December 7, 2007: Not Too Busy for D&D

CNN has a great article today about the twenty five year old Commodore 64 computer system.

Today was incredibly busy.  I never got a spare moment to do anything at all.  I was rushed off of my feet from early morning until late in the evening.  By the end of the day I was seriously exhausted.

After work Ramona came over and she, Dominica and I all went to Food for Life for some dinner.  We ate and returned to the apartment to just hang out for a little while.  Originally the plan had been to play Dungeons & Dragons tonight with about six people but we failed to find a dungeon master who was able to run a game for us so the three of us were just going to hang out.

But Dominica has been really itching to learn how to play – she has been hearing about it for years and just this past week finally decided that she wanted to actually try playing it and is now quite anxious.  And Ramona had been looking forward to playing so they eventually talked me into running a game even though I have never had a chance to learn the D&D v.3.5 rules which are the only ones that we have any material for here at all.  I was not planning on acting as a DM so this was going to be rough.

Min and Ramona watched some DVDs while I worked frantically to find some game material, learn some basics (I have neither played nor run a game in about fifteen years) and generate some characters for them to play.  Ramona found her roommate Chris and he came over to join us.  He was in the original lineup for a game tonight and has never played before either so he was excited to get to try out a game.

It was just after eleven when we managed to get started playing the pre-generated game “Bad Light” from Wizards of the Coast.  I did the best that I could considering we had no dice, miniatures, props or experience.  We played until one thirty.  We all had a good time and decided that we would break for the night (I have to be up to work at eight in the morning) and play again tomorrow.

As rough as it was – it feels great to get to play again even if I am stuck as the dungeon master for the moment.  It is really hard to believe how long it has been.  But the AD&D Second Edition rules were brand new last that I played and much of my gaming was done under the “D&D Cyclopedia Rules” that predate the second edition.  Now we are playing under version 3.5 and version four is expected early next year.  A lot has changed in the world of D&D.  And the “Known World” or Mystara setting seems to have passed by the wayside during that time as well leaving the Forgotten Realms as the primary setting for the game.  When I used to play the FR was the “young upstart” setting.

December 6, 2007: Game Cube Stuff and Houston

Another day, another attempt at finding a Wii. No luck though. I was there at GameStop when the doors opened but there was no shipment today. Oh well. This isn’t looking like it is going to be a very fruitful venture. This is the third time that I have checked this week. Dominica has done some checking too. But nothing. At least there has been some hope that shipments are still happening just not as many as are needed.

While I was at GameStop, though, I did pick up some needed supplies like the Classic Controller for the Wii which allows us to play games that are downloaded via the Wii’s Virtual Console (you can store them onto an SD memory card.) The games are normally re-releases of NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis / MegaDrive, Neo Geo or TurboGrafx 16 games. I think that they need to figure out how to emulate the Sega Saturn. That would probably have a few games (Panzer Dragoon, anyone?) that people would really be willing to shell out for. Perhaps the games are too large or the Wii doesn’t have the power to emulate the Saturn. I also think that they should get it to emulate the Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance systems. Those games are small and I bet that there are many people who would be happy to be able to play some of their favourite games on the big screen for a change. My plan is to get Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64 via the Virtual Console to try out the system. This is a handy list of all games available for the virtual console.

I also picked up a third party wireless GameCube controller to use with the Wii. The biggest draw, for me, in getting the Wii is that it is able to play Nintendo GameCube games. Since I never owned a GameCube I am now able to go and get all of the old GC games used very inexpensively and have a nice collection of just the best games after all of the wheat has been separated from the chaff after years of people playing these games. So in addition to the wireless controller I picked up three games for the system that Dominica will be very happy with: Super Mario Sunshine, The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords Adventure and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. She pretty much has the definitive Zelda collection sans the old Game Boy titles in the series. We own the GBA remakes of the original three titles (Z1 and Z2 from the NES and Z3 from the SNES), all of the N64 titles (the collector’s editions even), all of the GBA original titles, all of the GC titles (as of today) and the one Wii title. There is one new game for the DS that is just now out that she does not have yet.

Dominica and I made some Christmas plans today. The plan is that we are going to leave New Jersey on December 21st, that is Friday, after work and drive up to Frankfort and spend the night at Dominica’s parents’ house. In the morning they will take Oreo by car and drive with him to Houston, Texas. Hopefully that long of a trip with Dexter panicking will not teach Oreo to worry about car travel. Then Min and I will go to my dad’s house that Saturday morning and stay there until Christmas morning.

At six in the morning on Christmas day Dominica and I are flying out of Rochester to go to Houston to meet everyone there for Christmas. I will be working both from “home” and from the Houston office while we are down there. It will give me a chance to scope out the Houston facility. We will be in Houston all week and will come back the weekend after Christmas. Dominica will ride back with her parents and Oreo and I will most likely fly back to Newark but might ride back with them as well. While in Houston I will be working from Williams Tower – the fourth tallest building in the state of Texas and the fourth tallest in Houston and the tallest outside of downtown (Williams Tower is in the heart of uptown.)

I ordered my textbook for my class from Amazon today. It turns out that one of my two remaining textbooks for my class is available online through the university so I only need to buy one of the four since I already own the other two (and have read them both in the bast nine months.) I overnighted the textbook so that I can work on my homework this weekend easily. I can’t be falling behind or I will never catch up again.

My day was pretty busy today. Lot’s of work rolling in all day long. I can never decide if I should be coming into the office to “be in the office” or staying home to actually get work done.

Tomorrow, after work, we are planning on having a Dungeons & Dragons game at our apartment but, at the moment, we have no managed to secure a dungeon master yet nor do Dominica and I even have so much as dice to play with so we are in pretty rough shape. We are waiting to see how this plays out. Tomorrow night is rather up in the air at the moment.

The chair that Dominica ordered from Target had a matching love seat that is currently on sale so we needed to make a decision about it before we got the chair. We decided to just bite the bullet and get the loveseat too. So now we are going to be going from a rather spartan living room to a rather cozy one with a lot of seating locations. But no television to watch yet so just a lot of seating. Hopefully we can address that after Christmas spending is over or when the year end budget is a little more clear. Getting the chair and loveseat didn’t help things any.

After work Dominica took Oreo to the vet for his regular checkup. So far he is looking to be pretty healthy. They love him at the vet. He is everyone’s favourite little boy.

I got back to Newark around seven and walked over to GameStop on my way home (it isn’t really on the way home) and found out that Wiis had come in this morning just ten or fifteen minutes after I had left there! No Wii love for us I guess. I did pick up a memory card for the GameCube that I had forgotten about this morning and also got Skies of Arcadia Legends and Tales of Symphonia for the GameCube used.

I also walked over to the comic book shop on Broad in the hopes that they would carry game dice but neither do they appear to carry them nor were they open.  It was a lot of walking for me this evening.

I got home and ordered in pizza from Nino’s for dinner.  Dominica was home just minutes after me.  She had done some shopping and had not found any dice either but had, finally, managed to find a ten foot long white grounded extension cord.

Dinner arrived and we hooked up the GameCube stuff and started playing Skies of Arcadia Legends.  We have the original Skies of Arcadia for Dreamcast but this very has the wireless controller, no disk swapping and supposedly better graphics.  We only got about thirty minutes into the game tonight though but so far it looks pretty good.

Ryan came over to test out some of his stereo equipment that he was having problems with.  His “new” stereo from eBay is having issues and he wanted to see how ours was working to verify which piece of equipment is not functioning correctly.

After Ryan left we tried using the Wii Virtual Console and downloaded the Nintendo 64 version of Paper Mario.  Neither of us ever player this game back when the N64 was our main systems (we each independently had the Nintendo 64 back in the day.)  Dominica had never even heard of it.  We fired it up and it played well.  The graphics are very impressive for the N64.  This must have been quite the game in its day.  It was released in the United States in early 2001.

We were tired and were off to sleep a little earlier than usual.

December 5, 2007: Oops, classes have started

Dominica is feeling a little better this morning. She slept in late and went to work around ten. Oreo enjoyed the extra sleep time but went to daycare too. He will be nice and tired again when he gets home. There is a little Jack Russell Terrier named Lana there whom he really enjoys playing with but she really runs him ragged.

I made a quick walk over to Airlie Cafe for breakfast and then over to the GameStop down the street just on the off chance that they had any Wiis come in – but they didn’t. So it was off to work in the cold. Actually, it seems cold but I was still a little too warm after walking all that way. I was cold until I got halfway down Wall Street when the air got much, much warmer and my coat was a bit too much for me.

I forgot yesterday that it was my first day of winter semester and that my Project Management course had begun at RIT so I made sure to print off my syllabus and other information today so that I can get started tonight. I haven’t ordered my books yet so I have to deal with that ASAP. I am really lucky, though, that both of the “extra” books that are suggested for the class are books that I have read in the past several months – “The Mythical Man Month” and “Peopleware“. That is two courses in a row that I have already owned all or nearly all of the books for the class ahead of time.

I didn’t get to escape the office until pretty late. I hit Borders on Broadway just before they closed to pick up an old fashioned novel to read (old fashioned meaning pulp not electronic.) I bought R. A. Salvatore‘s “Homeland“. I read quite a bit of it on the ride home on the train.

I picked up dinner from McDonald’s in Newark’s Penn Station.  That is really handy and I am glad that Dominica thought of it.  That is a really nice, friendly, safe and clean McDonald’s that I feel comfortable going into (you have to be careful in Newark) and the food is good and fresh unlike the one near our house or the one that Dominica sort-of passes on her way home.  So I picked up dinner and walked briskly home so that it wouldn’t get too cold.  It was nearly eight by the time that I got home.

Dominica had been playing The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess on the Nintendo Wii when I got there but we switched to watching Are You Being Served? while we ate our food.  After that she spent the evening playing he game and I read some of my book.

I found a cool listing of the top one hundred sitcoms in the UK as voted upon by the viewing public there.  This could be a good source of new material.

December 4, 2007: Dominica Gets Her Teeth Out

If you have a moment, check out the best first wedding dance ever. Thanks to Chris Purcell for that link. While we are checking out great videos, the Vegetable Orchestra is amazing. You can learn more about them at VegetableOrchestra.org.  You can find more from the orchestra on YouTube pretty easily.

Oreo was Mr. McLazybutt today and decided to sleep in until three thirty in the afternoon! Talk about a sleepy dog. He slept in late in bed, moved to his pillow in the living room for about an hour and then went to the recliner and had me bundle him all up and he stayed there all day. No walk. No food. No worries.

Now that the futon is gone we decided that we really need additional seating right away so Dominica did some shopping online.  We looked at several stores and lots of options and finally found a chair from Target that we really liked.  So far we have been very happy with Target furniture and so were quite inclined to shop with them again.   The chair that we decided on was very inexpensive too which made us quite happy.  It is expected to arrive early next week.

Our days were a little shorter than usual today because Dominica has her oral surgery tonight to have two of her wisdom teeth removed.  Two today and two more in a week from today.  She skipped her lunch break today so that she could leave early.

Dominica got home at five and we headed straight out to go to the dentist.  I had to drive which means that this was my first time behind the wheel of any car in two or three months!  It was a little strange.

It took less than an hour for Min’s surgery.  She was in pretty good shape when she was done.  We drove down to the Ironbound from Kearney and went to Walgreen’s to get her prescriptions filled.  Being in Walgreen’s there drove home why we don’t want to consider living in the Ironbound.  Not a classy area when you really get right down to it.  It was quite uncomfortable shopping there for any length of time.  Some aspects of the Ironbound are so great and some bits are just awful.

We came home and did some rearranging in the living room.  I cleaned out the area where the futon had been and moved everything out that had been there to make room for the television cabinet that we are moving there.  I moved it over and we checked it out underneath the east facing window and then tried it diagonally in the corner and realized that it was smaller than we though and would work perfectly on an angle between the southern eastern facing window and the heating unit under the eastern sourthern facing window.  It is perfect.  We are very excited now.  This is going to work out far better than we had planned.

One of the big benefits to setting everything up this way is that there will be no television actually sitting on top of the unit (which may seem a bit of a waste) but that means that the Marantz receiver can now go on top of it which is great because it really didn’t fit properly inside of the unit and was so hot that we had to take out a shelf and have the cabinet door open anytime that the system was in use and even then it was overheating.  Now it can run easily and still looks nice.  And the cabinet can hold more stuff.

So I moved the Sony PS2 and the Sega Dreamcast into the cabinet to get them put away.  This is going to make more apartment space by giving the Dreamcast an actual home instead of having it stored in a plastic bin under our bed.  Awesomeness.

Ryan surprised us by showing up unexpectedly looking for stereo system advice.  We talked for a little while in the apartment but Dominica was fading fast having taken her hydrocodone for the evening.  So she and Oreo went to bed.  Somehow Oreo is still exhausted even after having slept for the entire day.  And I went down to Ryan’s apartment with him to look at potential setups for his new stereo that arrived today.

We put in an hour or two figuring out what to do with the stereo and then settled in to some Chu Chu Rocket on the Dreamcast.  A little after midnight we realized that neither of us had really eaten all day so we ordered in a pizza and ate around one in the morning.  It was around two when I finally got to bed.

At two in the morning Dominica decided to take her second dose of hydrocodone because she was having trouble sleeping from the pain and we figured that it would be better for her to have to wait for the affects of the drug to wear off in the morning than to have her not get any sleep and be worthless all day.  After that she managed to fall asleep.

Miscellaneous Link for the day: Mean Kitty Song

December 3, 2007: We Have a Wii Again

It is still quite cold today and we still have yesterday’s snow on the ground.  But the snow is out and it is a beautiful day.  I got paged out at five in the morning, though, which is not exactly how I was hoping to start the day.  At least it wasn’t anything major.

Oreo was off to daycare today.  We figured that with all of the rest that he got this weekend that if he didn’t go to daycare that he would be bouncing off of the walls.

Tomorrow I have to take Dominica to the oral surgeon because she is having her wisdom teeth removed.  We have been putting this off for a really long time and we really can’t wait any longer.  So Dominica is skipping her lunch and leaving work early to run to Eleven80 to pick me up.  Then it is off to Kearny for the surgery.  Then I will drive her home (if I can remember how to drive – maybe we should take a cab.)  She is only have a local anesthetic but she will still be unable to drive for a while.  Her surgery is likely to be far worse than mine was.  I had a full anesthetic and I didn’t have to witness any of it.  I just woke up without my teeth.  So Dominica is in for a really tough week.  We have no idea how she is going to answer the phones on Tuesday.

My day was much, much slower today than any day was last week.  Today was really just a normal day.  I put in so much time last week on overtime and skipping lunches to try to keep up with the workload as it came in and then with putting in several hours over the weekend keeping up with the weekend work and doing some stuff from the week it really caught me up and today reflected that.  It is nice to have calmed down a bit although I was enjoying the overtime too.  None of that today.

I ran over to Newark’s GameStop on Broad Street for the first time even though they have been open for months.  They didn’t have what we were looking for but they do have a really good selection of used games which is good to know.  I found a game for the PSP that looked interesting and I hadn’t seen before used and inexpensive so I decided to give it a try.  It is called PoPoLoCrois.  But I didn’t get a chance to even consider playing it today.  I had meant to pick up a Game Cube controller (preferably a wireless one) to use with the Wii but forgot about it once I was at the store.

Dominica got home with Oreo a little after six and we walked next door to the new deli that opened up in the building on Saturday.  This was our first time checking them out.  It is exciting to have a restaurant, although a small one, here in Eleven80.  The menu is extremely limited and has practically no vegetarian options but for us it has: breakfast all day, veggie burgers (the only ones that we can get in the area other than the Subway veggie patties which are not the same), French fries, onion rings, mozzarella sticks, grilled cheese, fried shrimp and tuna fish products.  The big deal is the proximity and the hours that they keep.  They also have a minuscule mart there that handles bread, milk, crackers, toilet paper, bottled water, paper towels, whip cream, and other basic items.  The selection is very small but it does provide a few things that we just can’t get easily otherwise.  And the prices are very good.  Dominica and I got a large dinner this evening (two grilled cheese sandwiches, two orders of fries, a fried shrimp basket, a big half-moon cookie and a can of soda) all for just $10.04.  That would have been an easy thirty quid in London!  So we expect that this will fall into our dinner rotation and happily it is the least expensive option so will most likely reduce our average dinner cost slightly.

After dinner we finally took the time to hook the Nintendo Wii back up – now in our bedroom. We haven’t played it in months and don’t even remember which games we have!  Dominica spent most of the evening reacquainting herself with the system and learning how to play The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess again.  She got several hours in on that game but got completely stumped at the section where you have to go fishing and get a fish for the neighbourhood cat near the beginning of the game.  She spent a lot of time there to no avail.  I tried for a while and we kept reading the manual and getting nowhere.  So I did some searching online even but we were getting nowhere fast.  It turns out that the manual, IGN and GameSpot all have completely worthless and incorrect instructions on how to fish in the game.  One of the sites that I read not only had poorly worded or ambiguously incorrect directions but was totally and completely wrong to the point that it is very likely that they never played the game at all but were clipping bits of game reviews from other people (and made the mistake and clipping some bits from a Wii review and some from a GameCube review!)  In the end it was GameFAQs that came through and saved the day.  (I will let you do your own research Mr. TooLazyToLookThingsUpForMyself.)

We played until midnight when the crew from downstairs stopped up to the apartment to pick up the futon.  Originally it was going to leave on Wednesday but the opportunity came up today so we figured that it was perfect timing.  Now we can get the area cleaned and the furniture rearranged tomorrow.  I always feel better to move ahead with a plan once a decision has been made.  I prefer action.  Once we knew that we weren’t going to keep the futon I wanted to get it out of the apartment and move on as quickly as possible.

I did some looking at the SGL stats for the past month and surprisingly, far and away the most popular post that I have written is my coverage of IP Networking on the Netgear SC101 Consumer SAN Appliance.  It is amazing how few resources exist out there for this device.