to get them through the module with some beating of the clue sticks near the end to help them get through successfully rather than having time called on them.

Went home. Had some follow-up to do from the previous night's work. About an hour's worth of work. Got to bed about 12:30.

Sunday:

Slot 5! I judged VER 7-05 "The Lion and the Dragon". Fun table. Challenging mod, but they were a bit overpowering APL 8 table (and the mod only goes to APL 8), so they managed to win outright. Hey, why is the XXXXXX cooler (and more deadly) at APL 6 (where I played) than at APL 8 (for these guys)?

Slot 6! I judged VER 7-06 "The Swan and the Crow". Direct sequel to the previous slot, and almost the same table - only one player changed. This time they played at APL 10, and at points they may have wished they could have stayed at APL 8! But, they were challenged and succeeded, which always makes for the best games.

Post Con: The family went out to California Pizza Kitchen. Then I crashed hard for about 9 hours.

And that was the weekend. Next post - what's been going on in Iowa, why I'm going back this weekend, and why I'm then going to Ottawa on Monday (not the one in Illinois, the one in Ontario).

"That certainly is Eric Gagne!"

2008-04-01T16:10:00.003-05:00

... that's what I said yesterday in the bottom of the ninth, after Gagne walked Aramis Ramirez. That was before Kosuke Fukodome hit the three run home run to tie it, though I pretty much called the home run as well.

So, it may not have been a Cubs win, but it was a good game to watch. I'd pretty much written off the game after Kerry Wood gave up three runs in the top of the ninth, figuring that the Cubs wouldn't make up that deficit. But, I hadn't realized that the Brewers closer was now Gagne. When he was announced, suddenly I had hope.

A very good game of Fukodome, but he was almost the entire extent of the Cubs offense. A well pitched game by Zambrano and Marmol (and Ben Sheets for the Brewers). The temperature was OK, and we were underneath the stands enough that the rain was never bothersome. We stayed in the club late so that the pre-game rain delay was ignorable - I got to my seat just in time for the first pitch. And the second delay during the game wasn't too long at all.

A bad game for Prince Fielder. He hit one little ground ball that rolled out to second base, and DeRosa was playing so deep that I thought surely Fielder would beat it out. But no. Fat-ass Fielder was barely half-way down the line by the time he was thrown out. The ball could have come to a stop and any one of four Cubs could have strolled over, gotten the ball, and made it to first before Fielder.

Then in the ninth Fielder fields a groundball from Pie maybe 15 feet behind first base. But it takes him time to get to the base and he veers to avoid collision with Pie - in the process missing the base with his foot and failing to get a tag on Pie in time. I don't even know why he particularly tried to avoid the collision - he may easily weigh three times what Pie does. Felix probably would have thought he ran into a brick wall.

For about an hour in the afternoon, we could truthfully use the phrase "The Royals and the Nationals are tied for the best record in baseball", knowing we'd never use that phrase again. Then we added the Rays to that list, then the Diamondbacks (but it got less funny then). Eventually, the Nationals won so they could stand on top with the best record unchallnged. At least until today's games.

Happy Birthday, Ellen!

2008-03-29T18:07:00.001-05:00

A quick post before we go out to dinenr to celebrate.
Spent the day packing up more stuff at my mom's house. More later. (but when?)

Bracketology

2008-03-22T21:24:00.003-05:00

I picked the wrong two 16-seeds.

It's NCAA tournament time, and pretty much the only interesting four days of the college basketball season (which is four days more than the NBA season has - sorry, I'm not a basketball fan).

So, I have a couple half-assed theories on the NCAA tournament:

1. Every year, two #12 seeds beat the #5 seeds in the first round.
2. Every year, three of the found #9 teams will beat the #8 seeds.

This is pretty much just observation, but it holds true most of the time (theory #2 fell a bit short this year). And, they seem to have some supportable reasons:

1. Seed #12 tends to get the best of the small-conference teams. On the other hand, #5 seeds often are teams from big conferences that have good records but the team is on the downtrend. Records too good to drop lower, but not good showings of late that would pull them into one of the top four seeds. So, the small-conference team has the momentum, the team chemistry, but no one treats their conference seriously. Note a lot of this argument can also hold for #11 vs #6, a bit less for #13 vs. #4, but they happen (as seen this year).

2. On the other hand, the difference between #8 and #9 seeds is negligible. Could have gone either way. But now the #9 seed has just a little bit to prove, so they ride that incentive.

The big problem with my #12 vs. #5 explanation is that it fell apart this year. Two #12 seeds beat their #5 opponent, but they were exactly the opposite ones from what I was expecting.

Villanova isn't from a small conference. There were a bubble team, the kind that often gets seeded a little higher like #11).

Western Kentucky is from a small conference, but Drake is from a mid-major, not one of the classic major conferences. They were convincing enough that they got a bit higher seed than mid-major winners usually get.

The #12 seeds that fit my model exactly are the ones that lost.

Oh well. I'll be interested through tomorrow (especially when we get the two second-round #12 vs. #13 games), but then it will be baseball time.

That Was Fast

2008-03-19T17:12:00.004-05:00

OK, I linked the listing for my mom's house in the previous post. It's been on the market maybe four days.

We got an offer this morning.

We counter offered.

They accepted our counter.

House is sold -- at least provisionally.

Maybe we left money on the table since it was done so fast, but it's taken care of. Now I've got to decide when I'm going back to pick up some more stuff, because I have about a month to finish clearing the place.

Listing

2008-03-19T12:19:00.002-05:00

OK, if you ever wondered what my mom's house in Missouri Valley looks like, here's your chance:

Not here, but you can see the listing for it, which has pictures outside and in.

And Ellen (with Rachel, Brian, Nicole, and Beth) did a terrific job getting things cleaned up, because it certainly didn't look that good when I left a week ago.

Return of the Keys

2008-03-13T10:26:00.002-05:00

Minor things make me happy.

For the past few months, I've been carrying one key, occasionally two. The one key would be the "Valet" key for my car, the one designed to be given to valet parking and that can't open the trunk. (The second was a house key, that I often didn't carry because there was rarely no-one at home).

I didn't have the remote lock/unlock fobs.

The story goes back to last summer (or maybe spring, almost a year ago). Ellen was driving this car regularly then. She was returning from work at Marionjoy late one night, stopped at a Jewel on the way home for some groceries, and when she got back to her car she couldn't find her keys -- though she'd obviously driven there. She had to call me to bring another key to the car so she could get home. Couldn't figure out where the keys had gotten to.

The second set of lost keys were after I took the car for daily use. When my mom died, I rode to Missouri Valley with my brother. Ellen and the kids drove over the next day -- some in Ellen's VUE and some in Ryan's car. Ryan didn't have an I-Pass for the tollway, though, so Kalen got my keys and retrieved my I-Pass. That would be the last anyone knew of what happened to those keys.

So, since then, months with just the valet key. I was just on the verge of breaking down and ordering a new remote fob and key from the Saturn dealer.

Last Thursday, Ellen got an envelope in the mail from Jewel -- with her long lost keys. No explanation, but we figure they must have been dropped in the store and then kicked under the cash register stand or maybe under shelves. That store must have been doing either some deep-cleaning or remodeling, found the keys, and connected them to Ellen through the Preferred Customer Card tag on the keys.

Last Friday, on our way back to Iowa, Ellen and I were reshuffling things on the console of her car -- making room for drinks, I believe, with our dinner-on-the-fly. She opened a compartment that she doesn't use much and -- there are mykeys. When they got tossed in there we're not sure. I may even had been asked where to the put them at the time and decided to put them in there. Then everyone involved totally forgot.

OK, It's a stupid little story, but I'm glad to have my keys and my remote fob back. It's a little nicety, and made ... well, not really made my day, but made that hour.

Happy Birthday, Kalen!

2008-03-09T10:10:00.002-05:00

Happy birthday, eldest daughter! She turns 1A today (at least the way I normally count my age).

Three quick posts, but I wanted to make sure this one was on top. Wish Kalen happy birthday at her blog (though I don't know whether she'll get to it until tomorrow, unless she nabs Cody's computer).

It's Later than I Think

2008-03-09T10:00:00.002-05:00

I totally forgot daylight saving time last night/this morning. I thought I was waking up at a nice, reasonable time to get some things done, after 8 hours of sleep. I got an hour into the day before I realized it was almost 10am, rather than 9am.

I was reminded by reading the comics. Both Arlo and Janis and Blondie have daylight saving time jokes today. At least, those are the only ones I've seen so far.

Bob says "Hi!".

RIP, Elaine

2008-03-09T09:51:00.002-05:00

My mother-in-law, Elaine Waterhouse, passed away yesterday.

Alll three of her children were with her at the time, and her passing was peaceful, though sudden (or at least, not at all predicted earlier in the week).

And, again, that's all I have to say about that at the moment. We were already in town here in Missouri Valley as we were dealing with stuff from my mom's estate.

Gary Gygax, RIP

2008-03-04T14:20:00.003-06:00

Gary Gygax has passed away.

I don't really have anything to add to this, other than noting the amount of enjoyment I've gotten out of the various incarnations of D&D over the years.

This news I got from Mike Norton's blog, though it's probably all over a bunch of Yahoo groups I read (but can't get at right now).

Happy Birthday, Ryan!

2008-03-01T08:54:00.001-06:00

It's heading into birthday season, and Ryan is first up. Happy birthday, Ryan.

My youngest is officially 21 today, but his siblings aren't here to take him for a drink.

Tall Structures

2008-02-29T23:02:00.002-06:00

As noted in tonight's "Fun Facts" on the Late Show with David Letterman:
"Prior to the discovery of penicillin, laughter was the best medicine".

Today, I laughed and laughed, and just couldn't stop for a long time.

It was during yesterday's episode of Jeopardy! (preserved on Tivo). In the category "Tall Structures":

The world's tallest supported structure is a 2,063-foot tower in North Dakota used primarily for this

Incredibly bad response given by one contestant:

"What is Storage?".

I just couldn't stop laughing to enumerate the many things were wrong with that response.

Literally. Every time I tried to make a comment to Matt on why I was laughing, I just got going again. Failed my save against "Tasha's Hideous Laughter".

Cancellation Shuffle

2008-02-27T23:41:00.002-06:00

In which, I arrive home just a little late.

Tuesday morning, I did two conference calls from my hotel room as I'm finishing packing, check out which still on the second call, then work in the lobby for a while (WiFi in the lobby). Then I grabbed a late lunch (California Pizza Kitchen) and started driving to the airport for my 6:30 flight.

I got only about a mile down the highway when I got a call - automated alert from United that they'd canceled my flight.

So, I find an exit and a spot to park as quickly as I could, then called home to talk to Kalen. I'd missed the customer service phone number on the message, but I knew that the same message would have come in at home (if I'd thought about it, the message was also on my voice mail at work).

I called customer service, and they could get me booked on the 5:03 flight. Huh? My flight was canceled, but an earlier one was available?

Anyway, could I get to the airport in time for the 5:03 flight, they asked. It was 3:01, I was a half hour from the airport, had to return a rental car, and I knew I'd have to have my bag checked about an hour before the flight time or they might bump me. It would be close, but ... sure ... I can just make it.

Avis was a bit slower checking in than normal because lots of people wound up returning their cars at the same time. And, I hate the rental car set-up in Philadelphia for Avis. The bus had to go all the way back out of the airport area to get turned around back to the terminal, and then I had to get to the fourth stop to get off for United. I kept checking my watch as the time ticked closer.

When I got to the terminal, though, there was zero wait for United check-in, so I was safe. I got checked in with a few minutes to spare, and already knew the flight was sure to be delayed anyway.

The 5:03 flight got delayed to a 7:00 take-off, so only about a half-hour later than my original flight. So, I didn't even really have to hang around the terminal more than I'd figured on anyway, and we got into Chicago at about 8:30, only about 20 minutes late all told.

The 2:30 flight Philly to Chicago took off at 6:15 from Philly, and got in about 15 minutes before my flight. And I'm sure that some people that were booked on the 5:03 flight hopped over to that 2:30 flight on standby, as the 5:03 flight I took wound up with some empty seats. Right after their flight boarded I realized they took several standbys, so I went over to the automated kiosk, checked seats and was able to move from a middle seat in the last row to the window seat further forward. And, the seat next to me wound up empty. So, not only was I barely late, but I was in more comfort than expected.

The vagarities of why my flight was canceled and the other flights let through are beyond mortal ken. The reason seemed to be that United got a few landing slots trimmed in Chicago due to weather problems much earlier in the day. Why my original flight rather than one of those others -- who knows.

Anyway, I'm home again. Yay!

Of course you know, This Means War !

2008-02-25T16:00:00.004-06:00

Winter War, that is! The long delayed Winter War post.

I tried to get caught up on sleep and get everything organized before Winter War. I was mostly successful, and wasn't quite so frantic on Friday morning. The weather was OK, roads fine, traffic a bit heavy through the suburbs, but we got to the hotel in Champaign with enough time to spare to register for the con, check in to the hotel room, get slightly settled (big room), and get some lunch at Friday's.

My goal for the convention was to catch up on all the regional Verbobonc modules that I'd fallen behind on because I had no time to do zeroes before Stuffed COWS. I was playing through the whole weekend as Aelorin, my sixth-level law-enforcement tank (Paladin 3/Fighter 2/Outcast Champion 1).

Slot 1: VER 7-05: "The Lion and the Dragon". I played this with Ryan, and I was appointed "commander" of the table due to the greater number of regional mods I'd played with my character, plus it was perfectly in-character for him to take command. The problem - one person didn't follow orders. I could chalk it up to the barbarian playing "wild" and thus in-character, or I could chalk it up to a bad choice by the player. Either way, we got our asses kicked, and barely escaped without any fatalities among our group. If the one guy had followed orders -- we still would have gotten our asses kicked. It's a good mod, but it kicked our asses.

Slot 2: VER 7-06: "The Swan and the Crow". Played with Matt and Ryan. We were frustrated by much of this module, but I think that's the way it's written. It took way to long to get to the meat of the story. When we got there, the story was good, and we did everything we needed to do -- but there was soooo much frustrating crap before that. Also, the judge didn't facilitate us getting past our frustration.

Slot 3: VER 7-07: "A Bitter Pill". Played with Matt and Ryan. A good story, decent amount of stuff going on, and the judge kept this moving so we we're feeling too hard the fact that we played this from midnight to 3am.

3am - Hit the bed hard. Alarm set for 8am for a quick shower before the next slot.

Slot 4: Saturday morning - Matt, Ryan and I were split three ways as I was judging VER 7-08 "Race the Spirit's Lightning". My favorite current mod to run, even though it runs too long to be contained in a four-hour slot. In this case, we had a long break between slots due to the auction, so I had time to run get some lunch from McDonald's.

Slot 5: VER 8-01 "Mediation". Not "Meditation", as it read in one spot, which would be entirely different. There were a couple of "Whoa" spots in the mod, but for some reason I don't remember other parts as well as I should. Again, I played this with Matt and Ryan along with three other people who only came for that one slot. It was a very good table to play with, though.

Slot 6: VERI 8-01 "Investiture" - again, played with Matt and Ryan along with a couple other people I like playing with - Suzanne Wills and her daughter, with Brandy judging. I got to play about half of it with this crew, then I got dragged away for the Mounted Borderers special mission (all four of us playing Mounted Borderers). Both the Mounted Borderers and the table I left behind were successful, which was NOT true at a lot of other tables. The resulting bloodbath, and the investiture of the new viscount, will probably get rolled into the end of "Mediation" for the general release, since this interactive is not going to be replayed (it doesn't lend itself to replay at all).

That was Saturday, and my head hit the bed about 1am, again leading to the 8am wakeup.

Slot 7: I was judging again - I managed to volunteer for all the morning, short-sleep slots. I judged the module that was originally the Cienega Valley special mission, that I played earlier with Joe, my ranger-scout/resident of the town of Cienega Valley. In this case, there were no Cienega Valley resident at the table, and no Pelor worshippers, so the mission didn't have the personal attachment. However, it was a table full of people I really like judging for, folks that I have fun playing with. And they did a good job with the module and I challenged them pretty well with the real "boss-fight". They just walked through one encounter that was supposed to be tough, though, as one guy was perfectly suited to do a ton of damage in one round and then be done for the day. In that fight, his big smack-down was all they needed.

Slot 8, and final: VER 7-09 "Jinxed". A fun mod, as I would expect from the author. I played with Matt and Ryan again, and we had an easier time with it than the judge had anticipated. It didn't help that we broke the mod a bit by killing someone who was supposed to get away. By this time in the convention, Aelorin was just in the mood to smack on bad things, and this mod provided the bad things.

We got done, finished packing up, grabbed something to eat, and got out of Champaign and on the road to Aurora, so I could get to bed and be on the road again the next day. But that's another story, that I've already told.

Lunch in Delaware

2008-02-24T20:25:00.003-06:00

A weekend off from work - though I'll check e-mails here shortly.

Saturday afternoon I spent several enjoyable hours with Mike Norton, my pal from Legends. I was surprised when Mike said it had been six years since we'd seen each other last in Chicago, but I trust his accounting of it. Anyway, we had a nice late-lunch at a Mexican restaurant that he knew, and then drove around the area chatting and him sharing local info. As usual, he captures it better over on his blog.

Saturday evening - laundry.

Today, I drove over to Valley Forge National Historic Park, and spend a bit of time going through the exhibits in the visitor center. It's really a place that should be visited in better weather, though, so that it's nicer to walk the site. The grounds were pretty busy, though, with families with plastic toboggans, cross-country skiers, and people just walking the paths -- but I was happy to leave it to them.

After that, I just felt like driving. I drove south and had lunch in Wilmington Delaware -- just because I've never been to Delaware before.

Tonight, I'm watching the Oscar presentations while typing this -- as much because Nascar bumped Simpsons/Family Guy reruns (oop, I just flipped over and I see the Simpsons is on now -- the one where Homer has lost 24 hours of memory -- OK, been there, seen that).

Tomorrow, back to work, but not quite sure how busy it will be yet.

URGENT!

2008-02-19T20:56:00.003-06:00

Everyone got an e-mail like the following at work, right?


URGENT! URGENT! URGENT!

Reminder American Idol voting starts tonight!!!

OK, maybe it wasn't everyone.

I'll be interesting to see if call volumes go up enough for me to see it without even looking for it (i.e. it triggers some automatic alerts). Should start about ... NOW!

Sucking Zinc

2008-02-19T12:51:00.002-06:00

"Ask your doctor if Placebo is right for you."

I could feel the cold coming when I last wrote. On Saturday I ran out to get some zinc lozenges, as they always seem to help me combat the cold -- whether through real effect or placebo. I didn't do a lot on Saturday or Sunday, partly due to fatigue, partly due to a far-to-long conference call on Saturday afternoon (did it really have to got for three hours?). On Sunday I drove around Valley Forge National Historic Park for a bit, but didn't really feel like stopping. I may go there for a bit next weekend if the weather is better and I feel better. Sunday in the early evening I did some laundry (at a nearby laundromat, since the guest laundry here is broken) and got some take out dinner.

Sunday night, I was sick. Feverish, mainly, but the food I'd gotten also may have been a bit too rich and caused some indigestion. Whatever. I slept only in spurts. The fever broke hard in the night, but then came back in the morning. Through noon yesterday I was a mess again. Between the zinc, acetaminophen, and eating lightly I recovered OK. I slept like a rock last night, and today I seem to be back to near 100%. Let's see if I can keep to that.

Speaking of recovery, I will note that the co-worker's son that I mentioned earlier -- the one wounded in the NIU shooting -- is mentioned briefly in this Chicago Tribune article. We'll see if that link actually works for those that may not be Tribune subscribers. Anyway, he's mentioned as still being in Good Samaritan hospital in fair condition. From the article it sounds like there were three taken to Good Sam, so that matches what Ellen said of her seeing a helicopter hovering waiting for another to clear the helipad.

Frederick the Great of Prussia

2008-02-15T20:32:00.004-06:00

OK, I'm in a town that is not actually a town, and it's not actually named after Frederick the Great or any other King of Prussia. And I wouldn't know any of that if it weren't for the Wikipedia article.

I flew into Philadelphia early on Monday morning, after getting back from Winter War (another story). Not as early as I was supposed to, as the plane coming from Detroit was delayed due to mechanical problems. They wound up switching planes, and we got off about 2.5 hours late.

The story of this week has been sleep deprivation, not aided by the sleep deficit I built up at Winter War. Every night there has been drive testing from midnight until 4am (give or take half an hour), and then often a bit of clean up work after the drive test. Then a project conference call at 9am. Then, whatever needs to be done during the day. Then another project conference call at 4pm. Then dinner, maybe a nap, and another drive test. That has been the pattern every day. So, I've been operating on, at best, five hours of sleep each night all week.

I've also got the sniffles (hard to call it a cold, but maybe getting there), and sore ribs after I fell on Tuesday (leaving Friday's after dinner I missed the edge of the curb, sprawling into the slush from the snow/sleet that had been falling). So, I'm a bit of a mess.

There's another drive test tonight, but no 9am call -- so I can sleep in!

No, I'm not driving for the drive test. I'm on the phone listening to how the calls are going, turning on and off logging, and adjusting parameters if the calls aren't as successful as they should be. Last night I did nod off during the drive test call (for about an hour, I guess), but I wasn't actually doing anything at that point and if they needed me I probably would have heard them calling for me on the conference call.

This weekend -- sleep, at least for a while. There's a 4pm call tomorrow, but it may not amount to much. From there I'll figure out if there's a Saturday drive test. Then we'll see what Sunday brings.

Thanks, you've been a great audience. I'm here 'til a week from Tuesday. Don't forget to tip your server!

NIU

2008-02-15T12:58:00.005-06:00

It turns out, the son of one of my co-workers was wounded in the Northern Illinois classroom shooting. He was wounded pretty badly, airlifted out to Good Samaritan Hospital near us (the medical campus where Ellen works, but not for the hospital), and after surgery is now expected to recover fully.

(for those not from the area, the Northern Illinois campus is about 30 miles WNW of my house)

And of course, I heard more news stories today about it. Everything that I heard was that the campus police had prepared for such an emergency (spurred by the Virginia Tech shootings last year), practiced, and executed the plan to the best of their abilities. It was said that some campus police were on the scene in 30 seconds.

But, there's only so far that such preparation can take you unless you're willing to lock down the entire campus and do searches of everyone. And, even then, there's only so much protection that provides. Shit happens, even when everything else goes according to plan.

Early

2008-01-30T17:35:00.000-06:00

Got my early voting done today. I got to vote for both Illinois senators.

I hadn't given any thought to this being the year that Dick Durbin's senate seat was up for election. Not that there's a strong reason to note that -- Durbin was unchallenged in the primary so it hasn't been talked about. I haven't even heard about Republicans running for Senate in their primary, so they must have annointed a token candidate to lose to Durbin and others haven't bothered. The seat is pretty secure. (OK: Google search shows there are three no-name candidates in line to lose to Durbin.)

So, the other senator was, of course, my vote for Barack Obama in the presidential primary. Then I topped off the vote by contributing a bit to his campaign (though the website could make that action easier).

Voting was done on a Diebold touch-screen machine. It was my first time doing so, but I found it easy. I could even see how the paper trail was done, though I couldn't see the shredder -- it must be deep inside the machine. Or maybe that's only enabled in the general election.

The early voting place was actually fairly busy -- maybe 10 people ahead of me in line plus several already voting, and just as many showed up as I was waiting. Of course, this was at 12:30pm, so I probably was there at the peak of the day.

Horizontal

2008-01-29T22:57:00.000-06:00

I was at work a bit late today. By the time I was ready to come, I called Ellen, looked outside the window, and commented that the snow was moving perfectly horizontally.

So, I drove home a bit slowly. It wasn't too bad on the road because in most places, the snow blew right off rather than accumulating. There were some spots where was some accumulation and maybe a bit of drifting, but most of the snow was gathering around vertical surfaces -- for example, there's a good amount of drifting now by our front door.

This all after we'd had the first period of thawing for a couple weeks. We'd been in such a deep freeze, single digits, with the temperature never coming close to that magic 32°. Yesterday and the first half of today it was warm enough (in the 40's) that most of our snow cover disappeared. We'll see in the morning how much we got back.

Because of that, I'll probably take the Wednesday morning conference call from home, maybe after some shovelling. Then, I'll get my comics and go do the early voting thing -- one of six sites in DuPage county is in downtown Naperville, so conveniently on the way between the comic store and work.

I Need to Update!

2008-01-27T22:03:00.000-06:00

I'm falling behind. It's been more than a week since my last post, and Ellen's updated twice since then. That just doesn't happen!

But then, right now I can't think of what I've been planning to blog about.

I guess I can put up the schedule for the next month, since between now and the end of February I'm on the go way too much.

This week, I'm actually home until Friday, and things should be fairly normal. Sometime this week, I need to figure out the early voting for the Illinois primary.

Friday, Ellen and I go back to Missouri Valley to meet up with Bob and deal with more stuff at Mom's house. We'll be there through the following Tuesday.

Wednesday and Thursday, Feb 6-7, back at home, relatively normal. I'll need to work on laundry and packing then, though.

Feb 8-10 (Friday - Sunday), I'll be at Winter War in Champaign, playing a bunch of Living Greyhawk, catching up on the Verbobonc regionals (and judging a couple slots). Then drive back on Sunday night, getting back home around 10pm (hopefully earlier). Then to bed, because I'll be up and out of the house at 5am in order to ...

... fly to Philadelphia (flight out at 7:30 in order to get in as early as I can without going out Sunday night). I'll be in Philadelphia (actually, King of Prussia, PA) for a bit more than two weeks, supporting a new feature release that's going into Atlantic City (though the office we'll work out of is in King of Prussia). I'll be there until Feb 26.

Then back home and hopefully back to normal, or whatever passes.

On a totally unrelated note: Tony -- check your e-mail. It's just easy to reach him this way.

At Least I Could Take It Out On Others

2008-01-18T22:13:00.000-06:00

I had a lousy day on Tuesday. But at least I could take out my frustration on others.

Well, actually, I was the delegate for my boss this week, as she has been on vacation. On Tuesday I got stuck in lab all day (and a bit into the evening), mainly because another guy begged off while he was working on a customer ticket. OK, that was fine. But meanwhile I was also getting requests from several other sources for help that my boss would normally be covering, so I had to find people to cover that. I had one unassigned customer ticket that needed addressing that day. So, I IM'd four guys that I thought could cover it, and asked for one of them to step forward and take the ticket.

None of them would. They all had their excuses.

So, then I talked to one of them individually to try to get him to take the ticket, because I knew what he was working on could get deferred. He kept coming up with excuses, and I finally got frustrated enough that I said "Forget it, I'll take care of it".

Then more tickets came in.

We got to four tickets when I e-mailed everyone in the group asking everyone to try to pick up one ticket. If they stepped up first they'd have their pick of the four - so they had the chance to grab the easiest. And I'd take the last one not assigned.

Then the fifth came in as I was sending the e-mail, so I e-mailed again.

Then the sixth came in as I was sending that e-mail, so I e-mailed again. I said that any ticket not taken would be assigned randomly to people by the end of the day, and no, I wasn't kidding.

That got results. Four of the six went quickly. Then I tracked down the remaining members of the group, rounded them up in one spot, and was about to do the random assignment. One of the three stepped up to take the second-to-last, so I took the last (the one I said I'd take earlier anyway).

So, we wound up the day with no unassigned tickets, and we've managed to keep the queue low all week. That's how it's done!

Of course, one of the ways the queue has stayed low was that I took care of 4 or 5 tickets in the past two days. But all of them were relatively easy, though, and mostly involved giving people some information (in a couple cases, setting them straight with something they should have known).

Ah, but I'll look forward to Tuesday, when my boss is back and I won't have to do they stuff that people come to her for.

Not so much else going on at the moment. I'll try to have a bit cheerier post tomorrow. No promises.

Mexican Chipmunks

2008-01-12T23:25:00.000-06:00

I was driving to Omaha this morning, poking around on the radio trying to find a station to listen to. The scan landed on a Spanish station, and lo and behold, the song was yet another Chipmunk voice. This one clearly meant to emulate the Chipmunk sound, though whether it was legitimately Alvin, Simon, or Theodore I don't know. Probably not. It may have even been technically meant to be a mouse, as it was singing about a cat (or, at least "un gato" was one of the few phrases I could pick out, and it was repeated.

I guess it wasn't really a Spanish station per say, it was a local affiliate of Radio Disney. It was all Spanish for the little bit I listened to it, though, including a few minutes after the chipmunk-y song finished.

So, other than that, we completed the deal for the sale of mom's car, so that bit has been taken care of. I went to Omaha to drop off a bunch of mom's clothes and coats at Goodwill, then I went shopping and got myself a new coat.

This evening, we went with Beth, Don, and Rachel to "The Melting Pot", a fondue restaurant (one of a chain). It was good, and the whole experience was geared more to socializing (we spent 2.5 hours there, which I think was pretty standard). We had to laugh at Rachel as she was having trouble finding things that were to her taste, at least until we moved to the pots of chocolate in the desert course. Mainly because there were just a lot of things she just hadn't tried before.

So, time to crash for tonight. Tomorrow we'll get the VUE loaded with a bunch of the stuff from here that's going back to Aurora. Hopefully we'll get going well before noon so we can be back home at a reasonable time.

Pounding out the Miles

2008-01-12T00:29:00.000-06:00

Sitting in Missouri Valley, after driving a bit more than 6 hours (about 10 'til 5 this afternoon to about 11:10 tonight. Ellen and I are here to take care of a bit of business (selling my mom's car), take Ellen's sister out for her birthday, and haul some stuff back to Aurora (as part of the whole cleaning-out-the-house exercise).

I don't really have anything else to say -- this is mainly here to let Kalen know we got in (since she's the one who worries). Assuming she even checks the blog from Indy this weekend (OK - Cody will tell her).

Chinese Chipmunks

2008-01-07T16:53:00.000-06:00

It makes a better post title than a story. Kathy and I ate at a Chinese buffet in San Antonio on Saturday night. While we were sitting there, I noticed that the background music had a vocal track that sounded most like Alvin of the Chipmunks. I don't know if there was a reason for it, or whether the singer was just singing in falsetto with a fairly effected voice. For all I know, since it was in Chinese, it was the translation of "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)".

OK, it was a lame story.

The other note about the buffet: we were talking about how every Chinese buffet has essentially the same items, faithfully reproduced in each place even though each restaurant is totally independent of any other. Then I went to get my usual desert of an almond cookie and tapioca pudding, only to discover that this buffet had no almond cookies!

And, on the other thing I mentioned. In Oklahoma, pretty much every interstate exit had signs that said "See <insert town name>!", with a list of about four local sites to visit. So, for example, there was "See Purcell!". But the exit was "Purcell / Lexington". As if the sign said "See Purcell! But screw Lexington, it's got nothing!".

Yesterday I visited the Alamo briefly, then walked over to San Antonio's Riverwalk and finally through the convention center to HemisFair park, site of the world's fair in 1968. The latter was interesting as there was still plenty in indications of where the fair was and how it might have looked, though there had been also a lot of redevelopment of areas since then. Some nice water features near the base of the Tower of the Americas looked like something that would be for a world's fair, but I later discovered they were added when the area was re-done less than 10 years ago.

I cut some of my touring short to go set up Kathy's wireless internet access, since the installer had been there to set up the cable modem. It was a good thing I did, since the router we'd gotten didn't set up properly with the given instructions. I called tech support and they got me straightened out. One line telling me the IP address of the configuration page in the router itself would have save the call, though.

The flight back was smooth and a bit shorter than expected, though a late departure meant we got into Chicago right on time. Ellen, Kalen and Cody met me at the airport, and then we met Ryan for a quick dinner. My the time we got home (about 10pm) I was ready to crash.

So much for Tim and Kathy's Big Adventure. I may be doing the same thing in reverse in May, but I've got four months. Hopefully Kathy will pick up some blogging telling us about her student teaching.

Running low on time

2008-01-05T21:54:00.000-06:00

In particular, I'm running low on charge on my laptop, so I'm just pounding out a quick place-keeper post.

I'm in San Antonio in a hotel. Kathy's in her apartment a couple miles away. The apartment is very nice. More on that later (maybe Kathy will post).

Remind me to talk about the Chinese Chipmunks. And Oklahoma not caring about all their towns. And, hmm, I guess about whatever I see at the Alamo tomorrow. I'll check the basement for PeeWee's bike.

Maybe I'll post tomorrow before leaving, if I'm chillin' at Kathy's apartment. Certainly when I get home, but it's possible the post won't get out until Monday then.

Monsterous

2008-01-04T20:52:00.000-06:00

So, we got into Oklahoma, and about 50 miles in there's a tollbooth. So, I pull up and ask what the toll is. And the toll taker says ....

"I'm goin' need about tree-fiddy".

Just then I noticed that the toll taker was the dang-old Loch Ness Monster!

OK, apologies to Parker and Stone. But the toll was $3.50, so that's the first thing that came to mind for both Kathy and I. Actually, the sign at the booth said it was $3.50. The toll taker was an older woman who barely paid any attention to me (as another woman held a cell phone up to her head. ?????).

Oklahoma has a ridiculously inefficient toll system. The toll both is in the middle of the road. If you want to get off at a a exit shortly after the toll both, you collect a receipt and then they refund you part of the toll at the exit. (If you get on at a ramp after the beginning of the toll stretch, you collect a ticket and give it at the booth to pay less).

Also, we stopped for lunch shortly after the second toll booth (also $3.50). We got a refund of $2.00 when getting off. Getting back on the tollway then cost $1.75. So, we saved a quarter by getting off the road then getting back on. Although I could have saved more, maybe. The booth was the same for both east-bound and west-bound, with west-bound (to Oklahoma City) paying $1.75 and east-bound (to Tulsa) taking a ticket. I didn't see anything really keeping me from taking a ticket and then getting on west-bound.

Strange system.

Anyway, we are currently in Burleson, TX, just south of Ft. Worth. A bit less than 4 hours left to go to San Antonio. It took a little longer than expected today because we stopped for a while so that Kathy could talk on the phone to the internet company arranging installation at her apartment on Sunday. They called her cell (as directed), but with the road noise she couldn't hear them until we stopped. And then, we hit Ft.Worth right at rush hour, so traffic slowed us down a bit.

And, for those of you reading only for the porn store report: I saw a couple in western Missouri that didn't have religious signs right next to them. It must be mainly an eastern Missouri thing that they are trying to one-up each other. Through Oklahoma I didn't see any such stores. May have been a toll road thing, or they may have outlawed them at least along the interstate. Probably the latter, as there was a big store just across the Texas border (just like there are fireworks stores just inside the Indiana and Wisconsin borders from Illinois).

By the way, I have no real strong feelings one way or the other about either porn stores or religious signs, but in Missouri they are both eyesores.

OK, that's enough for tonight. More tomorrow, if I wrest the computer from Kathy for a bit.

Live from Springfield

2008-01-03T21:59:00.000-06:00

Springfield, Missouri that is. Day one of the drive to San Antonio is complete. I'm beat, but I should be able to get a decent night's sleep. I didn't bother having Kathy drive at all today, but tomorrow she'll get her shift(s) in.

One thing I managed to leave home without is the power cord for my laptop. I thought I had more charge, but I onliy have about 30 minutes left. So I'm using Kathy's computer for everything - unless I get on for a bit on Saturday night when I won't be with her (by then she'll be in her apartment and I'll have a hotel room, until I fly out the next day).

Driving through Missouri -- there are a LOT of porn shops along the interstate, especially in the first hour out from St.Louis, and equally as many billboards decrying porn. Equally as many, because the billboards are strategically placed right beside EVERY shop. By contrast, there's exactly one such place along I-80 in Iowa, more subtle in it's advertising. Similarly one on I-65 between Chicago and Indianapolis - identical in every way (including being in an old Stucky's restaurant). None along I-88 in Illinois, but that's probably an artifact of the difficultly in exiting the toll road. There may be one on I-80. Just an interesting bit of sociology. Soooo many in Missouri.

I'm happy with the results of the Iowa caucuses. I'd be just about as happy with a Hillary or Edwards candidacy, but I like Obama best at this point and think he will be a good general election candidate. On the Republican side - eh, who cares among the lot of them. The real good news is that the 9u1ian1 campaign got embarassed.

Bizarro League

2007-12-31T11:08:00.000-06:00

In the regular season, my fantasy football team (the Aurora Owlbears) went 2-12. Last place, and fewest points scored.

But, it was an eight-team league with all eight making the playoffs.

In the playoffs, I exceeded by regular season win total. I was 3-0, and overall champion!

Go figure.

The league playoff results were nearly the inverse of the regular season. I beat the #7 team in the finals (I beat the #1 in the first playoff). The finals standings, relative to regular season standings, was something like 8, 7, 6, 4, 3, 5 2,1.

In other news, we finished "Red Hand of Doom" yesterday with only one casualty and one or two very-near casualties. Kathy's fighter/rogue died but got back in the fight immediately due to a special "raise dead" favor (just, you know, one level lower). And she would have avoided all the damage if she could have made just one of her three attempts at the reflex save.

In retrospect we shouldn't have gone into the last area with both the sorcerer (Ryan) and the cleric (Brad) nearly out of spells. But we didn't know how much time we could wait.

Tonight -- will be a long night with not nearly as much fun as usual. I have a special monitoring shift tonight from 11pm - 2am Central to make sure all our switches survive the new year -- especially the ones in New York City and Las Vegas. So, I'll come on shift at the stroke of midnight in New York and leave at the stroke of midnight in Las Vegas.

Merry Christmas

2007-12-25T11:49:00.000-06:00

Slip Sliding Away

2007-12-22T19:56:00.000-06:00

Well, not "away", fortunately. We didn't even do any slip-sliding really, but we saw people doing so.

We got as far as Colfax, Iowa. A bit more than half way back to Missouri Valley. We'd been seeing the electronic signs over the interstate with a snow storm warning from noon to 6am through central Iowa. Around Newton the snow started. Between Newton and Colfax it started getting worse and I could see (and feel) the snowpack starting to form on the highway. Then the first of the cars off in the ditch. And another. And a truck. Then the traffic came to a near stop as there was a car that just went off the side to the left (and a highway patrol car there to check on them right away). At this point, we checked Kathy's new GPS and figured out there was a motel just ahead about a mile. It was time to stop.

We may have been one of the first to stop and check into that motel, but then another woman came in right after us and was visibly shaken. She said she'd just avoided hitting another car that spun in front of her.

By the time I wandered back to the lobby a while later (needing to wander away from the confines of the room, even though it's decently sized), there was a line of about 10 people checking in.

We did venture out this evening to get dinner at a cafe in town, a couple miles away, and the wind is still blowing fiercely and producing some hefty drifts across the roads.

I'm assuming thing will have cleared up enough by tomorrow morning that the roads will be plowed out and salted, so things should be fine on the interstate. If we'd managed to go another 40 or 50 miles we would have missed this entirely -- the roads just west of Des Moines are reported to be clear. It sounds like this storm blew in from the southwest, as this is part of a system that I see is causing all sorts of problems in Kansas and northwest Missouri.

Anyway, we should make it to Missouri Valley just fine by early afternoon tomorrow. More then.

Shopping and Outages

2007-12-20T22:51:00.000-06:00

Got a bit of Christmas shopping done today. Most of it on Amazon, with a guarantee that it would be delivered on the 24th. One item wasn't guaranteed, but that's OK. We'll cope, I'm sure.

I did go to one mall today as well as a couple other stores. In all the running around I only found one item, and it wasn't exactly what I went out to get. But, running around the mall felt Christmas-y, what with parking far away and dodging people while walking quickly through the crowds.

I got two phone calls while out from the person with the hotline this week, needing some help. The first was just as I got into the mall, and I talked her through a bit and then figured out that there wasn't an outage so the issue could be deferred. Then, on my way home I got the second call from her and I helped through the outage, taking about 90 minutes out of the evening.

I may get out and do some more shopping tomorrow, or maybe it will wait until Sunday or Monday and I'll do it in Omaha.

I was going to copy something about procrastination that I'd written for Pulp Legacy, but, eh, it'll wait.

Kalen really needs to blog now.

And in that Christmas Sprit ...

2007-12-19T15:44:00.001-06:00

... it's a good time to link to that all time Christmas classic:

Deck us all with Boston Charlie

from the Official Pogo website.

And I'll note that one thing I'll miss this year, due to the Writer's Guild strike, is Letterman's annual Christmas episode. Alas, no Darlene Love singing "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" (well, it is on YouTube from past years: 2005 and 2006). No Jay Thomas knocking the meatball off the top of the tree with a football.

Ahhh ... Christmas traditions.

It's Beginning to Look a Little Like Christmas

2007-12-18T21:34:00.000-06:00

I hate struggling with Christmas lights. I pulled stuff out to decorate the tree and I had two strings of lights that didn't light at all, and one that only half lit. I couldn't really figure out what was going on with them -- changing individual lights didn't do it, and there was no missing bulb. We wound up stripping off the bulbs (apparently good, swapping them into one know good string) and throwing out the bad strings of wires/outlets. I had the girls go get four strings of good lights -- commercial grade -- and even then one socket was falling apart on me.

At least with the better strings of lights I feel I've got a bit more I can do to fix anything that goes wrong. They actually have replaceable fuses -- the bad strings probably have an internal fuse that's blown, or just a short I'll never find. And the quality of the wire is much better -- thicker gauge and the wind is tighter so I don't have indivial wires hanging out everywhere.

Anyway, the tree is up. The penguins with their igloo are out on the lawn, as are the choir kids on the other side of the door. Everything is going on and off with the timer.

I didn't get any lights hung on the house this year. Weather and events conspired against me. I didn't want to hang things while it was snowing heavily at the beginning of the month, and now the gutters are iced in so that I can't hang the usual hooks.

The annual lighting stuff is one of those things I always want to get figured out in advance. Next year maybe I'll just get lights up the weekend before Thanksgiving, and just keep them off until the beginning of Advent.

But, no, I'll be saying the same thing next year.

Christmas will be a bit odd this year. Ellen and I and the girls are going to Iowa to spend some time with Ellen's family and to pack up some stuff in Mom's house. Both Matt and Ryan had got work schedules that prevent them from joining us, so we'll probably do family Christmas on the evening of the 26th when we get back, or maybe the morning of the 27th (probably depends most on Ryan's work schedule).

Back

2007-12-11T22:42:00.000-06:00

Back home, and pretty much back to normal. We were threatened with an ice storm today, but it mostly turned out to be rain so far. Maybe its dropped below freezing now, but hopefully it won't mean a layer of ice for the morning commute tomorrow.

One day back at work, and I've got a bit of catching up to do, but nothing major.

And, the only thing else I have to say is to direct those that care to the Adventure Hooks blog for Kalen's post there, figuring out New Year's plans (if any). Thought I'd mention it here because I don't know if everyone is checking that blog (I've got it on my Google Reader, so I can see when a new post comes up, but not new comments).

And, that's it for the moment. I just want to get back in the blog habit.

Memorial Service

2007-12-09T23:14:00.000-06:00

Yesterday afternoon was the memorial service for my mom. The pastor couldn't do much with the eulogy since he'd only met my mom a couple times, and not at her peak by any means. He referred to some of her projects she was doing as "knitting", though I've never known her to knit -- rarely would she even crochet, and I don't think she had any yarn anywhere that she'd been getting at recently. It didn't matter, he did remember what she'd told him enough to use it as the main thrust.

The best part, though, was earlier in the service when he opened up the floor for testimonials, and easily a dozen people spoke of what she'd done and meant for them -- from church people to school administrators to former students, with one of my best friends from high school and college topping it off with a bit of levity. It was a very good service. It also got to me when I saw one of the floral arrangements was sent from the class of 1987 -- always important when student recognize a former teacher, though we were trying to figure out whether there was something special about the class of 1987 with Mom -- I think it must have been the first graduating class when she moved over to the high school from the junior high, so they would have had her in both places.

Anyway, that's it for now. We spent today getting a bit of stuff organized around the house here. I mainly tried to get some order on her desk while Ellen packed clothes and also cleaned out the computer room closet. Bob cleaned out several areas and worked on organizing recipe printouts with Kathy. Then this evening we had dinner with Ellen's family and played a game of Hawaiian Rummy with Beth and Rachel. We have a bit of business to take care of tomorrow, then back home for now. We'll be back here in two weeks for Christmas, and then probably for a few days in January to do more organization of stuff.

2007-12-05T23:14:00.000-06:00

A quick note. My mom passed away this afternoon. I got the call about 12:30 that she'd taken a turn for the worse, and the doctor was pretty clear that she wasn't going to make it. My brother and I started driving back to Iowa, and en route I got the call that she passed a bit after 2pm. From everything I can tell she had friends around her at the time, and died peacefully.

And, that's all I really have to say right now. The next couple days will be busy, so no idea whether I'll be around here.

Morning Star

2007-12-04T23:05:00.000-06:00

I won! In a raffle run in November by LUNA (United Native Americans at Lucent), I won a Morning Star quilt. $5 for six tickets worked out well.

So, I got that going for me.

Snow tonight, so I'll have to wake up early to shovel out at least Ellen's car. I'll have the option of working from home, but that doesn't work so well for Ellen when she has to see patients.

Today's WTF: I listened to a bit of Bush's press conference this morning as he tried to dance around his evaporating excuses to invade Iran. Still putting out reasons why that may be "necessary".

But, even worse are the neocon advisors to Rudy 9iu11ani claiming that the CIA is inventing evidence to keep Bush from attacking Iran, as if it were a foregone conclusion that it must be done sooner rather than later. With the people Rudy is surrounding himself with, he may be a more dangerous president than Dubya. Fortunately, his candidacy looks to be imploding.

Post Turkey Days

2007-12-03T23:39:00.000-06:00

It's not that there's nothing going on. Quite the contrary. It's trying to decide how to write -- and getting disciplined enough to write.
OK, so when I last wrote it was before Thanksgiving and I was in Iowa.

I drove back on that Wednesday. A bit later than I'd intended, and a bit snow-ier than would be preferred. Between Missouri Valley and Newton (a bit east of Des Moines) I saw maybe 20 cars that had gone in the ditch, but I didn't see people so they may have gone off the road earlier in the morning when maybe it was slicker with frost. I never thought the driving was that bad.

Thanksgiving: Kathy was home. Cody came up for the weekend. Bob came out for dinner. We played some games in the evening. A good time was had.

The weekend after Thanksgiving: Stuffed COWS. I judged seven games, never quite knowing what I was going to judge before I got assigned to a table. I did get to play one slot in the special. I'd planned on playing Aelorin (my paladin), but Duc was judging and he heavily hinted that I should play Blaine (my rogue). As it turned out, the team really needed a rogue to succeed, and Blaine's +20 to find and disable traps was important.

The following week -- hmm, it's all a blur now.

On this past weekend, I got the Christmas decorations down from the attic and got the outdoor winterization finished. Just as we covered the patio table with the tarp it started snowing all at once -- it happened the very second, such that Matt and Ryan thought we'd stirred up a bunch of dust unfurling the tarp. The strong wind and snow, and the rain the next day, kept me from getting the outdoor lights up (so they weren't up for the first day of Advent). Maybe sometime this week I'll do it, or on Saturday.

My mom is back in the hospital today after a bout of flu, but hopefully she'll be out tomorrow and will be able to continue her rehab.

And that's all I can think of for the moment, at least as far as the catch-up. More tomorrow.

A Quick WTF

2007-12-03T19:23:00.000-06:00

From an AP story on the funeral of Sean Taylor:

Mourners also included ... O.J. Simpson, whose children attended the same high school as Taylor.

Simpson expressed sympathy for the relatives of those arrested, as well as for Taylor.

"It's horrible, not only for him, but for those other four families," Simpson said. "There are four other lives that are gone."

I understand the sentiment, but if you're O.J. Simpson, do you really want to be the one to raise it?

A full update a little later today.

Moving Day

2007-11-20T22:33:00.000-06:00

Got mom moved into the nursing home today. She seems to be doing pretty well, so she may be able to regain her strength fairly quickly. Anyway, I got her recliner, TV, iPod, laptop, some clothes, and a bunch of miscellaneous stuff moved up today. I have a list of things to gather tomorrow before I take off for home.

While leaving the hospital today I passed my sister-in-law and her husband. She was checking into the hospital -- knocked down hard by a case of the flu and very dehydrated. I told her I wasn't really in town to visit her in the hospital. She often reads my blog, so by the time she sees this she'll obviously be out and back on her feet, so I can only say "Get well, Beth -- RETROACTIVELY!"

I had dinner tonight at Penny's Diner -- which is set up as a 50's style diner but I know it hasn't been there for more than about a year. I'd been eating too much fast food/fried food the past few days, so I was looking for something a bit better. Meatload, salad, mashed potatoes, green beans, and a roll, with my iced tea, and all less than $10. The potatoes were instant (instant disguished as home-made, peel-in potatoes, but the peel pieces were tiny and clearly part of the mix), but I don't mind instant potatoes anyway and as a whole the dinner was really good.

Penny's is a mini-chain, so I thought I'd Google it and link it's website (like I do so often). I didn't find a website (it looked like there were maybe 20-25 sites in the chain, but I did find that Bill Clinton had been in that very diner less than two weeks ago. Closing in on time for the Iowa caucuses, though I haven't gotten hit over the head with campaigning (but I'm also not watching much local TV).

Strange Cheese

2007-11-19T22:04:00.000-06:00

I'm in Iowa, so there's one thing I always have to do .... go to Nebraska!

Nebraska is completely made up. A fraud perpetrated by those in Omaha to make everyone else think they have a whole state behind them.

No, really, I drove over to Blair to get a Runza. The Runza in Blair is the closest one to Missouri Vally (probably the closest to Aurora as well).

As I was eating my Cheese Runza, I realized something was different. The cheese was not an American Cheese slice (as usual). It was a white cheese, and very melty and gooey. Almost like queso fresco. It may also have been mozzerella cheese, or maybe white American. Is there really any difference between those three? Anyway, it was different, and it was really good with the Runza.

Other than that, I've been taking care of some business for my mom. She's in the hospital now, doing better than she had been, and the plan is that she'll move up to the nursing home tomorrow. After that we'll see how things go and how long she'll need to be in the nursing home. So, tomorrow I'll get her stuff moved up there, take care of some banking, and hopefully drive back to Aurora on Wednesday.

Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)

2007-11-16T22:58:00.000-06:00

It's been a week when the things I could think of to blog about I couldn't really get motivated to blog about. This is kind of a forced update post.

I'll be out of town the first part of the week. I'm driving back to Missouri Valley on Sunday so I can help out my mom. The current thought is I'll head back to Aurora on Wednesday in time for Thanksgiving, but I'll play it by ear.

Ellen and I went to her inducted into Sigma Theta Tau honor society of nursing tonight, and then dinner afterward. Over dinner we agreed that the speaker at the induction ceremony didn't really go anywhere, comparing public nursing at the beginning of the 20^th Century to that now at the beginning of the 21^st Century. The talk didn't really go anywhere, but it did lead us to pondering when the Germ Theory of Disease was propagated and actually accepted by the public (conclusion: nurses 100 years ago had a lot of teaching to do).

Mice Are Jerks!

2007-11-11T22:16:00.000-06:00

Our pastor told this story as part of the sermon today. I told Ellen later that the point of the sermon was "Mice are Jerks!".

In other news, I was stiff today from too much ladder climbing yesterday. I cleaned out the gutters, installed some gutter guards to try to lessen/eliminate leaf buildup since most of the leaves were still on our locust tree, and also got Halloween decorations taken up to the attic. So, a lot of climbing.

This afternoon Ellen and I went to Normal for Kathy's choir concert. The concert was fine, especially Kathy's choir. I get to nitpick other choirs -- the solists in the men's glee were flat and the arrangement of "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" was one I didn't care for, but at least we didn't have bad scat singing from a lame show choir at this concert.

Tomorrow: D&D - maybe. So far I've only seen that we have three players and we need four.

Dreams Come True

2007-11-09T23:37:00.002-06:00

Last weekend I had a very vivid dream. One I then remembered well when I woke up, and can still remember now.

In it, I went to Payless Shoes and bought two pair of black shoes. One was a fairly bland pair of black work shoes like I usually wear (at least before I switched to pretty much always wearing white New Balance walking shoes). The other pair was a bit fancier -- shiny black slipons with a tassel, kind of like these. I took them to the checkout, and the dream ended.

Tonight, I went to Payless Shoes and bought two pair of black shoes.

OK, actually I took Ryan and got him a couple pair of black shoes. A pair of fairly plain black shoes for work, in exactly the style I usually buy (that would be these). And a pair of black sneakers for non-work-day wear. And, he and I went out for dinner since he and I were the only ones around -- Ellen at class, Kalen in Indy, Matt in Urbana (and, of course, Kathy in Normal).

Hopefully, I'll get some stuff done around the house and with my computer done tomorrow. Sunday, Ellen and I go to Kathy's choir concert in Normal. Monday night I think I'm playing D&D as a zero for Stuffed COWS.

Anyway, that's the promised update for tonight.

Usually I don't have dreams that are either so vivid or so oddly mundane. Actually, usually I don't remember my dreams at all, so maybe I dream about shoes every night.

Yes, I did have to search for a picture of the pair of shoes from my dream. Just because I wouldn't know how to describe them otherwise.

Tangled Dragon

2007-11-08T22:08:00.000-06:00

Ha! My 9th level rogue killed a large blue dragon with only a Tanglefoot Bag!

Ah, there's nothing quite so fun, so cinematic as that.

Of course I'm talking about Dungeons and Dragons. There's also non-D&D stuff in this post -- so you can scroll down, Mom!

Kathy, Ryan, and I played Dungeons and Dragons last Saturday with three other friends, in a long, long delayed session. Matt was our judge.

The dragon was probably going to go down anyway, as Ryan could blast it with spells and Duc had a bow suited for dragon slaying. However, it was my turn, and I was only about 15 feet from the dragon, which was hovering over a crevasse. I didn't have anything I could really do to hurt it much, but I could hinder it a bit by getting it slightly tangled up. So, I threw the tanglefoot bag (basically, you can think of it as a bag of tar).

The dragon failed it's reflex saving throw, so it got its wings tangled. It couldn't fly any more! So it fell into the crevasse. And it took 56 points of damage (I'm not sure how far the fall was to know how many dice of damage that was). 56 points was not nearly enough to kill the dragon, but it was enough to force a massive damage fortitude saving throw. Which, again, the dragon failed. Dead dragon.

Maybe not David v. Goliath, but in a similar vein. Failing both saving throws was probably a 1 in 100 shot, or worse. It would have eventually fallen to the sorcerer (Ryan) and the archer with the dragon-bane bow (Duc), but this was a better story.

♦ ♦ ♦
It hasn't been quite so busy this week, so I'm catching up on some of the work things that need to get done, and even a couple at home. If I can clear the work tasks, then I can feel freer to not check on things on the weekend -- thus leaving some time to catch up at home.

One thing standing in my way a bit, and one thing I need to work on, is that my personal laptop suddenly decided to crap out on me last Friday night. I was in Excel/HeroForge editing my character sheet, and suddenly the laptop froze. It seems like it may be a power problem, but we'll see. At the very least, what I need to do next is take out the hard drive, make sure I can still access everything, and then get it backed up. Then I'll figure out what I'll need to do to deal with the power.

♦ ♦ ♦
In other news, Ryan got a job at the AMC Cantera 30 movie theater (after his gig as "Halloween Expert" at Party City). I'll put that here, because you'll never see it on his blog. So now three of my four kids will have worked that theater (four of five if I extend that to Narf -- and I will!).

And, hopefully Matt and Kalen will have a bit more luck after we got their resumes in better shape last night. Their resumes were way too generic, where both really have some specific skills that should have been played up better.

More tomorrow night - promise. I've been thinking of too many things to blog about, and then not getting it done. So, I'll try to at least get a quick note when I have those thoughts, and flesh it out later.

Leftovers

2007-11-01T23:29:00.000-05:00

We've got leftover candy. We've got leftover pictures!

There were a few pictures on my camera that I didn't know were there (since I didn't take them). But, they're here, and I decided to share a few. Just because.

I have no idea when this one of Ellen and I was taken:

... but this one of Danielle and Jason (and Kathy's feet, I believe) claims to have been taken on the same day:

Finally, we have have this picture of Kalen and Cody:

... which is actually a better crop of this picture of Kalen and Cody and Harry:
Except if you crop it down, you don't know that it's taken beside Wrigley Field.

That's not all, but it's enough. The others are mostly redundant, and these are the best.

And so, AH HA! Beware if you leave pictures on my camera!

Heh heh.

The Night of Few Goblins

2007-10-31T22:58:00.001-05:00

If I counted right (counting comics before and after) we had 37 kids trick-or-treating tonight. About half of what we had last year.

No idea why. The weather was beautiful.

If anything, the mood was a little different because the rule for daylight savings time changed. It was still fairly light even by 6pm, and we don't get many kids show up after 7pm.

Again, the comics were a hit. I got an "Awesome" out of one boy when I gave him a copy of "Superman and the Legion of Super-heroes" (the Free Comic Book Day version of the recent-ish #1 issue). A group of junior-high boys commented that we always are the best (they like comics, and these guys always make comments on them).

We actually gave out 36 comics and 37 Kit-Kats. One was a baby, and Kalen decided not to pull out a comic (wouldn't make sense). I doubt that the kid was even 1 year old yet -- I said he came in his "Baby" costume, his mom said he (she?) had a costume on, but it was under his (her?) coat.

Pictures! We took some pictures of the front decorations and of Kalen's costume. Check them out on Picasa.

Anyway, Tony came over and had burgers with us. Tony, Matt, Kalen and I then played a couple games of Zombie Fluxx, including one that just wouldn't end. We abandonded the game so that Tony, Matt and Ryan could go see a movie (intended to see "Darjeeling Limited", wound up seeing "30 Days of Night").

And that's about it for the day.

All Hallow's Eve Eve

2007-10-30T23:24:00.001-05:00

Twas the night before Halloween, and all through the etc. ...

Candy in stock - check
Comics in stock (for giving) - check, as long as there's not many more trick-or-treaters than last year (65-70).
Decorations up - most of a check. Some stuff needs to go out tomorrow. That's mostly been Kalen's territory.

I think I'll work from home tomorrow, though. I like being home when the trick-or-treaters are here (because I like to give the comics), and I've got a couple errands I could do in early-afternoon, and a conference call in the morning that I always like to do from home anyway.

Hey, I even got that box of comics sorted this past weekend. And a few other minor things. Should try to check off a whole bunch of things on Sunday (Saturday is going to be for D&D). No Bears game this week to distract me.

Work was busy last week, as talked about in my post last week. This week is more normal, so less stressful. I still have a few things to catch up on from then, so I'll try to plow through them tomorrow.

I've touched on the 47 level in the freerice.com vocabulary, but I always get knocked back down from that level. OK, how many grains of rice do you think are in a pound (or kilogram, maybe)?

I guess that's it for now. The Halloween wrap-up will be tomorrow night.

Rice

2007-10-24T23:03:00.000-05:00

See my other post for whining about not having time.

But in a few spare minutes the past couple of days, I've gone to the web site freerice.com. I take about five minutes to build my vocabulary, and maybe get some rice to some hungry folks.

Thanks to Mike Norton for that link.

I always wonder how effective sites like this turn out to be. The idea is get some charity dollars from advertisers. In this case the advertising is really, really low key (hardly noticable, but present). And the vocabulary exercise is pretty fun. At least until I might sometime exhaust the available questions. In the three sessions I've done I've noticed some repetition.

Try it. My vocabulary looks like its sitting in the level 43-44 range. Anything lower I usually know the word. Higher and I'm lost. At level 44 I can manage to figure out most of the words based on roots. I've managed to see a few words at level 46, and maybe even answer one or two there, but I haven't managed to get a glimpse at level 47 yet.

Too Busy

2007-10-24T22:39:00.000-05:00

I'm taking some training during the day this week. Stuff I really need to know. A class everyone in my group has been strongly encouraged to be at.

Of course, that doesn't mean that other things get to be on hold. They need to be done, too.

So, a late night at work tonight.

Some of what needs to get done I actually do during the class. I have my laptop with me in class, so I can monitor a site that's been causing problems. I haven't had time to actually debug it like I should, but I can watch it and fix it when it goes bad. Until I get a chance to debug it.

And a new load got released this week, so we have some extra testing to do. That's why I stayed late tonight. But the lab was misbehaving, so we got done about half of what we'd hoped to.

And, I'm the anointed expert on where a specific hardware problem has been seen (aka, the mysterious problem in Dayton from my last post). So, I get called on to answer questions about that -- including the one from a director who called me while in the lab. So, I left the lab session for an hour and a half to find some more info for him.

So, it's been one thing after another. The box of comics still sits unsorted. Ah well.

Tomorrow. Well, more of the same. The weekend may be more promising, though.

Just Below the Top of the List

2007-10-21T22:18:00.000-05:00

Once again, Scott Adams nails my life perfectly. This time, not in a Dilbert strip, but in his blog.

The second line of his post certainly rang true:

My life is peppered with these little tasks that are just below the threshold of being worth doing. And that threshold is a moving target, depending on how busy I am.

Though it's not quite right. It's that there's something more important (or seems so at the time) that crowds out other tasks.

Like, I've got a box of recent comics that needs to be sorted so I can actually find the ones I want to read. It's been sitting like that for a few weeks. It's only important to me, but I want it done. But, always something else needs done first.

And, thus, also why I haven't blogged for a couple weeks. Something else has crowded it out. Most often in the last week, it's been work.

I got caught at work for a few extra hours on two (or three? I lost count) nights in the past week. There was a mysterious problem on a few sites in Dayton, and I spent a lot of time either debugging or, mostly, coordinating other people debugging. That's one of the aspects of my job, to get all the experts called in. The problem happened when these sites had a software upgrade. So immediately we eliminated the thing it turned out to be: a hardware defect. Only when we'd eliminated everything else and narrowed the problem to one unit were the experts in Germany able to figure out that the problem was hardware, a path that wasn't used in the old release but was in the new release, so the upgrade uncovered latent problems. We're still figuring out all of the affected sites.

And, after a long day and a fried mind, the only thing I wanted to do when I came home was relax and recharge.

Fortunately, my weekend has been fairly decent for relaxing and getting a few minor things done (still now that box of comics though). I did log into work this evening to check a couple things, and found both needed a bit more attention than I'd hoped so I wound up doing things there for .. oh .. about 3-4 hours. Oh well, I won't have a backlog of e-mail in the morning anyway. I'm supposed to be in training all this week -- we'll see how that goes and when I'll fit in the other stuff that still won't wait.

Anyway, I'll try to update again tomorrow with the other things that have gone on the past couple weeks. But tonight, I think I'm done.

Next Year? Again?

2007-10-07T20:05:00.000-05:00

Their chance was in the fifth inning. Score 4-1, bases loaded, 1 out, crowd making as much noise as possible. Result: double play, one of four on the day. And, the Cubs went out quietly.

I'm expecting by the night that I'll be chanting "Rex! Rex! Rex!", though at this point it's 7-7.

UPDATE: OK, I can't believe the Bears actually won that game. Basically, the Packers did everything wrong in the 2nd half, particularly in the 4th quarter.

And I still don't think Griese is that great a quarterback. He screwed up a couple times, but he'll get a lot of credit for a win that neither team's offense seemed to want. The Bears defense was the real winner tonight.

Philosophical Question

2007-10-05T23:47:00.000-05:00

So, today raises the question: Is it better to fall behind and not be able to close the gap, or to lose in stunning fashion with no opportunity to come back?

In other words, better to be the Cubs the previous two days, or the Angels and the Yankees tonight? All are behind three games to two.

Or for that matter, to get blown out twice like the Phillies?

The answer: better to be any of the above than to be the Mets, Padres, or Brewers.

In other news, it was a busy day at work. I was doing a kind of low-key, remote monitoring (down several steps from what we had been doing), but as soon as I started we noticed an outage in Albuquerque. Not our issue, but we had to struggle to get all the folks online to decide that and to get the customer online to deal with it. Then dealing with another problem reported that I don't think is a problem other than a screwed up antenna or blocked signal. Not a problem we can deal with (especially 1000 miles away). Then there was a false alarm that started just as I was about to leave, so I waited to see if there was a problem or not.

And then, a couple games of Fluxx this evening. Now closing in on midnight -- I need to get to bed.

I'll leave for Wrigley in about 13 hours so I'm there plenty early.

Not Really Liveblogging Game 2

2007-10-04T21:16:00.000-05:00

I'll open up this post to maybe make some comments on the game, but I'm not going to update quite as actively as I did last night, such as it was.

For one thing, I'll probably go do some dished after bit, and I know I need to log in to work and send an e-mail so that folks in Germany will respond during their day.

Tonight I've got the game audio on radio while keeping the TV on to watch. Right now Pat is explaining how they're going to try to delay the radio broadcast a bit to better match the TV, though it's a complex explanation of why they can't match for everyone (depends on cable system, or if you get satellite, etc. etc).

Ted Lilly has never shown me he can bunt.

Later in the game ... it's closing in on midnight and it's the middle of the 6th. This game is going to take forever.

Too bad Lilly had no command tonight. Not much of that to be found in any of the Cubs pitchers tonight, but we'll see how Kerry Wood does.

The bigger problem, though, has been that none of Soriano, Lee, or Ramirez have generated much of anything on offense.

But I did get the e-mail sent to Germany.
...
And now it's just before 1:00am. 3 hour and 45 minute game. Ugh. And Lee and Ramirez can't do anything in the 9th.

I did get most of the dishes done, though.

We'll have to get them on Saturday. Nothing like liveblogging on Saturday, as it's hard to do that from section 228. Stadium club late lunch/early dinner at 3:30. Report late on Saturday.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

2007-10-04T12:00:00.000-05:00

Time for another birthday post. Happy Birthday, Mom!

And, again: Happy Birthday, Mom!

Liveblogging Game 1

2007-10-03T20:57:00.000-05:00

OK, so that it hasn't worked so well to blog daily recently, more due to my own laziness and lack of motivation than anything. So, here's a new experiment: Liveblogging. I'll update this post periodically throughout game 1 of the Cubs/Diamondbacks LDCS series. So, keep reading ...

LDCS = League Division Championship Series. Except the winner isn't really champion of anything.

And, the TBS guy who's back in the studio (with Frank Thomas and Cal Ripken) just called Geovanny Soto "Geovanny Sato". We'll see how long I stay on TBS audio vs. switching to listening on WGN radio. This was on the pre-game.

Looks like the roof's open. I'm surprised.

Soriano grounds out on the first pitch. Then Jacque Jones is patient and the draws a walk, with four out of five pitches not close. On the other hand, those "not close" pitches fool Derrick Lee. Ground out by Ramirez, and the top of the first is over. And ... I'm not going to keep doing play-by-play.

Tip the hat and point to the sky -- Zambrano re-groups and strikes out the last man in the first to keep the game scoreless.

Uneventful 2nd inning. I can hear the Cubs fans in the stands with the double play that ended the 2nd. The TBS pre-game estimated maybe 20% Cubs fans, as Arizona had always been a place with a lot of Cubs fans before the Diamondbacks were put in there.

Hey, it's the Kenny Lofton/DHL commercial that makes fun of him getting traded a lot, but never listed the possibility of his eventual destination: Cleveland. I saw Lofton's 2nd game in Cleveland this year.

Zambrano doubles! And then ... three straight strikeouts. Meanwhile, Dick Stockton pronounced Mike Quade's name two different ways. It's KWAHD-ee, with a long E sound. Not Kwayd, not Kwahd-AY (long A).

Oh sure ... David Letterman does a lot to boost Frank Caliendo's career, and now he'll have a competing show?

1-0 Diamondbacks on Drew's homerun. Otherwise Zambrano's not looking bad at all, but Webb has been just a bit better. Still plenty of time for that to switch.

Stockton says "That should go as an error on the thirdbaseman". Yah think? When it's thrown six feet over the firstbaseman's head? Theriot at second on an error -- let's tie it up. Hmmm - Stockton just pronounced Theriot with a "Th" rather than just a "T" sound. Shouldn't he have pronunciation guides?

Still 1-0 - Zambrano had the best chance to drive in The Riot, but a good play turned it into a line out.

Theriot almost kills himself to try to throw out Ojeda (bottom of the 5th). At least Zambrano tried to field that one with his glove rather than his usual bare hand.

Ron Darling said what I was just thinking: the Cubs keep hitting everything hard but right at a Diamondback.

Someone clued Stockton in on the pronunciation of Theriot's name.

Tie game on the high bounce. Now, can Zambrano drive in some to help himself? Nope, but I'll take the tie.

Marmol comes in and gives up a homerun. No doubt about that one, just like the one from Drew. 2-1 Arizona.

3-1.

Another long fly ball from Ramirez. Need to get a little more on those. And now, the same from Floyd.

I'd rather see Ward pinch-hitting with with someone on base. But he is good for a walk.

Well, it's over. 3-1. Oh well. This was the game they were most likely to lose of any in the series. The important thing will be to get a split in Arizona.

I was taking inventory -- of the eight teams in the playoffs I've been to six of the home stadia (Cubs, D-backs, Phillies, Yankees, Red Sox, Indians). In the past three years I've been to the eventual World Series champion's home stadium in that year. If that trend continues, this year the winner will have to be the Indians or ... the Cubs!

Maybe I'll do this again tomorrow night. Maybe I'll just be content to sit back and watch the Cubs win.

Anyway, that's it for tonight.

Happy Birthday, Matt!

2007-09-22T12:18:00.000-05:00

Happy Birthday, Matt!

You can check Matt's blog and leave him birthday wishes, and check on the cat.

I'm not doing so weell on that daily posting I promised, but we'll see if I can pick that up a bit. Later.

Cure for a Bad Day

2007-09-19T23:59:00.001-05:00

Cubs Win!
Busy day at work for everyone. I didn't get in until late because I was up late and took a conference call from home, and then had some things to check that came up as we were talking. I didn't even leave for work until just before noon.

Then I supposed to get mid-year feedback from my boss, but she was busy at 1pm when I was supposed to go in. I'd told her I needed to leave at 3:30, so I would be OK to meet with her until then if she freed up.

She IM'd me at 2:30, and I figured it was time for the feedback meeting. But no, she wanted me to join another call where they were trying to get something fixed. I reminded her of my time constraint, but she remembered - she was trying to get someone else but I was available at the time. Fortunately, I wasn't on that call long before someone else from our team was reached and took over. So, I got out while the getting was good.

While I thought I was stuck, I called Kalen and had her bring me my jacket, as I'd forgotten it this morning and thought I might need it (it turns out I didn't).

I wound up getting down to the game plenty early, and waiting around for Bob. He wound up being late because of similar traps at work and getting the world's slowest train in. He'd had a worse day than I had.

And, we were late enough that we'd lost our stadium club reservation, but after only a few minutes waiting we were able to grab a side table that freed up.

BUT, the Cubs game was good. A close game - pitcher duel - that the Cubs pulled out a run in the bottom of the eighth. And the Brewers lost, so the Cubs are in first place by one game again. So all was well.

Which is good, because my train got re-routed on the way back from the game, so it took me about 15 minutes longer getting back than usual, and caused a bit of confusion for a while as I didn't know for sure which direction the train was going to go around the Loop.

OK, that's enough for now. I'm getting this post in just because Matt called to harrass me to post -- even though HE hasn't updated his blog as promised.

Mass Extinction (RPGA Meeting - Gencon, Saturday August 18)

2007-09-17T23:34:00.000-05:00

All of a sudden, all of my Dungeons and Dragons characters will be going away. The extinction event is next year. This is the RPGA meeting that I forgot to blog about earlier.

By the time the RPGA members meeting started on the Saturday of Gencon, most of the important information had already been leaked. That just meant that some people could come prepared with their best futile arguments.

With D&D 4th edition coming out the middle of next year, the D&D campaigns that I play the most are ending. I'd be able to keep playing Living Greyhawk until the end of 2008 (and longer, since no one will really care about the rules any more), but the trick is going to be how motivated I or anyone else will be. Living Kalamar is ending a bit earlier, with Kenzer's license for D&D ending, though again I may play after the "official" end because I'll just grab modules to play later.

The announcement of the end of Living Greyhawk made several people mad, and they tried to make that known at the RPGA meeting. People always fear change, and didn't like the idea that a campaign they'd spent seven years playing (at most) might someday not be there. Ignoring that the campaign had a pretty good run. Quite a few want to keep it going, ignoring that they are fighting against the marketing campaign of WotC and a well buttoned down colleciton of intellectual property. They might try to keep doing things in the Greyhawk setting, but if so they'll wind up playing a watered down setting like what Legends of the Shining Jewel has been (which is really a bastardized Forgotten Realms -- the campaign world that RPGA and WotD are going back to).

I'm basically looking at all of this as inevitable. I know that my D&D playing a year from now is going to be very different than it has been for the last few years, and right now I can't really how things are going to go. Eventually, I'm sure I'll be playing Living Forgotten Realms with D&D 4. I may play the successor to Living Kalamar with Hackmaster 5, but it will depend on if there are actually others to play that with.

I could also still be playing 3.5 under Open Gaming License rules with LSJ or Blackmoor, but I never did get into those campaigns much. I've got 3rd level characters in both that I really don't care much about.

Yeah, this hasn't really been about the RPGA meeting, because for the most part that was only good for the amusement of people trying to fight the inevitable with absolutely no leverage on their side. This is really just about me trying to sort out where my gaming is going to be in a year.

The Picture Post

2007-09-16T22:54:00.000-05:00

Pictures!

First, here's a picture of the new couch (with Kalen chatting online).

And, here's the love seat. It's the same color as the couch, the color shows up properly above (chocolate brown leather). Taking the picture with the sun shining on it didn't work as well. I didn't get a picture of my chair yet (but, it's the same color and basic design), and Ellen's hasn't come in yet (ditto). The only real difference is my chair is a rocker-recliner and Ellen's is a wall-hugger recliner.

And now, Ellen's new car. It's a Saturn VUE -- the seventh Saturn owned in the family (six at current).

So, now I'm driving Ellen's old car, and Ryan is driving my old car. And, I'll let Ellen tell more of the story on how she chose the VUE, unless I beat her to it (time to update your blog, Ellen!).

That's it for now. I just wanted to share the pictures. More tomorrow.

Saturn 7

2007-09-15T22:06:00.000-05:00

I've got to get motivated to blog again. Let's say I'll do daily blogging again for a while, and see how long I can keep it up. For tonight, this is more of a place holder and a catch-up.

More on Saturn 7 tomorrow, after I take a picture.

Ditto for the new living room furniture, which has been in place more than a week.

I realized afterward in my Gencon report that I accidentally left out the Saturday RPGA meeting, after I'd teased that in a previous blog entry. I'll report on that later this coming week (the short report - there was anger, not from me).

Other than that, it's been a busy week, but not insane. I got to sit in the nosebleed seat at Wrigley last Monday and see a Cubs win. I'll be at the game on Wednesday night with Bob.

And, that's enough for tonight. Tomorrow - photos! This is just a tease.

Gencon: Saturday and Sunday (August 18-19)

2007-09-04T22:03:00.000-05:00

Finishing Gencon, because the last two days won't make for long blog posts.

Saturday, I lazed around a bit more in the morning, since I didn't have anything scheduled until 1:00 and I didn't have anything I really wanted to do before that. So, I got things picked up in the room as best I could - mainly to get my stuff organized for a quick exit the next day.

I'd played enough Fluxx in the previous two days that the box was getting worn already, so I went back to the dealer's room to get the wooden box to store Fluxx (with an extra rule card, but that rule gets a bit annoying so I may pull it out of the deck more frequently). Oh, and I forgot, I bought the sixth collection of Girl Genius on Friday, and got it signed by all the creators. Just to stick that in since I forgot on Friday and that completes the set of things I bought in the dealer's room.

Back to Saturday - I reported for my judging shift, another shift of Living Kalamar, but only one table of players was there so I got released as a Kalamar judge. I went over to headquarters to see if they had something else they needed me to judge. Unfortunately, they did. They asked the group of us if anyone had prepped the preliminary round of the D&D Open. No. Has anyone ever run the Open before? Eeep. I had to admit that I had. So, I wound up judging a first round table of the D&D Open with zero preparation. I didn't even have maps before we started. But this group was insistent on playing even though they knew I had no time to prep, because they'd driven 14 hours just to play the Open.

As it turns out, they were a fun group and very willing to work with me as I took a few minutes to read each encounter as they got to it. The D&D Open is a timed event, so they were somewhat handicapped by that. On the other hand, I may have done a better job of killing them if I'd had a chance to understand all the enemy tactics (I definitely could have done more with the bugbears that would try to bullrush people off the machinery). As it turned out, they survived (I got one down to 1 hit point0 but didn't have a chance to do anything with the final encounter. They were happy, though, and got a group picture with me at the end.

In the third slot I was signed up to run "D&D for beginners". We didn't have the beginners at first, so I got recruited to oversee a Three-Dragon Ante tournament. Later, the players showed up for D&D for Beginners. I didn't know how it was scheduled, I found out later it was supposed to run at 8:00pm and 10:00pm. There was a big batch of people who showed up, so I ran a double-sized table through the first time, and then a table of six starting at 10pm. So, I didn't get done that night until just after midnight. Everyone else was back at the hotel by then, so I got a Polish sausage from a street vendor and called it a night.

Sunday morning, I got as much stuff packed up and out to the car as I could manage, with help from Ryan and the girls. I then left Ryan in charge of checking out of the hotel once we knew everything and everyone was out (i.e. Matt and Tony).

I walked to the convention center with Kathy. On the way through the RPGA room I ran into the group that I'd judged in the D&D Open. They'd made it to the final round. That made me feel better about the whole thing -- I hadn't slowed them down so much that they couldn't advance to the second round, but they were a good enough team to get through that round as well so they didn't advance just due to my inability to challenge them properly.

I was signed up to judge the Kalamar special, and Kalen and Kathy were signed up to play that. They wound up with two tables for the special, but more judges than that, so again I was released. Since I'd run D&D for Beginners the night before, Therese from headquarters latched onto me immediately to run that again. So, two more slots of full tables of beginners.

I got done at just after 1:00 and headed over to the True Dungeon riddle reveal. That gave me a chance to see some of the stuff they had on the combat side, and to see what we'd missed on the puzzle side to solve the stuff that we missed (or brute-forced).

Finally, we got lunch at Houlihan's, walked back to the cars, said bye to Kathy and Tony (heading different directions), and headed out. And I'll let Kathy tell how we totally failed to give her good directions back to the interstate to Normal.

And that was it. I drove back to Aurora and crashed hard. I was glad that I'd taken the next day off, and hadn't planned to fly to Cleveland until Tuesday morning. I needed all that time to recover (maybe could have used more!).

Gencon: Friday, August 17

2007-09-03T22:00:00.001-05:00

Played a game. Judged a game. Blew a roll.

Friday at Gencon started with Matt, Ryan, and I waking early and going over to the RPGA hall for first slot. We had tickets for the Living Greyhawk Special. Matt and I stayed together to try to play around APL 10 (we both had our level 11 characters), but Ryan split off as he didn't want to play that high. Matt and I got together with another guy we've played with from the Chicago area (Mike L.), his girlfriend(?), another guy that I've played with several times (most recently at weekend in Dyvers), and a sixth random guy (who had a barbarian who could throw down a bunch of damage, fortunately).

I was playing as my character "Joe", a Ranger/Scout. As the scout, I could scout ahead and check for traps. And I was the fastest and quickest (best initiative). Which means I was always the first to see any of the enemies. And, about the best thing I can do when I see an enemy is charge ahead and get an attack in fast. So, I was the canary in the mine. I would charge in, get one hit in, and then be generally torn apart by the enemies. But, that would tell everyone else what the big bad guys could do, so that helped them win the encounter.

It wasn't quite so bad as that. The first encounter was very tough, and we didn't think we'd get very far. But, as it turned out, each subsequent encounter was a bit easier, so we took out the last enemy quickly, and got the nifty rewards in the end. Yay.

After that, Matt, Ryan and I grabbed lunch then started back around the dealer's room. Matt and I started to do a few more demos in the Wizards area, but then Matt couldn't find his card so decided to ditch that. I decided to cash in my marks at the reward area -- roll d20 and add the number of Wizards demos (shown by the marks on the cards), and collect free swag based on how high the result is. The dice area wasn't open for business yet, and yet the line was starting to build. I wandered around the dealer's area more, still not finding anything that really caught my attention. I eventually joined the line, waited in the line for about 20 minutes, and then when it was my turn I took the big die and rolled: a 5! Dangit! Adding my 10 marks gave me a 10, which was just enough to get nothing I really wanted. I picked up an Axis and Allies miniatures booster for no particular reason.

In the evening, I was set to judge a session of the Kalamar module "To Shake the Pillars of the World". It was a good module, and the table that I judged was pretty good (including a couple guys I'd played Mark of Heroes with two years earlier). Nothing else I can really say about that.

A met Matt, Kalen, and Tony and we went to dinner at Steak and Shake. It was about 10pm by this time, a good time for a late dinner there. While we were waiting, we got in a couple more very quick games of Fluxx. Then, back to the hotel and a couple more games of Fluxx there (including Ryan).

To Be Continued!

Coming next: Saturday - The RPGA members meeting with the fallout of the 4th edition announcement.