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Miscellaniosity
I had been getting pretty regular about posting to LJ, but I seem to have slacked a bit of late. I've been reading and posting replies, just not posting my stuff. Well, here's a bit of a catch-up.
Game Design. I have a new game well into development, I think it'll be fun. It lets you make movies, we'll see how it turns out. It's definitely my highest card count of what I've designed thus far, it's also my longest rules but not really my most complicated design. I'm hopefully sending a copy to Phoenix to a fellow game developer for testing, I'll also probably send a copy to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deborak to get her opinion. (I'm also hoping to maybe convince her to do some poof-reading and editing for me, but I won't bring that up until later, I'll wait until she's really happy, like the day before Halloween or something….)
I came up with the title while watching a preview for some garbage movie a few weeks ago. Then while driving to and from Phoenix recently, I started dictating notes into my little digital voice recorder. Tonight I wrote up the initial version of the rules and discussed a couple of points with Russet. She likes it, we'll see how it plays once I print up the cards and run some tests.
, while I was in Phoenix, I bought a game called Blokus, specifically, the two-player travel version (they were out of the four-player version). I played it at a game convention in Mesa at an event run bymagic_rat and quite enjoyed it. It's sort of a board game version of Tetris, and it's really cool. When Russ and I were in Alamo Friday, we had lunch at a place called Moby's (GREAT burger!) I pulled it out and we played three games. Russ won two of the three, but when it came to total points, it was pretty close. She quite liked it, and I'm sure we'll be playing it lots.
Photography. With both of my 35mm bodies dying and delays in getting my new body and lens, I'm behind two assignments at school. I finished the shooting and developing for the second assignment, I should be able to print it Tuesday and turn it in Thursday. The first assignment I might have finished shooting and developing, it depends on what I think (and my teacher thinks!) of what I've shot. I'm not too comfortable with a couple of the photos, it's using aspects of the Zone System and I'm just not sure that I'm doing a reasonable job of identifying the various zones.
RIP: Cell Phone. I've been using cell phones since '92 or so, and I've never lost one. Until now. I was shooting one of my assignments in Alamogordo next to the railroad tracks (I hesitate to call it desert as it's right next to town, but the area is a lot like AZ desert) after class last Thursday and apparently knocked my cell phone off my belt. I didn't notice it until I got to class, and then it was a little late to go back looking for it. To complicate matters, it was on silent, so I couldn't borrow Russet's phone and call it and listen for the ring. So that sucks. And to compound matters, Michelle, who pays the cell bill, called to tell me that the bill for that month was over $900. Apparently my phone went from using the Alltel network to roaming. So pretty much all of my calls were at a hideous rate. The belief is that someone set up a tower closer than the Alltel tower and it grabbed my signal and forced me to roam. Thus, the bill stands. So I'm not getting a rent check from her this month. :-) And she's adding $10 to her cell bill to make for unlimited roaming, so this can't happen again.
Still, I'll end up having to go to Las Cruces and finding a new phone.
Broken Car. Russ met me in Alamogordo last Thursday after school for a bite at Chili's and catching the last showing of Transporter 2. After the movie, we did a Walmart run, and since I was literally next to the area where I lost my phone, I decided to look around with my flashlight. Russ went home, she was kinda tired. No joy in finding the phone, and it killed the batteries in my flashlight. That is no small thing in itself: those stinkin' batteries are $10 a set! They normally last a pretty good time, but that was a good 30-45 minutes of almost constant use, so I forgive them.
Eventually I head back up the mountain. It's 16 miles from Alamogordo to Cloudcroft, and you gain over 4000 feet in altitude in that drive. Half way up is a cool tunnel, and dropped in front of said tunnel were two pretty good sized chunks of rock and a lot of smaller pieces. My Rodeo had plenty of ground clearance to not be damaged, but my conscience got the better part of me and I turned around and threw the two big pieces to the side of the road and kicked a couple of the larger smaller pieces off, too. I keep a pair of heavy duty leather gloves in my truck so I didn't do any damage to my fingers and hands while doing so.
Finally I get home, and Russ asks to borrow my flashlight. Her reason: she hit the rocks. There was on-coming traffic exiting the tunnel, and she had traffic behind her, so she had no way of avoiding the rocks. After said impact, she had an intermittent grinding noise while doing the final eight miles to home. It obviously didn't tear the oil pan or gas tank, or she wouldn't have made it home and she would have left a spill behind her that I would have seen.
Friday we had an appointment to get Celeste groomed in High Rolls, it's about 6 miles down the mountain towards Alamo. I stayed home and slept (we were up late watching Wonderfalls). Russ takes her down, and her car grinds all the way. She decides to get the car towed to a body shop in Alamogordo, thinking that maybe a heat shield or something got dented and was rubbing. The body shop finally got it hoisted only to find she'd broken a transmission mount.
Transmission mounts is not normally a body shop service, and this shop proved no exception. Russ was off until Sunday night, then worked through first half Thursday night, so I drove her up to the observatory and she's staying in the dorms there. I'll go and pick her up Thursday night after class. She didn't have time to call the body shop and arrange for the car to be towed to a conventional dealer to get the tranny mount replaced.
I went to the observatory last night after having gone to Alamogordo to develop two rolls of film, Russet had left some items at home that she needed, so it was sort of delivering a care package. Whilst at the observatory, I wrote up the rules for my new game design (and did some modification this AM), and tried to access my work computer in Phoenix. It wouldn't connect. Sunday night I had tried the same thing with the same result, so I assumed that the power had blinked in the office and my computer had powered off, and Sunday night I sent an email off to my boss asking him to make sure my PC was powered up in the AM. Monday AM he replied saying the PC was up and running, my assumption then became that either the network had been down or the communications line into their network had been down. No big deal.
Until last night. My PC didn't connect again, making me realize that the observatory was probably blocking VPN connections at their firewall. Inconvenient for me, as I couldn't work from the observatory. But no big deal in the end as this is probably the last week of my job – limited contract.
So I get home about 2am Tuesday from the observatory and want to get online and post this blog entry after having written it. No connection. I figure the ISP was down for maintenance and go to bed. This morning at 9am the phone company calls to tell us about the voice messaging system that they just replaced, and the woman keeps saying email instead of voice mail, then explains that someone sliced through their fiber optic line with a back hoe. Thus, it looks like I'll be offline for a bit.
Which is actually a good thing. I can get online from school, so I can do some work that way, and it'll give me time to do some work on my new game. And maybe I'll work on my algebra homework. Maybe I might even work on organizing the house a bit, but I won't hold my breath. :-)
Well, I didn't plan on writing that much, but I guess I wanted/needed to. Still lots to talk about, photography, Wonder Falls, etc. At least I got this out.
Game Design. I have a new game well into development, I think it'll be fun. It lets you make movies, we'll see how it turns out. It's definitely my highest card count of what I've designed thus far, it's also my longest rules but not really my most complicated design. I'm hopefully sending a copy to Phoenix to a fellow game developer for testing, I'll also probably send a copy to
deborak to get her opinion. (I'm also hoping to maybe convince her to do some poof-reading and editing for me, but I won't bring that up until later, I'll wait until she's really happy, like the day before Halloween or something….)I came up with the title while watching a preview for some garbage movie a few weeks ago. Then while driving to and from Phoenix recently, I started dictating notes into my little digital voice recorder. Tonight I wrote up the initial version of the rules and discussed a couple of points with Russet. She likes it, we'll see how it plays once I print up the cards and run some tests.
, while I was in Phoenix, I bought a game called Blokus, specifically, the two-player travel version (they were out of the four-player version). I played it at a game convention in Mesa at an event run by
magic_rat and quite enjoyed it. It's sort of a board game version of Tetris, and it's really cool. When Russ and I were in Alamo Friday, we had lunch at a place called Moby's (GREAT burger!) I pulled it out and we played three games. Russ won two of the three, but when it came to total points, it was pretty close. She quite liked it, and I'm sure we'll be playing it lots.Photography. With both of my 35mm bodies dying and delays in getting my new body and lens, I'm behind two assignments at school. I finished the shooting and developing for the second assignment, I should be able to print it Tuesday and turn it in Thursday. The first assignment I might have finished shooting and developing, it depends on what I think (and my teacher thinks!) of what I've shot. I'm not too comfortable with a couple of the photos, it's using aspects of the Zone System and I'm just not sure that I'm doing a reasonable job of identifying the various zones.
RIP: Cell Phone. I've been using cell phones since '92 or so, and I've never lost one. Until now. I was shooting one of my assignments in Alamogordo next to the railroad tracks (I hesitate to call it desert as it's right next to town, but the area is a lot like AZ desert) after class last Thursday and apparently knocked my cell phone off my belt. I didn't notice it until I got to class, and then it was a little late to go back looking for it. To complicate matters, it was on silent, so I couldn't borrow Russet's phone and call it and listen for the ring. So that sucks. And to compound matters, Michelle, who pays the cell bill, called to tell me that the bill for that month was over $900. Apparently my phone went from using the Alltel network to roaming. So pretty much all of my calls were at a hideous rate. The belief is that someone set up a tower closer than the Alltel tower and it grabbed my signal and forced me to roam. Thus, the bill stands. So I'm not getting a rent check from her this month. :-) And she's adding $10 to her cell bill to make for unlimited roaming, so this can't happen again.
Still, I'll end up having to go to Las Cruces and finding a new phone.
Broken Car. Russ met me in Alamogordo last Thursday after school for a bite at Chili's and catching the last showing of Transporter 2. After the movie, we did a Walmart run, and since I was literally next to the area where I lost my phone, I decided to look around with my flashlight. Russ went home, she was kinda tired. No joy in finding the phone, and it killed the batteries in my flashlight. That is no small thing in itself: those stinkin' batteries are $10 a set! They normally last a pretty good time, but that was a good 30-45 minutes of almost constant use, so I forgive them.
Eventually I head back up the mountain. It's 16 miles from Alamogordo to Cloudcroft, and you gain over 4000 feet in altitude in that drive. Half way up is a cool tunnel, and dropped in front of said tunnel were two pretty good sized chunks of rock and a lot of smaller pieces. My Rodeo had plenty of ground clearance to not be damaged, but my conscience got the better part of me and I turned around and threw the two big pieces to the side of the road and kicked a couple of the larger smaller pieces off, too. I keep a pair of heavy duty leather gloves in my truck so I didn't do any damage to my fingers and hands while doing so.
Finally I get home, and Russ asks to borrow my flashlight. Her reason: she hit the rocks. There was on-coming traffic exiting the tunnel, and she had traffic behind her, so she had no way of avoiding the rocks. After said impact, she had an intermittent grinding noise while doing the final eight miles to home. It obviously didn't tear the oil pan or gas tank, or she wouldn't have made it home and she would have left a spill behind her that I would have seen.
Friday we had an appointment to get Celeste groomed in High Rolls, it's about 6 miles down the mountain towards Alamo. I stayed home and slept (we were up late watching Wonderfalls). Russ takes her down, and her car grinds all the way. She decides to get the car towed to a body shop in Alamogordo, thinking that maybe a heat shield or something got dented and was rubbing. The body shop finally got it hoisted only to find she'd broken a transmission mount.
Transmission mounts is not normally a body shop service, and this shop proved no exception. Russ was off until Sunday night, then worked through first half Thursday night, so I drove her up to the observatory and she's staying in the dorms there. I'll go and pick her up Thursday night after class. She didn't have time to call the body shop and arrange for the car to be towed to a conventional dealer to get the tranny mount replaced.
I went to the observatory last night after having gone to Alamogordo to develop two rolls of film, Russet had left some items at home that she needed, so it was sort of delivering a care package. Whilst at the observatory, I wrote up the rules for my new game design (and did some modification this AM), and tried to access my work computer in Phoenix. It wouldn't connect. Sunday night I had tried the same thing with the same result, so I assumed that the power had blinked in the office and my computer had powered off, and Sunday night I sent an email off to my boss asking him to make sure my PC was powered up in the AM. Monday AM he replied saying the PC was up and running, my assumption then became that either the network had been down or the communications line into their network had been down. No big deal.
Until last night. My PC didn't connect again, making me realize that the observatory was probably blocking VPN connections at their firewall. Inconvenient for me, as I couldn't work from the observatory. But no big deal in the end as this is probably the last week of my job – limited contract.
So I get home about 2am Tuesday from the observatory and want to get online and post this blog entry after having written it. No connection. I figure the ISP was down for maintenance and go to bed. This morning at 9am the phone company calls to tell us about the voice messaging system that they just replaced, and the woman keeps saying email instead of voice mail, then explains that someone sliced through their fiber optic line with a back hoe. Thus, it looks like I'll be offline for a bit.
Which is actually a good thing. I can get online from school, so I can do some work that way, and it'll give me time to do some work on my new game. And maybe I'll work on my algebra homework. Maybe I might even work on organizing the house a bit, but I won't hold my breath. :-)
Well, I didn't plan on writing that much, but I guess I wanted/needed to. Still lots to talk about, photography, Wonder Falls, etc. At least I got this out.
no subject
The "roaming" situation sux; my sympathies. I'm hanging in fear and trepidation over my "over minutes" bill that's due to come any time now: I had used the cellphone while getting my Mac looked at, and then used it during the convention. It's the first time I've ever even come CLOSE to using all my minutes, and I really didn't have a choice to not-use it, so I did -- and just have to hope it doesn't consume a whole paycheck!
Blokus was fun when I played it at one of B&F's gatherings. One for one; I'm just going to retire now to preserve a perfect record. lol
no subject
Am I seeing a pattern here? :-)