View From the Bushes

I turned down an offer to go to Spider-Man this evening. As I mentionedm I'm not big on going to see things opening night, though I did get my cinema fix in while I was donating platelets. I saw "Big Fish," which, if you haven't seen I highly recommend, particularly if you like Tim Burton movies in general.

Other than that, not much has happened in the last 24 hours. For a brief moment I thought I might be able to talk my boss into getting me color Blackberry, but the CFO has vetoed anything like that so I guess it will just be another cell phone.

Wow, this is a lame post, so I'll wrap it up before someone gets hurt.

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Ross

I just got off the phone with the cartographer and apparently, in addition to his hard drive, the lightning bolt fried his scanner and his DSL modem. His new estimate is another two to three days. Obviously this sucks, particularly since I would like to just put this adventure to bed and move on. Not that I'm not working on other stuff -- the Midnight adventure is coming along and I'm shooting for a simultaneous release of two Xenogenic NPC's over the 4th of July weekend. I took a brief break, just now, to check my e-mail and there was a Gamespot newsletter which mentioned that Half-Life 2 is now tentatively slated to go gold in August, approximately one year later than originally expected. Suddenly the two week delay in getting the adventure out doesn't seem so bad.

In other news Wired ran an article where they tracked down the originator of the Bill Gates will pay you to forward this e-mail chain letter. I've always thought that it would be kind of cool to be able to start a chain e-mail, but then my wife reminds me that I should be using my powers for good, not evil. To which I retort, "That's not what Machiavelli said!"

Spider-Man 2 comes out tomorrow; maybe I'll take a break and go see it, though I'm mostly allergic to seeing movies on opening day, so probably not. It's getting amazing reviews so I imagine that I'll see it sooner rather than later, but you never know, X2 was really well reviewed and it took me two months to see it. In any case, my continued apologies for the adventure. I imagine that I'm as, if not more, frustrated then you about it.

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Ross

It's up to day ten of "pathetic excuses for not releasing the latest adventure," and even I'm beginning to get tired of it. I can only imagine what it's like for my faithful subscribers. The weekend passed without any word from the cartographer. I tried calling him and ended up talking to his wife, and apparently his computer is back up and running, but he wasn't home so she told me to call back. Hopefully that means I'll see the maps tonight, but absent any additional information I'm hesitant to promise anything, plus I'm having a birthday party for my kids tonight so we'll see how things go, but I can tell you that my fingers are crossed.

Beyond the continuing saga of the tardy adventure there is, of course, the building excitement of the Tour. I discovered that OLN has their tour site up. Phil Liggett, Paul Sherwen and Bob Roll already have their tour previews posted. I was delighted to discover that Bob Roll had picked the same podium as me. It's nice to know that I'm not out in la-la land, though if you've ever watched or read much of Bob Roll you may disagree that with my assertion that he's not, himself, in la-la land.

In order to limit the number of anti-tour defections from my blog this year I'm going to limit whatever discussion I feel like engaging in to a single paragraph. I can't remember (and am too lazy to look up) whether I mentioned that the Olsen Twins had turned 18. There were several websites devoted to counting down the time and the event got a huge amount of air time. I figured that this sort of lechery was fairly recent, but I came across an article which traces the history and it turns out that it goes back much farther than I would have suspected.

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Ross

Well it's just after 8:00 here and still no maps. We'll see what happens. At one point during my conversation with the cartographer he did mention Sunday, though we ended up agreeing on Saturday, and I know how much of a pain it can be to start from scratch with a brand-new computer, and there was his health problem, which I don't really feel comfortable discussing in detail, but it was certainly the sort of thing you would expect weeks to recover from. It's still possible the adventure will be ready tonight, but I kind of doubt I'll see the maps any time before I go to bed.

In other news, Holland managed to advance to the semi-finals after exorcising the demons of the past. I wasn't aware of this, but the last three European tournaments, plus the 1998 World Cup have ended for Holland when the game went to penalty kicks. I would much rather have a game not be decided by penalties, but it was still nice to see them advance. And of course, the Tour starts a week from today. And of course the lesser known, but some would say far more grueling RAAM (Race across America) is going on as we speak.

Well, with no adventure there's not much to say, so I'll wrap it up here. Though with a huge work deadline on Monday, there was no lack of things to do.

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Ross

I'm not planning on writing much today, rather I think I'll break my general rule about posting on Saturday and post at some length tomorrow when (hopefully) I finally get the maps and I'm able to finally release the latest adventure. I will toss in a couple of links: In a huge upset, Greece beat France in the quarterfinals of the Euro 2004, and here's a humorous commercial my brother-in-law sent me. If you do decide to view it make sure you have the sound turned up, since the audio is kind of soft.

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Ross

I didn't have a phone number for the cartographer, but I did have his address, so using the power of Super Pages! (which in my experience is much, much better than Qwest's Dexonline) I found his number and called him. As it turns out, I was right -- he was very apologetic and not only that, he went on to explain that he'd had some pretty serious health issues plus, as required by Murphy, his hard drive had been fried by a lightning strike. I figured it had to be some kind of emergency, because in general he's been very, very reliable.

In any event, he's supposed to get his new computer today and he's promised to have the maps to me by Saturday, so that's what we're looking at in terms of release date for the next adventure. I did put the snippet up last night, which includes some of Chad's great art and covers the opening of the adventure and first encounter with a bodak and a chimera (though not at the same time), so hopefully that will tide people over until Saturday.

I finally got around to watching the copy of Bubba Ho-Tep I picked up the other day, and it did not disappoint. I'll have to watch it again since I was trying to finish up the adventure snippet and stay awake yesterday evening after I'd spent most of it watching my kids, which wouldn't have been so bad if the youngest hadn't started screaming anytime she was anywhere other than on my lap hitting random keys. But the movie was not only funny, which I expected, but it was also moving, which was something I didn't quite see coming.

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Ross

Still no sign of the maps; the rest of the adventure is basically done (Xenogenic adventures by virtue of their infinite variety can always use some polishing), so my plan is to release the adventure snippet tonight (for both the demo and pay subscribers) that will at least give you a taste for this latest entry in the Anyaka series. Meanwhile, I'll see about digging up some maps. I would expect that I'll have either gotten someone else to do a rush job, done the maps myself or have heard for the original cartographer (with deep apologies I would expect) by the weekend. Once again I hate to push it back, yet again, but for once it's (mostly) not my fault. In any case, you should have the snippet a little later this evening. I haven't quite decided what to use, because there are so many cool encounters to choose from, but it will be exciting, I guarantee that.

Anyone who has read my blog knows about my cycling fetish, but I don't think I've mentioned (or at least not at any great length) my soccer fetish. Currently, the European Cup is taking place. Having spent two years in Holland, I'm a big supporter of the Netherlands. Today they were on the verge of elimination unless they won and Germany lost. (There was some combination of draws which would allow them to advance, but it got pretty esoteric at that point). Fortunately it was Netherlands v Latvia: 3-0 and Czech v Germany: 2-1. From what I can tell, the French seemed favored to win, but the Netherlands won't have to face them until the finals (assuming they make it that far).

In other news, Wil Upchurch, who had procured a gmail invitation via his status as Gamer God of Love sent one my way as well. So now I'm direkobold@gmail.com. Since I have my own server, gmail isn't any huge improvement, though it's still pretty cool. I like their idea of rather than endlessly filing e-mails you just use their insanely powerful search engine to find what you want. And since they give you a gig of space, there's no reason to throw things away. Not a bad idea, all things considered.

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Ross

Apparently the first private space flight (SpaceShipOne) was not quite as flawless as initially believed. Still, I think it marks a very important step forward in space exploration. Still, the big problem with space is not so much public vs. private -- it's the fact that we've kind of hit the ceiling with chemical rockets. That was evident with SpaceShipOne, which used a jet to get the ship as high as possible before the rocket engine took over since jet engines have a much higher specific impulse than a rocket engine. One possible answer is nuclear engines.

Of course as I may have mentioned before, the word "nuclear" is as emotionally loaded for some people (particularly environmentalists) as the word "Nazi" is to the world's Jews. Though all serious discussions of trips to Mars or propulsion systems in general always feature nuclear propulsion prominently. I'm certainly not qualified to discuss all the pros and cons of using a nuclear-based rocket within the Earth's atmosphere, but I guarantee that it's not as bad as most people think.

As far as the adventure goes, it's mostly done; just a couple of encounters and the final polish is left, but I still don't have the maps. Hopefully, for all our sakes, I won't be forced to dust off my copy of Campaign Cartographer and make the maps that way. Overall, though, I would have to say I really love this adventure. It's got multiple interesting villans, extra-planer travel, saving the world, exotic monsters and overall some exceptionally clever settings. With any luck the next time I blog, it will be to announce that the adventure is available.

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Ross

As you might have noticed, I didn't manage to get the next Anyaka adventure out on Saturday though I did spend numerous hours on it over the weekend. Part of the problem is that it's just so long. Another equally large part of the problem is that the cartographer hasn't sent me the maps yet, which is the excuse I'm going to use for now. Unfortunately, I have to spend this evening doing some things I have put off for too long (like mowing the lawn... man I hate mowing the lawn). So I'm guessing (and this also depends on when I get the maps) that the adventure will be out on Wednesday evening.

That's about it for today. I don't really have anything exciting to report from the weekend since it mostly consisted of listening to Blink-182 at deafening volumes while coding encounters and monsters. Although I did find out an interesting fact yesterday. Did you know that Florence Nightengale invented the pie chart?

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Ross

It's starting to look like I'm not going to make my goal of releasing the next adventure tomorrow. It's a high-level adventure and those are always a lot more complicated to code up, and as I mentioned yesterday, it's long. I was looking ahead to see what sort of coding needs to be done at the end of the adventure and I was reminded that Wil put in a bunch of 'environmental' rooms full of every extraplanar monster he could think of from each of the different environments -- something that's very easy for him to do as a writer, but ends up being a real pain to code up. In any case, we'll see; I'm still hoping to release it tomorrow but it might be Monday evening before I can wrap everything up. Maybe I should use this as an excuse to take Monday off. On second thought, I think I won't. I think the next time I take a vacation it should actually be a vacation.

It's too bad I'm so busy, since it means I won't be able to catch Dodgeball, A True Underdog Story. I guess that's just one more tragedy to add to the long list which have occured because someone worked too hard.

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Ross

Today I appear to be in the zone. That magical state of being where I actually work. Some people would even go so far as to say that I reach the point where I'm actually having a positive affect on the world rather than a negative one. I wouldn't go that far, but then I know things they don't, like where the bodies are buried... Assuming I can stay in a productive groove, I should have no problem getting out a new adventure by Saturday, though this adventure is probably the longest one I've published (good for you guys, kind of bad for me) so hopefully I didn't speak to soon. The last 10% of an adventure does have a way of taking as much time as the first 90%.

In reference to a comment from yesterday: Historically I would agree that Tour de France podiums have had quite a bit of variation from year to year. But in the more modern era of cycling there has been some remarkably consistent performers. Armstrong, Ullrich and Beloki have all made it on the podium every time they raced the Tour (with the obvious caveat that we're talking about the post-cancer Lance and the last year when Beloki crashed). I admit that's not a very large data set, and I still think that the odds are against me, but only time will tell. I guess this would also be a good time to point out that Beloki isn't riding in this year's tour.

Well, lest I lose my will to work (and perhaps my will to live) with more vapid blogging, I'll end. Though if you're at all interested in the evolution and history of programming languages you should take a look at this chart of the evolution of programming languages from O'reilly. I didn't realize that Fortran was the oldest computer language...

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Ross

Well it's getting close to that time of year again -- yes, you guessed it, the Tour de France starts two weeks from this Saturday. I can hardly wait. But rather than talk about the race, which I know most of my readers find appallingly dull, I thought I'd talk about doping, and the drug allegations leveled against Lance Armstrong in a new book.

For some reason the perception is that cycling is among the worst sports for drug abuse. I think that comes about because cycling conducts more drug tests and subsequently gets more positives. Whereas baseball conducts almost no tests and never gets a positive, though by many accounts steroid use in baseball is epidemic. Armstrong himself has never tested positive for any drugs and is probably the single most drug-tested athlete ever. So if he is using some kind of banned substance, then the tests are of very little utility if in the hundreds he's taken he has never once tested positive.

Obviously, I hope (and in fact believe) that Armstrong is not taking any illegal performance enhancers. I think everyone appreciates a clean race, not to mention an exciting one, which is what I think this is shaping up to be. My personal podium picks (not in any particular order) are Armstrong, Ullrich and Hamilton. I have a bet which has been 'doubled or nothinged' to the point where it's real money, so I hope I'm right this year...

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Ross

In an act of altruism unparalled since "We Are the World" was recorded in 1985, I agreed to teach a basic computer class at a gathering my wife is in charge of this evening. In between securing a laptop and a projector, wading through hundreds of documents that the training department at work put out and stealing a half dozen, plus my own hand-out and a lesson plan I think I've have probably put in at least 12 hours before this is all done. Of course, all of that would be small potatoes if a) I wasn't trying to get an adventure out on Saturday and b) there was no chance any of these people are ever going to call with a computer problem in the future.

In other news, a Japanese inventor has come up with an invisibility cloak. His next project is invisible walls which would allow someone to put together a living room which looked like it opened directly on to the front yard. That sounds pretty neat, though once I had the idea for piping in a live feed from the gardens of Versailles or the Grand Canyon, I realized that I was wandering dangerously close to the 'Wall' in Fahrenheit 451. As a side note, it appears that Ray Bradbury is none too happy about Moore's appropriation of his title for Fahrenheit 911.

Well the class is tonight and I still have to pick up the projector and make sure that it works, plus browse a whole bunch of websites so they'll be in the local cache since I won't have internet access there. :(

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Ross

Last night was pretty bad. I took a nap in the afternoon and I may have overdone it, because when 11:30 rolled around (which is in itself later than I should have retired) I couldn't fall asleep. Of course, my condition was not helped by my youngest daughter (1 yr. old) who was in bed with us because she was sick. Not only did her breathing sound like an air compressor, but at all times she made sure to have a knee, foot or elbow jammed somewhere in my back. Finally after an hour and a half of it I decided to get up. Of course, I was too tired to do anything productive, but after checking my e-mail and surfing the web a little bit, I decided to sleep on the couch.

It was a fitting capstone to an otherwise unproductive weekend. Because of how little I got done (mostly attributable to my wife's absence) I decided to delay the new Xenogenic NPC and just focus on getting another adventure out the door on Saturday. Of course, my family is trying to sabatoge that as well by scheduling a family get-together on Saturday evening, which I'm sure will take up four or five hours. I've already started on the adventure and I'm hoping to get a big chunk of it done this evening, though I'm already feeling the effects of the sleep deprivation, so it will be interesting to see how far that goes.

I missed linking to an article discussing how long electricity would last if zombies took over a la Dawn of the Dead. I found the article remarkable not only for some pretty solid facts but also its great sense of humor. While I was reading the article, it occured to me that my watch is solar-powered, which means that when the apocalypse does come, assuming I can find food and water, that I should be able to tell the time (not to mention altitude, direction and barometric pressure) for many years after the fall of civilization.

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Ross

I may have mentioned a book club my wife belongs to. Last night was 'husband night,' but we didn't know where we were suppossed to go and it looked like we didn't have a baby-sitter either. As such I had basically decided not to go; not only was I still dead tired from the reunion, but I could have really used the time to catch up. At the last second they called and told us where it was and my mother-in-law jumped in and volunteered to baby sit, so we went. The book they were discussing was Peace Like a River. The book was pretty good, all things considered, and the discussion that ensued last night was servicable, though somewhat flawed by some very modern sensibilities which most in the group seemed to have.

While we were driving to the discussion, my wife and I got into a discussion of whether Reagan ended the cold war. I was basically of the opinion that the cold war would have ended eventually, but that Reagan certainly hastened that end. Slate has an excellent article on the subject which gives more details than I was aware of, though essentially reaching the same conclusion. One interesting fact is that Reagan was deeply opposed to nuclear weapons, considering them immoral.

In any case, I had the book club last night, my wife will be in Park City (see this blog entry from the last time it happened) most of the weekend. I have something on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, so it's looking iffy whether I'll be able to make the deadlines I set, but I'm hopeful that despite having all four kids to myself this weekend I'll still be able to get something done. I guess we'll see on Monday. In any case, on that note I'll let you go.

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Ross

I returned from the family reunion bruised, broken-down, bellicose and beleaguered. 1500 miles on the old van since Saturday, and then there was the game of 'capture the flag' I was roped into Monday night. In the half hour it took for my breathing to return to the point where I was reasonably sure I wouldn't puke, I realized that I was old and out of shape. Of course, I already knew that, but now I knew it in the way you know that gambling is a bad idea after you lose 25,000 dollars.

I'm still trying to get back into the swing of things. I returned home to 2000 unread e-mail messages and they finally re-organized my department today, putting me in a separate group and opening up a managerial position which I'm probably going apply for, but things are still on track with DireKobold. My plan is to have another NPC on Monday and then the new adventure the Saturday after that.

That being said, I think it's time to go to bed so that I can start recovering from the reunion. I will leave you with a link to a BBC article on a 740,000 year-old ice core.

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Ross

Tomorrow the plan is to hit the road at 5 am and then drive on and off (mostly on, hopefully) for the next 14 hours until we reach Klamath Falls. Obviously, I'm pretty slammed trying to get ready (I still need to get the car in so that I can figure out what the check engine light is and get the oil changed). I'll be getting back on Thursday, so that's the next time I'll post in my blog.

As usual, vacations are kind of annoying because they disrupt the work flow you have going (of course they can also jar you back into productivity). I think this time it's actually the former, but rest assured there's more juicy DireKobold goodness coming. Another NPC is planned for the Monday I get back and the Saturday after that I'll be publishing the latest in the Chronicles of Anyaka series. I just got the art from Chad and it looks pretty dang cool.

Other than that, it's a pretty slow day on the internet, so I'll end here, plus I have to get to some places before they close.

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Ross

Most of my time is being spent preparing for the family reunion I'm headed to on Saturday. Ideally it wouldn't take that much but There's always stuff that needs to tied up at work before I can leave, plus there are lots of things I'm trying to wrap up with DireKobold before I leave. The big deadline I need to meet is for submitting DireKobold to the ENnies which I should be doing as soon as I finish this. Of course the big thing that makes the reunion complicated are the fact that we have kids...

Normally a 11 hour drive would be no big deal, but when you toss kids into the mix the 11 hour drive turns into a 14 hour drive and the general difficulty increases by several orders of magnitude. Instead of a nice little jaunt up to Oregon it's an expedition reminiscent of Lewis and Clark with issues of logistics, pacifying the natives and just surviving long enough to see home again. Wish me luck...

In other news it looks like the FTC is finally going to review the current process for issuing patents. I for one think that it's long over due. I also came across another article which speaks to the difficult decisions involved with voting in general and third party voting in particular. In any case I should warp this up so that I can finish the rest of my to-do list before I go to bed.

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Ross

You know how when you click on a link often times it takes the most recent browser window and just eliminates whatever is there? I used SmartFTP as my FTP client, and it's nagware so the minute you open it, it takes you to the website to remind you to register it. Of course, the way Microsoft as set it up rather than opening a new window it just eliminated everything in the only window I had open which just happened to be my almost completed blog, so I lost everything. The thing I was trying to upload is this very funny clip, which if you haven't seen already you should. Anyway, that's it for tonight.

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Ross

I published the new Xenogenic NPC earlier today, but I wasn't sure what else I was going to get done, so I put off posting my blog. As it turns out, I don't have much else to cover so I probably should have posted it earlier. I've noticed that I haven't been getting many comments on my blogs where I talk about what's happening with DireKobold, so I guess I better get something else before I talk about the new Xenogenic NPC. It's probably the second most covered topic in my blog: cars...

Right now, the check engine light is on in my van and like many people, I don't know if it's the because the gas cap wasn't tightened all the way or if the engine is going to explode on the 12 hour drive to the family reunion on Saturday. It would be nice if I could just check it myself without having to go to a shop, but unfortunately many of the codes are proprietary. I'm not sure if mine are, but it's still not something which is easily checked. In any case the rest of the blog will be some of the flavor text from Ulgfar the Unhinged:

This is the first NPC with the exotic setting implemented, so I guess it's appropriate that I should explain it a little bit. This setting allows you to specify how exotic your campaign is. At the 'Vanilla' setting the NPC will only come from one of the PHB races. Should you choose the 'Diverse' setting then the possible races expand to include anything you could conceive as being a PC race (orcs, drow, tieflings, deep gnomes, etc.). The 'Extreme' exotic setting is everything that could concievably take a class up to but not including outsiders. Finally, there is the 'Outsider' setting where nothing with the necessary intelligence is excluded.

In any case, take Ulgfar for a spin and try out the new option. I think you'll have a lot of fun with him. I'll go into this more under the 'personality' section, but Ulgfar is based on one of my favorite characters ever: 'Animal' from the Muppets. Oh yeah, I can just imagine the kind of damage he could cause...

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Ross