It's been one week!

Since I last posted. There goes my good record.

So I'm participating in a triathlon team. I'm doing the swimming leg. I have to swim 500m as fast as possible. It's currently not very fast... But as a result, I've bee hitting the pool quite regularly. I've been enjoying it. I feel like I'm getting in better shape, and there is a cute lifeguard there in the mornings. =) It's quite refreshing to wake up and swim though. Hopefully I can make it through the triathlon swim. An interesting side effect is I'm sleeping better now. Maybe it's just the addition of another routine thing, maybe it's just the physical activity. I'm getting back to a good core sleep. I'm currently exhausted by my afternoon nap, I think I need to move it a little earlier, as it's pretty late currently. So I'll be making those tweaks in the next week. It's nice to have my polyphasic sleep back on a good track again.

So due to weather, I still haven't gotten any of my garden in the dirt yet. I did till the ground, but we are still getting frost warnings every night... Maybe I can actually plant this weekend. It's supposed to be nicer. I want my plants to get going! Quicker they start the quicker I can eat them.

So on the weekend, I was vacuuming the lawn. Yes, you heard me correctly. I had to borrow a shop-vac, and vacuumed the lawn. It's the first I've ever heard of anyone doing it. The story is an interesting one. Friday after work, I turned a bunch of dirt, and did a bit of weeding, and found a hole in our hose. The key thing from Friday was the backyard was great. Then, Saturday morning, I look out the back window, and see our patio table overturned. It had a glass top. Our backyard now had a section that was just covered with broken glass. Awesome. I was planning to mow the lawn that morning. Alas, I had to clean the glass up first. So I tried to pick up some of the biggest chunks, but pretty much all of it was crumbling further when I went to pick it up. It was a mess. So I tried sweeping it up, and raking it up, and collecting it in a dustpan. Those techniques did ok, but there was still a lot of glass it was missing. Only thing I could think of to try was vacuuming. Which, for the record, worked great! I am intending to spread some dirt in the area too, after mowing, just to make sure no small sharp edges are left.

So we were trying to figure out how our patio table decided to smash itself on our lawn. All I could figure was a) The Wind, and b) Young Hooligans. I thought the wind was pretty unlikely, as nothing else in the backyard looked moved, and the neighbours stuff was all fine, so I was forced to blame young hooligans. Around supper time, I answered the door, and it was our neighbour. He apologized for breaking our table, and I was confused. Did he jump the fence and smash it? He continued to explain. Apparently his dogs, in the morning, decided to break through the fence, and run around our yard. They ran into our table, knocking it over, and making a huge mess. (The dogs were fine). It did however leave me with a bit of an uneasy feeling. If those dogs can trash a patio table, they could easily take out roomies. (As the heaviest of the roomies, I suspect I'd have the best chance at survival). Our neighbour explained that he has now lined the fence with chicken wire, so they will have to break more than just weak boards to do it again, and he is intending to buy us a new table, which is nice. I'm glad he was honest, but at the same time, frustrated at those dogs. They bark all the time, and now they are damaging our property too? Sheesh.

I'll let you know my thoughts on the patio table our neighbour picks to replace it. I might just ask him to pick us up like a home depot gift card or something for the value of it, then we can pick it ourselves.

D&D Adventure Update!

So, my crew is having a blast.

They all took to D&D better than I even expected. Soeric started as the only one with a big backstory, and that hasn't changed, but Pamp, the rogue, has sure started to go crazy. As a rogue, he doesn't really get anything great on his minor action yet, so he constantly is trying to surprise people, scare people, and try crazy things. I've decided that I'll let him try to do pretty much anything he wants on his minor, as long as he can explain it to me. Then I'll determine what skill he has to check, and what the effect will be. I also don't let him do the same thing twice. So we have a little halfling rogue, running around trying to pants people, juggle, attempting comedic one lines, all sorts of interesting things to try to confuse the enemy. It's very entertaining.

The players just can't seem to have enough either. We were scheduled to play tonight (Thursday) after playing last Thursday, but on Sunday, Soeric suggested we play on Tuesday in addition too, and everyone was really into it. They also just got level 2 on Tuesday, and I caught my roomies spending easily a couple hours last night reading books, discussing feats, and strategies they want to try. They seem to be really enjoying it.

I started them in the dungeon delve book, just doing the first dungeon to see how they took to D&D. It quickly became apparent that they wanted a bigger story to go on. So I took the Keep of the Shadowfell adventure (which is free from Wizard's as a pdf) and basically replaced the first stretch of the adventure with the first dungeon delve. I swapped the young dragon at the end of the delve with Irontooth, and it worked out perfectly. So now I have them about to enter the keep, which I'm pretty excited for.

Should be a fun evening.

New Toy!

SO I picked up an Asus Eee PC 1000HE yesterday. I haven't been able to play with it as much as I want to. So far though, I'm reasonably impressed. The battery life does seem to be pretty good on it. I'm trying to condition the battery today, with full charge to full discharge usage, so I'll actually get some more real world-ish numbers. I do like seeing 30% battery left, 2:40 minutes. I'm just finishing my Ubuntu Netbook remix download, so tonight I'll likely be setting it up to dual boot, assuming I can find time somewhere between the Carbon Dating Service show, and 1 vs 100 Beta on Xbox live.

I came with some useful apps I wasn't expecting. Largely Skype. I've been working to install a couple other important apps, like Firefox, Media Player Classic, and so forth. I think I'll end up using this little thing more than I was planning. I still need to try watching some higher def content on it, to see how it handles it. I'm going to install and try some older 3d games on it too. Might run not too bad. I'm pretty excited to use this on a big road trip, like my Maine one I'm planning. Then on rest stops I can watch TV, play games, do whatever.

I need a good wifi coverage map for the North Eastern States... or to find a decent WEP cracker for a netbook...

Holy Spring Cleaning!

So I went on a cleaning binge. It was pretty satisfactory. I rearranged all the furniture in my room, and now have space to keep some of my music stuff up there. I'm hoping that will motivate me to practice more, as I really should. It also is now laid out to force me to keep it cleaner as well. Assuming I can keep up the habits I'm trying to form. I've decided I want to change some aspects of my life, and the organization / cleanliness of my room is one of them. It ties into others as well, as now I have enough floor space to do sit ups, and push ups, and potentially get somewhat back into shape.

My next goal, after the completion of my room cleaning, is to clean and reorganize our basement. It's not very great right now, and organizing it would open up a fair bit of space. We are planning to build a bigger gaming table too, for board games, and D&D, and it would likely go in the basement. It's too warm in the summer to not hang out in the basement. I essentially need to get permission from my roomies to junk a lot of stuff, then just have at 'er. I also had to wait until after today, as our garbage container was pretty full from my room cleaning.

All that said, I'm open to suggestions on a design for a good gaming table. We want shelves or drawers, somewhat light-weight, maybe modular? It would be great if we could put a cover on it too, to "pause" board games/D&D sessions. It might be quite the undertaking...

Adventure Begins!

So we had a ton of fun yesterday. At least I did. I hope everyone else did too. I forgot to snap pictures as it was going on though. Opps.

First fight my newbie friends got into was a bit rough. They didn't know how to work well as a team, or what their most effective moves were when. They ended up spread out all over the map, with no one in range of the heals that were available. Soeric the Avenger was knocked out, and a couple others were quite beat up at the end. I think it was a pretty good trial by fire start.

Second encounter was way too easy. They decimated the crew of 8 or 9 minions, and the 3 Kobold Slingers were getting horrible rolls to hit. It was a ton of fun for the encounter though, as the Sorcerer climbed a 8 foot wall, perched at the top of it, threw 2 aoe's to kill almost all the minions single-handedly, then promptly fell backwards off the wall. It was very entertaining.

Third encounter was about right for the difficulty. Maybe a touch too hard. They ended up pretty battered, but no one collapsed. A couple daily's were used, but not all, and very few action points. It is definitely seeming like the group needs more healing. I'm going to try to push some people to multiclass into something that gives a heal. There is only so much that Ghost Bear can do.

Timewise, things moved a bit slower than I expected. The first encounter was very long. I expected it to be long, but it was 3 hours or so, which was a bit longer than I planned for. The other 2 encounters were closer to the 1.5 hour mark. They had figured out how a lot of their moves worked, and some better planned strategies.

Overall, it was a good time. They didn't finish the little story I wanted to get done, they have 1 encounter left. But I might attach another encounter on, so that next session, we will get 2 encounters. Then head to town and do some shopping and such. Keeps the next session maybe a touch shorter. Hopefully they can level too, and we'll do the leveling process as well.

Beginning of an Adventure

So I'm pretty excited for Sunday. If you aren't geeky, you may want to stop reading now.

Sunday I'm starting as DM (Dungeon Master) for a D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) 4e (Fourth Edition) game. Man, geeks like Acronyms. I'm leading a group of D&D newbies. I think collectively as a group of players, they will have at most 20 hours of D&D play combined. I am a bit relieved because they are all video game RPG players, so some of the concepts they are familiar with. I should be pretty interesting.

It's also a wide mix of player styles. One guy has already submitted a character history, bio, and all sort of extra details that compete as one of the best back stories I've heard in D&D. One of the other players didn't even pick a close to appropriate name. Should make the group rather interesting as a group. I think a lot of crazy things will go down. It should be fun. I hope everyone has a good time.

I decided, since it's many of their first times playing, to not go too heavy into the story or role playing or anything. I'm intending the first session to be very combat heavy. I think they will connect to that quicker. After seeing how the first session goes, I'll decided if I want to hook them in to a bigger narrative, or just keep going with simple more one-shot style adventures.

I'll likely take pictures, and chronicle the adventure somewhat, as much for my own interest as any of my readers. So expect a summary next week sometime.

Progress!

So I deployed my first deployable build to the Xbox. I have the first 720p test map displayed, and the grid structure behind it loading correctly. I have the playable characters represented with some placeholders. Tonight I'll be attaching some basic controls to move the placeholders, and adding collisions, for locations you aren't allowed to move (and maybe some places that just slow you down, like hills?)

I got some pretty good progress yesterday, but need to make a lot of progress this week too. We have about 2 weeks until the deadline for submissions for the PAX 10. Hopefully by the end of next weekend, it's a a demo-able state. I might be hitting up a couple friends to start playtesting sometime this week, so be forewarned!

Hopefully I get the first 3d model sometime today, so I can retrofit my classes to support it. I'm a bit nervous about that. Hopefully it's as easy as I've tried to set it up to be. That is definitely my focus for this week though. Trying to free up some evenings to work on it, and I'll have to enforce a strict "Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard" policy. Hopefully I'll have a successful week!