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Monday I couldn’t start right in on Ellis because I had other responsibilities. Princess Smith and the Clockwork Knight is the next book due out from Sabledrake Enterprises, and will be released sometime in November. So I spent the day laying that out and getting proofs ready. I needed some artwork for that, so I renewed my subscription to ClipArt.com and spent much of the day downloading artwork from them. The layout went well, and everyone here as well as Rob, the author, liked how it looked.
Tuesday I finally got back to Ellis and dicked around for a long time before I figured out what exactly I wanted to do with the Bestiary section. And, since I had been playing around at Clipart.com, I decided to include artwork for the beasts. It took a long time (I didn’t finish until Sunday), but it looks really good.
That evening, I took Becca to a meeting at Deaconess Children’s Services, a local non-profit helping families and children. She had an interview to begin volunteering. She was a little shy at first, but was in a surprisingly good mood, and pretty well aced the interview. She was supposed to start helping with dinner food prep the following Thursday.
Thursday, there was a huge fire on the same block as Gary’s Games. It destroyed four little restaurants and damaged the Taproot Theater. It now turns out that the fire was arson, but we only found that out recently. KC, my co-worker, came in to see what was up with the fire and we had a long talk, both about the Ellis layout and about Gary’s Games’ web presence.
Saturday I worked on Ellis in the morning, and then we went out Halloween shopping. Becca has turned 15 over the week, so she got taken out to Mexican food for lunch. After a short nap, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) chubling came over for a bit and we strategized for an online RPG she’s playing in. Wallace & Gromit’s new movie for family movie night was a big hit and very cute, with better pacing than the last few.
Sunday, I got a private message over Facebook from Kelly, my neighbor across the street. He was having his roof done (I had only found that out Thursday morning as they delivered the industrial-sized dumpster) and was offering me use of the dumpster. We wound up having a long conversation during which I mentioned that I was having my roof done too.
Then we started comparing. He’s getting his done for less than $4000. That was quite a shocker. It actually made me want to cry. But then I was able to point to things that I’m getting that he’s not. His roof was being done by an independent contractor (just one or two guys) and his 10 year old son, who was wandering around cleaning things up. He only had one layer of roof to remove, while I had three (one more than the current building code allows). I’m getting top quality shingles (even that other bid that I got, the one for just materials, listed a price of $8k for the same brand of shingles with only a 30 yr. warrantee). They’re putting in new vents and flashing, and dealing with the difficult flat roof. All with a lifetime warranty, and we plan to keep this house as a rental for a long time.
And I guess that flat roof section is really the key. It has been troublesome the entire time we’ve owned the house. While it didn’t leak while we were there, it always sagged, and it being “fixed” was actually a condition of us buying the house. And by fixed all that really happened was that a support post got put in, rather than any actual repair to the structure. There is definitely something not right going on in there, the real question is just how much bad, how structural is it and how difficult will it be to fix. So I really want someone with experience and the resources to be able to fix whatever is under there.
This is all me trying to justify my decision, but I think it’s still a good one. While I would love to get a roof for $4000, I do want a good one that I can ignore for a long time. But on the other hand, for the price I’m paying, I could buy four cheap roofs. Even if they each only lasted 15 years, that would still be a lifetime’s worth. So I don’t know. It literally makes me sick to my stomach to think about it too much and to wonder if I’m really wasting that much money.
Other than that, Kelly and I had a great chat, over an hour standing outside on the very chilly morning. After that, I went inside and finished up Ellis while the girls worked on Becca’s zombie Halloween costume.Current Mood:  chipper |
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Current Mood: amused |
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The weather was horrendous that Saturday. The rain was coming down in buckets. So much so, that even on the drive down to Gary’s Games with no traffic, we were only going 40 MPH on the freeway.
I had gone to the bank on Tuesday and confirmed that I could get $10k out of home equity line of credit, and then Evan had come back over Wednesday night for us to sign papers on getting the roof re-done. Of the four contractors that came out to look at the house, only two actually got back to me with quotes! Only Jorve offered to meet with me and discuss options. And the other one, while they did send a quote, only quoted me for materials, not for time, permits, disposal of the old roof, etc. Jorve also gave me copies of all their licenses, insurances, Labor & Industries documents and the like. Professional through and through.
And with a professional price tag. $15,200 plus tax and possible overruns. So I’m figuring $18k. That includes new underlayment, new vents, flashing, a lot of work on that troublesome flat roof area that necessitated this whole thing and a lifetime warrantee. But they also said that they would come out and tarp down the roof so that it wouldn’t leak while they fit me into their schedule.
And so I drove by the house on my way to the game. Nearly the entire roof was covered in tarps and in the wind and rain it wasn’t fluttering or looking like it was going to blow away. A good, professional job. Later, when I called the tenant, he said that they had arrived on Thursday morning (remember we signed the papers Wednesday night, after business hours) and that the rain had started about 15 minutes after they left. Perfect timing!
I got to the game nearly late and drenched. Despite the poor weather, there was a good turnout -- five out of six spots. The game went very well, though there was a strange, unanticipated bit where everyone decided that I had not outfitted their characters properly and they wanted to go shopping.
We went a little late and wound up having to skip the big final battle. That is, we didn’t skip it, but also didn’t actually play it out. I thought it went well, and many of the player’s talked about coming to the next session.
That night we watched the really cute, and not at all cheesy Shaun the Sheep, in two videos for Family Movie Night.
Sunday was a major chore day, and I would up cleaning, doing yard work, shopping and dealing with several large totes full of old computer manuals left over from our July garage sale that had been left on the front porch but uncovered so that they had filled up with water and the paper rotted. Quite disgusting!
I followed that up with a second try at cheese making, which went much better (at least for the cheddar, the ricotta failed).Current Mood:  determined |
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My big project for the weekend was the layout of Ellis. I didn’t really expect to get it done by the end of Sunday, but I had hopes to be close and absolutely had to be done by Wednesday. But the layout wound up taking forever, first because it was 250 pages, second because I wanted this edition to be a sample of the final layout, so I was actually laying it up similarly to the final, printed edition so that it would be a test of that layout, and finally, I made some bad decisions in how to handle large files within PageMaker, so by the time I was at page 80 or so, I started to see major computer slowdowns whenever I would edit images or change pages, which was insanely frustrating.
And there was more to do that weekend. Since I had bought the milk, and the less processed milk had a shorter lifespan in the fridge, I had to do the cheese or waste $20 of milk. So, with really less time available than I needed, I started the chessemaking process. I’m not going to go into the details here (I’ll do it in my medieval living blog), but something went wrong and the cheese curds never really solidified. So while there was no cheddar, I did get some really good ricotta out of it, that would up making fabulous tasting Libum.
That night the CandyLand birthday party was a lot of fun. The idea was that everyone had to bring a game designed using the pieces of a CandyLand set without adding any pieces. My entry was a Euro-game style design that was a sort of mash-up of Res Publica and Puerto Rico, using the candy trail as a scoring track. I hadn’t had time to playtest it, so it didn’t work perfectly and definitely needs work, but it wasn’t too bad. I think it was one of the best themings at least. Charley is supposed to eventually post them all on his website.
Sunday was layout in the morning and the World of Darkness game in the afternoon/evening. Becca and I got into a little bit of a fight on the drive home, but other than that it was good.
Monday and Tuesday were all about layout and by Tuesday night I had to come to the conclusion that either I could finish by Saturday, or I could stop where I was (having finished character creation and combat) and do all of the prep work I needed to do for the game I had already committed to running Saturday morning. So I choose the latter.
It was a good decision. I made six characters, finished the adventure that I had started to write a year ago, made up player handouts, etc. I was still typing these out two hours before the game.Current Mood:  sleepy |
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A lot has happened in our little corner of the world since my birthday party, which was my last post.
That weekend we had planned to go downtown to BrickCon, a lego convention, but when we got down there, we encountered a line of 8-12 year-olds around the block and decided that it would be too much for us. That evening Becca went to a birthday party.
The next day we drove north to the Skagit County Festival of Family Farms. Becca had said beforehand that she didn't want to go, but that morning she changed her mind and came with us and that made me very happy. She really seems to hate my new-found gardening/farming hobby, but sometimes it shines through that maybe she just enjoys being contrary.
We spent the day touring the farms and bought some really good cheese and egg nog from Golden Glen Creamery. We will certainly go back there. We hit some thrift stores on the way home, looking for a copy of CandyLand, because Charley's birthday party was the next weekend.
Becca had complained that her wrist hurt ever since the party so I wound up taking her to the doctor on Monday. After a long wait and having to witness a 40-something daughter badger and berate her elderly, not-all-that-with-it father for most of it, she got x-rays that were inconclusive. We got a brace and were told to go easy on it.
That week, I finished the writing of the hopefully-final Ellis edition (v. 1.7). I also went down to the local co-op and bought supplies for making cheese, because after getting the cheesemaking kit for my birthday, I was eager to start in on that.
In less fun news, we had roof issues. We have a rental house and it has, for several years, had a leaky section of the roof. Every year I go up, slather on some tar, and that gets it through the winter and the tenants don’t complain. This year, that didn’t cut it. When I looked at it from the inside, looking behind sheetrock and pushing away insulation, it was obvious why none of my efforts topside had helped.
The wood of the roof (this is on a section of flat roof) was rotted through and you could see the underside of the tar paper. How it had kept the water out was really the bigger question.
So I also spent much of that week calling roofing contractors and arranging for them to come out at look at the place and place bids. On guy, Evan from Jorve Roofing, even came out to the house on Wednesday night to go over everything and teach me everything I wanted to know about roofs.
Needless to say, this stressed me out immensely and still continues to, but more on that later.Current Mood:  accomplished |
| » Thanks everyone, for the wonderful birthday party! |
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Yesterday was a really great day.
I took the day off work, originally so that the family could get away from the city and spend the weekend relaxing at our timeshare. But I made those reservations without paying close attention to the calendar, and it turned out that this weekend was full of things we all wanted to do in the city. I hemmed and hawed about whether or not to go up to Birch Bay anyway ... and wound up deciding to cancel. By then, though, it was passed the cancellation date, so we were stuck with the reservations. We wound up letting our across-the-street neighbors use them though, so it didn't go to waste. From the sounds of their Facebook posts, they're having a great time.
Early in the morning I worked and got caught up on most of my e-mail (I still have a little to do). I exercised and started a roast cooking int he slow cooker. Then Chris and I went out shopping and had a very nice time. Lunch and a nap later, Becca got home from school and went straight out to the Everett Sausage Fest. I got some work in on Ellis and when I got stuck I played some poker. At 7:00, Becca came home and we piled in the car and drove into Seattle for the birthday party.
We met at the store and then all walked over to Romio's. It was crowded, and the spece we had reserved for 20 only had room for 14, so the late-comers (sorry Joe, KC, Nik, Barclay and Harvey) had to stand around for a while waiting for them to clear us another table. There were a lot of people but the conversation was good and the food excellent.
I got some great gifts: a cheese-making kit from Christine and Becca, a book Why We Buy from Charley, the game Burger Joint from Nik, Le Chevalier d'Eon, a neat-looking anime series for Joe and KC, some Bitch Wine from Harvey and Ali, and a pair of linen trousers and leg wraps from my parents.
Much fun was made of my age. I got a card from Ali and Harvey congratulating me on my 100th birthday, black candles on the cake, etc., etc. The card that everybody signed was the best and has lots of little digs in there. Rather than quoting it, here's a scan of the card:
After dinner we all walked over to Fred Meyer and I got pick out a hoe as Layla's gift. Victoria slipped away as we were trying to find the garden department and made a happy birthday announcement over the loud speakers. Many jokes were made about hoes and picking out the right ones.
We wrapped it up a little after 11:00 and made the long drive home.
A perfect day. Thank you all, my good friends.
Oct. 3rd, 2009 @ 08:24 am
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| » The Loss of a Friend |
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Our cat and companion of 17.5 years died last night.
He'd been perfectly fine and healthy up until a week ago when he probably had a stroke and was having trouble with one of his back legs.
His personality changed completely from that point. He went from being the ornery, demanding, jealous, alpha cat to being meek and quiet and wanting attention. We gave him that in spades.
Wednesday night he must have had another stroke, because he couldn't really move the other hind leg either. Friday he didn't move at all from the nest we made for him on the couch. He was still there this morning when we found him.
He never seemed to be in pain, though Thursday while I was sitting with him and helping him drink, he looked up at me and I read fear in his expression. Fear of being out of control and being swept up and tossed about by life with nothing to do but hold on tight. He seemed to know, as we did, that his time was short and I think he appreciated the love we showed him in his final, difficult days.
He was a good cat, and we have lots of good memories of him. He was our first child, a wedding present actually, and he never quite forgave us for having a real, human child. He'll always be in our hearts and memories.
God speed, old friend.
Sep. 26th, 2009 @ 07:34 am
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| » The Power of Acid to resist the Nazis |
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I was reading alchemy articles on wikipedia while I work on Ellis, and came across this anecdote on the page for Aqua Regia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_regia):
"When Nazi Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of Max von Laue and James Franck in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from stealing them. He placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. After the war, he returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The Nobel Society then recast the Nobel Prizes using the original gold."
That's the sort of weird, quirky history I love.
Sep. 22nd, 2009 @ 01:51 pm
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| » My Birthday Wish List |
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Since many people have asked, here's I few things that would make great birthday presents:
- A hoe
- 25’ or 50’ coil-style outdoor hose (Such as this one)
- A nice, adjustable spray nozzle for hose
- A bed pillow
Games, not from the Store
Books (used copies are fine for any of these)
From Gary’s
- The Anima RPG
- Burger Joint
- Song of Fire and Ice RPG
Sep. 22nd, 2009 @ 06:34 am
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| » Ellis Update |
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I managed to get 2100+ words written yesterday, all about the changes I wanted to make to religion. They were hard words to pull out and I had been struggling with exactly how to change things for several weeks. But it all finally came together during my walk yesterday and then I actually managed to get it onto paper.
Also, Simon, the artist I mentioned now has in his possession four paragraphs describing scenes for pictures I'd like to see in the final book. I had expected that writing up the scenes would be kind of boring and feel like work, but it was surprisingly fun. Which is good, because I have 150 or more that I eventually have to write up.
Sep. 2nd, 2009 @ 06:22 am
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| » A weekend full of win |
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The weekend was quite a bit of fun. Saturday we started off by by going to the Evergreen State Fair. We watched a goat milking contest and nearly got roped into participating. It was a surprisingly enjoyable experience and makes me almost want to get some goats.
We wandered through the exhibit halls and found some neat displays. There was an SCAer making chainmail. We learned how to make cupcakes that look like tubs of popcorn by snipping the tops of marshmallows and dyeing them yellow and putting them on the cakes. We learned that there is an Everett Brewing Society, but they meet on Thursday nights.
The exhibit halls were pretty pathetic, unless you need leaf-free gutter systems (there were 5 booths offering them). One that stuck me odd was a booth promoting conversion to Islam. Now I have worked this fair trying to recruit people to become Freemasons, and that is pretty odd, but this booth had flyers and DVDs that seemed to be aimed at Christians trying to show them the errors of their ways. Even odder was that when I hesitated in front of the booth, curiously looking in and waiting for the girls to catch up, neither of the two guys tried to engage me. They just talked quietly to themselves, met my eyes for a second, and went back to chatting.
The fair food smelled delicious but cost a fortune, so all I got was some chocolate-covered bacon and some deep-fried cookie dough, neither of which were all that good. Instead, I waited until we got home and made myself fair food for a fraction of the price, brotwursts and a hamburger.
After reading about goats for a while on the internet, I took a nap. A long nap that felt wonderful. I worked in the yard some, trying to get the top half of my millstone out of the mold. After limited success, Becca and I went over to a neighbor’s house and picked blackberries for an hour. These will be going into the fermenter to make blackberry wine.
Then it was time for dinner and family movie night. We hadn’t thought ahead well enough to have a Netflix waiting for us, so after a bit of discussion we decided to watch two episodes of The Colony that we had recorded. Very neat reality show about surviving a global apocalypse. I’ll save my comments until I’ve watched more of it.
Sunday was a work day, at least until 2:00. Chris and I did a two week grocery shop. I milled some barley and made a loaf of barley Libum. I cleaned and pressed and preped the blackberries (we may need more). I opened up and sampled my batch of mead that’s been brewing since the end of June. I typed up my blog. I tried to print out the manuscript for Princess Smith and the Clockwork Knight, but first there was a page layout problem that took me forever to finally figure out (grrrr. I hate MS Word!) and then once I got it fixed I ran out of toner 30 pages in. I exercised.
Then Becca and I went to our twice-a-month Sunday World of Darkness game and had much fun.
Monday will be devoted to running a hundred little errands and hopefully getting some writing done. We shall see . . .
Aug. 31st, 2009 @ 08:38 am
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| » Finally posting |
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It’s been a moth or so since I last posted and a lot has been going on, so I just want to re-cap some of that so that I can move on.
First off, we’ve been in negotiations with Rob St. Martin, the author of the Sensational Squirrelman books and the Truthseekers novels to publish more of his works. Look for Princess Smith and the Clockwork Knight this winter, and Truthseekers 3 in the spring of 2010.
I harvested some of my wheat, but there’s still more that needs to mature on the stalk. I made long posts about it in my historical recreation blog.
Continuing on my medieval theme, I also cast a hand-mill (technically called a quern, but I’m trying not to be too technical about any of this) out of concrete. My instructions, while they seemed okay, left a lot to be desired and several serious mistakes were made. The biggest one being not using any mold release so now I can’t get one of the stones out of the mold. The full details of that project will get posted in the other blog in a few days. Despite all the problems it was a lot of fun.
Last weekend I bought about 40 pounds of D&D Miniatures for the store. Becca and I spent at least ten hours going through them all, first counting then and figuring out how much we could offer the owner, then separating them and bagging them for sale. It was quite a task but fun, for her more then me, but still fun. They’re now at the store and up for sale.
Editing Ellis for v1.6 has been slow and tedious. I’ll hopefully finish most of it this week (where have I heard that before?) but I have decided to re-write a major section of rules dealing with religion. ::sigh:: And this section is writing itself very slowly.
But in better Ellis news, I may have found an artist. I’ve been talking to an artist friend of a friend and he may be on board to do art. When I’m done writing this I need to send him descriptions of some pictures I want do and he’s going to try to whip them up for me. We’ll see how it goes and I’ll post here.
We went to two events -- Viking Days and the Washington Renaissance Fantasy Faire. Viking Days was a bit of dud. It was put on by the Seattle Nordic Heritage Museum. It was cute. There were a few reinactors doing a good job of true Viking-age lifestyle. There was a fabulous woodcarver, showing off his Viking-style carvings. Everything else was 18th and 19th century being passed of as older than that. The restored, klinker-style ship was very neat, but it was the restoration of a 20th century (non-recreation). Pictures of all of the above can be found here.
The ren faire was much fun. Christine and I went in costume and I managed to add to it by buying a sword belt for the fabulous rapier my wonderful friends got me last Christmas. The day was insanely hot, and I baked in all of that wool and suede. The joust was nice but seemed weaker than last time. There were a lot of performers but it was just too hot to hang out in the sun watching. There were a lot of good vendors and I also got a white leather ring-belt which will go with my Dark Ages garb. We ran into chromiuml and her parents and had a nice visit. And on the drive home we got to have the Blue Angels (they were in town for SeaFair) fly right over us. Pictures can be found here.
The wife, kid and I had a big ol’ fight one Saturday, which pretty much took up the whole weekend. A combination of of Christine and I each feeling some pretty strong life-goal crises and the kid having trouble motivating herself. It was difficult but I think we all grew from it.
DragonFlight, Seattle’s biggest boardgame and RPG convention was in there too. I worked a booth there for the store and exceeded all of my sales expectations! The game auction was a huge success and I came home with at least 100 lbs. worth of high quality games. Thanks to Victoria (you should really get an LJ) for her help. Look for some of those games to be appearing on eBay in a few weeks.
The downside was that packing everything out I managed to seriously tweak my back. I spent the next week either in pain or knocked out from the muscle relaxers.
That should catch us up to everything before this week. That will be tomorrow...
Aug. 30th, 2009 @ 12:39 pm
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| » Bad Tim, no posting |
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It's been a very busy week, in which I have gotten a lot done . . . and yet there always seems to be more. A long LJ post detailing what I have been up to was planned for last night or this morning was planned, but is not finding time to get done.
So, I am offering a quick post, which promises a longer one Friday or Saturday.
Aug. 27th, 2009 @ 07:14 am
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| » Not much done on a very hot day |
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Tuesday was hot, very hot. It hit 96 in the house with all the fans going, with the doors and windows open. Not fun.
I got some work done editing Ellis and I am now ready to start re-writing, but by Noon when I finished my brain was too warm to consider being creative. Luckily, I found something to do.
The nominees for the Diana Jones awards were announced today and that sent me to this website, http://jeepen.org/ the website of JeepForm, a Scandinavian roleplaying collective.
I spent two or three hours reading through their games. Wow! There are some very intriguing ideas there. The best one to my taste is Doubt ( http://jeepen.org/games/doubt/ ) and I would really like to give that a try. The others ... The Mother is way too intense. Four Fates (their only fantasy offering, and they use 'fantasy' in the loosest sense of the word) is too weird and too pre-scripted. Lady and Otto is a neat idea, but is more of a psych experiment than a roleplay experience.
But then again, maybe that's really what they all are. They are really acting exercises -- scenarios set up for the different players to roleplay through, exploring character with often a pre-determined plot. While players have a lot of leeway of ways to interpret their characters and explore the psychology, that's pretty much all there is to the games.
And many of the scenarios involve emotions, situations and happenings that are far removed from the common human experience. Two revolve around being a child abuser and one (unpublished) is ostensibly about gang rape though the description says that any violent act could be substituted. While I'm the first to say that roleplaying is a wonderful way to try to understand how other people think and how they justify evil acts, I would prefer somewhat safer themes.
Which is why I gravitate towards Doubt and Lady and Otto. Doubt is about two married actors. The play they are in is about falling out of love and the game switches back and forth between the characters' real lives and the lives being portrayed on the stage. In life they are each tempted into having an affair, and the game is about that temptation and what is done about it, with the real life events reflected back by the on-stage characters.
Lady and Otto is about making scenes without imposing conflict or drama upon them. To keep the action completely in the moment, and concentrating on keeping that moment a happy and harmonious one.
Anyway, I also tried to nap (as I had a hard time getting to sleep the night before. Anyone who knows me will know that 2 am is long past my bedtime) and failed.
I also managed to read some. I'm almost done with Marc Bloch's Feudal Society Vol 1. It is an incredibly dense book and a translation which have made it slow going. I read this one back in 1988 and it's been very interesting to notice, that while I have forgotten most of the details presented in the book, the broad themes and essential core of the book is well ensconced in my brain. Much of it is well reflected in the Ellis setting. Although I do notice that I did not finish the book (even though I did a 7 page report on it for Prof. Okin), as there is a dogearred page about 4/5 of the way through at which point my highlights stop.
There was a Dangerous Catch marathon on, so I watched that most of the afternoon and evening. Breaking huge ice chunks off the sides of the ships and plowing through ice-choked seas did not make the day seem any cooler. I do really like this show though. It does a really good job of showing that everyone is human, that everyone has doubts and that everyone has highs and lows, while still showing them (some of them at least) as good, noble souls worthy of high praise and respect.
Once Christine woke up, I broke out our little air conditioner and set it up in the bedroom. It's just not powerful enough to make a difference in the living room, but in the small bedroom it quickly got the temp down into the 70s. I should have gone to bed early or at least gone in there to read in the cool room, but I was hooked on the hunt for crab and couldn't tear myself away.
I got to bed at 10:00 and slept wonderfully. A pretty good day actually, despite the heat and the guilt that comes from knowing you should be doing something more constructive than that which you are doing.
Jul. 29th, 2009 @ 09:46 am
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| » Apricot Wine |
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As kind of a warm-up to making mead for my medieval projects, I started brewing a batch of apricot wine back in May. I don't remember if I mentioned it here or not, but it has been fermenting away for the past few months.
Today I spent 3 hours washing bottles, scrubbing out the insides of bottles, sterilizing bottles and spraying myself with water so that I could get 18 bootles of wine racked up and ready to age for another 3 months. No much fun, especially in the awful heat, but I feel accomplished and pleased. It is quite drinkable (although a little bland) even at this stange in the game, and unlike my previous two attempts at mead has nothing of a yeasty aftertaste.
Jul. 27th, 2009 @ 07:14 pm
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| » Catching up -- Ashland |
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Last Friday, Becca and I packed up the car and drove south into Oregon. We left around 10:00 am and made good time down I-5. There was traffic in Portland and the day was blisteringly hot. Just outside Albany we had a flat tire -- while at full speed in the fast lane. It wasn't a blowout and we were able to get to the side and put on the spare (again in less than 15 minutes).
( The whole epic tale (with pictures) behind the cut )
All in all, a very good trip.
Jul. 26th, 2009 @ 09:25 am
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| » Print on Demand Card Games and Board Games |
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For all of my game designer friends, check out: http://thegamecrafter.com
--Tim
Jul. 16th, 2009 @ 11:53 am
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| » And on Saturday, a Garage Sale |
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[Cross-posted from a reply to my wife's blog, because I thought that some of my friends might get a kick out of it...]
For the last four or five years, I've wanted to participate in the Riverside Neighborhood Garage Sale and get rid out some of our collected crap. The attic is full of old camping equipment, electronics and other stuff we've (read that as "I've") collected over the years and refused to throw or give away.
So the week has been spent dragging a lot of stuff out of the attic, especially old computers. Anyone want the first computer I bought myself? It was a great, state of the art, 286 that I built in 1989. Or how about a Sparq drive? Anyone? Anyone?
How about a 9" portable b/w TV (with a picture tube, not a flat screen) that I had when I was a teenager? It only needs 8 D-cells to run. Or a metric shit-ton of happy meal toys and the like from Becca's room?
Somehow I expect there will be a donation trip to a thrift store in my future . . .
Jul. 10th, 2009 @ 09:40 am
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| » New Internet, TV and phones |
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Last week, I got convinced to switch from Verizon (for internet and phone) and Dish Network (for TV) to Comcast cable for all three. The big thing that convinced me was the price (we should save $80/month) but also because of poor service. The dish signal was erratic, especially for HD and DSL would also cut in and out once a month or so.
This morning we started with the following stats, courtesy of SpeedTest.net:
Ping: 50 ms
Download: 2.8 Mb/sec
Upload: 0.51 Mb/sec
Right now, I have:
Ping: 13 ms
Download: 29.64 Mb/sec
Upload: 8.19 Mb/sec
I am very pleased!
The VoIP seems to work as we got a telephone solicitation call. The TV is a bit disappointing. The channel selecting menu is primitive compared to the DISH interface. The remote isn't full featured. I think it will still be OK, but we'll see.
Jul. 6th, 2009 @ 10:23 pm
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