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Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
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5:14 pm - Roadfood Eating Tour
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4:41 pm - Origins 2009
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We didn't do much actually at Origins this year. We mostly skipped the con itself, but we drove up on Saturday for the Colorbox's party, and went through the dealer's room on Sunday.
We drove out on Saturday, with a stop for Roadfood at Michael's Beef House and Coleman's Fish Market. Summary verdict: Michael's was not that special, but vastly better than Arby's. Coleman's was not worth a second visit.
The Colorbox party was a good party. I ended up playing Pandemic, which I quite enjoyed and intend to purchase. (One down side of this game: it brings out my bossy streak, since at the end, I found a way to win that required everyone to follow my plan exactly.) I also ended up playing a game of Goldbrau, a game of money-making through stock ownership in beer gardens and breweries. I won, but I didn't feel any great aptitude for the game.
Sunday, we went down for the traditional Sunday brunch with Origins friends, then bought a $3 dealer's room pass and walked around there. I didn't see that much to covet there. The most covetable sight was Geek Chic, who make heirloom-quality gaming tables and other accessories. Utterly droolworthy.
( Photos )
I noticed a few dealers with smaller displays, particularly Koplow Games and Out of the Box.
Digression: I noticed a lot of iPhones this weekend. In the room with the Pandemic game, almost everyone had an iPhone, and I saw a bunch in the convention as well. And lots of people had customized their phones with apps that served them--for example, a doctor's iPhone had medical references, and the Out of the Box president was using his iPhone to do credit card transactions. Apple really does have something solid here.
After the dealer's room, we went back to visit the Colorbox for a bit, and then left for home. We tried to stop at Mehlman's Cafeteria for another Roadfood stop, but a combination of getting off late and GPS error prevented us from dining there. But it often happens that when we seek roadfood, we find it, even if we don't find our original target, and that happened this time as well. We spotted a sign for Kirke's Homemade Ice Cream, called to learn that they were open late but didn't serve dinner, and visited there after a low-key dinner at Bob Evans.
I got a cone of black cherry rum ice cream that was <i>splendid</i>, with a wonderful rich rum taste. The ambiance was excellent also, because we were able to eat outside at a small gazebo and enjoy a beautiful sunset.
One particularly nice note about Kirke's was their size policy, as expressed in a sign that read (more or less) "You are the boss. We will serve any size you want, from marble to basketball, and charge you by the ounce." I like this a lot, because I am often pleased with smaller portions of ice cream.
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| Friday, June 26th, 2009
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5:10 pm - The worst part of computer security is the people
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So someone sent a message to the Apple list for discussing WoW that went like this (paraphrased):
I noticed a scam today.
I got a message about ... and to visit http://www.scammer-url.net (not the real URL) for more info.
Three people admitted that they had clicked on the URL in the message before the "scam" part of the message set in.
These are Apple employees, capable of thinking about these things. And the message was unambiguously claiming that the linked website was a phishing scam.
We just run on autopilot so much that we are vulnerable to such things. (I believe that I am not an exception, and that I am myself vulnerable.)
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| Thursday, June 25th, 2009
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4:32 pm - Fractal Pecan Pie
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This quote from http://www.instructables.com/id/giant-fractal-pecan-pie/ reminded me of ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) eub:
the thing they don't tell you about fractals is just how sharp and dangerous they are. i mean, you think you have a pretty good grasp of the mathematical analysis but until a piece of metal with a very high perimiter to surface area ratio tears into your flesh, you're really missing intuitive appreciation for objects that lack continuous derivatives almost everywhere.
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| Friday, June 12th, 2009
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11:32 pm - Stanley Cup
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Watched Game 7 of the Stanley Cup championship with Kevin and Dave tonight. The Pittsburgh Penguins beat the Detroit Red Wings in a down-to-the-wire nailbiter of a game--there were shots on goal that would have tied the score if successful within the last five seconds of the game.
The narrowest save that I saw: the puck headed for the goal over Marc-Andre Fleury, who had dived low to block a previous shot. Fleury managed to lift one shoulder just enough that the puck glanced off his shoulderpad and hit the crossbar of the goal net. (We were describing the action in GURPS terms, and decided that in that incident, he'd rolled a failure, spent an action point to get a reroll, and got an exact success on the reroll.)
I can clearly hear someone playing "We Will Rock You / We Are The Champions"--and I don't think that they are on my block. (I investigated, and I was wrong--the likely source was at the end of this block, around the corner.)
One of the stories of this series was that of Marian Hossa, who left the Penguins this year to sign a one-year deal with the Red Wings in hopes of winning the Stanley Cup. I must now don my schadenfreude cravat.
During the debacle of the Penguin's 5-0 loss in game 5, I joked that the best possible interpretation was that the Red Wings were squandering all their points on that game, while the Penguins were hoarding theirs for other games. This turned out to actually be true; the Pens won games 6 and 7 with fewer points than the Red Wings scored in game 5. Over the course of the whole series, the Red Wings outscored the Penguins 17-14; this is the equivalent of winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote.
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| Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
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1:33 pm - [WoW] Big Spender
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A couple of weeks ago, I spent 60% of my gold over three days. It ended up making me a lot happier.
I had been sitting at about 10,000 gold, and this had the effect of pushing me into an odd spiral:
- I felt I had enough gold to buy most anything I might want.
- So I wasn't doing many daily quests or otherwise spending a lot of time making money.
- So my income dropped.
- So prices seemed high in terms of current income.
- So I wasn't buying things.
But I had a spending spree that I didn't intend:
- I saw an Emerald Whelpling for sale for 1600g, about 60% of the normal selling price. So I bought that.
- I saw someone advertising a desire to trade their Teldrassil Sproutling (normally 3500g) for a Sen'jin Fetish (available for 2000g in the auction house). So I bought the Sen'jin Fetish and made the trade. (The sproutling is super-cute as it sleeps and does the tree form dance. I am glad to have it.)
- I decided that I'd have more fun playing Roktazza if she had swift flying, so I passed 2500g to her so that she could afford it.
It turns out that this has disengaged me from my previous stall. I'm working harder to earn money, and I'm having more fun because I'm doing more.
There's a lesson to be drawn from this, but it should be drawn very carefully. In particular, real life has a lot more necessary expenses, and doesn't tie my earnings so directly to the things I do, so what pleases me more in WoW may not extend to real life.
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| Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
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1:29 pm - Cheese
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I consider myself a foodie, but I don't think that I have a very refined palate. For example, I don't think that I could reliably distinguish between extra-virgin olive oil and extra-promiscuous. (This is probably not the term favored by the industry.)
I found myself thinking yesterday of the number of cheeses I've sampled at restaurants and cheese counters, and how few of those I can even name, much less recall clearly. This prompted me to try to figure out how many cheeses I can recall clearly enough to identify.
To be more precise, my standard for inclusion in this list is that in a cheese plate of only these cheeses, I think that I could distinguish each of these cheeses from each other. (I leave open the possibility that I might get confused by unfamiliar cheeses on the plate.)
Cheeses on the same line are cheeses I would probably confuse with each other.
Cheddar
American
Feta
Cream Cheese / Neufchatel (American Neufchatel, that is)
Boursin
Bleu cheese / Gorgonzola / Stilton (I might be able to distinguish Stilton from the others)
Mozzarella / Provolone
Havarti
Parmesan / Parmigiano Reggiano / Romano
Halloumi
Brie / Camembert / St. Andre
Cambozola
Colby
Jack
Asiago
Gouda
Fontina (maybe)
Swiss / Emmenthal / Jarlsberg
Alpine Lace (just by the size of the holes)
Queso blanco / queso fresco
Cottage cheese
Ricotta
Mascarpone
Wensleydale
Red Dragon
Gruyere
Chevre
Some cheeses I know that I've tried but wouldn't be able to identify include Port Salut, Reblochon, Cabrales, and Manchego.
That's 27, which is a bit more than I'd expected. My guess is that this is a medium amount; I'd expect that most everyone could hit 10, some folks on my friends list would not be able to break 20, and some people on my friends list could break 50 or 100.
I'm not sure how many possible cheeses there are; I found it hard to count the cheeses at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cheeses, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese says "The British Cheese Board claims that Britain has approximately 700 distinct local cheeses;[6] France and Italy have perhaps 400 each."
I wonder how I'd do on this test with other sorts of foodie pursuits. I doubt I'd recognize such a variety with beer, for which I have trouble distinguishing a stout from a porter, or with wine, where I have only a feeble chance of distinguishing a Riesling from a Chardonnay.
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| Monday, May 25th, 2009
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9:36 am - Autistic Trekdom
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| Sunday, May 24th, 2009
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11:46 am - Dragon Taunting
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A war story about our April 24 GURPS game.
My character is a priest, in the plate-wearing D&D sense. In fact, though I didn't plan this, he fits the fantasy-game notion of a paladin pretty closely.
He's just learned a new spell that (if successful) will compel a foe to attack him. (The strategic advantage is that it draws a foe away from a vulnerable or wounded ally. I think of this spell as a "taunt", akin to the WoW warrior ability.)
We've been traveling with a good dragon (named Vicnagolotha), en route to a territory of evil dragons. At a rest stop, she suggested that she could engage in mock combat with us, to prepare us to fight evil dragons if the need arose.
We made plans: we could go all-out against her, she would pull her punches. She would breathe fire so that we could see what that is like, but she would aim over our heads.
We began to fight and saw how clearly outmatched we were. Our hardest-hitting warriors could scratch her a bit if they got lucky. Our mage's spells could only penetrate her magic resistance with great luck. And she could easily knock us down with her wings and tail, or take to the air to elude us entirely.
She pointed at our mage and began to breathe fire over his head. In a bid to "save" him, I shouted "attack me, instead!" and cast my taunt spell. It was a nigh-futile gesture; I had never cast the spell before, and her magic resistance made it extremely improbable that it would affect her at all.
I rolled a critical success. The dragon's head snapped around and she blasted a jet of fire straight at me.
The GM ruled that a critical success on my first cast granted me some extra divine favor so that I didn't get burned by the fire; I insisted on at least the cosmetic damage of having my eyebrows burned away.
Even so, it was a splendid demonstration of the inherent risks of this taunt spell. I'll be pressuring other characters to learn first aid very soon.
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10:21 am - Shower
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I have been lax in singing the praises of our new shower.
There were several factors that triggered our bathroom renovation. The plumbing was wonky and the tub had worn to a point that it was hard to keep clean. The triggering factor, though, was that the grout on the shower walls had dissolved to a point that the tiles started falling down. (It turned out that there was another layer of tiles behind those. Our house has lots of construction quirks like that.)
Lori's father offered to do it for us. We intended to do it over the winter, but it got delayed til spring: we were slow to order products, then Loews neglected to order one of our pieces, then the tub surround had a slash sawed through it at one edge and had to be sent back. So we didn't start ripping out the old shower until April.
There followed two weeks of inconvenience as we had to go elsewhere to bathe. Lori did most of her bathing at her parents' house; I learned that my office building had a nice locker room with showers. After that, we had the tub and the surround installed, but not the shower doors, so we could take baths but not showers. On May 12, though, the caulk on the shower doors had finished curing, and I got to take a shower at last.
Our new shower is splendidly sumptuous. The showerhead (Amazon link) has two parts, a fixed shower head and a handheld part. The fixed shower head does a great job of covering my back with water luxuriously; the handheld part detaches to focus water on one part for easy rinsing, and adjusts to provide a nice massage as well. (Both parts are independently controllable; when we were in bath-only mode, we would use the handheld part without the fixed shower head.)
I'm also very pleased with the drainage. After years of fighting with a corroded drum trap that was very prone to clogging, our tub now drains so efficiently that water doesn't come halfway up my toes during a long shower.
The cabinetry is not yet done, so I'm not ready to post before-and-after pictures of our bathroom. But showering is lovely. I hope that I'm able to hold on to the delight of this shower for quite a while.
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| Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
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5:05 pm - Submitted for your mockery
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In case you're wondering, there are people who read the notes that you include with your crash report. I am one of those people.
I got permission from my boss to quote this outside Apple:
- Im a student! if u don't fix it, Im going to ask my dad to buy ur company out!
(The actual crash is one that I wish we could fix, but the comment did nothing to persuade me towards that.)
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| Friday, May 1st, 2009
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2:30 pm - Missed Vacation
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Had I known about this, I would have yearned to go. Maybe it'll get repeated next year.
http://www.louisianaroadfoodfestival.com/
Roadfood.com and the Louisiana Culinary Trails are bringing sixteen of the state's best restaurant cooks to the French Quarter, setting them loose to make their signature dishes for visitors to enjoy. Festival fun takes place in a milieu that evokes the adventure of Louisiana culinary trails and includes strolling brass bands and soloists, panel discussions and ad hoc debates about the nation's outstanding Roadfood, and the camaraderie of like-minded foodies from around the nation and the world.
You could travel for miles and weeks throughout Louisiana and you'd still never discover all the great eats visitors will find in one weekend along 4 city blocks in the heart of the French Quarter! Here is an opportunity for locals as well as travelers to sample fare that is exotic indeed to appetites from Minnesota or California, and to discover exquisite specialties little-known even to Louisianians.
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| Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
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5:44 pm - [WoW] Damage Meters
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A high note of a raid last weekend: I managed to top the damage meters on a 25-man raid.
I've generally had a talent spec that gives me all the talents I really want for bear-form tanking, and most but not all of the talents I really want for cat-form DPS. With these talents, I do solid DPS, but I rarely top the damage meters.
Patch 3.1 a week ago brought dual specs, letting a character have two different talent specs. I bought a second spec, with the eventual plan of having one spec for the tank/DPS role I've been doing, and one spec for healing.
But we're running low on tanks in our guild these days, so it's not clear how soon I'll be needed as a healer. And I haven't enchanted and gemmed my healing gear yet. So when I joined a 25-man Naxxramas raid that had enough tanks, I decided to go with a full cat spec and see just how well I could do if I was focusing purely on DPS.
The answer: well enough to hit #1. Now, we were missing some of the folks who usually top our damage meters, so I'm not convinced I could hit #1 every week.
It was especially gratifying because the #2 player was a good friend, and I started out a bit slowly because I was still choosing talents as we were starting to clear trash. So he was cheering for me as I rose in the ranks, then as I was running neck-and-neck with him, we had the friendly trash talk of two guys being good sports.
However, having topped the damage meters once, I'm not eager to do so regularly. I'm one of our most solid tanks; I don't want to create bad blood by being our top damage dealer as well.
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4:40 pm - Ephemera
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I've been thinking about the details of my life that are disappearing. Examples:
Cassette tapes
When I was a teenager, I bought all of my music on cassette tapes. I still own a few hundred cassettes--many of them with music I don't have in any other format. But I haven't listened to cassettes in years. I'm not sure how readily my children will learn about cassettes--I can think of more films that show vinyl records than I can think of films that show cassettes.
(An NPR story last night pointed out that along with the decline of cassettes came the decline of boom boxes.)
Phone Dials
Even when I was a kid, telephones with a rotary dial were on their way out. But my family had a rotary phone until about the time I went to college.
Rotary-dial phones are just about extinct, but the terminology lingers on. I wonder if folks in rural third-world populations who have never had a phone before the introduction of cellular phones still speak of entering phone numbers with a term that originated with manipulating a round dial.
Line Noise
I got accosted by someone named Deathpickle in WoW, who whispered me a string of random non-English characters. I described it as "line noise", and then found myself wondering what fraction of WoW players would recognize what I meant by that.
What I mean, specifically, is the pattern of gobbledygook characters that would interrupt text transmitted over a modem when the signal wasn't clear. For example, if you were dialed into a terminal server and someone lifted the phone handset, your text would be interrupted with a slew of gibberish.
It wasn't random, as I remember it; ~'s seemed to predominate, and {'s were common as well. It was certainly a qualitatively different sort of gibberish from the 'akdflajkjl fakjld' that you'd get from a human wiggling their fingers at a keyboard.
But my memory is inadequate to characterize it exactly; I haven't seen line noise in almost a decade. And I doubt much has been preserved for posterity. This may be as foreign to my children as the chagrin of dropping a stack of Hollerith cards is to me.
(On a similar note, digital television signals will put a final end to snow on television sets. Digital transmission shows transmission failures in different ways.)
Incandescent Light Bulbs
Most of the light bulbs I've encountered in my life have been incandescent bulbs. But incandescent bulbs are being phased out. By 2014, I'll buy compact fluorescents for almost every case where I currently buy incandescent bulbs.
There'll be a few details of the experience of incancescents that will go away, though. Incandescent bulbs darken as they burn out, and burned-out bulbs have a distinctive tinkle when you shake them--neither of these are true of compact fluorescents. Those details of light bulbs will be foreign to my children.
The thought crosses my mind that these last two examples are particularly examples of failure modes going away (being replaced by new failure modes). I could probably follow that to several other examples, like the horizontal line that a cathode-ray television or monitor would display as it warmed up, or the chatter of a floppy disk drive reading data. (For that matter, floppy disks could get an entry all their own. It may be a decade since I've put a floppy disk in a drive.)
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| Friday, April 10th, 2009
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3:04 pm
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Now that I've started working on this task in earnest, my previous procrastination on it seems like premonition.
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| Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
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3:27 pm - Zero Tolerance
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9:01 am - [WoW] Emergency Bear
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There's a pattern that's a mighty ego-boost for me when it occurs: while I'm DPSing in cat form, the tank dies, and I switch into bear form, taunt the boss, and save the day. So far, I've done this on Anub'Rekhan, Grand Widow Faerlina, Maexxna, Heigan, and Kel'thuzad.
Last night, I managed a different variation on that. We were fighting Kel'thuzad. I was main tank. We had an off tank who's relatively new, but shows great promise. He picked up the Guardians of Icecrown when they entered the fight, but some glitch happened between him and his healer, and he dropped like a stone.
I roared and growled and managed to get the two guardians to attack me after they killed only one more player, and we managed to finish the fight with me tanking all three foes. (And sweating bullets doing so.)
Which means that I managed to grab aggro when the tank went down and finish the fight--when I was the main tank.
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| Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
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5:11 pm
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I've been thinking hard about threading problems this afternoon, and now I'm in a state in which I have to consciously acquire the mutex on my pocket to take out my keys.
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| Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
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1:32 pm - Wilful Ignorance
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I would rather assume that the phrase "Large Hadron Collider" has been corrupted into the title of a porn movie than investigate the question.
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| Monday, March 23rd, 2009
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6:29 pm - [WoW] The Naming of Devilsaurs
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I've been thinking of playing Mazumok again. The rationale is a little twisty, but it goes like this:
- I haven't done Borean Tundra, Grizzly Hills, and Zul'Drak with Marendyn.
- If I cruise through them at 80 before doing them with other characters, I'll enjoy those zones less, and I'll be less likely to play other characters.
- Also, I could spend my useless Stone Keeper's Shards on heirloom shoulders to increase Maz's xp gain.
- So I'll play Maz through those zones to have more fun with them.
(There's a flaw in this plan--instead of getting the pvp shoulders, I'll get the pve shoulders with Emblems of Heroism. So my shards are still useless.)
One of the inhibiting factors for me, though, has been the question of naming my devilsaur. (It's silly, but it does matter to me. I've also been slowed down by trying to get the devilsaur's stompiness right.)
A friend had used the great name Gorynych for a devilsaur, after a Slavic dragon. I liked that name, and I was considering asking him for permission to use it. But I looked at the Wikipedia entry, and the multiple heads and fire breathing seemed more apt for a core hound.
But six Wikipedia links later, I found a mythical monster that seems to fit a devilsaur well. I'll name my devilsaur Kasai.
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