I had started playing golf again a couple of months ago, while Valerie was away a lot during the summer. But it does get expensive.

Well, a friend of mine (MA) told me that I should try disc golf. He started explaining the game to me, and telling me that the rules are essentially the same as golf, but the idea still sounded kind of dumb to me. I mean, really, you’re playing golf with a frisbee.

Anyway one night he came to game night and showed me his disc golf bag and a few discs. It opened up my eyes. These aren’t normal frisbees, they are discs with all kinds of different flight characteristics, and will fly differently based on how you release them, etc.

So sometime toward the end of July, I decided to drive to Tupelo and give it a shot. I would say that mentally and physically as challenging as golf, but insane amounts cheaper, as there aren’t any greens fees. And the courses end up being everywhere too. There’s one fairly close to work I’ve been able to play a few times. It’s one of the ‘shorter’ courses and is only 9 holes, but still good enough to get some practice on.

Anyway. It’s a fun game, if any of you have ever thought about trying it. Give it a shot. I’m sure it’s not for everyone, but I’ve been enjoying it. Sadly, the cheapness of the sport is about to get more expensive, as I find myself eying one of those cool disc golf bags I see around.

Well, it’s just over a year from that post. In the past year, I have not played a single new Euro game that I’ve been excited about. They always seem so meh. Now, I still enjoy some games. Recently a game of Power Grid was really fun, also a recent game of Princes of Florence with the expansion, and a game of Reef Encounter have definitely been entertaining times. But if you asked me right now what I wanted to play, I’d probably say Twilight Struggle or Age of Steam. Depending upon the number of players. (Although if we had five, A Game of Thrones, or Republic of Rome would be quite tempting )

But like I said, I haven’t played anything new, that excited me at all. Until Saturday… I played Hammer of the Scots. I LOVED IT! I’m seeking the game out currently, and will probably add Crusader Rex to the order whenever I am able to get to it. I haven’t been this excited about a game in a long time. I’m probably going to order some of these with the money from selling off all of my Formula De.

I should clarify a little bit though. I believe I’m a ‘light’ wargamer. I don’t mind a few pages of rules, but I’m not going to go through the 300 page field manual that ASL requires! And, I have no interest in using tweezers to move chits around a map the size of my dining room.

One barrier I have to wargaming though, is finding people for two player games. You’d think it should be easy, but we have a small game group currently. A lot of times on our game nights only three or four players show up (We need to work on some growth). And breaking off to play a two player game is hard to do. And on non game nights, I’ve got one friend who is a socialite and is busy most other nights, and the other friend just had a baby like six weeks ago. Sarah’s getting pretty close though. A couple more years now and she’ll be ready!!!

Oh well, Game night is tonight. It looks like we’ve got Pandemic on the Agenda. I might take Power Grid over there too.

The biggest offense was picking up a copy of Titan from Tanga. I can’t believe I did that. I’m not even that big a fan of the game. But it was like $30 bucks. Oh well, maybe I’ll give it a couple of plays and unload it at a flea market.

Most of the others were circumstances. I picked up a couple of titles at Goodwill, simply because they were insanely cheap. Hisss, Conspiracy, and Sorry Sliders are the main ones that come to mind.

As far as game orders, I can only think of one that I made, and that was for a copy of Glory to Rome, which should come back in to stock basically any day now. I’m about to order the historical versions of Battleground Fantasy Warfare and the Expansion. I kind of thought Arcane Legions might satisfy my historical want for a mini like wargame. But I think it has some flaws people are talking about. I’ve decided that Battleground is sufficiently tiny, and gets sufficiently good reviews for me to give it a shot.

Anyway, I digress. So in order to curb the recent trend, I decided to try to reign in my growth a little this week, and looked to cull some more stuff out of the collection. I’ve decided to finally let go of some oldies but goodies that I’ve been hanging on to.

I’m getting out of the Formula De business. The game just takes way to long for the amount of fun contained, and I’d much much rather play Snow Tails nearly every time, or even Turfmaster. So I just had to finally give up on it, especially since the tracks are worth so much. In an effort to speed this up, I’m sending my Spa Francorchamps, USA Track Pack 1, and USA Track Pack 2 to Troll and Toad. For these three Track sets, they have offered me $220 bucks, and I can’t keep them sitting on the shelf unplayed when they are worth that and somebody will get them that wants them. They only offered me $15 for the base game though, and I could get that at a Flea Market without going through Troll & Toad for them. Plus I really think I might be able to get $20 or so at a flea market anyway, since I have painted pewter cars and stuff in mine.

I also posted some old Martin Wallace Treefrog things on BGG, one has sold this week. My copy of Tinners’ Trail Signed & Numbered 1128 of 1500 has already sold. Hopefully I’ll get an offer on my signed and numbered copy of Steel Driver sometime soon as well.

I liked both of these games well enough, but can’t keep them around when I’d rather play Chicago Express over both of them, despite my love for Martin Wallace and his games and designs. I still can’t get rid of Perikles though, I haven’t gotten to try it yet, I need to get that one to the table to see if it makes the cut or not.

This album contains some incriminating photo evidence.

The other being of Adam and Tiffany’s Wedding this morning at the OU Club in Oxford, MS.

I had already posted these on facebook, but posted them here as well in case someone in them wanted to steal the pictures. They are much bigger on my blog than they are on Facebook.

I read the rules real quick, it’s interesting one of those double bluff type things that isn’t very deep or anything, but hey, it’s free.

Operation BP: ****Censored**** Plug Name not safe for my blog!

I thought it was interesting enough and appropriate to pass along.

• I will be removing our backyard koi pond. I know that I’ve said this in the past, but I really do think that I might be able to get to it this year. I’ll be working on it slowly over the span of a couple of weeks, but eventually by the time they get back, I think it will be gone. I need to look into buying some dirt to fill in the hole. Anyone around Oxford got some leads on dirt?
• I want to build some new boardgame shelves/tv shelf/entertainment center for the office. I’d kind of like to get the boardgames a little bit under control. I’ve done really good this year with purging and all, but my collection is really really tight right now, and I can’t find a whole lot more that I want to peel away from it at this time. I’ll look more critically at it in a different discussion, but I’d like to build some 16 inch deep shelves to put them in, I also want to build a 16 inch deep shelf for putting the Television, Xbox, DVD player, Bose Wave Radio, etc. in that lies between my two game shelves. I also want to increase the width of them a little bit as well. This collection pic is from July of last, year, but it gives you an idea of what I currently have if you’ve never seen it.
• I’d also kind of like to build an ‘emissary‘ type game table/breakfast table for our kitchen. I had so much fun building the table last year, I’d kind of like to do it again, but with a bit different of a project. Though I can’t decide between the shelves and the table. I may eventually do both this year, but I may not, there are other things that have to happen…
• I’d kind of like to build up my ‘workshop’ a little bit more too. I don’t have a decent air compressor, I can’t run a nailer or a sander or anything. I need to get an air compressor. There are some nice ones for good prices at Harbor Freight in Tupelo. 2 hp, 110 v 20 gallons. I think that should be powerful enough for the stuff I want to do with it. I also really need a good circular saw, and a compound mitre saw as well. Both of those things have to happen before either of the two upper things get done. I could borrow the saws, but the air compressor is nearly a must.

That should keep me busy till the wife and kids return for good toward the end of the summer. There are little things here or there that I need to do as well (killing those freaking azalea’s that keep popping back!!!!), but the koi pond removal is near the top.

Just a quick note to let you know the reasoning for my lack of updates. I have basically stopped using the web site for the last several weeks and only wanted to post in a limited fashion, because a couple of days before we went to Nashville, I was told by my web host that I needed to move the files and database to a different server. I took a backup of the web site at that time, and I didn’t want many changes to the backup and such until after it was done.

Well, it should be finished now, there may be something screwy here or there, but for the most part, everything is changed over just fine. I have a few more things I need to work on, but as of now, nearly full functionality should be good on here. And I’ll get back to fairly regular updates (as regular as they used to be anyway) to those of you that care.

What was it that made it so interesting. Well, let’s see.

Tennessee Game Days were held at the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville Tennessee. This is an amazing hotel, beautiful, and TGD was able to secure an unbelievable room rate for the convention. Those that booked early enough got a wonderful rate of about $79 a night, plus a resort fee, etc. They ended up being about $110 a night after all was said and done. However, this hotel had amazing amount of value for that amount of money.

It happens to be the largest hotel in America, (That is not a casino). TGD Was just a small part of the festivities and amenities available at the hotel. Because of this, my wife and family decided that they would come along with me.

So, I booked the family rate of the TGD Convention online and booked the room. TGD is very family friendly. The individual rate for three days pre registered was $40. The family rate, (adding my wife and two daughters) was only $50. It was a no brainer to bump up even if they didn’t want to play anything at TGD just in case. It would have been a no brainer for me at even $60, I might have thought about it for a few minutes if it was $70.

So we arrive in Nashville on Friday Morning and it is a beautiful day. We find free parking in the Opry Mills Parking lot and walk to our hotel on a short walkway which also just happened to used to be the Grizzly River Rampage ride at Opryland. It brought back a few memories back from when I was younger. It was quite interesting.

We check in at the TGD Registration Desk fairly early Friday Morning. Chat with some old friends I only see once a year or so, and get our badges. Olivia (5) and Sarah (10) are quite enthusiastic about the cool passport badges that they have…

Oh, yeah, so the theme of TGD is that it’s like a traveling theme. The badges are ‘passports’ and you can get stamps for playing certain games which gives you more chances to win from a quite generous supply of prizes from their sponsors.

Anyway, the kids love the theme, we sit around and chat for a bit with new and old friends.

Hotel Registration. Not wanting to wait to terribly long, and also wanting to explore the hotel which we were in awe of while looking around (It really is amazing.) We decided to head toward the front and see just how early we could check in.

So, after checking in, and wandering around an amazing hotel, we meandered back to the TGD Ballroom and started playing some games, Me and the kids played some Crokinole on the TGD Logo Crokinole Board. There is a local Woodworker making some amazing Crokinole Boards in Nashville, You may remember the Jupiter Board. There was also the TGD Logo board, and a Death Star which was quite amazing looking too.

After Crokinole, the wife and kids decided to check out the hotel swimming pool, while I stayed and played some games. Got into a game of Ghost Stories, where we were doing alright, but then all of a sudden about 4 cards before the Wu Feng came out, it all fell apart, and we started dying left and right. Finally succumbing to the ghost threat before we could make it to the Wu Feng.

I also played a game of In the Year of the Dragon, and Chinatown in fairly quick succession.

I played the only new to me game of the weekend (alright, maybe there was one other coming shortly, but not sure it counts) Finca.

I liked it a lot. Didn’t really see it coming, but the lightness and the quickness and ease of possibly being a nice family game and gateway quickly have put it on my want list. I’ll keep an eye out for that one and get it as soon as I can track a copy down, or make an order. I wanted my wife to try it out before the weekend was up, but unfortunately that didn’t happen.

I stuck around for the Friday night drawing playing a game of Loot, While we were playing my younger daughter was called out as a winner, unfortunately, she was already asleep and since you had to be present to win, I felt a little disappointed for her.

On Saturday I woke up pretty early to get my flea market stuff ready, and set up in the game room.

I set up for the flea market trying to get rid of some unplayed stuff in my collection, and did fairly well, striking up a few deals just to get some stuff out.

I browsed others, but I really am trying very hard to restrict my game purchases and did a very good job, I was tempted by several things, I finally ended up picking up an in shrink Quiddler for $2 and a copy of Neuroshima Hex, with the expansion, and a deftly prepared (by Verkisto) DIY Expansion as well for $35, but I still came out ahead in the flea market by about $40 bucks or so.

The most interesting item sold at the flea market was the cursed copy of Fact or Crap, which was sold for -$2 (Yes, that’s a negative two dollars)

My family came in sometime during the flea market while I was manning my area and started playing some games over in the corner. I walked over finally when I gave up on the last few stragglers and me and the family headed out to Dinner and rode the shuttle bus over to the Opryland Mall (we would have walked, but it was pouring down rain all day Saturday.)

Walked around Opry Mills for a good while, and had a nice time, but made it back in time to play a few games with the kids before our scheduled matches of the Crokinole Tournament.

I played a game of Pickomino, A couple of games of Crokinole, and a game of Hula Hippos with the Family and some others that had kids there as well. Hula Hippos I guess was the other, new to me game of the weekend.

Then we set up for our rounds of the Crokinole Tournament. My wife and daughter made it through to the second round of doubles, I was eliminated in the first round in singles, but regai and I managed to make it to the third round in doubles.

I let my kids stay up during this, because I felt bad about Olivia missing her chance to ‘win’ from the prize table. So I took the kids and wife over to the prize table to discuss strategy. Talked about the five games we really wanted off the Saturday table, (Warlords of Europe, Mystery Express, Genoa, a new Tigris & Euphrates, and something else, can’t remember) and Sarah (My older daughter) said if she won she was going to pick up the copy of 7 ate 9 first.

Wouldn’t you know it, she won and took the copy of 7 ate 9 that she wanted, I don’t know what was left when she went up there, but I was happy for her. I actually read the rules, it looks fun, I’m sure it will get a lot of good play in our family!

Went to bed shortly afterwards on Saturday Night.

Woke up early Sunday morning and walked down to go to the Take it Easy Tournament, My favorite time of the TGD Weekend. Unfortunately, I didn’t do so hot when the inept caller never called the numbers he should have, and instead kept calling stuff that kept messing up my board even more.

Finished with a 76.

After that, picked up my games and was going to pack up the car and get them out so It would be easier to check out and come back to play games that afternoon. Went to go out in the pouring rain to get my car out of the Opry Mills parking lot (It was still raining!!!) When I noticed the Mills parking lot was a lake, I decided hmm, maybe it’s not such a good idea to stay here after all. I was listening to the radio, and according to it, I40 was still open, so I got the car around and took it to the hotel lobby and we loaded it up. Deciding to get out instead of staying around. I left kind of suddenly, but tried to go say bye to people real quick before I left. The room was pretty sparse though.

Anyway, Started going west on I40, got directed by officers through standing water on I40 at Exit 201, and then it was clear, for two more miles, where it was gridlock somewhere near Exit 199.

http://www.newschannel5.com/Global/category.asp?C=125220&aut…=

We finally after a couple of hours, got off at 199, and were stuck in the Bellvue area of nashville for several hours trying various little roads going west seeing if we could find a way home. Finally, after giving up and deciding to sleep in the car in a parking lot of a Target Store, we went into the store to kill time and met a couple saying they were trying to get to St. Louis, but couldn’t get West or North, but told us I65 south was open. So we got back in our car and drove around trying to make it that way without using I40. Although we got through some roads which were at or very near flooding, we never got stuck and finally found a way to hit I65 fairly far south of Nashville and managed to get home via Birmingham and Tupelo.

It took a lot longer than we expected, but I’m glad we made it out safely. I hope that everyone else at TGD 2010 is able to get home safely too!

I was at work on Wednesday 4/14, and I had just finished my weekly MIS Meeting where we update on projects I’m working on, as well as the direction I should be heading over the next little bit, etc. Just to make sure things are on track.

So I go back and sit at my desk and bring up some code I’m working on for Production, and I hear what sounds like a drill above my head. That’s strange, what is DS working on up there…

So I decide to take a look, after getting up from my desk and heading onto the floor toward the stairs to the attic, I notice the lights are off. Also interesting, that means the sound was something else. I head up the stairs and open the door to the attic to see that the fan sitting next to my network switches which pushes the air off of them so they don’t overheat is ablaze.

I was a little shocked, and begin looking around for a fire extinguisher, but I don’t find one (Turns out we don’t keep one upstairs which has already changed) so I head down in and open the office door and tell everyone there is a fire. Turn around and head back upstairs with a couple of others to show them, and TM heads off to grab an extinguisher. As he’s running up the stairs, I met him halfway, grabbed the extinguisher, and ran toward the fan which is now completely engulfed in flames, and start to douse it with a couple of quick bursts.

Flames go out immediately, Baking soda is all over the upstairs attic, but the fire is out. There was a sprinkler just above the fan, which was probably a few seconds away from triggering, but if it had, it would have been a mess as it would likely have doused my servers and a lot of the electronics which exist just below it.

Turns out what was the drill sound was the motor on the fan burning out, so I was extremely lucky to hear it, and it saves me a lot of time and our company a lot of money over the next couple of weeks had the sprinklers have triggered.

The rest of the day, after the fire dept came and inspected the situation and cleared us for reentry, consisted of diagnosing network connections and stuff (Some cables had unplugged from the switch as we were moving it around and stuff, and it was full of baking soda from the fire extinguisher as well, which I had to blow out and stuff, but everything still works and we got everyone re-connected finally.)

Some other notes which complicated things. We had tested the sprinkler systems just that morning (at 11:30), however, we had forgotten to warn the plant, (though we did warn the security company), so when the alarm sounded the plant just sat there instead of doing like they are supposed to do. Because of the false alarm though, when we had the real fire incident that day, at first when I opened the office door and told them we had a fire, nobody really moved. But they quickly bolted into gear when they saw I was serious.

All in all it was a good thing, and more good things happened than bad things, but it was a wake up call, and though we have disaster recovery contingencies, we can point to a real situation now and evaluate where we would be had it been a worst case scenario.

Enjoy.

It is absolutely 100% the perfect device for what I use it for. I don’t think it’s perfect of course, but it doesn’t matter. It is seriously awesome for what I need.

I purchased this device to replace a Macbook which was going on 4 years old. I kept the Macbook in my bedroom, and would use it sparingly at night before bed to check email, read facebook, and in general, goof off.

Well, this does all of that. And actually does it even a little better than my Macbook. One of the things I always wanted to do, was to watch movies and stuff that I had on my desktop computer in iTunes. Macbook never really could do that because it never registered the play. iPad syncs with iTunes, and now when I watch on there, next time it syncs with the desktop registers the play. If I listen to Music or Podcasts on my iPad, it registers those plays as well. This is important to me because I use a lot of Smart Playlists that keep track of these things to figure out what to put on my devices.

It’s lighter than my Macbook was. So it will be great on trips. On Trips 99% of my use was email, facebook, twitter, light web surfing. And you know what else. BATTERY LIFE IS AMAZING! Really Really good. It claims 10 hours for uninterrupted video. Well, under normal use, you can probably count on more like 12 hours. I ran it out by doing stuff solid for two days before it finally shut off.

If I want to do a little work, the on screen keyboard is a little blah, when you turn it sideways, the keyboard is a little small still for my hands. That coupled with the fact that I am a touch typist makes it a little difficult to use as I have to hover my hands over instead of resting my fingers on the display. But they fixed all that. iPad will sync with a bluetooth keyboard. So Bam. I’ll just keep one in the bedroom and take it on trips etc. just in case.

I’ve goofed off with a few of the games. Some of them are better on iPad. Some are a little worse. the bigger screen is nice, but sometimes with having to touch the screen, you obscure the graphics and can’t see what’s going on sometimes. It’s really not that big a deal when the games are well written.

One of the coolest uses was the ‘Small World‘ game. It’s a port of Days of Wonder’s boardgame of the same name. It works awesome on the iPad, and though it’s two player only. Playing a boardgame without any bits is pretty neat, especially when it’s doing all the calculations and everything for you.

Really Really great little device they’ve got here. Oh, and Sarah loves her ‘new’ macbook as well!

* This post was completely written on my iPad!!!

It was just too good not to share.

This shows the current (as of this morning 3/29/2010) official web pages for the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Looking at the two pages, which party do you think has more intelligence and class. And which party do you think respects its readers?

As Octavian put it. “It looks like they are writing for different audiences.” I put it to you: Which audience would you trust running the country?

I walked in on Val while she was watching TV. It was some girl screaming into the microphone. I asked her what she was watching.

Val: American Idol

Me: Well, she needs to get voted off then.

Val: She’s the special guest they asked to come sing. She’s already famous.

Me: Oh.

Maybe I should just stick with listening to NPR.