Tim’s Snarking Post

One of the topics that I could talk about but is rapidly turning into “old news” is the existence of the Jonathan Coulton concert DVD called Best. Concert. Ever. This is a concert recording of a show he did in San Francisco (with Paul & Storm) back in February 2008. I was aware it was coming out from Coulton’s Twitter or RSS feed but I’d seen the show live so I wasn’t in a major hurry or anything. Then shortly after it came out I got an email from a friend saying that Karin and I showed up in the audience “several times”. So thus reminded I ordered the disc.

First off, I recommend the disc naturally. You get an immediate link to download the music tracks and then a few days later you get the DVD/CD combo set. To be honest I haven’t taken the CD out - I mean I had the audio files already, but the music tracks are worth having. They may represent things you already had - but it does have the Zen Drum version of Mr. FancyPants which I’ve been wanting well … ever since I saw this show in back in February 2008. And the DVD is a lot of fun to watch. I haven’t listened to the commentary track yet, but Karin said it was funny.

I did watch the regular concert part but I watched it from an unusual perspective: I wanted to know if it would be unhealthy to play the “Every time we see Tim or Karin on-screen we take a drink” drinking game. Now I should note I was not playing said game, I was just checking. For the first third or so I thought “man, people are crazy. I haven’t seen either of us at all”, then there were some shots. And some more shots. Then I saw a shot from the left wings and I remembered “Oh that’s right, that one camera guy really liked that angle and parked over there quite a bit.” We quickly went from “this would be a sucky drinking game” to “Well, that song would have been a bit much to be doing to shots” to “No, this would not be a shot-drinking game” to “Oh no, you wouldn’t even want to play this game with a mild beer”. In short, we turn up a lot in this video. No idea why especially, I suppose just my magnetic personality and charisma carries through ….

So if you want to know what I was up to about a year and a half ago, you could do worse than to watch this concert DVD. Which is awesome in its own right, even without the bits featuring me or Karin. You should really go see Coulton live, but this DVD is a good substitute if that’s all you can manage.

Here’s a quick tip for people who are upgrading their iPhone: when you restore from backup it doesn’t restore your Keychain so you need to re-enter all of your passwords.

You may say “Well, duh Tim! Everyone figures that out fairly quickly!” And yes, you probably put your email and your WiFi passwords back in fairly quickly. If you use MobileMe though, it might not occur to you to go re-enter that password. If you don’t then the the iPhone just silently stops syncing. Eventually this will cause you a problem if you think that entering appointments on your phone puts them on your main calendars.

Once you get into the proper screen you’ll see that the Password field says “Required” instead of a series of dots, but Calendar or Contacts will NEVER say “Hey, you know we haven’t been able to sync for the last week.”

Blog posts! We should have some blog posts! I hear the desperate wheeze of the iron lung that is keeping this sucker running, so maybe I should make some content!

I think there’s been so much recently that I may need to declare “blog bankruptcy”. You know when you read those stories about people just throwing away all their unread email and sending out a big “Sorry, please try again” email to the people they care about? I feel that way about blog topics.

Did I ever discuss redoing my desk layout? I don’t think I did. I got rid of the two dead soldier tower computers sitting under my desk and much more importantly got all of the cables off the floor. I mounted a pair of powerstrips under the desk and cable tied all of the wires along the frame of the desk itself. Now the only computer items that touch the floor are the Mac Pro itself and the UPS (oh, and the subwoofer for the speakers). It looks a lot better and I think the improved airflow means the computer is running better. It also means there’s no rat’s nest of cables that can’t be cleaned and thus attracts big tumbleweeds of cat hair. I installed a keyboard drawer so I can have almost the entire expanse of desk free for materials, and I got a laptop stand so my laptop screen can sit up at the height of my monitors. Lastly I ran a LED “light rope” along the underside of my windowsill so at night I can have a bias light behind the monitors for reduced eyestrain.

Did I just start off by saying “here’s a topic I’m not going to blog about” and then blog it? I think I may have.

Well, since we’re here, if you’re a Mac user and you have both a laptop and desktop machine you may want to look into a piece of software called Teleport. What it does is it lets you move your mouse to the edge of a screen and then onto another computer. While your mouse is away the keyboard controls goes with it. So I have my laptop on the stand to the left of my monitors and I can just sweep the mouse across all three displays. I can now use the laptop to VPN into another machine, or run tail -f commands or whatever, while I use the main screens for work. It’s pretty slick. I also tend to leave email running on my laptop which means I can look at mails on that screen while I’m looking at code maximized on my main displays.

Life continues to be a bit hectic, so blog posts continue to be sparse. A lot has happened lately and I suppose I could blather on quite a bit about WWDC or MaxFunCon, and i got a iPhone 3GS yesterday so that could merit some discussion. (I’ve been running the 3.0 software for about a week and a half now - I installed the GM partway through WWDC.) But instead I’ll talk about something else altogether different!

Unheralded by me after all my ranting and complaining we really did shut off analog NTSC broadcasts on June 12th. I wasn’t even in town when it happened. So far so good, but then something not-so-good happened. ABC (KGO-7 out of San Francisco) for some crazy reason decided to move their digital off whatever good UHF frequency they had back to VHF 7. Which can’t quite reach my rooftop antenna. And SHAZAM! ABC disappeared from our digital lineup. The last episode of Pushing Daisies was unwatchable.

Now in all fairness my antenna is supposed to be UHF-only, although it pulls in some VHF frequencies. NBC 11 from San Jose broadcasts in VHF, but they are so close they come in anyway, even though the antenna is directional and pointed away from them. But I had forgotten that KGO was going to do this so I was caught off guard when they disappeared. Now I could no doubt buy a VHF antenna, get somebody to go up there and put the antenna on the mast and splice the two signals and so forth. End result though is that I’d probably be paying several hundred dollars in order go get a single channel. It just doesn’t make economic sense, even if I do have to buy the last season of Lost from iTunes. (That’s what I did for the last episode of Pushing Daisies.)

There’s some talk about KGO being on their “Auxilliary Antenna” for another month and then something ELSE going on until October. As I understand it Sutro Tower (where all the SF stations broadcast from) is a crazy hodgepodge of temporary stuff while they were broadcasting both analog and digital and I think now they are taking all of the analog “hacks” down. We almost get KGO now, so if the main antenna does something better then maybe it will work once the maintenance finishes. Still I thought it was humorous that the HD reception got worse as soon as they shut down analog broadcasting. How did that help again?

Oh look, Microsoft decided to spam me (again)!

Know what you don’t see there? You don’t see an unsubscribe link! (See this post if you want to see me complaining about the same goddamn thing last September or here’s where I explain why I ever even touched the Zune software in the first place.)

So yeah, I reported it as spam to Google. Fucking Microsoft sends emails I don’t want about a service I don’t use and I can’t unsubscribe? That’s spam. By any definition.

And you know what? Ever time I see the damn spam I’ll blog it. I’m doing my little part to make sure Google hears that if you ever download Zune you get emails about it for life, even if you were tricked into downloading the software under false pretenses.

Microsoft can add all of the “HD” you want to their media player, but as long as they are spamming about Zune I wouldn’t even think about dealing with the damn thing. I get email from Apple about iTunes as well, but at least that has an unsubscribe option, like a modern, responsible company.

I’ve launched onto a busy week. I’m at Apple’s WorldWide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) right now and I’ll be at it all week. Then Friday as soon as Karin finishes her last day of school we’re off to the airport to rush to MaxFunCon for the weekend.

I have no idea what that means for posting. This is my first WWDC so I’m not sure how busy I’ll be. Obviously I’ve got a laptop so if there’s downtime I may post but no promises.

I’m a little late to mention this but Plants Vs. Zombies is a seriously good gaming value at $20. The game is a lot of fun and has quite a variety of game modes. I’m not sure what all it’s available on - I know there’s a Mac version (Intel only), and I’m reasonably certain the is a PC version as well. There’s also a free demo so if you have any interest in a solid little game on the computer of your choice you should definitely hit that link and check it out.

Unless it the link doesn’t work where you live of course, in which case suck it up!

Does anybody use the RSS “Combo” feed? It’s supposed to provide the fulltext of the articles with the comments and then if somebody posts a new comment the article is marked as “new” again. It’s never worked that well and it makes upgrading WordPress more janky than it should be.

I’m seriously considering killing the combo feed so if you like it I’d advise speaking up soon.

Brother-in-law-to-the-blog commenter Whiskey asks what I thought of the BSG series finale. It’s a fair question, BSG is probably one of the more discussed shows here on the Snarking Post.

Well … I still think Battlestar Galactica represents one of the best 1.5 seasons of television out there. Unfortunately they followed that with another 2.5 seasons of crap. The series finale did nothing to change that opinion and in fact reinforces it. I thought the finale was jumbled, unsatisfying, and they clearly punted on a lot of key issues. We’ve spent an entire “season” (spread across two full years) on what the hell is going on with Starbuck and the final answer is just “she’s an angel. POOF! Wait! Look over here! Dancing robots!” They find Earth. Again. But this Earth isn’t all frakked up! Wait what again? It’s OUR Earth! They destroy all their technology! They are the ancestors of modern humanity! I guess they destroyed all their oral history as well! That way we can not learn anything!

Just why do the Cylons keep insisting this has happened before and will happen again. Clearly it didn’t, not in this way with a Cylon/human war and genocide and “angels” and whatnot. Was there any point to Baltar’s religious conversion? Any point to the conflict between the human polytheism and the Cylon monotheism? WHY DOES NOTHING HAVE SQUARE CORNERS?

In short, the finale made no fucking sense. Not only that it failed to close out many of the series’ long-running questions. At the end of the day it turns out that BSG was a big shaggy dog story. Swell. Can I have the last “four seasons” of television watching back now?

I don’t have any plans to watch Caprica anytime soon, I’ll tell you that much.

Yeah I really did post “Hey the blog’s back” and then not post for a week. Sorry ’bout that. In my defense I ended up being busy preparing to go to … KublaCon.

I’ve been to GenCon once, back when I was fresh back to the States from Germany and stuck in New Jersey for a year, but the gaming convention bug didn’t really stick with me in any meaningful way. But lately I’ve been getting the itch to play D & D Fourth Edition instead of running the game (as a DM). I talked Blake into going with me to check out the “Game Day” event that Wizards had when Players Handbook 2 released back in March and while that had the stereotypical gaming collective problems it was still fun. Monster Manual 2 came out last week and there was Wizards-sponsored event for that on Saturday. I was trying to talk my players into attending that when Cyrus mentioned he was going to be at KublaCon. So I decided to take a flyer on it and go to KublaCon, make a RPGA Living Forgotten Realms character, and generally check out the scene.

The RPGA stuff is pretty fun overall. Basically there are some rules about how you get magic items and managing character advancement and then a whole set of adventure that you can sort of hop around from convention to convention. It strikes me as a little tough to follow in that there are stories, but each adventure is supposed to be roughly a third of a level and most of the storylines have the first adventure for character levels 1-3 and then the second adventure is for character levels 4-7. In other words I played in a session last Friday (East 1-1), and I need to play in something like eleven to twelve other adventures before I can play East 1-2 and revisit that storyline. The odds of me remembering much about it are pretty slim by then. I played three times over the weekend and got my character (a gnome sorcerer using cosmic magic) up to level 2, as well as acquiring a spiffy +2 weapon that he can’t use until he reaches level 3. It was enough fun that I’ll probably try to play more in the future.

I also got to play several new-to-me boardgames over the weekend. I played EuroRails, which is one of the classic Rails series but I had never played any of them before. I liked EuroRails enough but I think the pacing of it is somewhat off. It was really slow starting (and we were using “expedited” rules to make it play quicker) and it seemed to suffer pretty badly from a “once you have fallen behind you just fall further behind” mechanic. I think it’s probably one of those things where if I had experienced it back in 1990 when it was released it would have blown my mind, but nearly twenty (!) years later it suffers a bit in comparison to state of the art. I’d certainly play it again or one of the other games with the same basic rules, but I don’t see jonesing for a copy myself.

I taught Agricola to Cyrus and some of his friends on Sunday night and we played that twice (using the beginner rules without Minor Improvements or Occupations). Agricola is a really good game, I think it deserves knocking Puerto Rico out of the #1 spot on BoardGameGeek, as it is a very similar game but doesn’t bog down in the end the way Puerto Rico does and it has a lot more variation/customization to it.

Lastly I checked out Dominion and Small World, both of which are relatively recent releases. Dominion really shot up the charts last year after it was released (it currently sits at #6 on the Geek), but I had never really understand how it plays. The idea is that each player has a deck of cards and every turn you buy new cards to put in your deck, so you’re simultaneously using the deck to draw a hand of cards to play in order to build the deck. Basically you build up an economic engine (in your deck of cards) and use that engine to generate more and more wealth (represented by cards in your deck) until you can buy victory points (which are also cards in your deck). It’s a really elegant design and there’s a lot of subtle interactions between the cards. If the dealer room had still been open when I finished playing Dominion I totally would have bought a copy and made Cyrus play it later that evening.

Small World wasn’t as good, but it was a fun little game, it had decent depth while not being overly complex and it played quickly. Small World is apparently some sort of redesign/retheme of Vinci, which I didn’t know because I had never played it. There’s a list of creature races available that are matched up randomly with a “profession”. Each race has some sort of bonus power, and the profession confers some additional benefit as well. Each player purchases a race and then gets a certain number of tokens which they use to conquer territory. Once you’ve expanded that empire as far as you can (you don’t get more units after the initial race purchase) you can put your race “in decline” which means they continue to hold their terrain and you get points for that but you can’t move them around or anything and they are weakened such that somebody will soon expand into their territory. In the game I played there were nine turns (it might change for other numbers of players? I’m not sure) and it takes an entire turn to put a race into decline so that’s a major strategic decision when is best to switch horses.

I liked both games, enough so that I ordered both of them from Funagain. Dominion plays two to four players and Small World plays two to five and I think Karin will like both games. Games that play well for two players and Karin would like are the gold standard game category for me, as we can play them without having to arrange some sort of larger social gathering.

Anyway, KublaCon was fun. I came home a little tired (we stayed up until after 3 AM on Saturday night/Sunday morning and that’s a bit much for my old bones these days), but I guess that’s probably a good thing for a convention. I would seriously consider going back next year.