| You should go here and buy things for other people |
[Nov. 27th, 2009|09:51 pm] |
I posted almost four years ago about Child's Play. Apparently I haven't posted about it since. Which is unfortunate, because it's a pretty awesome charity.
There's a bit of history to it, but basically the guys from Penny Arcade decided to piss off an asshole by asking gamers to donate toys, books, and games to their local children's hospital. The response was... a little overwhelming. So it's an annual thing now, and instead of donating to just one local hospital, they've got hospitals from all around the world participating. And this year, CHEO's finally on the list!
I hope Tommy never needs to go to CHEO. I really, really want to avoid that place, for reasons that I think are pretty obvious. But I'm happy to know that it is there, and if we ever do find ourselves needing to spend some time there, I hope that they'll be able to make it as pleasant as possible, and studies have shown that having video games, books, and other activities around can make a huge difference in the level of pain that kids feel and the speed of their recovery.
So in an attempt to purchase some pre-emptive karma that will hopefully never be needed, I've purchased a few items for CHEO already. If you have the money available, would you consider joining me? |
|
|
| FINALLY DONE |
[Nov. 8th, 2009|10:28 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  amused | ] |
OK, this took way too long and I should have gone to bed like 45 minutes ago and I'm going to be so tired tomorrow but after three days I HAVE FINALLY FINISHED READING THIS.
"THIS" = Questionable Content.
It is good. I am so le tired. I am also old. BUT SO FREAKING AMUSED. |
|
|
| I need more vacation |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|10:47 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  busy | ] |
It's Thursday already?! I've only just barely started planning the next D&D adventure, I haven't even begun sculpting kobolds (much less Helja), I've only painted a handful of miniatures, I haven't written any code, I haven't done my laundry yet, I haven't spent more than a tiny portion of my gift cards... Ug. I need more vacation. That's all there is to it. |
|
|
| I think this is so awesome. |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|12:48 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | cheerful | ] |
From an article about Spirit, the Martian rover: "Spirit has worked on Mars for more than 69 months in what was originally planned as a three-month mission." |
|
|
| Lost |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|08:41 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
I'm on vacation! Since I'm only on vacation to satisfy a weird policy my company instituted* I find that already, 20 minutes in, I'm a little lost.
Sure, I've got stuff to do. I've got a bunch of miniatures to paint, and I've got some DVDs I want to watch, and some reading to do, and I'm finally past my cold** so I'm planning to hit the gym every day, and if I have any time left over I'm going to finally finish preparing a lot of things I should be preparing for my D&D campaign (including the next two or three adventures). But it all feels like fill-in-the-time stuff. It kinda feels like I'm just killing the time until I have to go back to work.
Part of that is because, as stressed out as work has been making me, and as fed up with some aspects of it as I've become, there are still a lot of things at work I really enjoy... and naturally, late Friday afternoon I finally came up with a solution to something that's really been bugging me, so I want to go back to work and argue for the need to treat something as a problem when no-one else at work has even noticed that we have a problem looming on the horizon.***
I'm sure I'll get into the swing of this vacation thing soon... Probably in about 10 minutes, when I finish my breakfast and start painting miniatures. But for right now, I just feel a little lost.
* Capping vacation accumulation is fine. My company's just done it in a way that I find a little strange.
** Or at least, I'm recovered enough to not really be able to use it as an excuse for much.
*** I've found over the past year and a half that I'm very, very good at figuring out which minor irritations are preparing to explode into major catastrophes. Luckily, management has noticed that I've got that instinct, which is why we're talking about changing my role at work.
|
|
|
| XKCD makes my eyes bleed |
[Oct. 26th, 2009|01:05 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  nauseated | ] |
I sure hope XKCD's current layout doesn't last beyond today.
I also hope I never thought that was a nice-looking layout. |
|
|
| And a good time was had by all |
[Oct. 25th, 2009|09:40 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | cheerful | ] |
I hope, anyway.
Thanks to everyone who came out for my birthday party, it was a lot of fun! People didn't eat nearly enough food... or at least, didn't eat nearly enough food to make up for Andrea's need to prepare enough food for every guest to gorge themselves sick at least twice. So now we've got all this leftover snack food, and who do you think is going to eat it?
Not Andrea, that's for sure. Or at least, not today, and quite possibly not tomorrow either. She spent a great deal of time in the washroom last night after everyone left. She's now sleeping, and will probably not be in a great mood when she wakes up. I feel a great deal of sympathy for her, but I'm not above also being amused at her condition.
I, on the other hand, apparently managed to drink enough water to make up for the booze I had -- which was considerable, by my standards. I only had about 6 or 7 drinks, but each drink was... potent. Very, very potent. But apparently having 6 glasses of water across the latter part of the evening did the trick, and I feel fine today! Which is lovely. And also probably dangerous, because next time I'm able to have a few drinks I might get overconfident and end up like Andrea is today. |
|
|
| This is not good |
[Oct. 22nd, 2009|02:32 am] |
|
It's 2:30 am, and I'm wide awake and in pain. I'm fighting a cold, and I'm still sore from Monday's workout. (Yes, I'm out of shape. Hence the working out. Stop laughing at me!) I have taken Tylenol and Advil in the hopes that between them, they will help me feel reasonably human enough to be able to sleep. We shall see. |
|
|
| Mockery is expressly forbidden |
[Oct. 15th, 2009|01:16 pm] |
This plan has gone well so far. Other than the pain. And stiffness. And the lack of sleep (resulting from being too stiff to sleep comfortably). But that's all to be expected.
So -- no laughing at me and calling me Igor. |
|
|
| Well that didn't work |
[Oct. 11th, 2009|10:37 pm] |
I posted a while back that I was going to change my workout routine. That plan... failed. Miserably.
So. New plan! As of Tuesday, I'm back to the weights, but I'm changing my workout time to ~10 am. I'm also going to try to talk one of my coworkers into going with me... We'll see how that turns out. |
|
|
| Signs that you need a break |
[Oct. 8th, 2009|09:11 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | work | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | tired | ] |
I just got distracted while writing an important email to the CEO of my company... because I was fascinated with the shape of the question mark in the font the email was being typed in.
Oy vey. |
|
|
| I can has tiny people? |
[Oct. 3rd, 2009|06:28 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | d&d | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | cheerful | ] |
With the beginning of our new D&D campaign, I decided to finally invest in some miniatures. They make it so much easier to follow the action and resolve disputes... but really, that's just an excuse. I just really want miniatures, and have since I was young and got to see a friend's Warhammer 40K army all set up and painted.
Having purchased a dozen or so minis, I now need to paint them. I don't know how to paint miniatures. I realise that this does somewhat diminish my gamer cred, but hey, we weren't exactly rich growing up. So I bought myself a little kit. I also bought some files and spent last night carefully trimming the excess material and filing down some of the flaws... I'm sure I did a perfectly terrible job, but that doesn't matter, because I'm having fun. If I'm lucky, I'll find some time this weekend to glue up the minis and maybe even start painting them.
I'm worried about this. I can see myself having a lot of fun getting these things set up. But once they're fully glued and painted, well, they're done, right? Sure, I could go back and repaint them, but that seems silly. So then I'd need to find some new miniatures.
I may need a larger house. |
|
|
| I missed this |
[Sep. 27th, 2009|02:18 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | d&d | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | happy | ] |
It's been years since I've run a D&D campaign, but I finally got off my ass in the past week and got a game set up. I figured I'd just load up on pre-generated adventures and string them together to make a "campaign", but even after only a single session, I'm tempted to throw out the pregen adventure the characters have already started and move on to something different. Except that I've got big plans for the town the characters are currently in, which means I need the characters to have spent some time there now so it's not just some random place I drop them into when ... things happen. :-)
I don't remember the last time my creative juices started flowing like this... I've got so many ideas I can't keep track of them all, and I certainly can't run all the adventures I've thought of. Many of them won't work, and many of them are very conditional on the players showing interest in certain things, etc etc, but coming up with all these ideas is just oodles of fun.
Pretty random topic for the day, but I felt like sharing anyway. :-) |
|
|
| This seems like a bad idea |
[Sep. 13th, 2009|11:08 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  irritated | ] |
The folks at WotC have built a kick-ass character generator for D&D 4E. That part's great. The problem is, the full version is only available to subscribers to D&D Insider, which costs $6US per month. Sure, you get access to a ton of other stuff, but frankly, I don't have any interest in the other stuff -- I can read short things on the Internet, but any protracted reading is done off of dead trees.*
So $6/month for a character generator... not exactly an appealing option to me. From WotC's perspective, it probably seems like a great idea -- they get to add "extra content" to a monthly revenue stream, increasing the odds of people buying in. Hooray for them.
Here's the problem: 3E shipped with a basic character generator, and shortly after that, WotC supported development of a semi-official open-source generator. It worked pretty darn well, too. 4E's got a lot of changes, and their snazzy new character generator is pretty cool, so it's pretty legit to charge a fee for a license (say $40, the same as one of the core rulebooks) but a monthly subscription? No thanks. And a lot of people agree.
Which means that for a lot of people, 4E actually represents a step backwards in terms of available technological support. Which, considering that everything else in the world is getting more and more connected all the time, means that WotC is actually helping drive its customers to either pirate the software or investigate other roleplaying systems.
Of course, that last option assumes that any other roleplaying systems ever pull their heads out of their collective asses and start building technological tools to support their games. For an industry based on nerds, RPGs sure are technophobic.
* With the exception of Shadow Unit. It's worth the eyestrain.
|
|
|
| I have little to report, but will report it at great length |
[Sep. 6th, 2009|10:16 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | bored | ] |
Nothing happening at work. Well, aside from the usual panic and chaos caused by scheduling a release 6 months earlier than it could possibly be ready and then expanding the scope by a month immediately after promising a specific release date to all your customers and partners who then proceeded to make business plans based on that date. But the new project that I was supposed to move to, well, I'm not moving there any time soon. They're desperate to have me, but we still haven't found my replacement on my old team, and even if the perfect candidate walked in the door on Tuesday morning, by the time we got them in and trained and I could move over, it'd be too close to a critical deadline on the other project for it to make sense for me to actually join them before at least January, and probably more like March. And there have been other possible changes discussed, but they're on hold until at least October. So work's basically been just lots of chaos and frustration and tension. Not as much fun as it could be.
I think I've probably gained weight over the past month and a half, because I've been sick and eating poorly and skipping the gym, but I finally got around to making some lunches tonight and plan to go back to the gym on Tuesday. I've decided to change my workout plans slightly -- I really want to lose weight, and I always find that lifting weights makes me crazy hungry, so I'm going to switch to simply doing some moderate cardio and focus more on controlling portions (and having healthier food to begin with, obviously), and give myself permission not to lift weights for a few months. We'll see how that goes.
Tommy is doing well. He's getting smarter and more entertaining pretty much by the day. His speech is very clear these days (for the most part) and he's starting to be able to talk in more than just clipped sentences. He's made up a number of (admittedly incoherent and bizarre) stories about his toy animals, and he has them do fun things like have dance parties, and he's becoming more and more capable of expressing complex ideas. A new game is that he calls me over by saying, "Daddy, come here! I want to tell you something in your ear." And then I go over and lean down and he whispers something in my ear. Sometimes it makes sense ("I love you Daddy!") and sometimes it doesn't ("All animals! Yay!") but still, it's really cute.
That's the majority of my news lately... You can see why I haven't been posting. Nothing's been happening! But signs are pointing to exciting things happening soon, so maybe I'll be more interesting then. You never know. |
|
|
| New favourite show |
[Aug. 30th, 2009|09:50 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | cheerful | ] |
I finally managed to acquire a copy of season 1 of Leverage, the new(ish) show from John Rogers. It's not available in Canada, but I can be sneaky when I need to, and the DVDs arrived on Tuesday.
The premise of the show... Basically, it's a modern-day Robin Hood deal where a group of (mostly) thieves gets together and scams greedy people and corporations who've hurt honest folks. Every episode has a couple cons/heists going on, and... yeah. Really, I don't have the brainpower to explain it right now. (Still sick. OMG this can go away any day now.) But: Smart heist show where the "victims" deserve what they get. Good acting, too.
One random bit of weirdness: The show's resident bad-ass butt-kicking goon is the actor who played Lindsey on Angel. It's a little weird. But he does a great job. By now, I'm sure that if I were to go back and watch Angel, I'd find it weird that Eliot's playing a lawyer. I'd probably spend a lot of time wondering what kind of con he's trying to pull off. |
|
|
| I'm not sleeping |
[Aug. 22nd, 2009|03:49 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | exhausted | ] |
Wicked insomnia tonight. (Not amnesia, which is what I originally typed.) The only plus side I've found out of this is that a half of a novel popped into my head tonight. Unfortunately, it's all broad stroke stuff, so I have no clue how to make it work. But I'm going to try massaging my ideas a bit in the morning when I wake up.
Or, better yet, in the afternoon when I wake up.
(One can dream...) |
|
|
| All the birds are singing that you're gonna die |
[Aug. 14th, 2009|08:55 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  nerdy | ] |
We watched Dr Horrible last night. Now I've got the songs stuck in my head. I need to get the rest of my files copied over from my old computer so I can get Dr Horrible back on my iPod.
Also: NPH is awesome. There are a ton of little details in his performance that I hadn't noticed the first time round. |
|
|
| Home alive! |
[Aug. 9th, 2009|10:33 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | cheerful | ] |
Not much to say right now. We had a good vacation, we're slowly decompressing at home, and everybody seems to have survived intact.
On the work front, I haven't transitioned to my new team yet, but even before I get there, there may be another change in what I'm doing. Which, of course, I can't go into yet. But it's always fun to come back from vacation with an email waiting for you telling you that you might be doing something different when you actually come in to work. :-)
More info later. For now, I have to go mow my lawn. It's turned into something of a jungle this year. It's nice to have a lawn that doesn't look like a desert, but holy crap, I think I could bale this stuff profitably. |
|
|
| Zombie photo gallery! |
[Jul. 25th, 2009|07:53 am] |
At my old company, a few of the amateur photographers floating around got together and framed some of our favourites and hung them on the wall in the development area. It was considered one of the highlights of the office.
When I moved to my new company, there was no wall space for a gallery, so I didn't try to set one up. Then, back in September, we moved to a new building, where we briefly thought there might be space, until it was promptly filled with whiteboards. So the idea was pushed to a corner for a while.
This week, one of our recent hires found out that I'm an amateur photographer and after some discussion, he proposed setting up a gallery. He also pointed out a great spot. Pending approval from the Board (why they need to be consulted I don't know, our HR lady is weird sometimes) we should be putting up the first batch of pictures next week.
I find it somehow amusing that the only pictures I'll have ready at that point are the ones that were on the wall at my old company. It's like the old gallery is coming back from the dead! |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|