Category Archives: Trips

Duck!!!, Renaissance wedding, games, race, Tartan, People Wars, and macarons (phew)

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Life has been full of lots of awesome things recently.

In probably the biggest (ha ha) thing, a giant rubber duck is in Pittsburgh! It is super cute.

Greg, Eric, and I went to see it on the night it arrived, at which time they were throwing a huge bridge party for the duck.

Yay duck! I was actually expecting it to be much bigger (not having read anything about it beforehand), but apparently it’s only 30 by 40 feet. It’s still extremely awesome.


I think downtown is enjoying the attention the duck is bringing. Here’s Noodles & Co at Market Square that evening. It’s significantly more packed than usual. (The soda machine was constantly out of ice as well as many kinds of soda. And it’s one of those newer ones that has hundreds of varieties of soda and that makes its own ice.)

So yeah. Greg’s undergrad friends Eric and Dan were in town for the wedding celebration of Vicki and Brett. It was held at the Pittsburgh renaissance fair, which was an interesting venue.


Besides the usual wedding food and things, we had access to the fair with things like jousting (which turned into an “attack the good guy and force a ‘joust to the death’ tournament” thing), strength testing, hatchet throwing, arrow shooting, and fire manipulating.




Naturally, there were also board games.

In other recent board game funness, I acquired the Leaders, Cities, and Wonders pack expansions for the game 7 wonders. I also printed the official Catan board, the “official” Cupertino board, the official Stevie and Esteban and Louis leaders, and some boards from the fan-made Empires expansion. The result is an awesomely complex, awesomely large, awesomely 23-wonder-ful game that I am really enjoying.
(More photos of this, and other board gaming adventures in September, can be found here.)

This morning was also the Pittsburgh Great Race. Eric, Dan, and I went to watch Greg run.

The best outfit was a guy running in full Penguins ice hockey gear. Yes, including ice skates. (Word on the internet is that this is actually Tom7, who I actually know [but only in the ‘I have met him once or twice’ sense], so that’s awesome.)

There were also people with awesome signs cheering on the runners. (My favorites were “Worst parade ever” and “Why do all the cute ones run away?”.) They also cheered on the ambulance, police car, and bus at the end of the long line of runners, which was awesome.

There was also Tartan production today. The situation there is rapidly improving, which is awesome. Swathi is doing a good job as the new layout manager and leading a good group of layout staffers. The section editors have started getting their shit together (well, mostly). Papers are slowly (and sometimes painfully) becoming longer than 8 pages. Let’s keep going like that.

But in fun Tartan things, there was also a Kate tree constructed, which rapidly turned into a Tartan ed staff tree. It’s pretty awesome. (More photos of it, as well as general Tartan stuff from September, can be found here.)


I’ve finally started working on the next People Wars expansion, Flashback. It’s themed around PPA students (and general effects that look at the discard pile or add traits), and should be fairly interesting… but what’s getting me in making it is how amazingly young everyone looks.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised given I’ve been tracking this stuff on my photo stats page for years, but it’s still kind of weird whenever I actually go back and start looking through high school photos. Baby friends! ZMONGS!

Speaking of photos, June 28, 2014 will be the date when I’ll have been taking (digital) photos for exactly half my life. It’s kind of awesome that, in about 9 months, I will have over half my life documented in photos. I plan to keep up with my photo journal, so it should be an interesting adventure.

Last, but not least, a nice new French bakery opened in Squirrel Hill by Greg’s work. I stopped by and couldn’t resist getting some macarons. They’re a bit pricey at $2.25 each, but so very worth it. Their French bread is also very, very good.

Yay awesomeness.

Connecticut trip, photo stats and graphs

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life has gotten an update to both the photo journal and the stats section. People haven’t changed that much this time around. I guess we’re all getting older and more boring.
Patrick makes his first appearance in almost 5 years thanks to his wedding, 8 drops off for the first time since I moved back to Pittsburgh (since he moved to the bay area recently), and Emily and Justin return after more than a year of not seeing them.
Yay for people.

This past weekend, a bunch of us traveled to Connecticut to see Tim and Kayleigh’s new house, their new dog Scotch, and Mars and Dan’s new dog Panda. It was interesting cramming 11 of us into a 2-bedroom house, but it was a good time and full of fun board games, crazy miniature golf, tasty food, awesome friends, and cute puppies.





More photos are at my photos page.

Photoshop organizer now reports that I have tagged 336,971 photos. (The number of photos taken is quite a bit higher given that I actually edit down my photos instead of keeping them all now.) It might be time to update some stats.

Here’s the dates on which I took each 25,000th photo:

25,000 50,000 75,000 100,000 125,000 150,000 175,000
January 12, 2004 October 20, 2004 April 10, 2006 April 20, 2007 December 4, 2007 February 7, 2009 July 4, 2009
282 days 537 days 375 days 228 days 431 days 147 days
175,000 200,000 225,000 250,000 275,000 300,000 325,000
July 4, 2009 April 14, 2010 September 4, 2010 June 23, 2011 December 23, 2011 August 24, 2012 June 2, 2013
284 days 143 days 292 days 183 days 245 days 282 days

You may remember the camera stats I posted a while back. Here’s updated stats for the two cameras that still exist:

Samsung SL30 July 27, 2009 – August 16, 2013 1481 days; 4.05 years 20,033 photos $70 13.5 photos per day 0.35¢ per photo
Nikon D90 February 26, 2010 – September 3, 2013 1285 days; 3.52 years 135,774 photos $780 105.7 photos per day 0.57¢ per photo

Also here’s some updated graphs (first posted here).

Photos taken by month (log scale):

Photos taken by month (linear scale):

Photos over time:

Life, walks, travel, and games

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I suppose it’s time for another update.

Today we went on a 12.5 mile walk to Riverview Park north of the city. It would have been longer except it started raining by the time we hit downtown on the way back. After taking the T from the north shore, the rain really started picking up, so it made more sense to bus home. It was a nice walk though.






I recently went on a trip to San Francisco for work followed by a trip to the Northwest to visit Ben in Seattle and to attend Patrick’s wedding on the Oregon coast. Photos of the adventures can be found on my photo site.




Also, as followup to the edit on my last post, Southwest never sent me a voucher as promised for the baggage issues. At this point, I’m mostly apathetic (and I certainly won’t stop flying with them because they still do a better job than pretty much any other domestic airline), but it’s still a rather unhappy end to a terrible flying experience.

My Kickstarted game Pixel Lincoln finally arrived (almost 7 months after its initial delivery estimate). The shipping experience was a huge mess, and has pretty much convinced me never to back another Game Salute game again, no matter how interesting it may be. The games sat in their warehouse for two weeks before they event sent out information on paying for shipping. It then took another week after payment before the games started shipping, and it took three days after receiving tracking info for them to actually get the game to Fedex to ship. Overall, it was over a month from the time the game arrived at their warehouse to when it got to me… which wouldn’t be as terrible if it wasn’t for the absolute lack of explanation from them.
Combined with the already-sketchy expansion Kickstarters they ran before we got the game, it has really been a bad experience.
All of this would be less terrible if the game itself was awesome, but I can’t help feel like I got ripped off terribly. After $49, I got fewer cards than a basic Dominion set and a game that somehow feels not as fun as I was expecting it to be. It seems that there isn’t enough variety in cards (despite me getting a couple expansions offered during the initial Kickstarter) to make interesting enough levels (especially since you need to make two). The characters, mini-boss, and boss cards have no flavor (and no abilities that differentiate them from any other character, mini-boss, or boss card). The rulebook is terribly written and editted, and several important things (like using cards for symbol abilities) are not explained at all. The game itself therefore plays rather clunkily.
Meh. Lesson learned, I suppose. At least I only lost $49 on it.

KoL has been going rather well. The BIG! challenge path that was recently released has made getting the full sea outfits much easier (yay for immediate level 16 aftercore), and I’ve also managed to get down to 3 day ascensions reliably. My last run was a 702 turn run as a Sauceror, which I feel good about (especially given that I do 100% familiar runs).

I’ve been watching quite a few Smosh videos lately and as Zeke says, “Alan’s Law: Anything he spends over 30 hours consuming, he shall make into a card game.”
I’ve hammered out some basic rules and general cards for the game, which is turning out to be a customizable shared-deck game (so a card game where everyone draws from a single deck, but where that single deck can be customized as desired). The rules are drawing from Bohnanza and Investigations, where the goal is to collect cards to complete episodes by trading with other players. Hopefully the player-interaction and fixed deck aspects of it will make it more readily playtestable with my usual Thursday gaming group.
We’ll see if this project actually manages to get anywhere, or whether it’ll fall prey to my laziness like the RPG Get! revamps and the Investigations CCG.

Yay life and things.

I hate flying

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Yesterday was one of the longest days ever spent travelling, and makes me remember why I hate flying so much.

I had a 7 AM flight into SFO, and had to catch a 4:30 AM 28X. Therefore I decided not to sleep the night of the 22nd, because it was easier, and I was getting into SFO at 1 PM and had plenty of time to sleep anyway. Big mistake.

Got to the airport around 5:30 (took Supershuttle instead because I didn’t want to walk 30 minutes to campus at 4 AM). There was a huge line to check bags (about 20 minutes) and a huge line for security (even at the alternate checkpoint; about 45 minutes). I had less time than I wanted to get food and eat at the gate, but it worked out in the end since I always budget so much extra time at the airport for myself.

The flight started out fine. We were in one of the new Southwest 737s (larger, longer, more open, more comfortable) for the PIT -> LAS leg, which was a nice experience. Got into LAS around 9:30 only to find that my connecting flight (scheduled for 11:30) into SFO was delayed until 12:30 due to weather conditions.

The delays were extended twice (finally scheduled for a 4 PM departure) before they cancelled the flight. There was no announcement to go up to the podium to be reticketed (rather, there was an announcement NOT to go to the podium while the agents tried to work out alternatives), so I ended up near the end of a very long line and therefore had very few options by the time it got to me. With no more seats on SFO-bound flights, I was instead reticketed onto a plane for OAK, leaving after 10 PM.

So I got to spend 12 hours in the Las Vegas airport trying to find things to do and wanting desperately to sleep. That was not fun.

At least the salad I had for dinner was tasty, even if I was so stressed out by that point that it took me over 90 minutes to eat it. (And I’m normally a really fast eater.)

So I eventually make it into OAK after 11:30 PM, and go to the baggage office to deal with my checked bag. No one there seemed the least interested in helping me, only telling me repeatedly to check the carousel that did not contain my bag. (Which was surprising given it’s Southwest, that I usually have nothing but good experiences with.) Eventually the agent at the carousel tried looking up the bag tag and told me to call the SFO baggage office. Who confirmed that they had the bag (not unexpected) but that I would have to go get it at my own expense due to “voluntary separation”.

So yeah, that was pretty ridiculous. They had over 8 hours from the flight cancellation to retag my bag to Oakland. Failing that, I would have expected some effort on their part to reunite me with it. Failing that, I would have expected at least some compassion or interest in my situation from the people working. I know it’s been a long day for everyone, but you could at least try to help confused, tired, and cranky passengers. This was made worse by the fact that I was dumb and didn’t carry on any clothes (never had checked bag issues before) and it was after midnight by that point (so I couldn’t make it down to SFO to get the bag).

So I couldn’t really sleep last night, and ended up waking up at 6 AM and being unable to fall back asleep. Which means I’ve had a total of 5 hours of sleep in the past two days. Went to SFO this morning at 7 AM to get it, so now I have clothing, and feel more reasonable. But still really, really tired.

On the plus side, the hotel I’m staying in is pretty awesome.

Edit: Whoa, this hotel has free wine every night. It took me 3 chardonnays before I discovered they had sangria (so tasty!). Best hotel ever.

Edit edit: My hotel apparently has chair massages (like, sit-down massages with a professional masseuse) on Fridays. My back feels much looser now.
Also Southwest responded to my complaint letter (I complained only about the baggage and not the delay, since weather delays aren’t their fault), and wants to make things right. They’re offering a voucher (that I haven’t received yet), which is really awesome of them, given I wasn’t expecting anything at all.

Cruise yay

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We went on a cruise through New England and Canada! It was awesome! Moar cruising next year plz.

Here’s a fun gif of them setting up the gangway in Charlottetown. I like that the first thing they do is set up the hand sanitizer dispensers.

Additional photos can be found here, here, and here.

I flew into Boston on Friday to meet my parents there, and we spent that evening and the following morning wandering the city and walking the Freedom Trail. It wasn’t anything new (had previously visited with Greg), but it was still fun to see and do again. The ship left Saturday evening.

Sunday morning, we got into Bar Harbor, Maine bright and early. We didn’t eat any lobster (too expensive, and there was lots of tasty free food on the ship), but I did get an awesome stuffed lobster. The tag says his name is “Lobbie”, but that’s a dumb name. His name is instead “Om nom nom”.

We took a bus tour into Arcadia National Park and up to Cadillac mountain, which had beautiful views.

Monday we cruised into Halifax, Nova Scotia. We spent the morning touring the Citadel fortress at the top of the city, and I regret not having more time to see all it had to offer.


In the afternoon, we took a bus tour to Peggy’s Cove to see the famous lighthouse. It was really kind of underwhelming, and it was really cold and windy and rainy up there.

Tuesday we cruised into Sydney, Nova Scotia. The rain and wind had followed us from Halifax, and we hadn’t booked any shore excursions, so it was rather a short and boring day. We wandered the city for a bit (not much to see… the ship’s city guide had even said they don’t dock at Sydney for Sydney, but rather for the access to Cape Breton) and spent the afternoon on the boat relaxing.

Wednesday was Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. It was by far the most beautiful of the places we visited, and also had a lot of historic things to see (since the confederation conference was held here). They have a really nice walking tour set up in Founder’s Hall, and you could also see Province House, the current seat of the provincial legislature.


Thursday was an at-sea day and we didn’t do very much. We docked in Quebec City, Quebec on Friday and went on a bus tour of the city before wandering it on our own. It feels a lot like Europe to me, actually. Was an interesting place to visit.

Overall, it was awesome, and I want to do it again. The infinite free food was probably the best part (full-service dining room at night with fancy, tasty food :D :D), but I really liked the lack of internet ($0.75/minute on the ship means you basically go without it instead of paying). It’s weird how much of a useless time-waster it is. It was also nice to wake up every day in a new place with new sights to see.

The ship also has shows every night and general activities (a library with books and board games you can check out, ping pong tables and a giant chess set, etc).


Also, it’s hilarious that the ship’s coffeeshop had prices for all their drinks, but not their food. It’s weird to me that all drinks on the ship (except water, tea, and coffee) cost money ($2.95 for a can of soda!), but all food was free (including the snacks and sandwiches at the coffeeshop). Still, infinite food almost-whenever you want it really can’t be beaten, and I don’t drink soda anyway.

Moo.