The gaming industry, like the voiceover industry or the genre fiction industry is not very big, when you really get down to it. In fact, among creators, the overlap between "industry" and "community" makes almost a perfect circle. Everyone pretty much knows everyone else, and good news travels as quickly as bad.
Yesterday, one of the truly great people in the gaming industry, who I think we all believed had reached maximum character level, surprised us all and leveled up a little bit more:
John Kovalic's Dork Tower joins WIRED's GeekDad.
If you know of Dork Tower, then you’re already squee-ing in excitement right alongside us. If you don’t know what Dork Tower is, then either you’re about to add a new layer of happiness to the Photoshop composite of your life, or you’re slowly beginning to realize you didn’t click through to the Monkey Bites blog.
Dork Tower has, in its decade of life, existed as a standalone comic book, a featured comic in Dragon, Scrye and Games magazines, and one of the earliest regular webcomics online. Its creator, John Kovalic, is also the illustrator and co-creator of world-renown games Munchkin and Apples to Apples. But perhaps his greatest creation is his new daughter, whose existence has transformed him from a simple, Bruce Banner–like comics and game illustrator, into a hulking green(bay) GeekDad. Which is where we come in.
This is kind of like my favorite indie television show getting picked up by a major network. It's such a perfect match, I can't believe nobody ever thought of it before. You know those people who are so delighted to be a parent, they sort of jingle and glow and levitate off the ground with joy when they talk about their kids? That's John. You know those guys who you know you can speak to in the most obscure geek dialect, secure in the knowledge that they'll grok you? That's John.
Congratulations to John and GeekDad, and to all their individual readers who are about to discover an awesome new level of the dungeon to explore.
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 20 mm — 1/200 sec, f/5, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Canopy of Color
Himukai Shrine, Kyoto Japan
In my previous post, “Changing Lenses”, I showed a picture of a friend in front of a serious splash of fall colors. The leaves were so low in the view because we were at the top of a set of stairs. From the bottom of the stairs, looking up, the view was the impressive canopy seen above.
The view was pretty impressive from most everywhere...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 20 mm — 1/100 sec, f/5, ISO 250 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Heading Up
In the background of the center of the shot above, you can just barely make out bits of the namesake for my “Gate of Disrepair” post.
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm — 1/100 sec, f/5, ISO 560 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Distractions
keeping us from the shrine at the top of the steps
The shrine area itself is fairly small, but picturesque...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm — 1/160 sec, f/13, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Arriving with a bit of Sunshine
The small buildings at right, with thatched roofs, were interesting, as thatched roofs tend to be....
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — 1/4000 sec, f/1.4, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Ready for Winter
Roofs can be thatched in various ways; these are thatched with large, rough reeds...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm — 1/800 sec, f/5, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Rough Thatch
They're usually a bit more tidy, such as this, but often the rough nature can be used to preserve a natural feel, such as with or these thatched walls. (A much cleaner appearance, though certainly much more expensive, is to thatch with thin strips of ceder, such as this, this, and this.)
It seemed that only the top layer had become roughed up by nature.... the bulk of the roof seemed to be still neatly trimmed....
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — 1/100 sec, f/3.2, ISO 400 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Neatly Trimmed
reed thatch at least a foot thick
The roof looks to be glowing a bit, because as the sun had just come out, the dew had heated up and started to steam. I first noticed it on the roof of a small wall fronting the further thatched building...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — 1/125 sec, f/3.2, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Steamin' Hot
It was sort of dramatic in how it wasn't steaming at all when we first walked up, then suddenly started. As mist tends to be, it was difficult to catch with the camera....
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — 1/1000 sec, f/2.8, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Steam in Grayscale
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — 1/3200 sec, f/1.4, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Reverse Angle
looking back toward the entrance at the top of the stairs
Stepping back even further added a foreground splash of momiji (maple)...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — 1/400 sec, f/5.6, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Momiji at 85mm
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 14 mm — 1/1000 sec, f/5.6, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Momiji at 14mm
In a competition between 85mm and 14mm, it seems that the winner is us.
Stepping back a bit further shows the bridge I was standing on (and the same guy who stood right there for five minutes, seemingly intent on doing nothing but spoiling the photos I and others were obviously trying to take)....
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm — 1/160 sec, f/7.1, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos
The site continued back and up the mountain a bit, so I could step back and up further for a nice view. Playing around with one shot in Lightroom, along the lines of the Barbary style, I ended up with something that I think's sort of pretty...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm — 1/1250 sec, f/3.5, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Zak in Silhouette
Frederico writes that he’s recently discovered Raph Levien’s Inconsolata font and really liking it.
I likewise discovered Inconsolata not too long ago (it was packaged in Gentoo and I was really pleased to discover it also available in Debian), and have been using it as the constant-width font in Quill and Parchment for program listings in technical writing.
We all tend to get obsessive about things we like, and so of course I tried it as a terminal console font. Interestingly, after a brief consideration, I decided not to use it for terminals and gedit and such. Deja Vu Sans Mono is still the king for that, especially if you’re using Deja Vu Sans and Deja Vu Serif for the rest of your UI; it means that the visual consistency across your desktop is really awesome.
Inconsolata doesn’t have anything even remotely close to the kind of Unicode coverage you need in your full-time constant-width font, and when fontconfig does a fallback it looks awful because Inconsolata’s metrics are so different from others. That’s all ok; Inconsolata is meant for program listings, and looks incredible on paper.
Anyway, Frederico noted that bold didn’t work when specified as a FontDescription, it doesn’t come up bold me either when I tried to do so via a bold PangoAttribute. But if you use Benjamin’s Specimen, it shows up fine (on an Ubuntu box, anyway):
So there’s a bug in our stack somewhere.
AfC
Update
Or not. I just reread the JavaDoc for the FontDescription constructor, and lo and behold relearned what I wrote there in the first place. To get bold Inconsolata you just need to use a ',' in the right place:
desc = new FontDescription("Inconsolata, Bold 8.0");
...
and my Cairo drawing code on screen in a XlibSurface shows bold. Great.
But nothing is ever simple. I ran the same drawing code out through to a PdfSurface, and no bold. What the hell? There’s a bug in our stack somewhere. {sigh}
This blog post is an extract of the release note from the NEWS file which you can read online … or in the
sources from Bazaar.
java-gnome 4.0.14 (16 Dec 2009)
You have to compose in order to enchant
Access to Enchant spell checking API
Coverage of the Enchant spell checking facade (which was already an implicit dependency arising from our GtkSpell coverage) is now included in java-gnome. It’s a lovely library with a simple to use API which in turn fronts for various back end spelling providers.
More detailed input handling
GTK’s handling of complex input methods is extraordinarily powerful, and of
course present by default in the Entry and TextView text entry Widgets. If
you’re doing your own text based work, however, you might need to capture the
results of an input method being used to compose characters or words.
InputMethod.Commit is where the result of a compose sequence is captured and
delivered to the application.
We’ve also made numerous improvements down in GDK where events are processed; as a Java library we represent many naked low-level native entities with strongly-typed classes, and have improved our coverage here, notably with new Cursor constants representing the common use cases of changing the pointer.
Improved text rendering
Other minor improvements are present across the text rendering stack, notably
with the ability to introspect where a Pango Layout has made its line breaks
when wrapping via LayoutLine’s getStartIndex() and getLength() methods.
Guillaume Mazoyer finished up a work by Serkan Kaba resulting in us having coverage of the special LinkButton subclass of Button which can be used to present clickable URLs.
You can now create custom PaperSize objects, which is handy if you need to use Cairo to output PDF documents with a non-standard paper format.
Other changes
You can now use gdk-pixbuf to query an image on disk for its dimensions via
Pixbuf getFileInfo() function calls.
There were of course miscellaneous improvements to various long established core classes, mostly fixing typos.
We now have the methods necessary to have ImageMenuItems actually show images (there’s a GNOME bug whereby suddenly icons are not showing in menus. So you need to either explicitly tell an ImageMenuItem that it should always show its image, or use the global Settings to say that Menus and Buttons should always have their icons showing).
The internal initialization sequence has been tweaked to ensure that GLib’s
threads are initialized before anything else. This means java-gnome apps will
work if glib 2.22.3 is installed; this is a workaround for bug
603774.
Headless testing
For a long time we’ve had to be careful in our test suite not to do anything
that would cause a Window to appear or otherwise popup while the tests were
running. But some for some test cases this is unavoidable, especially if the
main loop needs to cycle. We now run the java-gnome test suite within a virtual
X server (ie Xvfb), and as a result distros packaging the library can run the
test suite on their headless build servers if they wish. There’s a new base
class for java-gnome TestCases needing to run in this environment.
Looking ahead
What’s ahead for java-gnome? That’s always a good question. At this point java-gnome provides a comprehensive API for development of user interfaces suitable for the GNOME desktop, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see people using the library for their own programs.
Development of java-gnome has continued pretty steadily, driven by people finding they need additional features from some of the underlying GNOME and FreeDesktop libraries we already expose. As a community we also work to fine-tune the performance and quality of the library through continuous improvement of the code base and its algorithms. There are also people quietly working on experimental coverage of more unusual libraries such as GStreamer and Clutter which is pretty exciting to see.
Anyone using java-gnome are always welcome to join us in #java-gnome to ask
questions or just hang out! So happy hacking, and see you soon.
You can download java-gnome’s sources from ftp.gnome.org, or easily checkout a branch from ‘mainline’:
$ bzr checkout bzr://research.operationaldynamics.com/bzr/java-gnome/mainline java-gnome
though if you’re going to do that you’re best off following the instructions in the HACKING guidelines.
Enjoy!
AfC
Taking another look at my notes, I found a bunch of quotes from speakers that I thought you might like to hear. - "If you think you're not using a MSSP, you already are. It's called anti-virus." Can anyone claim that, from the CIRTs and MSSPs panel?
- Seth Hall said "Bro is a programming language with a -i switch to sniff traffic."
- Seth Hall said "You're going to lose." Matt Olney agreed and expanded on that by saying "Hopefully you're going to lose in a way you recognize."
- Matt Olney also said "Give your analyst a chance." ["All we are sayyy-ing..."]
- Matt Jonkman said "Don't be afraid of blocking." It's not 2004 anymore. Matt emphasized the utility of reputation when triggering signatures, for example firing an alert when an Amazon.com-style URL request is sent to a non-Amazon.com server.
- Ron Shaffer said "Bad guys are following the rules of your network to accomplish their mission."
- Steve Sturges said "Snort 3.0 is a research project."
- Gunter Ollmann said "Threats have a declining interest in persistence. Just exploit the browser and disappear when closed. Users are expected to repeat risky behavior, and become compromised again anyway."
Thanks again to all of our speakers!
I took a few notes at the SANS Incident Detection Summit keynote by Tony Sager last week. I thought you might like to see what I recorded. All of the speakers made many interesting comments, but it was really only during the start of the second day, when Tony spoke, when I had time to write down some insights.
If you're not familiar with Tony, he is chief of the Vulnerability Analysis and Operations (VAO) Group in NSA.
- These days, the US goes to war with its friends (i.e., allies fight with the us against a common adversary). However, the US doesn't know its friends until the day before the war, and not all of the US' friends like each other. These realities complicate information assurance.
- Commanders have been trained to accept a certain level of error in physical space. They do not expect to know the exact number of bullets on hand before a battle, for example. However, they often expect to know exactly how many computers they have at hand, as well as their state. Commanders will need to develop a level of comfort with uncertainty.
- Far too much information assurance is at the front line, where the burden rests with the least trained, least experienced, yet well-meaning, people. Think of the soldier fresh from tech school responsible for "making it work" in the field. Hence, Tony's emphasis on shifting the burden to vendors where possible.
- "When nations compete, everybody cheats." [Note: this is another way to remember that with information assurance, the difference is the intelligent adversary.]
- The bad guy's business model is more efficient than the good guy's business model. They are global, competitive, distributed, efficient, and agile. [My take on that is the financially-motivated computer criminals actually earn ROI from their activities because they are making money. Defenders are simply avoiding losses.
- The best way to defeat the adversary is to increase his cost, level of uncertainty, and exposure. Introducing these, especially uncertainty, causes the adversary to stop, wait, and rethink his activity.
- Defenders can't afford perfection, and the definition changes by the minute anyway. [This is another form of the Defender's Dilemma -- what should we try to save, and what should we sacrifice? On the other hand we have the Intruder's Dilemma, which Aaron Walters calls the Persistence Paradox -- how to accomplish a mission that changes a system while remaining undetected.]
- Our problems are currently characterized by coordination and knowledge management, and less by technical issues.
- Human-to-human contact doesn't scale. Neither does narrative text. Hence Tony's promotion of standards-based communication.
Thanks again to Tony and our day one keynote Ron Gula!
andthat this makes it very easy to blackmail them by saying, "I know the whole truth."
Little Johnny decides to go home and try it out. He goes home, and as he is greeted by his mother he says, "I know the whole truth."
His mother quickly hands him $20 and says, "Just don't tell your father."
Quite pleased, the boy waits for his father to get home from work, and greets him with, "I know the whole truth."
The father promptly hands him $40 and says, "Please don't say a word to your mother."
Very pleased, the boy is on his way to school the next day when he sees the mailman at his front door.
The boy greets him by saying, "I know the whole truth." The mailman immediately drops the mail,
opens his arms, and says, "Then come give your real father a big hug."
----------------------------------------
A passenger in a taxi leaned over to ask the driver a question and tapped him on the shoulder.
The driver screamed, lost control of the cab, nearly hit a bus, drove up over the curb, and stopped just inches from a large plate glass window.
For a few moments everything was silent in the cab, and then the still shaking driver said, 'I'm sorry, but you scared the daylights out of me!!
The frightened passenger apologized to the driver and said he didn't realize a mere tap on the shoulder could frighten him so much.
The driver replied, 'No, no, I'm sorry, it's entirely my fault. Today is my first day driving a cab. I've been driving a hearse for the last 25 years.'
----------------------------------------
It's wise to remember how easily e-mail can be misused, sometimes unintentionally, with serious consequences.
Consider the case of the Illinois man who left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick e-mail.
Unfortunately, when typing her address, he missed one letter, and his note was directed instead to an elderly woman whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked her e-mail, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor in a dead faint.
At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:
Dearest Wife, Just got checked in. Everything prepared for your arrival tomorrow.
P.S. Sure is hot down here.
----------------------------------------
A woman walks into a tattoo parlor. She gets into the chair and tells the tattoo artist, "I want two tattoos, one on each of my inner thighs. I want a turkey on one thigh and a Christmas tree on the other."
The tattoo artist begins his work, but is a bit confused, so he says, "Lady, I'll do anything my customers want, but I gotta ask, why would you want a turkey on one thigh and a Christmas tree on the other?"
"Well, if you really want to know," she firmly answers, "I'm sick and tired of my husband telling me that there's never anything to eat between the holidays."
I don't think many people will shed tears over this brand. They made possibly the ugliest cars ever. I wouldn't say that about their heavy trucks though.
Looks like I’ll be changing blog clients, as ecto no longer appears to actually save or post the text of my blog posts anymore. *sigh*
Anyway, here’s what’s going on:
Last weekend, my friend Inga came into town. We had a great time shopping and hanging out. And on Saturday, the night before she left, a random stranger gave us two free tickets to the Andrea Bocelli performance. It was awesome and beautiful, and we were about half an hour late, but the 5 encores made up for it.
I like my job and I like the people I work with. I like being respected at work, and I like being worthy of respect. It’s a refreshing change.
I had 4 automatic sick days when I started, and they don’t roll over to 2010, so I took today off to go to the DMV and get my drivers license. Well, you have to register your vehicles at the same time as you do your license. Our car didn’t pass smog, so we have to go back on the 30th, which is also a sick day for me. I’m really looking forward to it. From what I hear, Nevada DMVs are mini-portals to hell. Perhaps there will be zombies. I’ll be sure to bring my board-with-rusty-nail.
I finished a pair of socks:
Also on the needles are a couple of hats, a sweater for John, and a vest. And an “I’m thinking of casting on” for a pair of socks in gray yarn. I can’t really wear my handknit socks to work every day– they show in my work shoes, and I’m going for “business attire” Monday through Thursday. Bright stripey socks doesn’t quite go with the muted grays and blues of my work wardrobe. But I can knit gray socks with lace patterns and have comfy socks to wear with my business clothes– that I can definitely do!
Today, I got an email from my publisher about a great review of my novella “Hunter.” It’s very motivating to have someone say “I hope she writes more.”
Also motivational: I screwed up my back this week and it’s been just stabbing pain in the lower back for several days. As you know, I’m overweight and under-exercised, which of course cause and contribute to the back pain. But this week has just been really hard on my back. Today, I took myself off to Curves and signed up for a year. Merry Krismas to my body. I also did the circuit workout and didn’t hate it. I think the gal signing me up wasn’t thrilled when I told her I would be happy to still be shopping at Lane Bryant by the end of next year, as long as my back wasn’t killing me. But she also kind of understood, as she’s lost over 100 lbs. and has over 100 still to go. When the really obese get together to talk about this process, we know that a single year won’t mean reaching the finish line.
The Curves membership is my own Krismas present to my body. I deserve to be healthy, don’t you think?
All over for A1GP?
I never did see any of their races after seeing the very first. Never did like the format.
"I'm not getting out of bed at this time", he thinks, and rolls over. Then, a louder knock follows. "Aren't you going to answer that?" says his wife. So, he drags himself out of bed and goes downstairs.
He opens the door and there is man standing at the door. It didn't take the homeowner long to realize the man was drunk. "Hi there," slurs the stranger, "Can you give me a push?"
"No. Get lost, it's half-past three. I was in bed," says the man and slams the door.
He goes back up to bed and tells his wife what happened and she says "Dave, that wasn't very nice of you.
Remember that night we broke down in the pouring rain on the way to pick the kids up from the baby-sitter and you had to knock on that man's door to get us started again? What would have happened if he'd told us to get lost?"
"But the guy was drunk," says the husband.
"It doesn't matter," says the wife. "He needs our help and it would be the Christian thing to help him."
So, the husband gets out of bed again, gets dressed and goes downstairs. He opens the door and, not being able to see the stranger anywhere he shouts: "Hey, do you still want a push?" and he hears a voice cry out "Yeah please."
So, still being unable to see the stranger, he shouts: "Where are you?"
And the stranger replies: "I'm over here, on your swing set."
What sta...
I've discovered that, unless I specifically set aside Geek Time for me, Wil Wheaton, I end up doing nothing but work. This isn't entirely bad, because most of the work I do is geek-related, but I eventually run out of HP, and I have to recharge. by doing some private geeky thing, like reading comics, playing a little Xbox, or getting together with my friends
Think of it this way: reading a comic book gives me a little HP, like 1d4. Reading a graphic novel gives me 1d6+2. Settling in with a good book (Currently reading Spook Country) gives me 1d10, but I can't do anything else for several turns and have to save versus distractions at -2. Playing a video game gives me 1d8+1, unless it's Rock Band with my friends or family, which gives me 2d10+5.
In fact, doing any geeky thing with friends is an automatic additional d10, which is why I like to get together with my friends at least once a month to play hobby games. During these gatherings, I can usually count on going all the way back to my starting HP, and if I'm especially lucky, I'll gain 1d10 additional HP that is lost at a rate of about 1 point every two hours after we've all gone back to our regular lives.
(Incidentally, writing those three paragraphs gave me 1d6-2, in addition to the 3d6+10 I got earlier today when I got to be a voice actor for four hours.)
So recently, I had a bunch of friends over for a game day, and we played some games I loved so much, I wanted to share them with the rest of the class, in case some of you are dangerously low on HP and need some healing:
This is a card game that plays like a CCG (think Magic: The Gathering) without requiring you to buy a bunch of booster packs and participate in the deck-building arms race that makes most CCGs a meta game of "who can spend the most on cards." BoardGameGeek says:
In Dominion, each player starts with an identical, very small deck of cards. In the center of the table is a selection of other cards the players can "buy" as they can afford them. Through their selection of cards to buy, and how they play their hands as they draw them, the players construct their deck on the fly, striving for the most efficient path to the precious victory points by game end.
Dominion is not a CCG, but the play of the game is similar to the construction and play of a CCG deck. The game comes with 500 cards. You select 10 of the 25 Kingdom card types to include in any given play -- leading to immense variety.
Dominion plays very fast, and is one of those games that you can play while drinking a beer (or three) and still play (mostly) competently.
There are expansions, but I won't buy them on principle, because that path leads to the CCG stuff I'm trying to avoid or at least limit.
Steve Jackson Games is famous for putting out the classic RPG GURPS, irreverent card games like Munchkin and the Chez games, and war games like Ogre and Car Wars. This is the company's first offering that could be considered a Eurogame, and I absolutely love it. Quoth BGG:
In Revolution! players take advantage of the fluid political situation by secretly bidding for a number of characters, each yielding a combination of territory control, points (popular support) and more currency with which to bid next round. Players win by gaining the support of the people (the most points). Players can gain bonus points by controlling an area of the city at the end of the game. This game is for 3-4 players and takes 60 minutes to play.
What I love about Revolution! is the lack of one clear perfect strategy to win the game. In many respects, it's like poker: you win by playing against the other players as much (if not more) than you play the actual game. It's very simple to pick up (I'd say it takes about 5 minutes to teach) and really needs four players, though you can play with three.
Bonus soon-to-be-released SJ Games: Cthulhu Dice (I played this at RinCon and loved it) and Zombie Dice (which I haven't played, but looks like a whole lot of fun.)
I love cooperative games, where the players are working together against the game itself. Some games, like Shadows Over Camelot, toss the uncertainty of a traitor into the game, while others, like Arkham Horror, are so purely cooperative, they can even be played as solo games. Pandemic is a purely cooperative game that BGG describes thusly:
You are specialists at the CDC/Atlanta where you watch several virulent diseases break out simultaneously all over the world. The team mission is to prevent a world-wide pandemic outbreak, treating hotspots while researching cures for each of the four plagues before they get out of hand.
Players must plan their strategy to mesh their specialist's strengths before the diseases overwhelm the world. For example, the Operations Specialist can build research stations, which are needed to find cures for the diseases. The Scientist needs only 4 cards of a particular disease to cure it instead of the normal 5. But the diseases are breaking out fast and time is running out: the team must try to stem the tide of infection in diseased areas while developing cures. If disease spreads uncontrolled, the players all lose. If they can cure all four diseases, they win.
This game looks and feels beautiful, and though it's probably the most complicated to learn on this list, it's not nearly as complicated as an RPG, a historical wargame, or understanding one of us geeks. You can adjust the level of difficulty (from easy to legendary) and if you get the expansion, On The Brink, you can add mutations and virulent strains of the various diseases, as well as a bioterrorist who is working against the other players. You rarely breeze through a game of Pandemic, and even though you start out sort of losing, victory is almost always decided by a razor-thin margin.
Pandemic is so frakking hard to beat, it shouldn't be fun, but I have had more fun losing games of Pandemic than I've had winning a huge list of other games.
Days of Wonder is probably best-known for games like Ticket To Ride and its sequels, Battlelore and its sequels, and Memoir '44 and its sequels. Small World is a very recent release from Days of Wonder, and I think it's one of the best games they've ever published. One more time, let's borrow from Board Game Geek:
Small World is inhabited by a zany cast of characters such as dwarves, wizards, amazons, giants, orcs and even humans; who use their troops to occupy territory and conquer adjacent lands in order to push the other races off the face of the earth.
Picking the right combination from the 14 different fantasy races and 20 unique special powers, players rush to expand their empires - often at the expense of weaker neighbors. Yet they must also know when to push their own over-extended civilization into decline and ride a new one to victory!
Okay, so that description doesn't really capture what's awesome about this game. Let me try to explain why I love it so much: first, it's a map conquest game that comes with different maps for different numbers of players, so you get a balanced game whether you're playing head-to-head or with three or four other friends. Second, the zany characters get different unique special powers every time you play, so there's no point in developing a strategy (or counter strategy) exclusively for Flying Amazons or Dragonmaster Ghouls, because you may not get to use it that often. Third, it employs an elegant scoring system that tends to keep the games close (are you sensing some commonality among the games I really like?). Fourth, it just looks beautiful. The counters and the boards feature great artwork, so it's easy to buy into the theme. Finally, it's a relatively quick game, which is important to a guy like me who doesn't have nearly enough time to play all the games he wants to play.
All of these games are suitable for ages 12 and up, with the exception of Pandemic, which I think is >just< a little to complex for the under-14 set.
Now that I've spent enough time on this post to have actually played one of these games, I'd like to close with three RPGs that I haven't played, but desperately want to play:
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay from Fantasy Flight
- Savage Worlds from Pinnacle
- Dragon Age RPG from Green Ronin
Okay, now that I've regained some of my HP, I think I'm ready to go ahead and attempt the Drop Off Packages At The Post Office quest. If I don't come back, avenge my death and immortalize me in song.
Glad that he'll be back for the coming season. I thought he did a good job subbing for Timo
He's rough around the edges but he's quick and not afraid to mix it.
I'm really looking forward to seeing how he develops
( 23 more pages under the cut )Just so you know, here's our warehouse and customer service closure dates over the holiday season.( More )
- Mood:
busy
This makes much more sense than what happened in 2009. Hopefully this rule will not need to be invoked in 2010, especially not because a regular F1 driver was seriously injured and cannot complete the season, but at least this will prevent complete newbies to the current-season cars from "testing" during a grand prix weekend.
With the expansion of Street View coverage in Canada, we can continue our exploration (see parts one & two) of historic Grand Railway Hotels.
Travelling again from east to west, we begin in Winnipeg, location of the magnificent Fort Garry Hotel.
Constructed in 19131 in the now familiar Chateau style, it was the tallest building in the city at the time. The hotel was named after the nearby Upper Fort Garry, which was a prominent trading post in the 1800s.
The hotel was, for a while, totally self-sufficient – with heat, food, water and laundry all being taken care of on-site. There was even a working printing press, which was lifted into place before a room was constructed around it (it’s still there but currently unused). Unlike the majority of railway hotels which are today owned by Fairmount, the Fort Garry is independently operated.
Another non-Fairmount hotel is in Saskatoon, The Bessborough.
Named after the then-Governor General, the Bess was built in 1932 but the great depression meant it didn’t receive its first guest until 3 years later. This hotel is noted for its extensive private gardens which stretch down towards the South Saskatchewan River.
Following the route of The Canadian to the west, we get to Edmonton and the Hotel Macdonald, which brings us back into the Fairmount properties.
Named for Canada’s first prime minister, The Mac was constructed in 1915 in the Chateau style, though the use of Indiana limestone gives it a different appearance to many of the other hotels. This hotel was in poor condition and closed for a while in the 1980s. Heritage designation from the city saved it from demolition, and it reopened in 1991 after a major renovation.
Finally, we go beyond the reach of the railway, to Victoria and the unmistakable ivy-covered walls of The Empress, which opened in 1908 to serve passengers from Canadian Pacific’s steamships.
Perhaps most famous for its afternoon teas, The Empress has a storied history of Royal and celebrity visitors. Similar to The Mac, a period of decline almost saw its destruction, but local sentiment was strong enough to save the building. That same civic pride forced Fairmount to abandon plans to alter the iconic sign on the hotel’s exterior.
There are many more railway hotels across Canada, but this concludes our look at the majority of the grandest and most historic properties.
An earlier Winnipeg Hotel, the Royal Alexandra, was demolished in 1971. Its fine dining room was taken apart and reconstructed a few years ago at a railway museum in British Columbia. ↩
Locations: Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan / Categories: Buildings, Street Views
You're reading an entry from Google Sightseeing, which is copyright © 2009 Alex Turnbull & James Turnbull and must not be reproduced without permission.
Fly
Originally published at Swati Sani. Please leave any comments there.
This seems like a solution in search of a problem:
MagTek discovered that no two magnetic strips are identical. This is due to the manufacturing process. Similar to DNA, the structure of every magnetic stripe is different and the differences are distinguishable.Knowing that, MagTek pairs the card's magnetic strip signature with the card user's personal data to create a one-of-a-kind digital identifier. MagTek calls this technology MagnePrint.
Basically, each card gets a "fingerprint" of the magnetic strip printed on it. And the reader (merchant terminal, ATM machine, whatever) verifies not only the card information, but the fingerprint as well. So a thief can't skim your card information and make another card.
I see a couple of issues here. One, any fraud solution that requires the credit card companies to issue new readers simply isn't going to happen in the U.S. If it were, we'd have embedded chips in our credit cards already. Trying to convince the merchants to type additional data in by hand isn't going to work, either. We finally got merchants to type in a 3–4 digit CVV code -- that basically does the same thing as this idea (albeit with less security).
Two, physically cloning cards is much less of a threat than virtually cloning them: buying things over the phone and Internet, etc. Yes, there are losses here, but I'm sure they're not great enough to justify all of this infrastructure change.
Still, a clever security idea. I expect there's an application for this somewhere.
A quick note for those who follow my blog but not the SANIsoft blog. The Wordpress Plugin to import comments from your Flickr Photos into your Wordpress posts is now listed at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/live-f
Bug reports, feature request and patches most welcome
Originally published at http://tariquesani.net/blog/. Please leave any comments there.
Taking on the hopes of a nation and assuming the mantle of such an iconic F1 name is no easy task, but few men are better qualified...
BUT when it comes to offering negative publicity they are quite generous in mentioning the names, like say eg, "Jet Airways today turned away a passenger since he was having a physical disability and was not accompanied by another person," or "the Vice President of Standard Chartered bank today hit a pedestrian and killed him," or like this report ’Ha(a)gen doesn’t which of all papers was front paged by the Economic Times. Complete with a photo. See this TOI link to see the photo. But in the end Haagen Dazs [whoever they are] will have the last laugh here, since I am very sure that they didn't turn any one away with or without passports [international heh] and if people really know them and wanted to taste their ice cream now have TOI and ET to thank for.
Now Put A Bow On It
Continued from Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4</em>
Although the printing is complete, and the room no longer smells like denatured alcohol & paint thinner (except for the splash I’ve added to my coffee for a little pick-me-up), there’s a bit more to be done before the calendars are Formally Finished. Once the covers are signed and numbered, all the cards are collated into sets and double-checked to make sure nobody’s getting two Augusts or getting shorted a February. Although I do want to sow a sense of existential ennui among the populace at large, we now have too many external calendar systems for any minor rebellion here to be tremendously effective, and I will save my efforts in that realm for more grandiose schemes.
Last year, we collated the cards by setting the stacks around a table and then continually circling the table over and over, picking up a card from each successive stack like it was the world’s most obsessive comic-convention freebie table. That was a very dizzy way to do things. This year we just kinda put them in a long row and then walked down the row a bunch of times.
With the cards collated, they’re then SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION into little capsule units that can be thrust headlong into our shipping workflow:
And these, along with the easels if desired, are what customers get! We spent the full day yesterday packaging and shipping, and I’m pleased to announce both that: all pending pre-orders have been sent, and all new orders are shipping out immediately. As of this writing, less than two dozen copies remain. Please, if you’ve been on the fence about ordering, don’t delay — I’d hate for you to miss out. UPDATE: You guys are too much. They are all gone!
(I will also be a little sheepish here and say that if they sell out while I’m asleep tonight, and I’m unable to update the store in time, please forgive me if I have to write an apologetic email. Hopefully this won’t happen.) ack
That buzzkill aside! I am so tremendously pleased with how this whole process has gone that I can hardly tell you. (Though you cannot fault me for trying.) Whether you buy a calendar or not, whether this has inspired you to make anything creative of your own or not, whether you’re even the least bit interested in this process or not, I hope you take one key thing away from this entire, long-winded story. I’ll put it on its own line and bold it so you’re sure not to miss it:
You can make something from nothing.
Let me repeat that. You can make something from nothing. The Wondermark Calendar is not a model kit that we assembled from directions. It’s not a box of LEGO® brand interlocking building blocks that we dumped onto the floor and then very precisely made into a spaceship. The LEGO® brand interlocking building blocks that we used were paper and ink. Any meaning that they have been given is meaning that we have fabricated.
You can do this too. I’m not saying you should necessarily make a calendar, or start hunting eBay for a GOCCO, or anything so specific — I’m saying that the tools and the effort and the materials and the sweat that went into our project are nothing my wife and I have a monopoly on. They are not hard to fathom nor out of reach. It just takes work: exposing yourself to ideas, swishing them around with other ideas and original notions, being a bit of a perfectionist at times, and just working at it. I know I’m never so satisfied with my job as when I sit down and make things that used to not exist.
(click)
I’m going to stop there; you can run with that ball anywhere you like, or leave it be, as you prefer. I just think it’s neat that there was nothing and then I had some cockamamie idea and figured out where to buy paper and stuff and then, a bunch of man-hours and problem-solving later, there is something. This is a thing we wrestled into existence. If you buy one of our things, you will be getting a tidy little package made of paper, ink, brass, and force of will.
If this calendar stays in your house, in the most quiet stillness of an afternoon when everything is at an ebb — if you get very close, close enough to see the fibers and detect the thin mounding of the ink over the paper — and if you hold your breath and if your refrigerator isn’t on and if the pets are all napping and nobody’s trying to email you right then –
– If the rest of the world is silent, and if the light catches it just perfectly right, I do believe you will see this thing’s heartbeat.
Thanks very much for all your kind attention this week, and for your wonderfully flattering patronage. While I was writing this, I went back and checked and it looks like one more has sold. I am serious. Get one now, if ever. UPDATE: They are gone, compadre. Wowsers.
That being said, I understand that this isn’t for everyone, and to those folks, sorry for hammering on this point all week. Thank you, regardless — I will make other things, on other days, for free most of the time, and presumably you will be able to share in those. It’s been a fun week but it ain’t over yet so now I am going to go to bed.</p>
Last week I was invited by Nokia Malaysia to preview their latest flagship E-series device – the Nokia E72. A bit of background to this device and me: I was dearly using my Nokia E71, right up until it was replaced with a Nokia N97, and before that I was using the Nokia E61i. I’ve loved this particular series of devices, and the E72 is no different to me.
First impressions? Build quality is still excellent. Its got a better camera (5MP vs 3.2MP). They keyboard seemed a little odd in my hands, but maybe its because I’ve become used to what the N97 gives me (it took me a while to get used to that too). The charger is now micro-USB based, making it pretty standard. It supports SIP/VoIP out of the box (something the Nokia N97 still does not offer!).
I’ve seen many ads about how its a “Blackberry killer” of some sort. I know it does well with Exchange and Lotus Notes, but how does it deal with Google Apps? Probably just works over IMAP, and throw in Google Sync and all should be well (I didn’t test this out, its just an assumption). The mail application is free for the life of the phone, but I don’t know – I’ve grown accustomed to having email on a BlackBerry device. I tried the mail application on the N97 (during its beta phases), and it was too unreliable for me. One would assume the E72 has a more stable version.
Chat. They have some kind of OviChat, which reminds me of the BlackBerry Messenger. Its unclear to me how my Ovi account on my N97 can get on this chat, but it could be a useful feature. Have data, have OviChat, no need SMS messaging – I’m sure the telcos will love this. It also supports Google Talk out of the box, and MSN Messenger. It apparently signs you out to conserve battery life if you don’t use the chat app after a certain period of time… and that to me isn’t too useful. Give me good juice, and also keep me signed in… always.
From my limited experience with it, I didn’t see it supporting VoIP over data – its just VoIP over WiFi. The in-built browser could use some improvement – its still a little too last century for me. I don’t exactly like Opera on the Nokia devices either (though I use Opera Mini on the BlackBerry, again because its in-built browser sucks).
Camera. Before this, on the E71, you’d press T to autofocus. Now, you’d just use the optical Navi Key. It autofocuses, and like magic, it takes the snapshot. I never mentioned that yet, huh? The Navi Key. It rocks. Its what makes the latest BlackBerry Curve 8520 a good phone too… In fact, they’ve depressed it, and the feel/functionality is actually better.
Trend watch? All devices that don’t have touch screens and still have a navigation key, are giving up on those trackballs. I reckon they’ll all go the way of the Navi Key (or whatever they call it). It’ll be optical. It’ll be accurate. It’ll be less of a burden on your thumbs.
Disclosure: The meal at Italiannies was nice, and I got a bunch of door gifts – a cute guide to mobile etiquette and a (leather?) cards holder. Plus I got to have a chat with some friends whom I don’t see often, all on Nokia’s dime.
| Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham |
www.phdcomics.com
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title:
"Year-end accounting" - originally published
12/16/2009
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