codrus

All the paperwork signed, my life has been faxed over, so now I'm mostly just reacting to questions as they come in. I should have house walkthrough sometime this week. Closing in 3 weeks is scary and busy.

One of the tough questions is whether or not to keep the pool table. It takes a huge amount of space, and I don't play enough pool, to be honest. The new place replaces traditional living/dining/family rooms with a single "great room". That room may just barely be big enough to fit the pool table as well as all of the other stuff that needs to go in there. I say just barely because, eyeballing it on paper, it looks like to make it work, I'd need to move the couch out of the way when we wanted to play.

Here's a diagram. :D

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The beast is dead.

While cleaning up my office this morning, discovered that one of the glue traps had caught the mouse. (Thus far, it had only been effective at catching ethernet cables).

Steve and I did suggest that maybe we should breed cats with glue coats or velcro, but there might be some unexpected problems there.

...and it is enabled by equally silly friends.

Me: My brain just flashed to a dystopian future where weapons have built-in tweeting capability
Lee: @terrorist HEADSHOT!

Former Microsoft Exec talking about why Microsoft has failed to sufficiently innovate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html

It took a little back and forth, but I made an offer on a nice townhome and had it accepted. Now the fun of closing and getting ready to move.

I'll post photos once the whole process is done -- I never assume that things won't go wrong.

I suspect the killer app for me on the iPad will be some sort of 4x game. I never picked up civ for the iPhone -- my iPhone game of choice is tower defense, as that genre works extremely well with the limited screen real estate. But a not-quite-casual 4x game would probably hit all my buttons as something I could play on a larger screen.

Soooo shiny.

Eventually I'll say more. I have books to edit, and more mass effect to play after.

So for the second time in a month, I've noticed the unexpected furry visitor to our house -- a wee little mouse. You'd think with two skilled cats in the house....oh wait, never mind.

Today, Boots managed to corner the mouse after playing kitty soccer with it for a minute-- in fact it was his kitty soccer game that attracted my attention, as I don't recall any of his cat toys being a little brown blur. When I found him in the game room, he had it cornered near one of the book shelves. He looked up at me with a "what do I do now?" look. In the time it took me to go upstairs and back, the mouse was missing, and he was looking for it again.

You are sooooo fired.

FWIW, today is the first day I actually *know* anything. The cone of silence is mighty. :)

This is basically a done deal for me. Not because it is revolutionary. For an iPhone user, this is not revolutionary -- this refines a lot of the touch interface from the iPhone. No, my reasons really are:

1. It does exactly what I want a tablet to do. Even a few years ago, I'd considered getting a pen-based Windows laptop, but passed on them because they were all clunky as hell. But I know what I want a tablet for, and this will do it all: Browsing + Simple UI apps + book reading + roleplaying game utilities. The fact that I can probably use it for other things (games) won't suck either.

2. For touch devices, I think the size of the display area is critically important to the usefulness of the UI. Playing with the Surface prototypes was a lot of fun because the size of the screen was large enough to do cool things. The iPhone is usable, and great, but not applicable for many applications because there's simply not enough room for both display and user interaction. The iPad uses a similar interface to the iPhone, but will be immediately more useful for practical work just because of the size of the display.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll have one of these by summer. Expecting to dig into the development kit for it this week, since I'm sure I'll be revising some development guides based on the iPad.

During my house hunting, I discovered a nifty feature of Google Maps on my iPhone. Zoom in far enough, and if you happen to zoom onto a street with businesses, you'll often see the names of those businesses. Useful for restaurants too. I don't know if these are people paying for the privilege or not, but it is pretty handy.

While looking around the zoomed in map, I did find a funny juxtaposition today.
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I've seen some of these on other people's lists of complaints, but after the last couple of sessions, I'm solidifying some opinions of D&D 4e. Players were 8th (will be 9th). (Some related observations from Foxbat's game, where we're level 4).

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On my way out to brunch today, I immediately noticed an odd sound, and the car wasn't feeling right. I pulled over before driving a half mile.

Sure enough, rear right tire was well on its way to being flat. Turned around and parked it at home.

Considering how much of a pain it is to change the tire with an overhead light, I'd hate to have to change it at night. I probably should add a "survival light" to the list of things to keep in the trunk. But the tire is changed, for now. Next up is finding somewhere I can drop the car off this week to get a replacement.

I'll be making an offer on a townhouse tomorrow. It isn't perfect -- I still miss my house up in Seattle -- but it is a pretty nice place, and with a few changes I can do most of what I want with the place. We'll see how it goes.

Recently, I've seen a huge spike in the number of spoofing emails trying to steal my WOW account. The typical version being something like:

---
You recently changed your password, please sign on to www.hackyourwowaccount.com to confirm this.

----


Sometimes they take more of the blizzard boilerplate to hide it, but if you mouse over the link text, it goes to some other web page.

I've had an authenticator lying around since '08, but I never wanted to use it because of the hassle of having it around when I wanted to log in. But the new spike in account thefts finally convinced me to add more account security.

Anyway, if you play wow, here's a few thoughts:
1. Get an authenticator. It makes it more difficult for them to steal the account. At a minimum, they need to spoof the blizzard customer support reps.
2. If you get an email, don't click on the links in the email. Go to the regular world of warcraft web page instead.
3. Don't visit strange web pages or links for WOW content.
4. Secure your browser and machine so that you aren't running as administrator.

Dog House Diaries is teh funneh. For one example from their archives:

http://www.thedoghousediaries.com/?p=171

You know, there have been days where I've considered an analysis like this.

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/phd_students/backus/why_i_dont_have_a_girlfriend.pdf

I'm not 100% sure why, but this week I've been very down. Very tried, my back aching a lot, and just drained. Unmotivated. Frustrated when things are broken (such as Comcast). Part of it is being on a deadline and not meeting it.

Anyway, I'm recognizing that I'm a lousy person to be around right now. Not sure what is going to change that this week, but I'm sorry if my patience for BS is a little low right now. :)

Caught Daybreakers on Saturday. It has a bit of a split personality. Some parts of it are very standard and by the number -- mix in a little bit of the Matrix with vampires and season to taste. Very predictable at times.

On the other hand, there's really interesting addition to detail in the movie that helps build the reality of the world. Some of that is set dressing, but there's other writing and directorial decisions that sell it. In particular, they do not do this in dialogue -- all movies require some pipelaying, but this movie shows it more than it tells it.

I'd probably shy away from seeing it in the theater -- netflix it. But it is definitely worth that much.

( spoiler example of more 'dressing' )

So, 2009. For me, it was a pretty decent, but not exceptional year. I'm in a pretty good job that forces me to stretch and learn (and where I'm rewarded for working hard). I'm seeing a lot of friends semi-regularly. And most days, I can get in an hour or two of entertainment (WOW, TV, reading a book).

It wasn't perfect, and I tried to resolve some of the problems.

Being a WOW guild officer became too much work and too much stress. Multiple times during the year the process went from stressful to thoroughly unhappy -- mostly due to people arguing for weeks on end or making baseless accusations against me. Most of the year, my roommates kept asking "Why is this fun for you?" In the end, I was tired of having to play diplomat 24x7 and decided to take a rest from being an officer. I still talk with the other officers, and I lead a lot of smaller groups, but I'm only peripherally involved in the decision making process now. I log in to have fun now.

Health is better than the previous year, but still not great. Exercise is the main thing lacking right now -- I'm still at least 20 lbs over where I'd like to be. Part of the problem is that it becomes a decision: do I go to the gym, do I watch TV or do I play WOW? Exercise loses because it isn't 'fun'. So that means either making it fun or combining it with one of the other activities. "Pedal faster, we need more damage on that raid boss!"

Cooking fell off my radar last year -- I was stupid busy in the first half of the year, and somewhat lazy in the second half. Again, like exercise, sometimes this is just me prioritizing fun over 'working' in the kitchen. But near the end of the year, I started doing more cooking again, at least to remind myself of what I already can do. But I have lots of recipes I haven't tried yet.

Bottom line is that sitting in front of a computer to play games needs to go down further on the priority list, but it has to do so in a way where I don't lose all my outlets to have fun.

I think 2010 is going to be a lot like 2009 -- a foundational year to build up smaller things rather than a transformational year with life-changing activities. I know the first half of the year will always be busy with work, so my goals for things I want to consciously spend time on are pretty modest:

- House hunting.
- Exercise more.
- Spend more time cooking.

Maybe I'll make a 2009/2010 post tomorrow -- haven't got a lot of thoughts along those directions yet.

In the meantime, boardgames! Emailed a bunch of folks this week, and managed to get a bunch of people to come over and socialize and play some quick boardgames. We picked short games -- no more than about 90 minutes in length for any one of them. That let us get in a bunch of games and play around with different things. What a blast.

It'll be hard to fit it into an already busy weekend schedule, but I'm going to try to get people together at least once a month. Rather than relying on my two D&D game mailing lists, I'll build a new mailing list so that I can rope in more players.

Today's Games:

Betrayal at House on the Hill: You explore a haunted mansion until one of you turns traitor. Then the game turns competitive with a 1 vs many mechanic. I ended up being possessed by a dragon, and proceeded to eat all the other characters. So so game; the end fight was very much a gigantic dice slog as the dragon and the dragonslayer character had a hard time hurting the other player. We probably rolled 10-20 rounds of combat to get a win; there really weren't many player decisions that could have altered the end game at this point.

Dominion: Finally got to try this, and this is a fun, *deep* game. Mechanically, its basic gameplay includes elements from tradeable card games and the rules bending of Fluxx. You start with a set of cards, and add or replace cards in your deck throughout play. New cards usually go into your discards, so there's usually a bit of lag between when you buy something and when it becomes available to you. But eventually you get more cards in your deck that let you take additional actions or draw more cards, which lets you set up some ruthless combos. What was interesting was that most of us latched onto different cards/card strategies in the two games we played. Both games were won by someone heavily focusing on cash. Given that you can pick and choose which cards to include in a game, there's a ton of replay to this.

Pandemic: Players co-operate to beat the board. I love these sorts of boardgames now. The players are members of the CDC trying to cure four plagues before they wipe out humanity. This was a big hit for all involved -- we played four different games of this, with 2 wins, 2 losses. Short (30-60 minutes), challenging (50% win rate in 'easy mode'), and full of some interesting strategic choices. Our second game win was very clean, and we got it by ruthlessly focusing on the victory conditions, rather than the losing conditions. Afterwards, we looked at the board and things could have gone to a loss if another turn had gone by -- we had a lot of plagues spreading on the board. Basically, you need to balance triaging to prevent a losing condition while remaining focused on the winning conditions.

So our family Christmas vacation this year was to take a cruise from San Diego to Catalina and Ensenada. Overall, I think the best I can give the cruise is a 'meh'. It wasn't terrible, it wasn't awesome.

The high points: Mostly, just being on a big, complex ship. More to say on this later.

The low points: The two shore excursions were just a couple of hours of tourist trap shopping. The food on Carnival was not great -- I was unkind on the survey they asked us to fill out.

Probably the most telling part of the whole trip was that nothing stood out to make the trip exciting. There were lots of interesting parts to the trip, but even those, I mostly saw as things I could use in a game or a story. Maybe that's just how I'm wired.

I would cruise again, but I think I'd do a lot of things differently.

Anyway, what follows here are some of my impressions of cruising on a big cruise ship, along with speculations on how I'd use these details in fiction. The latter, to some extent, is angled more at translating this experience into other genres, the obvious one being science fiction (which I'll translate into Traveller for convenience).

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