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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 . . .Current Mood:  amused |
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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.Current Mood:  techy |
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We had some pretty intricate summer plans. One of them was Becca's -- that she would go to summer school. That took up a big chunk of time and had big repercussions on the rest of us, but we figured out how to make it work.
Until summer school was canceled. We found out on Monday that they had only 7 kids signed up for the fast-start science class.
So Becca needs to find things to do with herself over the summer. It was a surprise, so maybe we just need some time for the situation to settle in and to come up with other ideas. We'll really need something to do next week though....
Not to say that the week wasn't bad. Becca and I have had a lot of fun, and she actually made four characters for the Ellis game today. We went for a nice drive on Monday, and then I did yard work yesterday while she played Sims 3. Ok, I played Sims 3 too... |
| » I'm so proud! |
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So my daughter graduated from 8th grade tonight. We went to the ceremony at the High School auditorium and were quite surprised to find her nominated not just for the Citizenship award, but for Student of the Year.
Student of the Year!
She didn't win, but this is certainly one of those times when it is a huge honor just to be nominated.
She is at the post-graduation party/dance right now. She got a bunch of compliments on her dress and went out after school with some friends to do hair and apply makeup.
I tried to take pictures of her getting the diploma, but they didn't turn out.
Jun. 17th, 2009 @ 09:12 pm
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| » Crap, Crap Crap, Crap |
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I drove into work early today to do a favor for the boss. I took our SUV so that I could bring in the tall ladder (to replace some pigeon deterrent). As I arrived at the store, parallel parking, I hit the curb and tore a huge gash in the side of the front passenger tire.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
This is the second time I've done this (in the same parking spot!) so I should really know that the SUV is wider than my little compact.
The really shitty part of this is that because of the active power distribution (or whatever its official name is) if I change one tire I have to change all four. Last time it was $500.
Grrrrrr.
Well I've already go the spare on. I don't know what it says about me that I am able to change the tire in less than 15 minutes. I guess I've done way too often.
So as soon as I'm off work I'll head to the tire place and get the bad news. Conveniently though, they can usually do a full tire replacement like that in less than an hour. Plus, it's only a few blocks from home, so I don't even have to sit in the waiting room.
Jun. 17th, 2009 @ 08:59 am
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| » I'm not old enough to have a daughter like this... |
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Becca is graduating from 8th grade tomorrow. After graduation there's a dance. A late-night, off-campus dance.
Now I had the brilliant idea to have a friend of mine make her a dress. That way Becca would get exactly what she wanted. Lizzie would get some extra money instead of an over-priced mall store and everyone would be happy.
Everyone but me, that is. Why? Because she looks like this:
I'm joking. I really am happy. I'm happy that she looks great. I'm happy that she's thinks she looks great. I'm really proud.
I just might have to poke out some teenage boys' eyes with a red-hot poker.
Jun. 16th, 2009 @ 03:46 pm
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| » Ellis Update |
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I ran a game down at the store on Saturday and it went very well. The game was fun and everyone enjoyed it. Two new players, one his first time playing any RPG.
I realized some small changes that I wanted to make, mostly having to do with damage numbers as compared to armor number.
I had lunch with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) raffenshiv and Victoria today. We talked about the game for about 3 hours. They had a bunch of good ideas that I really don't want to incorporate/change, but I think I need to. I want to move forward, but when it isn't quite right or could be made plainer, it has to be done.
So I'm going to re-write combat. I'm going to see how much I can finish tonight, so that I can work on saints tomorrow.
I've been on a little break from the game design since January, and it feels really good to be back!
Jun. 16th, 2009 @ 03:37 pm
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| » This week |
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It's been a fairly crazy week.
The weekend was good. I had a huge to-do list that I just never seemed to get control of, though I did get everything on it that _needed_ to done, finished.
We went garage saleing a bit and got a fabulous collection of gears and clocksprings and such that will be great for steampunking. Becca has claimed them which is a bit annoying, but if she actually does something with them that will be great.
I got Father's Day and birthday shopping done for my father (who, like me, is impossible to shop for. We also got Becca's graduation dress fitted for the final time. I should be able to pick it up tonight.
The week has been spent running errands, cooking (it seems like that's all I did on Monday), editing the +3 System rulebook and working on the RPG session I'm running on Saturday. The editing is going slowly (very slowly), but I'm very happy with what's there.
In what little spare time I had I've played a little Sims 3. Like most Sims games, it's funner than it looks. But there is nothing really new here, it's the same game as Sims 1 but with tweaks and much better graphics. The Build-a-Sim might actually be worse, at least in the facial designs, as I was very frustrated that I couldn't get much difference between faces, even by playing with all of the sliders.
Yesterday, I got carried away and spent way too much time playing with the new Ellis wiki that chromiuml set up. It was much fun and I see this as being a huge time-sink in the future as well.
Jun. 11th, 2009 @ 07:01 am
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| » Mmmmm ... vodka ... mmmmm ... bacon |
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I found this this morning and I am definitely intrigued. I think I want to try some.
From their website:
Bakon Vodka is a superior quality potato vodka with a savory bacon flavor. It’s clean, crisp, and delicious. This is the only vodka you’ll ever want to use to make a Bloody Mary, and it's a complementary element of both sweet and savory drinks.
Bakon Vodka is also a great Bar-B-Q companion. Use it in a marinade or sip it chilled with a steak. Check out our recipes section for more ideas.
The Meat and Potatoes… Premium quality, no joke.
We start with superior quality Idaho potatoes instead of the random mixed grains that make up most vodkas. Our vodka is column-distilled using a single heating process that doesn’t “bruise” the alcohol like the multiple heating cycles needed to make a typical pot-still vodka.
No tinge or burn on the tongue, no obnoxious smoky or chemical flavors, just a clean refreshing potato vodka with delicious savory bacon flavor.
Pure. Refreshing. Bacon.
Jun. 5th, 2009 @ 06:29 am
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| » Gunsmithing |
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One of the things that the guys at Zombie Buddy Productions (the folks that put on the excellent zombie apocalypse LARP at MisCon) did was sell modified and painted Nerf Guns. Becca didn't buy one of those, but she was intrigued by the idea.
So last night she came down with one of her Mavericks and asked me how to take it apart. So we did. No, I take that back -- I told her where to find the proper size screwdriver and she took it apart. She dove right in and pieces were quickly laying on the coffee table. I only helped take out one screw that was in there really tight.
Once she got the pieces out she found some sandpaper and started filing off some of the names and warning labels. I did help some with that and we had a good time.
She's going to bring it to the painting party on Sunday and paint it. I'm not sure what color yet, we'll see what she wants.
Otherwise, my day went well. I finally figured out how to get my spreadsheet to work. We went to Becca's last conference at Middle School. It was nice to hear her teachers really encouraging her and telling her that she has a lot of potential.
While at MisCon I also came up with a plan for Ellis, but that really deserves a long post of its own, so let's just say I have a plan and I have been taking small steps toward it. I also have a new plan for Sabledrake Enterprises, and along those lines I have been trying to figure out how eBooks work from the publishing side. So not much completed work to show for the week, but some good research and good progress made.
May. 28th, 2009 @ 06:44 am
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| » I hate bookkeeping |
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Errg!
I realized yesterday that my Sabledrake Enterprises Excel layout for managing our out-of-house authors is fatally flawed. It worked early on, but as pay-in and outs got more complicated, it dropped the ball.
I worked on it yesterday with litlle headway, although what I did get done was then lost in a blue-screen-of-death.
I've been working on it now for the last three hours and am close . . . It's going to be much clearer and more accurate, not that I thing it was very far off.
I'm going to take a break and come back to it after lunch.
May. 27th, 2009 @ 12:18 pm
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| » A weekend in Montana |
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So the illness I was feeling last week was definitely allergies. Friday morning the allergy pills I took got rid of the symptoms beautifully and they returned exactly five and a half hours later.
We left Everett at 6:20 am and arrived at 4:30 pm (losing an hour when we crossed into Mountain Time). We stopped in Coeur d'Alene for lunch at Sonic (a treat for us, since we don't have any). The trip was very pretty -- snow in the mountains, corn growing in the fields, and fast running mountain rivers.
Miscon itself was a lot of fun. We had a dealer's tables and I did my best to sell books. I wasn't very optimistic, but the tables were so cheap, I couldn't turn down the opportunity. In the end, we sold more than enough to pay for the table, which surprised me quite a bit.
Christine wound up being allergic to something out there and spent much of the con either miserable or asleep. I didn't see much of the con, being stuck behind the table, but it was very well organized and very attendee friendly.
The hotel is one of the best things about the con. Excellent free breakfast, friendly, helpfull staff, and a creek flowing along the backside of the hotel.
What wound up being the highlight of the con was some guys from Pittsburg who travel around the country to conventions and host zombie-themed LARP sessions for pay. Becca tried one out an Saturday and was immediately hooked. She is now in hawk for many future allowances and extra chores around the house, both for sessions and for some of their merchandise -- a I (brain) Zombies hoodie and a bio-hazard denim purse.
They were short one player for a Sunday night game, so they invited me to join them for free. It was surprisingly fun and intense. With a full group it would have been well worth $14 for a 90 minute game.
I got into a long conversation with Mike Stackpole and a few others about ebooks and the Kindle and have decided to give it a try. So that's my project for the next few weeks.
The drive home was non eventful and we got in late on Monday. A very nice weekend!
May. 26th, 2009 @ 08:14 pm
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| » Onward to MisCon |
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It's a short work week for me, as I am taking Friday off to go to MisCon in Missoula, Montana. I'm not particularly looking forward to the drive, but once we get there it will be a blast. Last year was our first time going; small con, lots of face time with the guests, great hotel with a creek running through it, good people.
I've been fighting off a cold all week and it still has yet to fully take me over. I keep telling myself I'm too busy to catch a cold and taking Vitamin C.
My wife has started a new guild for City of Heroes and so on Tuesday when I tried to work on Ellis and after two hours had gotten nowhere (not quite that bad, but it was rather irksome) I decided to write some fiction about my character for it. That went well and I was happy.
I have four half-written posts for my other blog that I have to tame and get posted. Maybe I can do that at MisCon.
I'm also back on my diet and have already seen some of my vacation pounds vanish. Yeah!
My parents got me hooked on The Mentalist while I was on vacation and I managed to watch the first 7 episodes this week. Very fun show.
May. 21st, 2009 @ 06:57 am
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| » Back from Vacation
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I’m back and happy to be in the cloudy, rainy Northwest. Not the the weather was bad while I was in the Midwest -- I actually couldn’t have asked for better. But it’s nice not to have to wonder if it’s going to thundershower today or hit 80 or both. It’s nice not to have to change shirts halfway through the day to deal with the humidity.
After getting home late Monday night, I slept in on Tuesday. Practically the first thing I did was call my doctor. I don’t think I mentioned it in may daily blogs (but maybe I did) but I went into the trip with a slight pain in my left elbow. I didn’t think much of it -- I have a lot of little aches and pains these days. But I did my best to baby it and let it heal.
Needless to say, hauling suitcases around, throwing them into overhead racks, dragging them around on subways and playing golf with my Dad was hardly “babying” it. It got feeling worse and worse as the trip went on and even the relatively slow (at least on my arm) time of the Medieval Congress didn’t make it feel any better.
So, much to my wife’s surprise, I made an appointment with the doc. An hour and a $25 co-pay later, he told me that it was Tennis Elbow and to take it easy on the arm and to take ibuprophen. Gee, thanks doc, like I hadn’t guessed that much on my own. He also wants be to ice it, which has actually done the most to make it feel better. But at least now I know it’s not something worse and I have a letter from my doc to give my boss, so that I’m on light duty.
The rest of Tuesday and all of Wednesday have been spent catching up on chores -- laundry, weeding the garden, tending to our apricot wine, shopping, paying bills, synching computers, posting to blogs, etc.
Becca had her first instance of the computer eating a project. She’d written a 17 page short story for a school writing assignment. She printed it out and gave it to us to edit, but when she went back in to make the changes, it was garbled to hell an unreadable. After a mild panic attack we went through and determined that it was truly unrecoverable, but since we had the printout we could scan and OCR it. It took us an hour last night to do it and went in surprisingly clean. I think it definitely helped that it was in 12 point Times.
I feel definitely recharged after this trip. I really want to do a hard push on Ellis and get it to a final draft state so that I can move on to the hard part -- getting it published. I think I will try to work on it this weekend (and may also drive up to Mt. Vernon to buy some honey), but next weekend is MisCon which is going to be a fun, but exhausting con (an 8-hour drive will do that . . . ).
That’s it for now,
--Tim
May. 14th, 2009 @ 06:33 am
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| » Vacation Day 10, Kalamazoo Day 6 -- Monday, May 11th -- Afternoon and Evening
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I met my aunt, or I should say she met me) at Union Station and we jumped in a cab and went deeper downtown. She took me to a Cajun restaurant, Heaven on Seven, and we had a wonderful meal of Jambalaya and Gumbo.
The next stop on the grand tour was Millenium Park. We walked around the park, seeing the giant reflective bean (officially called the Cloud Gate), the Crown Fountain (two giant glass block “skyscrapers” that they project pictures of people’s face on, then have them spit water out of their mouths) and walked over a winding pedestrian bridge to a lakeside park.
(The links above go to other people’s pictures, since I locked my luggage in a locker at the train station and forgot my camera there.)
Our next stop was the Chicago Cultural Center, the former downtown library and an absolutely gorgeous building. Tiffany glass domes, mosaic tilework everywhere, elaborate coffered ceilings . . . it was beautiful. The artwork it displayed was nothing special.
A quick cab ride back to the train station and I said goodbye to Nancy. I got my luggage and caught the L to the airport. I got through security with no trouble this time and had nearly four hours to wait.
I got a horribly overpriced glass of wine and a greasy hamburger at the Fox Sports bar. My phone was about to run out of juice, so I found a plug and read for a while. Another man was doing the same thing and I got to hear all about his trip to Rome.
The plane was on time and I had a window seat, so I got some really nice views of the countryside as we chased the sun westward. I finished _The Carolingian Economy_ and will post about it later. I napped for about a half of an hour and we got in at 10:30 pm.
Chris and Becca were both there to meet me and it was very good to see them. We were home an hour later and I was beat, so I went straight to bed.
May. 13th, 2009 @ 08:41 am
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| » Vacation Day 9, Kalamazoo Day 5 -- Sunday, May 10th
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I wound up not sleeping late. I woke up on my own right at 6:00 am. I blogged and got coffee and made it up the hill to my 8:30 session, “Dress and Textiles III: Heroes, Ladies and Fools”. I never posted about it, but after the first session, the one about French romance, I started keeping track of the male-to-female ratio at the sessions. That first one was 5:15, which was pretty noticeable and why I started paying attention. This one on clothes and fashion, was even more extreme -- 5:44. Men or women though, that was a fabulous turnout for a Sunday morning session.
The first paper was about descriptions of clothing the in the Dietrich Cycle. It was very surprising that there are very few descriptions of clothing in that work. That contracted quite spectacularly with Jean Renart’s _Roman de la Rose_ where gowns and linings,dying, embroidery, furs and slippers are all described in loving detail.
The last paper of that session was an examination of a small ivory chest, perhaps the size to hold a knight’s spurs, that had scenes of dressing and undressing from Chretien de Ttroyes’ _Perceval_. I really hope that my photos of the powerpoint turned out for that one.
The final session of the Congress was on Urban Culture in Medieval France and consisted of two really interesting papers about the emergence of towns. For whatever reason, both of these lectures inspired questions in me that I spoke up with and had answers given to me.
The first one looked at royal charters to towns (communes) by Louis VI & VII in the 12th Century. There were a lot of details given about the kings’ and the communes’ financial situation. For example, the estimate of the Louis VII’s entire royal budget was 60,000 pounds (Parisien) per year. So when the king was able to squeeze another £100-200/yr out of a town, it was fairly significant. And he either granted or confirmed 18-20 charters during his reign.
The other paper was about the emergence of Paris as the capital of France, both as the administrative center, but also as the cultural center in the eyes of French authors and poets. It’s earliest self-identity seems to be as an educational hub, with the University of Paris called “The Daughter of France”. The discussion to follow was quite lively and really brought into focus the late adoption of a “nation-wide” acceptance of Paris’ centrality.
That brought the Congress to an end. I got lunch and a nap, then spent the rest of the afternoon writing (on my secret novel project) and reading. Near 6:00 I walked back over to my pub and had dinner there again, while continuing to make my way through one of the books I had bought the day before, _Carolingian Economy_. I had two tall glasses of Strongbow Cider which was very good.
I came home very relaxed and found it impossible to concentrate on reading or writing. I really wanted to veg in front of the television, but I didn’t have one, and while I had internet, it was slow and intermittent. So I called home, surfed wikipedia and lol-ed until 10:00 pm when I turned out the lights.
May. 12th, 2009 @ 10:15 am
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Waking up
