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Yesterday, Maggie and I went to the animal shelter to foster an dog. We expected to just meet her and have an interview, but we ended up taking her anyway. Her name is Kelly and she's a four-year old beagle. She was recently hit by a car and her former owners signed her over to the shelter rather than pay the medical bills.
Despite her broken leg, Kelly is very active. She managed to pee on our carpet in five places last night while we weren't watching. Today, she's been much better behaved, so I expect (hope) that it was just nerves.
We're used to larger dogs, but there are certain advantages to the beagle size. Our backyard has a short fence, so a larger dog would be able to jump it easily. Kelly is also small enough that she's easy to carry (which we've had to do a couple of times because of her leg) and she's not overwhelming when sitting on your lap.
They expect that she'll be healed and ready for adoption by the time we leave for Christmas, so the timing should work out well.
We'll just have to see if we're ready to give her up at that point. |
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Maggie and I closed on the house today, which is a bit crazy. I might have more to say now, since not only will I have house stuff to talk about but for once I'm working on a project that isn't totally secret! Well, not anymore, anyway.
However, today I am posting for very practical reasons. Maggie finished putting our invitations together, so we're going to start sending them out to people ASAP. That means I need your latest contact info if I don't already have it (if you got your save the date card in the mail, you should be good). Drop me a line at will at greecouple.com and I'll make sure you get it!
Congratulations to all the other couples who've gotten married recently (or are about to get married)! I hope the after-wedding is more fun than planning the wedding. :) |
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Our latest game is now out in the wild, and you all should play M.I.L.O.. It's in the Jay is Games design competition (the theme was UPGRADE), so you'll see a little "vote for this game" link underneath the game (on the right, next to the screenshot). You should play it and (hopefully) vote for it. It does require that you donate at least $1 via Paypal (to minimize ballot stuffing), but that money goes directly to the authors of the game (that's us!), which is very cool.
While you're there, you should check out some of the other games in the competition too. While obviously not as awesome as M.I.L.O., there are some good ones.
Let me know what you think! Kudos to anyone who beats all 15 levels! |
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Okay, so I'm actually a couple of days late on this, but I've been sick.
It's still relevant, though. The game that we wrote for the fourth JayisGames (JiG) competition is a finalist! This was actually the first time that they had so many entrants that they had to winnow them down before the audience voting. This means that there are two dozen great games just waiting for some love.
The audience voting is pretty interesting. Basically, you use Paypal to give money to JiG and tell Jay which games you're voting for (and how much of your money goes to each). You have to donate at least a dollar to vote and you can't vote more than once for a game, no matter how much money you donate. All of the money you donate, though, is given directly to the games you voted for! It's a great way to support a game that you enjoy.
I encourage you to take a moment and vote for your favorites, because there are a lot of good games in there. Entropic Space is the very last on the list, so it's right on the way to the submit button once you're ready. :)
Enjoy the games and help support indie game design! |
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Sushi!
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Oct. 13th, 2007 @ 04:39 pm
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It's actually been a couple of weeks since we made the sushi, but I've been too busy to get my pictures up (mostly with Entropic Space). But with a burst energy probably provided by sleeping in and then taking a nap, I have posted a few of my favorite sushi pictures for all to enjoy!
Basically, it was lots of fun and incredibly good. We had enough rice to make four rolls and we ended up eating three. I ate the fourth the next day and it was still great cold. We played around with ingredients a little, but our favorites were sweet omelette (thanks, Amy!) with peas and fried sweet potato. Less popular ingredients were the red bell pepper (we didn't cook them, so they overpowered everything else) and the daikon radish (same deal, although earthy instead of spicy).
Thanks for your suggestions! We've got the materials, so we'll probably make sushi again. And this time, we'll start earlier. You might be able to tell in the pictures that the rice is a little sticky and wet. That's because we took it off the heat early and, even worse, didn't let it cool 100% before eating.
Overall, though, definitely a successful culinary experiment. |
| » Why I enjoyed Rails Rumble, but won't be doing it next year |
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For those who don't know, Rails Rumble was a 48-hour programming contest where teams of 1-4 built and deployed web applications using Ruby on Rails. It's the new version of last year's Rails Day, which was 24-hours but didn't require deployment. Rails Day 2006 had some hiccups as well as some serious judging problems (it took almost 4 months for juding to finish). However, Rory and I enjoyed Rails Day, so we decided to try Rails Rumble.
Here's what I liked about them, and why I generally enjoyed them both:
1. Working in groups is fun
2. It's cool to see what other people can do
3. It really stretches your programming muscles to do everything so fast
4. It doesn't have to be perfect, so it's easier to experiment
And here's why I won't be participating in 2008. These require a little more explanation.
1. It was poorly organized
The organizers only expected about 50 teams, even though 150 teams signed up for Rails Day last year (170 signed up this year), which led to slow-downs. Also, some things (like the voting changes) were only mentioned on IRC, making it difficult to know what was going on. They were also late to start the initial signup and voting, although those weren't big problems
2. 48 hours is too long
Working so hard for an entire weekend meant I was pretty worthless on Monday. I also had to bail on some other commitments (partly because the contest was announced late; see above). The only reason I've heard to keep it 48 hours is to keep deployment in the contest. Deployment doesn't seem like it should be a big part of the contest. Nobody had an application that just didn't run, so it wasn't a differentiator. The organizers have said that they think it's important to show people that Rails can be deployed easily, but the contest doesn't really address that (since we were given much nicer hosting than most people who have trouble deploying Rails).
3. The judging system was poor
Last year, voting was done by a set of judges who also looked at the code. This year, people could sign up to become judges and then rank applications on a 1-5 scale in four categories. Basically, that just makes it a popularity contest. After voting was done, the organizers decided to toss out anyone who voted all 5s on a single application (which was a poorly thought-out and communicated decision; see above) to address this. Of course, that doesn't stop people from voting all 5s on one app and all 1s for the rest. A better system would have pre-defined judges or use the Jay is Games system where casting a vote requires a donation towards that application. However, the organizers don't seem to feel that voting was a problem, so they probably won't change it significantly.
4. The rules reward "useful" applications, which stifles creativity
Almost all of the winning applications are just copies of existing applications (although well-done). In fact, the winning application is a recipe site, which is a common tutorial topic for Rails (some of you may remember the Kitchen Knight, which was my own take on it). I'd much rather see some crazy applications than yet another checkbook application, but that's not what the scoring system rewards.
Overall, congratulations to everyone who entered and good luck to the organizers next year! Just don't expect to see me there.
Oct. 2nd, 2007 @ 06:53 pm
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| » Baby sushi |
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I have a problem and I think you folks can help. Friday evening, Maggie took me to the SLT business meeting/dinner/silent auction. The food was very good, as were the speakers, and I got to see two different bald eagles! They're really, really big. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera (after all, what sort of pictures could there be at a dinner...).
Maggie and I have been talking about making sushi for a while. I almost got one of those hobby books on sushi, but it seemed overkill to get a booklet AND a DVD on making sushi. It seemed like a sign when, down at the end of the tables, there was a sushi kit up for bid. I ended up winning it, so we have all the basic making of sushi (plus, for some reason, a risotto spoon).
Here's the problem. I don't have much experience with sushi, so I need to know what your favorite fillings are. We figure we can make about 6 rolls. So far, we have some Japanese radish, some normal radish, and carrots. Surely there must be more delicious things that go into sushi.
I'd prefer vegetarian ideas, but if all of you sushi fans out there know of something incredible, by all means share it with the world (and by world, I mean my LJ)!
( What does sushi look like before it's sushi? )
Sep. 23rd, 2007 @ 02:23 pm
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| » Rails Rumble voting begins! |
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So now is the time to register and then vote for us!
This goes double for those of you who are currently beating me in Dungeons & Day Traders.
Sep. 14th, 2007 @ 09:48 am
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| » RailsRumble (the coherent version) |
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Now that I've had time to 1) sleep and 2) detox, I think I can talk a little more coherently about the RailsRumble experience.
( The RailsRumble experience )
Sep. 11th, 2007 @ 05:36 pm
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| » It's... it's... done? |
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And with that, Rails Rumble 2007 comes to a close.
Except that it doesn't! In fact, there will be judging starting Wednesday and running for a couple of days.
So you should check out our team profile, play some Dungeons & Day Traders and then vote for us! Or someone else, I guess, but D&DT is obviously the best. It has a duck!
Sep. 10th, 2007 @ 01:41 am
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| » Half done (or half undone?) |
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It's starting to look mighty good. Last year, this was the point of no return. Once that clock stuck 12, you'd better hope that everything was in SVN. This year, there's another whole 24 hours to do stuff in!
Which is good, because it means I can sleep a little. We're starting to make silly mistakes, including the dumbest one I'd ever seen:
# calculate a player's net worth
def net_worth
worth = self.cash
worth += self.stock_value
return self.cash
end
See the problem there? Oy.
Earlier, we managed to convince ourselves that we'd borked Rails somehow. None of our flash messages were showing up in the one place we were using them, which must mean that something is terribly wrong!
Or, it means that someone (not me this time!) forgot to tell the form where to submit, so it was just reloading the page it was on...
Sep. 8th, 2007 @ 11:57 pm
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| » T plus 10.5 |
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We've all gotten a little sleep, so things are progressing once again. Rory didn't even get started until 2:30 because he was out at a party. Hardcore.
Nathan has moved from validation on models to a functioning controller, so pretty soon he'll have the whole Model-View-Controller thing down. He's also been doing Test-Driven-Development (code to test ratio of 1:1.2), so you can see that our standards are high even though we only have 48 hours.
Sep. 8th, 2007 @ 10:28 am
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| » It begins |
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T-minus one hour.
As with last year, Rory will be joining me. Team Bee is also pleased to have a new member of the team who is, in fact, new to Rails as well. That's right, this will be his first real experience with Rails. Sink or swim, I always say.
Update: he is now reading my Programming Ruby book and occasionally commenting, "Whoa, cool."
Sep. 7th, 2007 @ 11:11 pm
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| » Sweet home carolina |
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And off to NC!
Sep. 1st, 2007 @ 07:35 am
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| » (No Subject) |
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So, GenCon. We got the cheaper (unadvertised) Yu-Gi-Oh passes and pretended we knew anything about the game. My entire knowledge of the game comes from Yu-Gi-Oh abridged, so it's a good thing nobody really cared. With the Yu-Gi-Oh passes, we couldn't participate in non-Yugi events (and we didn't get a swag bag) but it did get us to the expo hall.
And what an expo hall! I called Maggie at about 11:30 feeling totally overwhelmed, since we'd been there for almost two hours and hadn't gotten past the first three columns. We split up after that and things went faster (and I got a sense of where everything was), but it was still an all-day affair.
There were a couple of video games of interest. Starcraft 2 was there and looking basically like a pretty Starcraft (why mess with what works?). Eye of Judgement looks awesome. Augmented reality, here we come! Too bad it requires $600 of hardware to play. The Everquest stuff didn't interest me much, but they had one of the programmers there playing and explaining some of the little tricks they use to make it seem more dynamic, which was neat. For example, they have some flying bird monsters that swoop in when you trigger an event. A lot of them are just textures treated as a particle and created by some random objects on the beach to make it look crazier than it actually is.
Apart from that, it was basically wandering around looking at things, collecting swag, and trying out games. Ian and I played Warlords for a while. It was interesting, but I'm not sure it has enough depth to entertain me for very long. We'll try playing again one of these days and see, since we both got a bunch of cards for it.
I grabbed a copy of Dungeoneer from Atlas Games. Unfortunately, half of it was mis-cut and unplayable. I emailed them about it and they said they'd send a replacement but that means I haven't had a chance to try it out yet.
Adam and I played 1/3 of a game of Conquest of Pangea. I was looking for something that Maggie would enjoy playing with me, so I picked it up, along with the expansion. It plays a bit like Risk, although with no dice-rolling. Each player is trying to get their species to dominate Pangea before all of the continents split apart. Every game is different because resources are placed randomly and the continents drift in a different order every time. When Maggie and I played, it was remarkably even throughout, but it would be better with 3 or 4 players. The BoardGameGeek folks tend to criticize it for randomness, but that really only seems to be a problem in the 2-person game. In a larger game, players will tend to target the leader so it acts to even the playing field. In a 2-player game, I can see how it might let one player run away with it pretty quickly if they get just the right cards.
In other news, Rails Day has become two days this year as Rails Rumble! Of course, you also have to deploy your app, so that's not totally unreasonable. Rory and I are back as Team Bee, along with newcomer (to Rails as well as Rails Day) Nathan. I hope you'll cheer us on Sept. 8-9! Our application will be the one called Dungeons & Day Traders, so you know it'll be good.
Aug. 28th, 2007 @ 02:36 pm
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| » Feelin' fine |
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I'm working home alone today for the first time in a while. There continue to be distractions, of course (isn't that hwaet the Internat is for?), but it's going pretty well.
One of the things on my to-do list is to start updating my LJ again, so here we go!
Maggie and I are in our new place, now with furniture! They were very cheap for furniture and quite nice. They have already supported us for a movie and a disc of Avatar.
We don't have cable (Ian and Nathan have cable Internet next door and are sharing the wireless through my router), so we're thinking about getting Netflix. The peer pressure is enormous! :)
As I've been unpacking my books, I've divided them into "keep", "sell", and "I don't remember" piles. Following Rob's lead, I've listed the "sell" books on Amazon through their Marketplace. Since I listed late Tuesday, I've sold three books out of maybe fifteen. I shipped them out today and made a little bit of money. The closer mailing place (Pakmail) is about 75% more expensive than the USPS, though, so I'll probably make the trek out to the post office if any more sell.
On the business side, we've (mostly) finished our major contract and started in on a smaller one. We've also been pushing forward on our own stuff (starting with the website), so hopefully we'll have a much better site soon and have actual new content not far after.
This weekend, a bunch of us are heading up to Indy for GenCon, so expect to hear some game thoughts in a couple of days!
Aug. 16th, 2007 @ 02:47 pm
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| » Two observations |
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1) The Simpsons Movie is perfectly cromulent. In fact, perhaps even better than that.
2) The only thing worse than moving is moving in the rain. Bah!
Jul. 27th, 2007 @ 07:13 pm
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| » How many fiscal LJ posts before they call him a man? |
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[Note: this is probably of little interest others, so feel free to skim or imagine giants and dragons as you read]
We're moving to a new place at the end of the month, which is great. It's just down the street, but it's a duplex, which means that Maggie and I can live together and we'll be able to work in the garage. As with any move, this involves a certain amount of cleaning up and sorting things. It also means a new budget, since rent and utilities will be different (plus, I assume that living with Maggie will be different than living with two guys). By coincidence (or fate?), my cell phone contract also ended this month.
( The whole sordid story )
So anyway, long story short, I have a new phone, an old phone number, and a bunch of pre-paid minutes. I'd also like to take a moment to appreciate T-Mobile's service. I talked to over half a dozen people, each of whom was helpful, courteous, and quick. And only one of them had any type of accent at all, and he was very understandable. Kudos, T-Mobile, especially since you're the only company currently serving the needs of we few infrequent phone users.
Stay tuned for my next installment of my adult journal wherein I discuss Health Savings Accounts!
Jul. 20th, 2007 @ 11:17 pm
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| » Project Bike |
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Yesterday, Maggie and I finally got a chance to look at bikes. We went downtown to Bikesmith's in the morning and looked at what they had. We tried to look at the Sedona ST (a mountain-bike-y hybrid) because we plan to use the Rails to Trails paths nearby. They didn't have any STs in stock (the guy in the shop didn't know why and the owner is apparently more of a noon to six kind of guy) but they did have one of the more upscale versions. We eventually tried out a 17" Cypress ST (more of a road-bike-y hybrid) and a 15" Cypress DX (a fancy one with front shocks, etc.). We ended up deciding on the Cypress ST after biking around on rocks near the bike shop convinced us that it could handle the Rails to Trails paths.
It's a steel frame, which means that it's heavier, but it doesn't have the shocks, which makes it lighter than the aluminum one. Overall, a wash on weight. I've never had shocks on a bike before, so I don't think I'll miss them. They had a 15" in stock, so they're putting that together for Maggie. They had to order a 19" for me, but that should be here in a couple of days.
This afternoon, we're heading over to pick out accessories (lights, pannier, etc) before they start building the bikes.
It only took a month, but we finally have our engagement bikes! Well... almost have. And yes, they're matching. Sorry, Nathan, but they only come in silver. Expect pictures once I actually have the bike and not just a receipt!
Jun. 28th, 2007 @ 01:57 pm
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| » Brilliant! |
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Many of you have probably seen this since it's sweeping the Internets, but The Golden Compass is becoming a movie. I like the books quite a bit, although I'm not sure how well it'll translate to the big screen.
In the world of the book, everyone is born with a daemon that follows them around all the time. They can shapeshift until you become an adult and then they settle on a final form.
As a promotion for the movie, they have a Flash interface that lets you answer some questions and then assigns you an animal for your daemon. Pretty normal so far, although it's nicely presented (your daemon gets a name and you get a little video of your daemon moving).
The cool thing is that if you save your daemon, you can get other people to answer questions about you to refine your animal. So maybe you think you're a snow leopard, but your friends think you're more of a wolf. In that case, your daemon actually changes.
But only for 12 days, so you'd better hurry up and propogate that Internet meme!
Currently, my daemon is a snow leopard. See if you can change it.
Apr. 28th, 2007 @ 12:34 pm
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