Category Archives: Activities

Tartan, games, People Wars, photo firsts (Owen, Charles, Mark, Justin)

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Today was Tartan production. I was supposed to do layout for sports. What this meant, in practice, was staring at the intranet and its distinct lack of sports articles that were ready for layout. I did manage to get the first broadsheet page to copy though, but that’s because it was a page 3/4 full of ads, so I just filled the remaining 1/4 with a sports commentary and submitted it. Instead, I did some copy and some photography and did some early layout for the special section. Because, oh yeah, the TOC is this week. (I’m not going, thankfully… but this means that some awesome people are back in town and hopefully I will get to see some of them again.)

Afterward, Keith, Dan, Marina, and Owen came over and we played games.

I won the game of Ingenious against Owen in a tiebreaker… up until my last play, we were completely tied (lowest color at 9, next at 11, next at 12, next at 14, and two maxed out). I ended the game with a play that increased my third-lowest color by one and won the game. It was amusing.

Won the (very short) game of CMU Chrononauts when other people patched the timeline to my character’s desired state. It lasted less than four times around.

Lost the game of 6 nimmt to Dan by one point (16 to 17, with Greg in third place at 34).

Then I won the game of Bohnanza by tiebreaker (cards in hand). Dan, Marina, and I all had 14 gold and Owen had 13 gold.

So it was a night with many (very) close games, which was a lot of fun. Friends are awesome, and games are awesome, and I’m glad that games with friends are becoming a regular part of my life.
(There was also an awesome gaming marathon with people last weekend.)

There was interesting funness Friday night when there was a party celebrating Patrick’s successful thesis defense. There will likely never be photos posted from that, because yeah. It’s amusing to me how much grad students can act like undergrads when it comes to alcohol and partying. But there were board games at that too, so I have played lots and lots of board games this month (plus the usual Thursday board games at Yubin’s), and it’s not even 1/3 of the way through the month.

I’ve been working more on People Wars’ new expansion set: Exchanges. The theme of the set is effects that hurt you but grant some larger benefit (like reducing your hand size to 1 but letting you play more items each turn, or reducing work on tasks by 1 but not working when exhausted and letting other players use the character to play cards). I’ve been really happy with how People Wars is coming along… as a game, it feels more mature than its previous variants (PPA TCG, Student Wars), and I also feel like each expansion set has a distinct theme and feel.

In any case, it occurs to me that I never bothered posting the first photo I took of Owen, Charles, Mark, or Justin even though I added them to photo stats, so I should remedy this.

First photo of Owen:

November 2, 2007 in Scotland Yard (with Sully, Sam, and Josh)

First photo of Charles and Mark:

April 27, 2006 at the SCS BBQ (this was before I knew them; can you find them both?)
My first photos of them after actually meeting them were in San Francisco on July 12, 2009 and August 4, 2009, respectively.

First photo of Justin

August 31, 2008 in front of my apartment building (when he was coming over for games)

Life, hike, (hopefully lack of a) rant, and foo

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It’s the end of another four month period, so life (both stats and life) has been updated. Yay more life. There are also some photos up at photos.

Things have been funness lately. Today we took a bus and the T down to the Montour trail for a 10-mile hike. The original goal was to hike it for 10 miles, to Clairton, then continue upward to McKeesport (another 5 miles) to catch the 61C home. However, we didn’t get to Clairton until after 5:30 and I was feeling really unhappy by that point (due to the heat, humidity, and dehydration from my stupidity of not bringing drinking water), so we caught the Y46 bus to downtown, ate at the Golden Palace Buffet that wasn’t a buffet due to the dinner and weekendness, and came home to collapse.

I have also now surpassed 300,000 tagged photos. Photoshop album reports 300,951 photos tagged. This is lower than the actual number taken, since I now go through photos and delete many before saving the rest (for example, today’s trip was reduced from the 261 taken to 181 to keep). But it’s still a fun statistic. The 300,000th tagged photo was of New House (Stever?) getting ready for House Wars.
In another fun milestone, my D90 has broken 100,000 tagged photos (100,874 right now). It should overtake my D50 (105,067 tagged photos before it died, after being repaired once) at some point in the next few months.
I’ve also been noticing how more (most, even?) of my photos are now taken portrait style, rather than landscape style. I think this was prompted by the template redesign of People Wars (where card photos are portrait style now), but it’s spilled over into my general photography. Not a bad thing, just something that amuses me. (Even my portraits used to be landscape.)
Speaking of which, I released the next People Wars expansion a couple days ago, and also added a way to list cards by expansion (since the old card database was only useful for listing by type). I need a good “E” name for the next expansion. Any ideas?

I got a raise at work. Apparently I’m doing good work. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it and it feels like I don’t get nearly as much done as I should, or as other people do. But apparently that isn’t true. I’m trying to work better (9-5) hours, given my habit of just working from when I wake up until the evening. So far it’s kind of working out?

KoL continues. The new challenge path (Zombie Slayer AKA become a zombie and eat brains) has managed to get me addicted to the game again. Currently nearing the end of my second run (with good luck, I can be done tomorrow. But this is rather unlikely.) and it’s enjoyable in the same way Boris was enjoyable… less fiddlyness, more of a sense of success after each run, and more being able to push my normal character abilities. The new IotM looks amazing too. Perhaps it is time to break into the horde of Crimbo meat I have to get one.

Not much else is happening. Life continues. Life is good.

New music lately includes Alexandra Burke (sadly not available in MP3 format in the US), Josh Gracin, and Alanis Morissette (which was free after my $3 album credit and $5 coinstar credit). I have managed to keep myself from spending much more money on Kickstarter lately. This is a good thing.

Greg has convinced me to get a bike. Being the sort of “meh whatever” person I am, I will probably pick one up at Costco the next time we’re there for food. We shall see.

I kind of want to write a rant about how “social justice” and content warnings have been turned into these horrible (offensive, in a way?) concepts for me because of things that keep appearing in my (few remaining) social media feeds. But I will refrain from that for now because it will not do anything productive and probably just get me flamed by everyone.
I understand and sympathize… really, I do. I just feel like people take things way too far sometimes and overreact, which in turn makes the entire thing something I am more inclined to disagree with. And, as a concept taken too far, it really clashes with my “personal responsibility” (or lack thereof in current society) view of the world.

Perhaps this has much to do with what I consider my general movement towards being more moderate and generally trying to be more understanding of differing views. …something along the lines of, “People that disagree with you are not wrong and are not unreasonable. They just disagree with you.” Which I suppose is also dangerous because it’s an absolute (yes, sometimes people are actually just “wrong,” like if they’re arguing that the Earth is flat), but it’s closer to what I feel than the opposite.
That part is what I alluded to at the end of my last post, but I still haven’t really figured out a way to put my thoughts into coherent words, so they shall continue being unwritten.

I’ll leave you on a more positive note with photos from today’s hike because I like photos and I like hikes and I like posting. Yay hike.






Moving, games, and disappointment

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Haven’t done a general life post in a while. Life goes.

People seem to like my SimSimi pillows that I brought back from Thailand.

In any case, Greg’s sister Chris recently moved to Pittsburgh for a year-long internship thing at UPitt. We spent most of the weekend helping her move things from there to here.

Nothing like helping people move to realize how much stuff people can accumulate. It’s left me and Greg with a desire to get rid of more of our things so any future move we might do isn’t nearly as painful.

In any case, after moving was done, we went to Red Robin for dinner, as I had been wanting to do for a while. Maybe I have unreasonable expectations or something for a casual restaurant, but I felt rather disappointed. Our waitress didn’t refill my tea unless I asked (and would come by and grab other people’s empty glasses and refill them), and generally seemed like she was unhappy at me. Also, my “well-done” burger came out terrifyingly red in the middle. (Not even sure how a burger that thin could manage to be that undercooked.) By that point, I was feeling unhappy enough that I just wrapped it up and took it home instead of asking it to be fixed. And then reheated burger is never that good… managed to eat it tonight, somehow. But kind of a disappointment for something I’d been looking forward to.

In any case, today we had some more board games.


Besides Ingenious, which seems to be getting popular on game nights and is one of Greg’s favorite games, and My Happy Farm, which I think has become my favorite “quick” game choice, we also played Puerto Rico for the first time in a while. There was also a lot of 7 Wonders (with Max and Yubin’s set that we’re holding on to until they return from getting married), which is quickly becoming one of my more favorite games… perhaps it will be time to buy a copy in the near future.

This upcoming week will be interesting. On call for work while I’m spending Friday being driven to a wedding in Connecticut, then on call all weekend while I’m there and on a train to Boston. With luck, nothing will happen. Without luck… well, at least I’ll always be at most 30 minutes away from an internet connection.

Meme: ITG and comprehensive camera stats

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It seems that 8 will be moving to the bay area at some point in the near future. This makes me sadder than it should. Meh.

As for meme topics, we have ITG. Which I’m actually not quite sure what to say about.

The first time I played DDR was in a Gameworks in Arizona Mills, probably in middle school or so. I didn’t know what I was doing and stepped on the arrows pretty much as they came on screen. Then I added another player after the first song (which that machine apparently let you do), wasting some money because player 2 only got two songs instead of three.

I think I started being interested in it in high school, when we went to a Fry’s Electronics and they had the PS version of DDR set up with pads. This was intriguing, and my parents bought me a PSOne, DDR, and two mats with the promise that I would play it for exercise fairly often. (Of course, this didn’t really happen. I was such a horrible kid. :P)

My first real experience with the arcade machine (and hard pads) then was in college when I came to CMU and discovered the DDR machine in Scotland Yard my freshman year. From photos, it seems the ITG machine appeared around December 2005. I remember the brief period of time when the machines existed side-by-side, and I remember being annoyed at the “elite” ITG players who wouldn’t alternate with DDR players (like myself) since you couldn’t play both machines at once (the music got mixed up and way too confusing and threw everyone off).

I think I really got into ITG the summer I had the PLSC internship in Pittsburgh (2006). I played with 8 at least once a week every week that summer, and managed to progress up to 10s. (I think the desire to avoid my room and my horrible roommate at the time had a lot to do with this.) I’ve pretty much been playing since then, although my general interest in it seems to have lowered somewhat.

At this point, I’ve stopped trying to improve on song difficulty, and have mostly resigned myself to playing casually in the 9-11 range. I also really, really like marathons and mods, so I’ll do that a lot. But the ITG machine at CMU has been having issues lately, and the stupid company in charge of it keeps screwing it up, so I don’t know if it’s really something I’ll continue doing regularly.

Also, wow… I’m making a lot of posts this month. This is weird.

I now have 296,595 tagged photos in Photoshop organizer. I think we’ll break 300k by the end of August. Or maybe not, because I’ve been taking fewer photos lately. We shall see.

I went through and tried to find the first and last photos taken by each camera. Photoshop organizer doesn’t let you sort by filename, and I have way too many files to do EXIF data searches, so some of this may be off by a few. (In particular, finding the “last” photo my Intel camera took is a pain because it still works, and I was using it for its portability even though high school even when I had gotten the Kodak camera. And it didn’t even record any EXIF data, and you can’t do a “negative” search in organizer. So blah.)

And it turns out the photos aren’t all that interesting anyway. So here’s just the dates of each camera’s first and last photo.

Intel Pocket PC camera October 6, 2000 September 18, 2003 1077 days; 2.95 years
Olympus C3000 Zoom September 28, 2001 December 5, 2003 798 days; 2.186 years
Kodak Easyshare DX6490 December 8, 2003 March 17, 2006 830 days; 2.274 years
Nikon D50 March 22, 2006 November 15, 2009 1334 days; 3.655 years
Samsung SL30 July 27, 2009 Current (last July 20, 2012) 1089 days; 2.98 years so far
Nikon D90 February 26, 2010 Current (last July 25, 2012) 880 days; 2.411 years so far

Getting numbers for how many photos each camera shot would also be interesting, but not easy to do.

Edit: Searching by filename and using the power of maths should give reasonable estimates of total photos. Therefore:

Intel Pocket PC camera 15,829 photos $200 14.7 photos per day 1.26¢ per photo
Olympus C3000 Zoom 10,647 photos $450 13.3 photos per day 4.23¢ per photo
Kodak Easyshare DX6490 49,413 photos $500 59.5 photos per day 1.01¢ per photo
Nikon D50 105,067 photos $570 (+$250 repair cost) 78.8 photos per day 0.54¢ per photo (0.78¢ per photo including repair cost)
Samsung SL30 18,571 photos $70 17 photos per day 0.38¢ per photo (so far)
Nikon D90 97,068 photos $780 110.3 photos per day 0.80¢ per photo (so far)

Cost estimates don’t include charges for accessories (extra batteries and lenses in the Nikon case), electricity, or memory cards.

Meme: Photography and Pokemon

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Before I forget, I should wish Greg a very happy birthday. Yay birthday.

I’ll never forget my first trading card game and my first trade. Back in May 1999, I went with a friend (Jim) to a GameStop. He picked up some boosters and I bought a starter deck plus two booster packs of the Pokemon card game. Opening the packs yielded a holographic Raichu and a Clefairy Doll for the rares. (Of course, I had no idea about rarities at the time, since I had never touched or seen a trading card game before.) This was also at the same time as a Pokemon card game promotional thing or something, because I also had my picture taken with a giant Pikachu card (for me to take home on a floppy disc!).

Jim and I sat down at one of the provided tables to play a game, and I lamented about how I couldn’t play the Raichu because I didn’t have a Pikachu card to evolve it from. One of the younger kids playing nearby apparently overheard and offered to trade me one. He looked through my small stack of cards and asked for the Clefairy Doll. Upon Jim’s advice, I made the trade of my rare for a common. (“That thing only had 10 HP, and the Pikachu has 40 HP. You got a great deal.”)

Fortunately, several years later when we had both learned what rarities (and rarity symbols) were, he traded me a Clefairy Doll for a Pikachu, and all was well. Yay noobness.

But that’s not really what I want to talk about here. Continuing with meme topics from Jess (after quite a hiatus), we have photography.

Photography is one of those things I enjoy doing, and have periods off and on of wanting to do professionally (or, at least, with more dedication that I do now). My first digital camera was a Intel Pocket PC Camera (retailing for $199 at the time) when I was in middle school (late 2000).
My parents were redoing the front yard at the time (removing the palm trees and grass and replacing them with rocks and gravel), and promised me a digital camera if I helped. Of course, being the horrible child I was, I managed to get the camera first, and then proceeded to do nothing to help (except take photos of my parents working on the front yard, which are some of the first digital photos I ever took).

The camera took photos at an amazing 640×480 resolution, more than enough for anyone, and came with an option to switch to 320×240 resolution in case you needed to take more photos (since there weren’t memory card options).

This camera satisfied me only about a year. I got my next camera, a Olympus C3000, my first year of high school (2001). It took amazing (for the time) resolution photos, and had a flash, and was the best thing ever. I actually still have the camera, and it still works, even though the drivers no longer work in Windows XP (or 7) and there is no card reader that can read the SmartMedia cards it takes.

That camera lasted only a couple years (2003), when it started to have issues with exposure metering. (Photos were coming out completely black every so often.) It was quickly replaced with a Kodak Easyshare DX6490 with its amazing 10x optical zoom and even better resolution. Naive me referred to the three steps as a “casual” camera, a “semi-professional” camera, and a “professional” camera. Upon reflection now, it seems horribly stupid of me to think that a point-and-shoot that didn’t even have full manual control could be considered “professional” by any means.

In any case, the Kodak lasted until my Sophomore year of college (2006), when it proceeded to die in a series of unrecoverable errors (the last photos it took were at the fondue party at Wes’ house). It was replaced a week later with a Nikon D50 (with its kit 28-80mm lens) that I shot for the following 3 years (including a series of repairs by a horrible company that didn’t fix it right the first time).

The D50, in turn, was replaced by my current Nikon D90 (in February 2010) after it died in November 1999, which still seems to be in great condition. Overlapping the two is my Samsung SL30, which is a crappy $80 point-and-shoot I picked up just to have an “easy to carry” camera.

So I seem to be in the habit of going through cameras every 2-3 years. This, I suppose, is somewhat expected given how much I abuse and use them (my D50 had over 100,000 shutter releases when it died completely, via the mirror refusing to flip).
There’s a summary of my cameras, which is accurate minus the D90, here.

As for photography in general, I find it to be a good hobby, a good way to remember my life, and a good way to remove some level of awkwardness at large gatherings (using my camera as a shield, which I have previously written about). I don’t think I’m particularly good at it… I just take thousands of photos, which means I’m bound to get one or two good ones out. Most of my shooting is casual snapshots… I used to do more studio shooting when I had access, but in retrospect find the setting too boring and limiting.

I suppose the good thing about taking so many photos all the time is that I often manage to get candid shots of people that you wouldn’t otherwise get. People are so used to me having a camera all the time (and taking their picture all the time) that they’ve stopped noticing. As a photographer, that’s one of the best places to be.

Anyway, photo meme = moar photo. Here’s Chris with the awesome pillows I got from Thailand.

I don’t know what else to write about photography. If you have anything specific you’re curious about, feel free to ask.