Category Archives: Board Games

Life, Carcassonne, and Zeke

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It’s a new year. I guess I should probably write something here.

My photojournal and stats page have both been updated through the 1st. People haven’t changed much in the last 4 months. It also seems like most of my time has been spent with Owen (and Greg, obviously), which also makes sense given we’ve been doing more board games and general wandering things.

I mentioned in my last post that I got Carcassonne Wheel of Fortune for Christmas. One of the green meeples in the set was the wrong size (a larger meeple, normally from the Inns and Cathedrals expansion; proof that even they can’t tell the two sizes apart). I contacted Rio Grande and they sent me a replacement normal sized meeple. It was super simple, and I’m glad Rio Grande is awesome and stands behind their games.

So we attempted a 6-player game with all of the tiles (base set, Wheel of Fortune, and Inns and Cathedrals) and all of the meeples (15 a person, plus the scoreboard, plus the large meeple). The result was kind of insane. No one ever ran out of meeples, despite placing almost every turn, and the game lasted many hours. Here’s the final result.

Since then, we’ve figured the normal 7 meeples is much more reasonable, and we’ve played a few games with all of the tiles, including this one where we managed to make a 99-point city (and made Greg sad because he didn’t get points from it). (It’s in the upper left of the photo.)

I also ordered two additional colors of meeples (orange and pink) from Meeple Source. They’re slightly different from the standard meeples, and seem to be inferior quality (and weren’t cheap either), but it’s nice to have the ability to play 8-player Carcassonne.

I really, really like the wheel though. Not only does it provide a better start tile (automatically split into three fields; although there seems to be a tendancy for at least two of them to join up as the game progresses), but the wheel spaces themselves are really interesting. In particular, plague is useful as a way to take back pieces that are no longer useful, and all of the various point scoring spaces mean your people stuck on the board are still worth something throughout the game. Yay.

Keith also got us a copy of the Catapult expansion (from Austria; so it’s in German). We haven’t tried it yet, but I’m trying to figure out some house rules for the fair tiles in the (likely) event that the catapult itself isn’t any fun to use. We shall see.

In other fun things, Zeke came to visit for a few days after Christmas, and there was much board gaming and Ke$ha.


As you can probably tell from all of the above, I’m still loving my 35mm f/1.8 lens and wondering why I didn’t get it sooner. It has pretty much been my exclusive lens since I got it, only coming off the camera a couple times when I needed the 18mm end of my 18-200mm. (Surprisingly, I don’t miss the ability to zoom in at all, like I thought I would. And 35mm is wide enough for most things.)

Life has been full of people and photos and board games and is generally awesome for it.

Christmas, tech ranting, and Greyhound poop

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It seems all I ever write anymore is rants about technology gone wrong. This won’t be any exception.

I’ve already ranted about how Facebook logs your search history and when you untag yourself (despite already making it really difficult to do so). This combined with the inability to actually see things you’re tagged in now (recent change?) means I’m once again contemplating deactivating Facebook. I would probably just leave it inactive until I need to contact someone, at which point I would pop on, grab the email address (or I guess send a message?) and deactivate again. Argh blargh why is Facebook so bad?

But the thing that has been bothering me lately is the new version of iTunes, especially since I took my personal laptop (running iTunes 11) for the holidays and was very unhappy with its interface.

Here is iTunes 10.

Along the left side, under “Library”, there are various filters for your library. You can view all of your music, shows, etc. You can also filter down by playlist, or things like recently added or recently played. You can sort the music in the usual way (clicking one of the named headers in the music view). This makes sense.

Here is new iTunes 11.

The sorting of your media type (music, shows, etc) has moved into a drop down, which is reasonable. However, all of the sorting options have moved into the top bar (but you can still sort the old way by selecting “Songs”), where they are somehow treated the same as playlists. These seem like fundamentally different things to me… sorting all files is different from filtering down on files via playlists. Apple, why did you do this? This non-intuitive sorting also means iTunes needs all sorts of special tricks like temporarily showing the playlist list when you start to drag a music file (so you can actually add it to a playlist).
There’s also a bunch of changes that don’t make any sense to me. Previously, shuffle/repeat were specific to a playlist. Now, it seems to be a global state. That means, for example, you can’t just click from a playlist (that was shuffled) back to your full library, since you’ll be shuffling songs in your full library as well. (This was useful when you purchased a new album and wanted to listen to it straight through, but your usual playlists shuffle.)
They have also, for some bizarre reason, decided to treat music in iCloud the same as local music. That is, in your library, you’ll see greyed-out music appear that indicates it’s not downloaded. Which would make some sense except it shows EVERY song in iCloud, even ones you have already downloaded, resulting in many being shown twice. (Yes, you can disable this functionality, but you have to unintuitively go to the “Store” tab in preferences.)

I guess this, in particular, bothers me because Apple is known for being extremely user-friendly. The changes to iTunes don’t seem to make much sense to me.

In any case, this has been 500 words of rant, so I should perhaps talk about nicer things.

I had a Christmas. It was nice. Greg got me a copy of the Wheel of Fortune expansion for Carcassonne. This is awesome since it means we’ll now have super Carcassonne with 15 meeples per person and close to twice the number of tiles (and, most importantly, a larger start tile that starts with 3 separate fields). Woo. He also got me a copy of Thurns and Taxis for my birthday, but let me open it early. Awesome game.

I also received an iTunes gift card that I used to buy some new iPad games. Plague, Inc is very similar to the Pandemic II flash game, and just as difficult. Cytus and Groove Coaster Zero are music games, which I generally like. Surviving High School and Cause of Death are “visual novel” type games, although SHS also has some minigames inside it.
I’ve also been playing Sake Visual’s visual novels since I had lots of free time over the last week. They’re really, really well done (even the free ones). Highly recommended.

Also received an Amazon gift card that I used on their $1.99 albums sale to pick up Red River Blue and Red. I actually haven’t listened to the latter yet, but if it’s anything like the singles she’s put out, I won’t like it. Seriously, why did Taylor Swift veer so sharply into pop? (“I Knew You Were Trouble” is closer to R&B than Country, but it’s definetly pop.)

As for getting home, the Greyhound yesterday was miserable. My bus was scheduled to leave at 12:10. We didn’t leave until after 3 when two buses came and went because they were full (with passengers from Cleveland). Seriously, Greyhound, you know how many tickets you’ve sold. Why is it so hard to get enough buses with enough capacity? The part that really bothers me is that their ticket explicitly states, “Seating is first-come, first-served. In case of insufficient seating capacity, passengers will be placed on succeeding schedules that have available seats.” So they don’t even have to take responsibility if they planned poorly and don’t have enough buses… they just have to push you to the next one (which might not and, in my case, didn’t have enough room).
Never again. I think I’d rather pay to fly home than deal with such a mess again. At least, with airlines, they have to compensate you if they bump you due to capacity (and they have ways to check whether your flight has been cancelled or delayed other than showing up at the airport and waiting).

Yay life. Yay games. Yay music. Boo Greyhound.

Edit: Facebook deactivated again. Good riddance. I really wish people still blogged or used email, because I dislike being unable to contact some people. But Facebook is not worth it.

Yay life

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Life has been full of nice things lately.

I went out with Allison to the Brew Gentlemen and took photos, one of which was used as the front-page photo for one of the sections of the paper. (They used one of the ones where the people were out of focus though, so meh.) But yay for my first Pillbox cover photo.

We got some nice new glass tupperware to replace our random collection of plastic stuff. I feel much better about putting food into these and sending Greg off with lunch in them.

We got a new Carcassonne expansion that came with “giant meeples”. However, the meeples weren’t easily distinguishable from the regular ones, so we added smiley faces to them. Yay happy meeples.

We went to Dave and Buster’s with Yubin and Max to play Pump It Up. It was a lot of fun and good exercise (especially given that the ITG machine has been out of commission for a while). I also got my first full-perfect combo in any dancing game. The accuracy ratings in PIU are much, much more forgiving than ITG or DDR.

I’ve also been cooking more, which is generally an indicator that I’m happier. I made a huge pot of curry over the weekend, and have been making things like burgers, quesadillas, pasta, and salmon throughout the week. Nice things there include a nice hunk of romano cheese to freshly grate over pasta and lots of fresh vegetables (in salad or steamed).

I’ve also been eating a lot this week, which is a good thing. Food is tasty.

Tomorrow is (supposedly) the usual board games with Yubin and Max. Board games are awesome and playing them with awesome people is even more awesome.

I’ve been feeling like rewriting CMU adventures lately and continuing to build it. I just need to get motivated to write code outside of work again.

Yay life. :D

Temporary files in Firefox, taxes, photos, and life

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So the internet has been quite worthless on the question “Where do files get saved when you open them instead of downloading them in Firefox?”. All of the results for things like “temporary files”, “download location”, or “opened file location” assume you’re referring to the browser cache. Sigh.
So it turns out, on Windows, when you click a link and it pops up a “Download or open” dialog, choosing to open will store the file in C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Local\Temp. (My coworker reports that, on Linux, it stores in /tmp, which makes sense.)
This seems like poor design on behalf of Firefox, because it seems like it should automatically save such files to your default download location (normally something like C:\Users\yourusername\Downloads) rather than an arbitrary location that isn’t even associated with Firefox. It means you probably have sensitive data (like I was opening PDFs containing pay stubs) saved somewhere that won’t be deleted, either with a Firefox cache clear or a manual check of your downloads folder. If it’s going to use \AppData, the least it could do is save in the Firefox folder in \AppData.
Combined with all of the latest fun with Firefox (daily freezes, constant slowness, insane memory usage, refusal to properly close when you hit X, and inability to remember the last download location [seriously, it will show me one of my last three chosen save directories, seemingly randomly, when I try to save something]), I think it might be time to move off of it. You were such a great browser, Firefox. What happened?

Speaking of pay stubs, I got a raise at the end of last month, and got my first pay stub afterward today. My before-tax pay went up by $237.50 this pay period, but my federal taxes withheld went up by $304.07, so I actually make less now than I did before the raise. I thought taxes were set up so that this situation couldn’t happen. How very odd.

Life has been full of photos and games lately. I photographed the TOC on campus on Tuesday and (as usual) took photos at Yubin’s game night last night.



Max and I played a game of Carcassone where we completely tied, and we were sharing a huge field with 4 workers each in it. (The field went back and forth many times, including blocked attempts to join a fifth farmer to the field by each of us.) It was pretty awesome. Here’s the game before scoring the last field.

Kempy was also in town for the TOC, and we got dinner on Monday.

Here’s a Ben from lunch yesterday.

In other news, I have finally started working further backward in life.alanv.org through high school, eventually hoping to reach the first photo I ever took (in September 2000). I’m currently back in October of 2003 (my last year of high school), and expect to be done with it by the end of next week. Yay actually completing projects, for once.

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)