Author Archives: Alan V

Climbing, board games, TV shows, card games

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Life has been pretty uneventful lately.

I recently celebrated 80 months of companionship and love and awesome. I guess in some ways it’s silly that we still track months together, but it’s also nice. So yay relationships.

There was a Thanksgiving. There was lots of tasty food and lots of fun games.

I’ve started climbing again after Groupon had a $70-for-a-three-month-membership deal. I actually haven’t gotten too much worse (finished a couple V2s yesterday), which is nice. A gallery of December climbing photos will be posted in about a week (since I batch together all related photos from a month).


There has also been copious board gaming, which is always fun and awesome. Eight Minute Empire Legends recently arrived, and it was played, and it’s a really nice filler game. For some reason, all of the recent Kickstarters I backed seem to have all finished production early November, so they’re all shipping around Christmas time. I’m expecting the Machine of Death card game and The Agents card game soon (or, I guess, when I get back from Christmas break), and Euphoria is arriving in January (but only because I used the “delay shipment” option, since it would otherwise arrive Christmas week).
(More board gaming photos will likewise be posted in about a week.)

I’ve become re-addicted to the show Supernatural, after Amazon had it on sale for Black Friday and I bought the seasons I was missing (7 and 8). Watched through season 2 in a few days and started on season 3… and I don’t know why I ever stopped watching. Yay awesome TV shows.
Also bought the last two seasons of Smallville that I was missing (9 and 10), as well as the first three seasons of The Walking Dead. Have a lot of TV to watch now. Maybe at some point I’ll get re-motivated to work on the Investigations card game. I’m thinking of making a tweak to the game where every deck card has a “conspicuousness” value, and every character provides conspicuousness, and exceeding a random conspicuousness value makes you automatically fail the investigation. (Would provide another value to tinker with on cards, and some more strategy in deck building to get good abilities with low conspicuousness cards or worse cards but be able to throw more characters at things.)

Work continues on People Wars: Gatherings. The theme of the set is “dual characters”, so I’m adding a bunch of dual characters along with abilities and skills that key off of them. Also, in an effort to make hybrid decks more feasable, I’m adding cards that reward working characters with kill counters as well as tasks that can provide items and attacks/skills. There’s also new abilities to help score tasks late game, and to help deal more damage early game. (Also notice the new “Climbing” and “Game Group” attributes, which I’ll flesh out in later expansions.)

Work has been super stressful lately. Not much to really say about that. I need to get better at separating work and life, and stopping work when it’s not work time. Hopefully that will come.

So yay for life, at least.

Philadelphia!

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My photo journal has gotten an update to bring it current. Not too much has happened in the past month, except for a trip!

Greg and I went to Philadelphia on the Amtrak last weekend. It was an excellent trip and we saw both the old city and historic sites, as well as the Western part of the city with parks and the university. Philadelphia is a rather beautiful city, and is very walkable too, which is nice.

We took the Amtrak last Thursday starting early in the morning, and it was uneventful. It’s funny how “reasonable” the Amtrak cafe car prices are to me now… $7.25 for a wrap is actually not an unfair price to pay. Maybe it means I’m used to eating better food, or am less concerned about food expenditures in general, now?

We spent the first full day in Philly (Friday) visiting the historic sites with the assumption that Saturday would be busier due to being a weekend. But apparently some schools were in town Friday for a trip (I guess Veteran’s Day weekend is a good time for those?), so everything ended up being super busy anyway, and it was fortunate that we got Independence Hall tour tickets before 9:30. (Literally right after we got ours, a huge swarm of students and teachers descended upon the ticket counter.)

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to take the city hall tour, because they sold out of tickets by the time we got there, so we instead wandered around and had cheesesteak for dinner. Apparently there are two “competing” places for cheesesteak in the city: Pat’s and Geno’s. Pat’s is the “original” cheesesteak, while Geno’s advertises itself as the “best”.


But, really, there was no competition. Geno’s meat tasted fatty and greasy while Pat’s was nice and meaty and flavorful. Pat’s fries were deliciously crisp and potato-y, while Geno’s tasted like eating crispy bits of nothing. Even the peppers were significantly better at Pat’s… their peppers were nice and flavorful and gave just right when you bit into them, while Geno’s seemed under-ripe and under-marinated. Geno’s wins barely for their bread, which doesn’t get as soggy with the meat juices, but it wasn’t enough to really matter. I didn’t dislike the bread at Pat’s anyway.


Still, at $9.50/sandwich and $4.50 for fries, it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll be back to either place, even if I visit Philly again. Pat’s had a good sandwich, sure, but not $14 good.
Afterward, we got to do some nice night photography of the Eastern river.

On Saturday we wandered West from our hotel and explored the museum district and library and park and the river and UPenn. The library (at least the central branch) gives library tours as well as tours of its rare books section, and both are worth going to.

The leaves were also changing color, so it was an excellent time to wander the park and museum district.

The train back was on Sunday, and that was mostly uneventful as well (minus some signal trouble that took 40 minutes to resolve). We went to the Reading Terminal Market in the morning for breakfast (which was at a nice, but kind of overpriced, diner in the building), and I also had the unfortunate experience of wanting to buy food from a vendor, being offered a free sample from them, and deciding to walk away instead. Seriously, how do you manage to make such flavorless jambalaya? I was really looking forward to it too. :\

More photos are here.

In other things, work has been full of super stress lately. I guess in a lot of ways I’m the most senior person on the team now, and so a lot of stuff falls to me, and I kind of wish we had a more experienced or senior person directing everything. I don’t know. I’m kind of a terrible leader. :\ Bah.

I guess I’m doing reasonably at my job from a technical and productivity aspect, but I wish I was better at big picture and organizational things.

(I also wish people would stop filing us huge bugs and issues the week of feature freeze when we’re already scrambling to finish up everything for the release, but that’s not something I have control over.)

Also, as far as followup for CrashPlan seeding goes, it ended in great success. I sent back the drive, they received it and uploaded the data, I left my computer to sync up with the servers overnight, and voilà. My 1 TB of data is now online and able to be restored at my leisure. I’ve been syncing my photos and general updates since then every evening (since my personal laptop is not usually connected to the internet), and it seems to be working fine. Yay for online backups!

Strict Königs-Pittsburgh walk success

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We hadn’t been on a long walk yet this year, so yesterday a bunch of us decided to do a modified version of last year’s Königs-Pittsburgh walk… that is, to cross every pedestrian-navigable trans-three-river bridge in Pittsburgh with both endpoints in Pittsburgh exactly once and end back where we started.
Actually, the problem as stated is now impossible thanks to the recently-reopened 31st street bridge (and since the 9th street bridge is open to pedestrians even though it’s closed to traffic), so we added in the 40th and it works out.

The trip itself was a relatively easy 27 miles, so about 12-14 miles shorter than our usual walks. As such, it meant we were able to start at a reasonable time while the sun was up, and finish up before dinner.

Overall, I didn’t have any foot or leg problems (probably because it was shorter) and ended up with no blisters (thanks to the awesome cloth tape), but I did start having back problems toward the end. I guess my back isn’t used to me being upright anymore.

Anyway, we started at 8:42 AM at the Giant Eagle in Shadyside. A few people were supposed to come, but it ended up being only me, Greg, and Keith.

We took a long walk all the way down to the Glenwood bridge, which technically counts due to the small bit of Pittsburgh on the other side of the Monongahela River, crossing it around 10:34 AM.

Next up was a walk along the riverfront trail to the Hot Metal bridge, crossing around 11:53 AM.

After a break for lunch at Panera’s in Oakland until 12:55 PM, we crossed the Birmingham bridge around 1:11 PM.

Next was the 10th Street bridge at 1:34 PM

followed by the Liberty bridge at 2:20 PM.

It started raining around this point, and rained off and on throughout the day. I guess we can’t have a bridge walk without rain. :\
Next was the Smithfield bridge around 2:40 PM.

We met up with Owen at Market Square and then crossed the Fort Pitt bridge around 3:08 PM, finishing up Monongahela river bridges.

After a walk down Carson street, we crossed our only Ohio river bridge, West End, around 3:30 PM.

We met William along the riverside trail on the north side and watched people smashing pumpkins at the Carnegie Science Center. Then we crossed the Fort Duquesne bridge, the first on the Allegheny river at 4:07 PM.

Then it was a quick trek over to the three matching bridges: Roberto Clemente (formerly the 6th Street bridge) around 4:20 PM

Andy Warhol (formerly the 7th street bridge) around 4:25 PM

and Rachel Carson (formerly the 9th street bridge) around 4:34 PM.

Over along the north shore trail to the David McCullough bridge (formerly the 16th street bridge) a bit before 5 PM.

Then through the strip district to the reopened 31st street bridge at 5:25 PM.

At this point, we’d technically crossed every bridge with both endpoints in Pittsburgh, but we were on the north side, so we headed to the 40th street bridge to cross back, hitting it around 6:08 PM.

Made it close to home (detoured to dinner instead) around 6:56 PM. There are more walk photos here.

Overall it was an excellent trip. Greg is kind of disappointed that this will be his first year in Pittsburgh without a 30+ mile walk, but at least he’s still managed to do a 25+ mile walk every year. Which is still impressive.

Data, backups, and CrashPlan

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Wow, we almost got through October without making a post. I’m not ready to let this journal die (or be updated less than once a month) yet, so I guess it’s time for a general update.

Theme of the past couple weeks have been hard drive deaths. It started a couple weeks ago with Greg’s work, where they had a RAID drive fail (apparently resulting in data loss because the RAID controller hadn’t previously reported that the other disk was dead… so both disks dead == unhappy data).

Not to be outdone, last Wednesday, my external hard drive decided to start issuing checksum errors everywhere, and slow reads and writes down to unusable speeds. This prompted a panic and a rush to get new drives and restore my backups. (At least I’m super anal about backups, so I didn’t lose any data.)
(This is actually my first hard drive failure ever, which is kind of interesting. It’s not my first data disaster, as I previously had rogue virus scanning software wipe the hard drive while trying to clean a virus, but it’s the first time a drive has actually become unusable.)

Now today, Greg’s laptop seems to be having problems and freezing shortly after boot. Hopefully it doesn’t indicate another hard drive failure. But regardless, it seems this is not the month for technology.

Ben has previously written about cloud backups. I’d previously written them off (after all, I do local backups and off-site backups at my parents’ every time I visit them), but after the recent not-really-a-problem-at-all-but-still-scary “disaster” that was my hard drive failing, I took another look at them. After all, my data is priceless to me (especially my photos), and all of my careful backing up would be worthless in the event of theft or fire.

The service of choice for a lot of people seems to be CrashPlan. We use them at work, and I have 4 friends who use it (including Ben), so it seemed worth a look. The main benefit there (in addition to their great pricing and support for external drives) is their $125 seeding service, where they’ll send you a hard drive in the mail for you to do your initial backup on instead of having to upload everything over the internet. For me, with over 1TB of data to back up, this was a no brainer, and combined with their extremely reasonable prices, I decided to take the leap.

It took less than 24 hours from my order for the drive to ship, and less than 24 hours after that for me to actually receive it. This was last Friday (before my backup had even finished restoring onto my new drive!), so I kicked off the seed backup and it ran through the weekend. After it completed Monday morning, I realized I’d forgotten to exclude a couple directories, so I excluded them and ran an archive maintenance on the backup to permanently remove the files. Little did I know this process would take days to complete… it’s now Tuesday night, and it’s on the third step (of who knows how many) of maintenance.

So, as far as CrashPlan goes, a few first (and second) impressions:
1) Their customer service is amazing. Their reps are polite, knowledgeable, and responsive. It’s everything you want in customer service. So bonus points for that.
2) Their client is written in Java and therefore hogs memory like nobody’s business. My backup actually crashed on Saturday because the client had exceeded the default 512MB RAM limit, and I had to increase it to 2GB. Woke up some mornings to it using over 1.5GB, and had to reboot to get it back down to reasonable levels.* Negative points for that (although the Java aspect means they do support Linux, which I suppose is a plus).
3) Don’t do archive maintenance on your archives. :P It takes literally days to run (at least when you have 1TB of data like me), and there isn’t any warning beforehand about how long it could take. (And, as far as I can tell, there isn’t a way to cancel or delay the operation once it’s started.) Negative points for that.
4) Seeding service (assuming it works, of course, since I still haven’t sent back the drive) is awesome and totally worth the money if you have a lot of data to back up. It would have taken me months (like… almost a year) to send my 1TB of data over the internet. Seeding gets it done in a matter of days. So bonus points for offering that service.

*This is actually concerning to me, as my laptop only has 4GB of physical RAM, so CrashPlan regularly consuming half of that would be a serious problem. Fortunately, memory usage seems to only spike while a backup is actively occurring, and it otherwise uses a reasonable 150MB of RAM to run in the background and monitor files.

Anyway, this post has gotten a bit longer than I would have liked. I haven’t had a chance to do anything with photos while my computer has been restoring and backing up and maintenance-ing, so there isn’t anything to break up this wall of text for you today.

But yay for cloud backups. And boo for hardware problems.
(Also? Boo for the NSA being able to easily access my data now. But I suppose that’s a given for anything you put online, and I’d rather have a safe backup than worry about the government seeing my not-at-all-interesting files.)

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.