Rather than continue to make excuses day after day, let's just say that the Midnight adventure will definitely be available on Labor Day (September 6th, this coming Monday) and spare both of us the incessant bemoaning of the cruelty of that most fickle of all mistresses, Fate. Okay, that was a little melodramatic, but I had to shove it in all at once since I won't be mentioning it again until it's released.
Well, I went to the FLGS during lunch today. I was looking to buy the "World's Largest Dungeon" and I was hoping to talk the owner into cutting me a little bit of a deal, since it's $100 if I buy from it from him and around $65 if I buy it online. Of course, his initial reaction was to bristle a little bit, and tell me fine, go buy it off Amazon, but once I assured him of my desire to support my FLGS he relented and told me that he could give me 10% off. So I bought it, and since it ended up being 10% on anything I bought, I tossed in the Draconomicon and a couple of pairs of Giants of Legends boosters. I've also placed bids on a couple of cases of minature boosters, (different sets--Dragoneye and Archfiends--from what I bought today) on e-bay (which initially I thought there was no way I'd end up winning, but now I'm not so sure). In the final analysis, I think I may have just eliminated any chance of getting a Christmas gift this year. And I may be paying with my birthday as well.
Doh! I was just checking out e-bay again and there's another case of boosters being offered (this from yet a third set I wasn't already bidding on (Giants of Legend) which is (depending on what it goes for) even a better deal than the other two. I think I might need help, is there a D&D Miniatures anonymous?
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Ross
I graduated (I use this term loosely, more accurate would be to say I stuck around so long they finally kicked me out) from the University of Utah. Now when you hear that name, what do you think of? Probably lots of things, but if you're into science at all, somewhere in the top ten you're going to think of cold fusion, what has been referred to as the "greatest scientific hoax of the 20th century." Well as a University of Utah alum, I'm pleased to say, not so fast.
Popular Mechanics is running a story on cold fusion as a possible source of tritium and goes on to explain that in the 15 or so years cold fusion has spent in the physics doghouse quite a few interesting things have been discovered. I have to say that this is one area where it would be nice to restore some of the prestige that was lost in the last 15 years.
In other news, the Midnight adventure should be out any day now, assuming I can get the last little bugs worked out of the individual adventure ordering system. I had hoped to get it all hammered out over the weekend, but as usual everything took longer than I expected plus I'm still really sleepy. It always surprises me how long it takes to recover from serious sleep debt... Then of course, there's the wife, kids, family and last but not least my 9-5 job so that slows things down as well, but now I'm just being pathetic.
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Ross
As a special update, the GenCon pictures are available. There's not a lot of them, though in general all of them are pretty cool.
With Saturday staring me in the face, having everything done so that I can release the Midnight adventure is looking less and less likely. Mostly because I am finding more and more places in the underlying code where a subscription based model was essentially hardwired. I may release the adventure just to the subsribers tomorrow, but then again, I'd like to have all the pieces in place and do it all at once, so we'll have to see, plus there are still some items with the adventure itself that need to be reviewed and polished, so we'll have to see. But never fear, even as we speak (okay maybe not this exact second) I am working my butt off to get the adventure out the door.
Beyond my tireless devotion to DireKobold, seemingly unslakeable thirst for work and transcendent good looks, there's really not much to talk about. A panel of around 60 scientists voted Blade Runner the greatest sci-fi movie ever. Which is cool -- I mean, I like Blade Runner enormously, but when you think about scientists voting on things, you think they might vote for perhaps the most scientifically accurate movie, but perhaps they despaired at finding any movie where there was even one element was accurate, let alone a movie which sets some kind of standard for accuracy.
In any event, that's all for now. Still working on the pictures, and still working on midnight adventure, which of course means I should not still be working on my blog.
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Ross
Well, my long meandering report on GenCon has finally reached the final day. After spending a ton of time playing D&D, it was finally time to spend some quality time in the exhibitor hall. One of my many goals for the con was to find a copy of Dungeon 104. I was sure that someone at the con would have it, and indeed many vendors had Dungeon back issues, but for some reason most of them stopped in the 80's somewhere ('82 was the first 3rd Edition Dungeon so maybe they're all a bunch of 2E purists). One vendor went as high as 101, argh! After I finally gave up on that, I turned my attention to getting gifts for the wife and kids, which is always one of the most difficult parts of the convention for me, since I'm not looking for a specific item, but rather I have some vague notion that maybe I'll see the perfect gift if I just wander around enough.
While wandering I had a chance to trade out some of my shirts for merchandise (very few people can resist the saying on the back) and to sort of reflect on the convention as a whole. I noticed the Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE), once a giant of the RPG industry, was down to half a booth. I also saw what, to my mind, was one of the saddest sights of the whole week. Having been an exhibitor last year, I certainly feel for the first time exhibitor in the lonely booth trying to break into the biz. I saw just such a gentleman with a board game. He had it set up on a table waiting to demo it, but it was obvious from his expression and the stacks and stacks of unsold games behind him that he hadn't had much luck, and by Sunday his whole attitude was that of someone who had been broken. I feel for the guy.
After I finally found gifts for all the members of my family, I was able to get some last minute shopping in for myself, which mostly consisted of topping off my dice collection. I also managed to check out the display they had set up for the 30th anniversary of D&D, which presented a blow-by-blow of the game every year since its inception. While I was checking out the display describing the release of 2nd Edition, I started wondering whatever happened to David "Zeb" Cook, the author of the 2E Players' Handbook. Shortly after that, I was having lunch across the street from the convention center and found that I needed to use the bathroom. While I was standing there at the urinal, who should emerge from the stall, but Zeb Cook! Turns out he's working for a game company, which is I guess where the money really is if you're a game designer.
The trip home went about how you expect it to go when you're traveling on a Sunday Night. Basically you're just grateful when you arrive home and you can still walk under your own power. We do have pictures from GenCon which hopefully will be up within the next few days. At this point, while I'm still in the afterglow of GenCon Indy I'm seriously considering going to GenCon SoCal. When you live in Salt Lake and you have friends in LA, on a certain level it just doesn't make sense for someone to go to GenCon Indy, but not GenCon SoCal. In any event, we'll see.
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Ross
Before I get to the report on Saturday at GenCon, I'd like to address the whole issue of forgetting the anniversary. In my defense, I did remember the anniversary long in advance and had already remarked on the unfortunate inevitability of leaving on the very day it fell. Not only that, but I had in fact arranged to go to a Gilbert and Sullivan musical (HMS Pinafore) the Saturday before, which my wife eventually decided to skip because she wasn't feeling well. So yes, I did forget on the actual day, but I wasn't a complete thoughtless idiot, just mostly. In any case, on to a blow-by-blow of Saturday.
The day started off with Wil running a session of the new (soon to be published) Midnight adventure. When I say the day started off, we met at a quarter to eleven, but when you're at the con that is pretty much first thing in the morning. The adventure was a ton of fun, but even better was the fact that I got to meet a bunch of people from Against the Shadow, who were all very, very cool. Of course, by Saturday a certain degree of panic has set in. Everyone comes to the convention with a list of priorities. I imagine that my list was shorter than some, but probably longer than average. One of those priorities was to get pictures for our DireKobold GenCon archives. As of Saturday we were doing okay but not great, but I had a brillant plan to reverse all that. I had a camcorder with me and my idea was to go to the costume contest film that in its entirety and then get someone to make stills of everything. So I skipped out of the Midnight game early and headed towards the contest, only to find that the line to get in was about four people wide and streched for a good 200 yards (or more). At which point I abandoned that plan....
I returned, finished up the adventure and then headed out to dinner for Bree's birthday (Wil Upchurch's SO), but not before dropping $100 on my new-found minature addiction. We had about an hour wait, not merely because there were 11 of us, but also because there was a football game that night and so everywhere was packed. I was actually surprised that the football game didn't have a bigger impact on the con, considering that the stadium is connected to the convention center. Afterwards, I finally got a chance to open up my minatures. I was delighted to discover that I had one of the coveted huge red dragon minatures. Which sort of came in handy shortly thereafter when we invaded the fire temple as part of the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and had to fight a Red Dragon as soon as we entered. Afterwards was the 2 am game of Puerto Rico I mentioned earlier in the report. Overall, a pretty satisfying day.
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Ross
It may take me longer to recover from GenCon than I thought. I left work early yesterday and went home to take a nap. Then I went to bed early and slept in as much as I could this morning, and I'm still dragging. For some reason I've always thought that no matter how much sleep debt I acquired, one good night's sleep and I'd be back to normal. Sad experience has shown that, at least now that I'm old, that's not the way it works at all. In any case, enough rambling about my constant weariness and on with the GenCon Report.
Friday was kind of a wasted day. After staying up late playing Maure I ended up sleeping in till almost noon, as I recall. Then I don't quite remember what I did though I imagine I was in the Exhibit hall, but at three we had tickets for True Dungeon. Which, I have to say, was pretty cool. Apparently our party did pretty well. All but one person survived until the final room. I died because rather than having any sort of tactical combat, the DM just randomly selected who would be attacked, and as a wizard with a 12 AC you can imagine that that didn't bode well. After the True Dungeon we played a little Puerto Rico (the game I mentioned yesterday, though this wasn't at 2 am and we didn't manage to finish). Afterwards, it was time for the ENnies. I sat with the FFG guys who ended up doing really well. My friend Glenn was in charge of much of the ceremony so that was cool too. There was an ENWorld gathering after the event at the Ram, but I decided I was too tired and decided to just head home. So you can see why I say the day was kind of a waste.
This schedule of covering one day at a time is working pretty well so far; as such I think I'll continue at this pace. In other news, it appears that after swearing up and down that he would not make Star Wars episodes 7, 8 and 9 it looks as if Lucas might change his mind. When I first heard that Lucas wasn't going to do 7, 8 and 9 I was depressed; now that I hear that he might do them after all, I think I'm even more depressed. See, it's not a question of whether they'll ever be done, you know that at some point the heirs of Lucas will eventually (as in five minutes after the body is in the ground) sell off the movie options to make additional Star Wars movies, and at this point I would prefer that someone else made the movies. Someone who grew up with the movies and really understands the magic. I think the current crop of comic book movies, especially the X-men movies, are good examples of what I'm talking about.
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Ross
Well, I'm back from GenCon, and as usual it was outrageously enjoyable and even more tiring. For some reason, at the convention when someone says, "Hey, after we get done playing D&D at 2 am, you want to come back to the hotel lobby and play an obscure board game based on being a plantation owner in 18th century San Juan, Puerto Rico," you actually consider it an excellent suggestion and immediately say yes. I can't imagine any other circumstance under which I would think that was a good idea, but in any case I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's start with Wednesday.
I stayed up to 5 am getting everything ready for the con. Most of the time was spent on something I'm not really at liberty to discuss, but the effort definitely paid off. So after that I got about three hours of sleep before I had to wake up, run to Kinko's, and actually pack for the convention. In between the two hours of sleep and the hectic last minute preperation, not to mention the majority of the day being spent on a plane, I completely forgot that it was our anniversary and in fact did not remember it until this evening. But then my wife is cooler than I ever thought possible; she didn't even give me a hard time about it. The rest of the day was mostly spent with the tedium of flight, though I did manage to squeeze in dinner at the end with a bunch of old college friends I hadn't seen in a while.
Thursday, despite needing all the sleep I could get, we woke up fairly bright and early and hit the exhibitor hall basically as soon as it opened. I spent most of the day getting my big priorities for the con out of the way: the thing which must not be named, which went really well, and the second priority which was to get with FFG and get a final sign-off on the Midnight adventure, which I also got. There's still a couple of kinks to work out of the system for purchasing individual adventures, but I expect that the Midnight adventure will be available by Saturday. All told I spent about four hours in the hall, but I was still amazed at how little I really saw, which is probably good because the more you see the more you buy. After that we went to Buca di Beppo, which apparently is a big chain, but you wouldn't know it. To get to the maitre'd you have to walk through the kitchen. We headed for dinner about four; the whole idea was to get an early start and then play Castle Maure, the Gygaxian mega-dungeon, until we finished it (yeah right). Of course, in between dinner and finishing up characters, I think it was 8 or 9 before we really got started. I was hoping to just do one day per paragraph, but that's obviously not going to work...
It was while we were playing Castle Maure that it happened. I have a fairly addictive personailty. In other words, it's pretty easy for me to get hooked on something and I know that, so there are a certain things I know would be outrageously fun, but that I avoid because they would consume all my time and money. But every so often I get blindsided. Wil (Upchurch) said he needed some minatures for the game, so he convinced me to pick up a box. I figured I could give it to my son as a gift. Of course, once I saw how cool the minatures looked and realized how well they would work in my own D&D campaign, I was hooked. The very next day I dropped $100+ on minatures. Oh well, if I hadn't spent a hundred dollars on minatures I would have ended up buying the "World's Largest Dungeon". In any case, Maure was a lot of fun even though we did end up activating the terrible golem and I ended up getting slaughtered in a single round. That's what I get for making an Elven Fighter. Elves just aren't meant to go toe-to-toe with anything called the "Terrible Golem."
Well, that was longer than I expected, so I guess I'll split the rest of the days over the next little while.
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Ross
Unless I find some really convenient way to post while I'm at GenCon, this will be the last entry till Monday. And by really convenient I mean the hotel having wireless, which in this day and age should be fairly common. However, my experience is that even when a hotel says that it has a wireless internet connection, 9 times out of ten it doesn't work for any number of reasons, from "temporary" downtimes, non-existent range, misconfiguration, etc., etc. So we'll see -- certainly it would be easier to do some kind of GenCon report if I could actually do it day by day, rather than trying to regurgitate everything in one chunky mass of chain-mail bikinis, strange German board games, increasingly desperate D20 releases (The Complete Book of Hobgoblin Adolescence) and sleep deprived role-playing sessions.
In preperation for GenCon I was going to read Dungeon Magazine's "Adventure Path" series. So I set about gathering up all the installments which were spread across ten or so seperate magazines. After the first sweep I had all the installments but the fourth one, so then I really turned the place upside down and after this more comprehensive search I had assembled every Dungeon Magazine from #90 (I have a ton of others, but I was restricting my search) up through the most recent one, with the exception of #104, which is, of course, where the fourth installment of the Adventure Path is located.
I'm not sure how much situations like this annoy the rest of you, but in my heart I'm a completist. I want to have the whole series, the complete collection, the entire set, and the annoyance at having this one missing magazine from the beautiful stack of magazines at the side of my desk drove me nuts. To the point, and I know people are going to have a hard time believing this, that I almost cleaned my office (if I had actually had the 12 hours it would have taken, I would have). Finally, there's a humorous thread over on fark discussing how the New York Jets can't find hotel rooms in Indianapolis because GenCon is this weekend.
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Ross
Well, it looks like my dreams for a fusion utopia have once again suffered a serious blow. I can't help but think that if we spent more time on fission power, that we would be farther along with fusion power, but maybe there's not as much overlap as I think.
At the moment I'm pretty much a stress case. As usual, everything I was hoping to have done in time for GenCon basically still needs to be done. I think it's a combination of the very human desire to wait until the last minute, combined with everything taking longer than I thought, on top of just plain forgetting about stuff. Tonight I'm planning to put a mirror of the DireKobold server onto a laptop I have. That much is mostly according to plan. Of course, this morning I remembered my brother-in-law telling me that the battery on the laptop was weak to non-existent, and it occured to me that if I wanted to use it to demo DireKobold on the Exhibit Hall floor that a battery might be a very good thing, so I had to put in an emergency order for a new battery. Just one of the many things which are popping up in the sprint to the finish. Well, I'll cut this short at dive back into the morass, wish me luck!
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Ross
Every morning at 8:10 am I have a meeting. The point of the meeting is to review all the old technical requests and assign all the new ones. For a variety of reasons not worth going into (though most involve sloth), I don't get assigned to many requests, in fact it's quite common for me to not have any. Since my vision of Hell is being trapped in a meeting with nothing to do, I've been trying to come up with things to pass my time while in this daily meeting. In the past I've tried reading, brainstorming on upcoming tasks and doodling, but this morning it occured to me that I could use that time to come up with a topic for my blog every day. My first topic: coming up with a topic. Would that make this an example of a meta-topic or a recursive topic?
This whole idea of coming up with the VFB topic during my morning meeting occured late enough in the meeting that it's really as far as I got. Sorry... Perhaps on Monday I'll have some earth-shattering insight into a topic. Of course, come Wednesday I'll have left for GenCon and even though I'll have a laptop with me, I doubt that I'll be able to post anything until after I return.
The other day I was talking to my wife about the situation in Iraq and I mentioned that I just didn't understand Muqtada al-Sadr. He seems to be fomenting unrest without any clear goal. The only thing I could imagine was that this was a long shot bid for control of the entire country, but it seems that if one were going to try something like that that, you would wait for the Americans to leave, but then again maybe not. As I was browsing through Slate today I came across an article addressing that very question. I would certainly recommend reading it. There's quite a bit of historical background which really illuminates the whole history of the region.
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Ross
There was an article in Nature recently which has gotten a fair amount of press (though I'm sure that the authors of the article were checking my site on a daily basis, wondering if they would get a mention here and thus complete the "grand slam" of news coverage). The article discusses a study which found that monkeys procrastinate too. Generally they wait until the last minute to accomplish something, but by turning off a key gene, the monkeys transformed from indolent slackers into hard-core workaholics. It's too bad that this sort of thing won't be legal to do to humans for probably decades, because I could really use this treatment, you know what I mean?
In other news, I have neglected to mention the Ennie awards, which are given out every year at GenCon. My good buddy Wil Upchurch, who's been nominated for the Dawnforge Setting asked me to mention the awards in my blog on the off chance that he might score one more vote. Of course, I just checked and I guess voting is closed (it was open this morning) so as usual, I'm too late.
I did something to my knee yesterday, so I may get my time in on the exercise bike at home rather than ride into work tomorrow -- I'm still trying to decide. As I've mentioned before, I could use the little bit of extra time that would give me. Plus, I still haven't been able to figure out just what exactly it is about biking which bothers my eyes so much, and until I can do that it's not just the time I lose biking into work, it's also the time I lose when I can't see straight because my eyes are bothering me so much.
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Ross
I biked to work for the first time with a heart rate monitor; it was an interesting experience. I don't think I was doing quite as bad as a I thought, but I still ended up coming into work pretty slowly -- my second worst time/average speed ever. Only my first ride in after nearly a year and a half of torpor had a worse average speed, and only by 0.2 mph, so today was pretty slow. On the upside, I felt really good after the ride. I didn't collapse as I walked through the door or spend most of the morning in a fatigue induced haze, so that's obviously a plus.
I got a fair amount done over the weekend and the two days I took off, but I'm still amazed at the amount I have yet to do before GenCon. Hopefully I won't arrive at the convention as sleep deprived as I was last year, but you never know. I really want to get the Midnight adventure out before I leave, but the gods have not been co-operating.
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Ross
After pictures were over last night (the photographer came out to my mother-in-law's house), I biked home. I debated for a long time whether I was going to bike at all, since I still have so much I want to do before GenCon, but I have sworn that this time no matter how busy I get (or how tired) that I'm not going to skip a day of riding. Of course, I'm only riding every other day so that makes it a little bit easier to not skip a day, so I rode. For once, there were no real hills on the route, and that in combination with what I hope is my increasing fitness level; for the first time I felt pretty good.
I finally got my heart rate monitor today, so hopefully that will make my rides more productive, more aerobic activity and less just beating my legs down. One of the problems with biking is that it has just been murder on my eyes of all things. I think it's sweat getting into them, but I wore a bandana last night and that didn't seem to help that much, so maybe it's something else. The air here isn't exactly known for it's humidity, so maybe it's just my eyes drying out. I'm not sure, but it's this more than the time or the tiredness from biking that's getting in the way of me getting other stuff done. I guess I could always go see a doctor rather than just tossing out wild guesses.
Finally, I'm not sure if you heard or not, but there was an accident at a Japanese nuclear power plant yesterday, which I think is a great example of the enormous bias towards nuclear power. People are calling it a nuclear accident even though nothing about the accident involved the actual radioactive material. Rather, a rusty cooling pipe burst, spewing boiling water everywhere. Now I'm sure that pipes carrying really hot water are not unique to a nuclear power plants, and I'm equally sure that if one of these other pipes had broken and killed the same number of people that it would barely make national news let alone international news. As an example of this bias I offer the following article.
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Ross
This is going to be a pretty quick entry. I actually am home from work today. I'm taking a couple of days off in an attempt to make sure that I get everything I need done in time for GenCon. Of course, as usual, rather than having an uninterrupted day to really get in a groove, we've got the family pictures this afternoon/evening, so probably just about the time I get a full head of steam I'll have to drop everything and go stand in the hot sun and try and maintain a smile while I wrestle with the kids.
Of course, since the pictures are today, yesterday my number two son took a nasty spill while running down the sidewalk (something he had already been warned against) and ended up messing up his face pretty badly. In particular, the outside edge of his left nostril looks particularly bad (and is basically un-bandagable). Oh well, I suppose if the photo is suppossed to be an accurate snapshot of life, then we would have been remiss to not bring along at least one recently injured child.
On one of the mailing lists I belong to someone mentioned Garden State (I guess it has a shot of a bookshelf in someone's bedroom being filled with D&D stuff). I remember hearing that Zach Braff (J.D. from Scrubshad a film at Sundance, but I didn't make the connection until I started watching the trailers for Garden State that that's what it was. It sounds pretty good, though my guess is that in will play in Utah for all of a week and I'll be too busy to go see it.
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Ross
I just found out that OLN is not going to broadcast any of the Vuelta (the Tour of Spain). I'm rather disappointed by this, since I would much rather watch it than the Giro (the Tour of Italy), which OLN did broadcast, essentially in its entirety. There's a petition online for those who want to try and convince OLN to cover the Vuelta, but I can't imagine that even if OLN changed their minds today that there is sufficient time or money for them to reverse course. At this point my assessment would be that it's a lost cause, though I signed the petition anyway.
The reason I enjoy the Vuelta more than the Giro is that it seems to resemble the tour more closely. None of the big Tour contenders ride the Giro because it's too difficult too peak twice in such a short space of time, and in fact, none of the big names ride the Vuelta either unless they had a really crappy tour, at which point they go to the Vuelta for redemption. So Tyler Hamilton, Iban Mayo, Roberto Heras and even Beloki will all probably be riding the Vuelta. Plus, even though the climbs of the tour are legendary, the Vuelta includes climbs which, although not part of the legend, make l'Alpe d'Huez look like a hill rather than a mountain. I think the highest grade on the Alpe is 11%. A couple of years ago the Vuelta had a climb with a 23.6% grade (see article above).
I realize I broke my self-imposed limit of one paragraph on cycling per entry, and I'm going to compound it by writing about my ride in this morning. I had a hard time falling asleep. I normally don't even need an alarm, but this morning I slept through it. It didn't help that it was set to radio and it wasn't tuned to any station and the volume was down, and as a result the alarm was just quiet static which blended perfectly with the fan I had running. As a result, I got a late start which always discombobulates you. On top of that, one of the straps to my helmet was soaking wet when I went to put it on. I leave it in the garage so I can't imagine how it (and only half of it) got so wet. Finally, I was trying out carrying an MP3 player for the first time, which actually worked out pretty well. I think I may have to add that. I guess the point of all this meaningless rambling is that it was kind of a weird ride.
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Ross
Looking around the IT department where I work, you would expect that most of the employees are not merely sedentary, but may in fact actually be comatose. Because of this, when the company introduced a fitness contest, they decided that the IT department needed something special, so in addition to the normal individual contest they implemented an additional contest between all of the various departments in IT. My initial reaction was "nice idea, but I don't think it will make much of an impact." I overlooked the fact that although none of my co-workers would be classified as fitness-buffs, that many if not most of them are enormously competetive.
To describe the competition which has developed as "heated" would do it an injustice -- "cut-throat" is far closer to the mark. Just a few minutes ago I wandered over to talk to a colleague in another group and someone in his group accused me of coming over just so I could spy on their exercise records. Sure he could have been kidding, but you never can tell. If I had the energy I might take this opportunity to seque into a discussion of how it is precisely this trait which makes capitalism work so well, but that's a pretty big jump even for me.
With respect to the Lori Hacking case, for a while the police have been saying that credible witnesses told them that Mark had confessed to killing his wife. I had wondered who this witness(es) might be and why the police were willing to believe what they said. It has come out since then that it was Mark's brother's who gave the police the information. One would think that the brothers would have no reason to make up that sort of information so I guess it must be pretty credible. I'm not sure how Mark feels about his brothers ratting him out. I suppose it's possible that he already has such a deep sense of remorse that he's glad; if that's the case I guess one would hope that the state might be a little bit more lenient.
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Ross
I sort of forgot to post yesterday. That's not the entire story -- actually, I remembered, but by the time I did it was so late that I really didn't have the energy to post at that point. As regular readers can tell you, you didn't miss much; I'm pretty brain fried at the moment. I have way too much stuff I would like to do before GenCon, chiefly but by no means singularly the Midnight adventure. Of course, as bad as this year is, there's no comparison between this year and last year, since last year I actually exhibited, which was enormously more complex (not to mention horribly expensive).
One thing that's not going to change from last year: I'm still planning on posting a photo gallery once I get back. Last year's gallery was and continues to be very popular (for whatever reason this girl is particularly popular). Who knows, now that I'm not going to be chained to the exhibit hall, maybe I'll get some pictures I missed last year. Of course, I also plan on doing a lot more gaming, so they'll probably be more pictures than one might like of fat scraggy gamers staring at a tactical.
I biked in again today. This is the first time I've done it with only one day's rest and my average speed did suffer as a result, though not too badly. What that tells me is that I'm using my legs too much and my heart not enough. I also discovered today how easy it is to go from exercising to puking (no, I didn't actually puke). I was riding at a comfortable pace and approaching a traffic light. It was green while I was still a long way away and I was certain it would be red by the time I arrived, but it was still green. Of course, the minute I entered the intersection it turned yellow and then I was forced to stand up and clear the intersection as quickly as possible, which put me into the red zone just enough (even though it was only the width of a road (albeit a major artery with 4-lanes going each way) that when I got to work I felt a little ookie...
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross
Well as I mentioned, I took today off, and as is often (always?) the case, I wasn't as productive as I would have hoped. A big part of the problem is that based on the biking schedule I've been maintaining, this morning I was suppossed to ride my bike again, so I did. Of course, since it was my day off I went longer than normal and put in around 20 miles, which really isn't that much, but it pretty much wiped me out for the rest of the day In fact, and I'm ashamed to admit this, I ended up taking a morning and an afternoon nap...
The obvious solution was to not go biking this morning, but every time I try and get into shape (or perhaps more accurately get to the point where I don't get winded climbing into bed) something comes up and next thing I know it's been months since I broke a sweat. So this time I'm determined not to fall off the wagon, as it were. I did get a fair amount done, it's just that generally I have this vision of hyper-productivity for my days off, which as you can imagine almost never quite lives up to the hype.
I did get one big thing done today. I ordered some DireKobold t-shirts, which I'll be taking with me to GenCon. Early on I decided that I wanted some kind of pithy phrase on the back. Deciding that and actually coming up with a pithy phrase are two different things. Early on I came up with:
For those who want their adventures to be like their love-making: hot, flexible and electronic.
But I knew this wasn't going to go over very well with the more conservative elements in my family (for example, my wife complained that the kids couldn't wear it). But after days if not weeks of thought I couldn't come up with anything better (and this statement did play very well with the target demographic 18-38 year old males). Finally, to corrupt something Voltaire once said, done is better than perfect (or even good for that matter). So there you have it.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross