January 17, 2008: Playing the Bard’s Tale

I didn’t end up having to work nearly as late last night as I had feared that I might have. By two in the morning I was getting ready to head off to bed. And additionally, the new Ruby email processing script is working and I was able to set it up to make a long run during the night. The only really unfortunate thing is that I am on the early shift this week and there is no way for me to have slept in today because I am covering early.

I was dragging pretty hard when I pulled myself out of bed this morning. But there was nothing to be done but to do it. I was working again quite early as there were people ready to use the servers that I had built last night first thing this morning. So right to work I went. I am so glad that today is my work from home day. I couldn’t possibly have handled being in the office.

The day actually went by pretty quickly considering what a struggle it was for me just to stay awake. Throughout the day, though, I started feeling sick and eventually realized that I had managed to run myself down while Dominica is horribly sick with a bad cold. So now I have a cold as well. Great.

I took a nap in the afternoon and that helped a little with my exhaustion but not much. I am definitely going to be going to bed early tonight.

While doing other things today I kept running my Ruby script in the background processing tens of thousands of email messages. I am really glad to get that stuff cleared out of there. I can’t believe how many emails were there. Nor can I believe how long this is taking to run.

The other day while we were playing Dungeons and Dragons, Kevin had shown the original Tales of the Unknown: The Bard’s Tale (a.k.a. Bard’s Tale I) on an Amiga emulator. That got me thinking about my old days of playing BT1 around 1987 to 1988. I loved that game back then when I had it on the original Commodore Amiga 1000. I recently bought a copy of the complete series for DOS (that is BT1-3 and the BT Construction Set.) So I decided that I needed to sit down and play it again.

I played the original Bard’s Tale on the Amiga at the height of my interest in video games around age eleven to thirteen. This game was by far one of my favourites and was the game that introduced me to the mechanics of role playing games. I would follow the Bard’s Tale with the Faery Tale Adventure and Pool of Radiance also on the Amiga. During the time that I played the Bard’s Tale the first time I had kept a log, a video game diary, that kept track of the time that I had spent on the game, when I played, what I did in the game, the plot, maps, etc. In many ways I suppose that that was the precursor to SGL since it was the only other time in my life that I really kept a journal for any length of time. Because I used that journal I still know that I spent over one hundred hours played BT! I also never managed to actually complete it. For some reason my copy of the game would not allow me to reach the final dungeon and even though my characters were massively powerful the game just wouldn’t let me finish it. So now I want to go back and beat the game for real and see the actual ending.

One of the first things that I noticed about playing the Bard’s Tale after all of these years is just how incredibly hard this game was to start playing. And today it is far easier as we can start and stop the game, restore saved files and more very quickly. But this game is still brutal to new players who might spend ten or fifteen minutes preparing to play and then die without ever getting to see any of the game at all.

What was amazing to me is how familiar the game is. It has been twenty years since I have sat down to play the Bard’s Tale and yet it feels like it was just yesterday. I can still walk around the city of Skara Brae, the setting of the game, and I know where every shop, temple, guild, etc. is located. It’s like I never stopped playing. Just a few minutes of a game like this just brings the memories flooding back.

I didn’t bother to leave the apartment at all today for food. I had cereal for breakfast and leftover Chinese take-away for lunch. I was originally supposed to have lunch with Susan today but she had to cancel. We are planning to see her on Sunday.

It was a quiet evening for us.  We were both so tired that we decided to just take it easy and relax.  Dominica started reading the third set of R. A. Salvatore’s Drizzt Cycle books and I played some Bard’s Tale and planned to turn in early.

Everyone decided today that we are all going to be around on Saturday so another Dungeons and Dragons session is scheduled for them.  So that is what we will be doing all afternoon.

January 16, 2008: Long, Long Day

Up early and in to work.  Blah blah blah.  Nothing exciting to tell there.  Big IT news today: Sun buys MySQL!  This is awesome news for those of us who have worked a lot with MySQL and have been concerned about the long term open-sourceness of the company.  I am confident that SUN will lead the European company towards a greater level of being open source and will help to make the company enterprise ready.  The product may be enterprise ready but MySQL’s wishy-washy attitude towards its open source licensing has made the company seem as though they weren’t ready for the big time yet.

The early morning was slow as always. I am not sure that I can even remember a time that I had a busy early morning.  It just doesn’t happen.  Worst case scenario is an early morning conference call or something.  But nothing serious like that today.  The day itself turned out to be relatively normal.  There is starting to be quite a bit of chatter around the office about the announced layoffs, however.  So far I don’t know anyone who has been laid off but it is bound to happen soon.  Since we didn’t hear anything today it seems likely that we will be hearing something tomorrow.

For lunch I just ran up the street to the Wall Street Cafe and grabbed some pizza.  Dominica is coming home late tonight.  They needed her to work late this evening to cover for someone and since she was out on Monday we decided that it would be good if she stayed even though she has a cold and doesn’t feel particularly good.  She is getting paid double time for the hour that she stays which works out really well.

My afternoon got really busy and I have some after hours work scheduled for this evening too.  By late afternoon, though, it was decided that there was some “emergency” server builds that needed to be done and that I would just have to skip sleeping tonight to be able to do if that is what it took.

I took off from the office around three thirty.  Just enough time to get me home so that I could get right back to work.  I stopped at Borders quickly and picked up the next four books by R. A. Salvatore for Dominica.  Who knows when I will ever get a chance to read any but at least she is getting to enjoy them.  And I picked up the latest issue of Model Railroader for me.

I got home and immediately set back to work for more than an hour working on the project that was scheduled earlier today.  I hadn’t been expecting it to take so long but I should know better by now.

After doing my random project it was time to order in our dinner and shortly Dominica was home from work. This cold is really kicking her butt and she is totally exhausted.  We ate dinner and starting cooking the dog’s stew or else he won’t have any breakfast in the morning.  Then I headed back to the living room to get to work building those servers.  It is going to be a very long night.  No question about that.

In between other things I did get a chance to work on some Ruby code that I have been working on that takes emailed network appliance logs from Netgear hardware and parses it and files it into an enterprise database – in this case MySQL.  It is still a very basic system and I got most of it working a while ago but never got around to wrapping up some loose ends.  Now I have it working pretty smoothly where the email is parsed via a variety of sorting options, it is parsed, it is uploaded to the database, the email is removed from the folder that it is in and placed into a temporary “holding” folder to await inspection and then the mailbox is expunged.  It isn’t fast but it works and under normal circumstances would be run as a background job so speed isn’t too much of an issue.

Now that I have my script working my first order of business is to get one hundred and five thousand email messages moved out of my Inbox and onto the database.  This is going to take some time.  But it needs to be done.  My email just keeps getting more and more full.  I have been procrastinating long enough on this issue.

My work dragged on after midnight and that means that it is time to post.  I expect that I will get to go to bed tonight but my night will definitely be short.

January 15, 2008: Faux Govjadina po-strogonovski

Up at five this morning. I didn’t feel too bad though. I kind of enjoy getting up early and getting the day started. Oreo doesn’t like it – he prefers when I stay in bed until he leaves for daycare so that he is never without his snuggles.

It was all dark as I headed into the office. I grabbed the remaining cheese sub from dinner last night that I still had in the fridge and ate that while walking to Newark’s Penn Station.

Work wasn’t too bad today. Slower than it has been recently. I actually had the chance to get lunch today away from my desk. A friend from work and I grabbed food from the vegetarian food truck parked out front of the building and ate in the cafeteria.

Being a slow day I managed to escape after a normal length of time and head for home nice and early around four. Four being a full day when I come in so early.

On the way home I stopped in Penn Station in Newark where I pass through as I get off of the PATH. I decided to just grab a quick slice of pizza from Triponi in the train station. Their pizza is awesome as is their cherry lemonade. I hope that we will be getting pizza from there again sometime soon.

Dominica ended up running quite late tonight and didn’t get home until long after six.  She cooked fake beef Stroganoff or Govjadina po-strogonovski for dinner which turned out really well.  Much better than the hamburger helper that I remember.  It is a completely different dish.

Our evening was very short.  I did a little work and then did a bit of homework.  And we called it a night a little early.

I did manage to finish the adventurer’s journal for Dungeons and Dragons sessions that we played over the weekend and I got that sent out to everyone.  That turned into quite the chore to produce but I did discover that it worked out really well for getting everyone onto the same page as far as what happened in the adventure and where everyone was.  I think that recapping it afterwards like that helps to flesh out the adventure as sometimes while playing it can become disjointed and ultimately feel disconnected but the journal kind of ties it all together in a more literary form.

Dominica finished reading the second book of the Icewind Dale Trilogy by R. A. Salvatore tonight and moved onto the third one.  She is a bit ahead of me now and I don’t know the names of the books that she is on at the moment.

January 14, 2008: Schmap and Stuff

I was pretty tired when the alarm rang at five thirty this morning but not as bad as you might guess. This is my first day of my five days of early morning shifts this week.

I found out today that two images that I have on Flickr have been selected and will be used definitely in the upcoming “Schmap Montreal: Fourth Edition”. The link to the two images are here and here.

Here is a great tip for Dungeons and Dragons players looking for many of the older products out there from the AD&D and AD&D Second Edition time periods.  I have been looking for a lot of this stuff on eBay and you can get a lot there but the shipping costs tend to make the items a little more expensive than they would have been new even if they sell for a good price (depends on the items, keep an eye out for deals.)  Wizards of the Coast offer a good selection of older products available as free downloads from their website.  That is a great place to check first.  If they don’t have what you are looking for, check Paizo who has hundreds of D&D legacy products available as low cost PDF downloads.  Tons of older adventures and expansion books that would easily cost you six to fifteen dollars to get from eBay can be downloaded for just four dollars!  Now that is a bargain.  And you get them immediately.

In reality, getting the products via PDF might be better than getting them in print anyway.  Sure it isn’t as flashy but these days who has space to store all of that paper?  And if you have tons of resources in paper form you can’t easily take them with you when you are playing someplace other than your own home.  By having them as a PDF you can print out the sheets that you are going to use and you can happily write on them and know that your originals are still pristinely stored on your computer.  It also makes it easier for printing out “handouts” based on maps or images in the game materials.  Now I am sorry that I just recently bought two old adventures off of eBay.  I would rather have had them as PDF files and it would have saved me several dollars.

I bought “Sword of the Dales” and the classic “Ruins of Adventure” to check out the PDFs.  “Ruins of Adventure” became one of the most famous AD&D adventures ever when it was used as the basis for SSI’s classic 1980s video game Pool of Radiance.  I played and beat Pool of Radiance on the Commodore Amiga around 1989.  The game was new in 1988.  I also had the sequel, Curse of the Azure Bonds which I did not beat.

Things were pretty busy today.  I grabbed a knish out front of the office for lunch and ate at my desk.  That is how it normally is.   Not enough time in the day for everything.

I worked an eleven hour day and headed for home around six.  No snow today like everyone has been saying that there was going to be.  Just a little cold drizzle.  Nothing really notable.  I am amazed by how mild the weather is here on the coast compared to back home.

I picked up dinner at Metro Cafe in the Gateway Center on my way home.  That was a lot quicker and easier than trying to figure something out after I got home.  I had a cheese sub and Dominica had an eggplant parm sub.  We got some cake for dessert too.

Dinner was really good.  It was late in the evening already, though, and we weren’t up to doing much.  Dominica spent the evening ready from R. A. Salvatore and I did a little web design work and then worked on the adventurer’s journal from the game this weekend.  It is amazing how much work is involved in just writing down what happened.  We did play two sessions this weekend though so that definitely contributed.  There is a lot of material to cover in the journal.

In the short time that I was home I had to walk Oreo twice, feed him dinner and a snack.  When he wasn’t demanding food and walking services from me he spent the evening sleeping on the Ottoman between Dominica’s feet.

We went to bed around eleven.  I have to be up at five to head into the office.

January 13, 2008: More D&D

Dominica and I slept in very late this morning. We were both totally exhausted from yesterday. So it was around eleven this morning when we finally decided that it was time to get up. Oreo enjoyed the snuggle time.

We are getting concerned that Oreo has been eating a lot more than usual lately and we are entertaining the idea that he might have worms. We haven’t seen any evidence that he does but he has been eating far more food than it seems would be appropriate and he isn’t putting on any weight that we can see. So we are going to be getting the lab to check him out pretty soon.

Ramona and Winni came by a little after noon with vegetable stew and vegan cornbread (soy milk, bananas instead of eggs, etc.) It was really good. We ate that before getting ready for Dungeons & Dragons today. Our day is going to be pretty short as Winni has to catch a flight to Wisconsin at six thirty out of Newark.

Kevin came over and we played the campaign from about one until five – so four hours of game time. Around three we ordered in some pizza from Nino’s.

Dominica and I just relaxed for the rest of the evening. I did some homework for my Project Management class and we watched the remainder of the first season of What I Like About You. Then it was time for bed.

I am working the early shift this week so I need to get some sleep.