Author Archives: Alan V

Movies, photos, People Wars, work

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In the past few years, I’ve only seen a couple movies in theatres: Frozen this past February with Austin, Yubin, and Max; and The Lego Movie this past March with my dad when I was in Phoenix.
It’s interesting then that I’ve seen both of these movies again in McConomy: Frozen with the rest of the in-town Fairfax group over Carnival weekend, and The Lego Movie tonight with Greg when we were out of ideas of what to do and decided to see whatever movie was showing at CMU.
They’re both really well-done films made for kids but enjoyable by adults. So that’s kind of awesome. I keep thinking I should buy Frozen in Thai when it comes out on DVD. I already enjoy looping the Thai version of Let It Go while I work.

In any case, life has been really uneventful lately. Due to whatever reason, I’ve been taking far fewer photos than usual. A quick check reveals that I only have 318 photos since the end of Carnival (since April 14), which represent a total of 619 shutter releases.
So it’s both interesting how much I edit down what photos to keep now (a huge difference from in high school and college when I would just dump my memory card and keep everything), and how few photos I’ve been taking (619 photos used to represent a single day of photos for me).
A lot of the editing is because tagging photos has grown to be a chore. It’s super useful to have tags to be able to find photos by person or event or location, sure… but having to manually do all that for every photo I keep is rather frustrating. This is probably a good thing for my hard drive consumption anyway.

I think it would be interesting to stop carrying my big camera around all the time. I do so now half out of a sense of fear of not having a camera with me for that one big thing or some important moment I want to capture. And it’s also kind of neat to have photos of mundane everyday life. But my little camera is sufficient for that… and after all, I survived for several months (after the death of my D50) with only the little camera. We shall see.

Work has started on the next People Wars expansion, Hijinks. It’s themed around Climbing characters and Route cards, which enhance task playing and scoring.
I’m worried about maybe having overbalanced the game toward tasks given all of the task-centric cards entering the game recently (and given that I haven’t actually played a game with cards past the Exchanges expansion)… but it kind of feels like attack decks have it so much easier that tasks should be getting boosts. Who knows.





Work has been rather interesting lately. The other senior dev on the team recently left Salesforce, leaving the role of senior team member once again solely on my shoulders. Between that and a bunch of planned vacations from other developers, there are days when I’m the only developer working, and we’re probably down to about 2/3 of our previous productivity. Which will mean interesting things given the jam-packed plans for the upcoming release.
I guess time is showing me to be a terrible leader and coordinator, especially given how I already know I do badly under stress (or, rather, I will get the shit done, but I’ll feel like shit the entire time while doing it and hate my life).
We’re hiring a new senior developer for the team, who will hopefully be able to ramp up and help handle a lot of the knowledge, planning, and design work (which right now I think is falling mostly to me). But until then, onward as best I can.
It’s just frustrating though when a lot of time is being eaten up by bugs and questions and emails. I pulled a task last last Tuesday (the 15th) with the intention of starting it the next day. But between bugs and other things, I ended up not having time to do anything on it until this past Thursday (the 24th).
Let’s hope that’s not a sign of things to come in the coming months.

House foo

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It’s been a really interesting weekend.

We saw a house listing come on the market last week that was a few blocks North of us. Walked around the area, looked at the house, and decided we didn’t really want it… too close to Penn, had a grocery store being built right behind it with an HVAC and fans, had strange backyard, was even further from work and parks and people than our current place…

But we went to see the house yesterday anyway. And the inside of the house sold itself to us. Fully updated electrical and plumbing, remodeled third floor suite, beautiful living and dining room areas, really well sized rooms… I think we both loved the house. The backyard also ended up being really, really nice, even if it had looked a little strange from the driveway at first.

So we spent this morning looking over and kind of drawing up an offer on the house, which pretty much meant ruining our Easter brunch plans. Went back to the house for its open house with our agent and asked some more questions. Looked up some more information from the current owners about how loud the fans and units would be at the store.

Ultimately, the decision was that the unknown of the fans, along with some schematics and decibel maths, meant that we didn’t want to run the risk of the noise when the store did open, no matter how perfect the house itself might be.

So the end result of the weekend is that we’re right back where we were last week, albeit with some more knowledge of what a sale contract actually looks like.

So onward to more listings and more houses. We probably won’t find one before the lease is up on this place, but at least we can renew the lease and keep looking throughout the year.

Carnival 2014

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There was a Carnival. It was awesome to see people again, but for some reason this Carnival ended up being rather more stressful than fun.

Total photo count from Wednesday through Sunday: 2887, edited down to just over 2000… a far cry from past Carnivals where I took around 1000 a day (or, in the case of Carnival 2009, 2255 photos in one 24-hour period).









More photos exist at photos.

Life otherwise has been pretty much the same routine. It’s nice having weekly rock climbing and board gaming.

Pittsburgh weather has been full of crazy. Today it snowed. Yesterday it was really warm. Sunday it was in the 80s.

So yeah.

Life things. Yay.

Climbing, blood work, houses, food

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Climbing goes. I actually had a really good day today… got my first top-out on the big top-out wall (this yellow V2 route that Austin is climbing):

and also got my first real V2/3. (I’d gotten a few V2/3s before, but they were clearly misrated V1/2s or V2s.)
Here’s the view (and Maja) from the top of the wall.

I’ve been dumping climbing photos at my photos site in case that interests you. March climbing will be dumped after Friday, since that’s the last climbing day of the month.

In other less happy news, I went and had a routine physical at the beginning of February and had routine blood work done as a part of it. I have now been billed over $300 (after insurance) for the blood work, since apparently they sent the blood to a hospital to process, and I got charged a bunch of hospital rates for the work. Sigh. At least I have insurance… it would be well over $600 without. But I am never getting blood work done again. :\
…And they wonder why people are reluctant to seek medical services.

House hunting continues. It had been slim pickings for a while, but the market seems to be heating up now that the weather is starting to heat up. We saw two houses this past weekend that were interesting.
The first one had a huge, two-story, covered-in-glass room in the back that was really nice. Unfortunately the rest of the house was not so great… it had “three” bedrooms, but one was really awkwardly shaped to be used for anything but an office, and the second had a built-in desk that would make it weird to put a bed in. The kitchen was also rather tiny and had no counter space.
The second had “four” bedrooms, but one wouldn’t have fit a queen bed, a second wouldn’t have fit *any* bed, and the third in the third floor had the stairs in the middle such that you can’t fit anything other than a couch-mode futon in there. So that was fun. They were also asking way too much for it, according to our agent.

In other things, Ben was in town late last week for Simiao’s match day for med school. She got her first choice (yay!) and afterward we all went to dinner at Cure.
It’s probably the fanciest restaurant I’ve been to (at least on-par with Salt of the Earth and Toast), and featured a lot of interesting things. The menus were on nice wooden cutting boards.

Simiao’s drink had little fruit juice beads on an orange peel that looked like caviar and mine had a super-thin slice of some fruit with fruity foam on top.

Juice beads made another appearance in Greg’s cream of mushroom soup, this time in a lime variant. The soup was poured at the table into a plate containing crab meat and other tasty things.

Simiao got the foie blonde, which came with delicious crumbly pistachio stuff, and Lilli’s beef tartare had some odd foamy gel stuff.

The food was, of course, delicious. Greg was not eating meat that day, and was contemplating ordering the lamb gnocchi minus the meat. In the end, he ordered the chef’s vegetarian special and was pleasantly surprised by gnocchi, minus meat, plus veggies.

I ordered the spaghetti carbonara as a safe choice (I really don’t like my meat red, and they don’t serve meat over medium-rare here), and it was delicious. The egg was gummy, so it was cooked through but not so much that it was hard… Simiao thought they’d probably done it sous-vide. Delicious.

Everyone else got hanger steak.

Dessert was also very good… Ben got chocolate souflee cake while Greg, Simiao, Lilli, and I had frozen creme brulee with passion fruit and blood orange.

Ben was silly and paid for the whole thing. Poop on you. But thanks very much. :) It was tasty.

Emily, Card games, Kickstarter games

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Emily has complained that I don’t post photos of her anymore, so here are Emilies. Lots of Emilies. Alllll the Emilies! Bouncing Emilies (assuming your browser supports the good old <marquee> tag)!







Click them… if you can. They get bigger.

Life goes. Not much else has been happening. Photos from my San Francisco trip have been posted to photos. It was really good to see Patrick again (in a context that wasn’t the formality of his wedding).

Before I left for SF, I’d ordered some card games for myself (kind of as a belated birthday present), so it may be time to update this list of card games I own. Key is the same as before.

  • Game of Thrones TCG
  • Lord of the Rings TCG
  • MegaMan TCG (Yes) (C)
  • Sonic X TCG (Yes+)
  • Star Wars: Young Jedi CCG
  • World of Warcraft TCG (Yes)

I’m finding it harder and harder to find rulebooks online for many of the games I have, including .hack, the X-Files TCG, and the Fullmetal Alchemist TCG. I’m wondering if it makes sense to enhance my TCG site to compile information on some older games I play as well… things like rulebook scans, starter deck card listings, and general game info. Meh. I can’t really be the only person who still plays some of these CCGs, can I?

Stonemaier games came out with with an expansion to Viticulture called Tuscany. It’s on Kickstarter now, and if you’re into board gaming, I recommend it.
Unfortunately, this means I’ve been dragged back into Kickstarter. In addition to the recently ended character meeple campaign (adorable Dargon the Dragon meeples!), I also found an awesome card game named POOP (yeah, perfect game for me :P) and an interesting dinosaur-based deckbuilding game called Apex Theropod. Still not quite sure what to do about the last one, as it’s reasonably-priced at $38, but my gaming group (and Greg in particular) tends to shy away from deck-building games. But it’s so, so pretty.

I haven’t really made any progress on People Wars lately, since I’ve been doing things 3-4 evenings a week during the week, and Saturday has been declared computer-free day in an effort to do something other than stare at a screen. (I spent most of last Saturday reading books, which was dubbed “cheating” by Greg, so I suppose future Saturdays will involve more things outside the apartment.)
In any case, I’ve reworked the newest set, Hijinks, to be themed around Rock Climbing instead. And similar to how lots of interesting conversations happen and people from different fields mix and mingle, the “Climbing” faction in the game will be themed around “Route” cards (similar to Kiltie characters and Cheer cards) that boot task scoring. We shall see how that works out.

Yay life.