Category Archives: Activities

Meme: The Tartan

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The year is a third over, which means life has been updated both with new photo stats and with new main life updates. Yay.

Continuing Jess’ meme topics for me, we have The Tartan, CMU’s student newspaper.

The Tartan is one of those things I wish I had done in undergrad, because it’s just *fun*. I had previously tried joining their photo staff during an activities fair my freshman year, but no one ever emailed me or anything, so I joined The Thistle (yearbook) instead.

After I moved back to Pittsburgh, it came time to put together the Orientation issue of The Tartan. Not having much to do on weekends, I tagged along with Greg to help lay out the pages. We pulled some crazy hours (finishing and sending pages to the printer as the sun was rising), but got it done, and I was kind of hooked.

After that, with permission from the editor-in-chief and publisher, I joined the staff mostly to do layout. At some point, I got copy certified and started doing copy editing as well. And at some point I submitted some photos (because they needed last-minute ones and I happened to have some on me), so I kind of joined photo staff as well. I wrote one opinion piece last Carnival on the new hardhat requirement, so I guess the only thing I haven’t done for the paper is ads-related things. And apparently, they like me, because they gave me the title of senior staff.

I think the best part of The Tartan is the people. It’s not a social organization, because everyone is there to get things done and everyone has a job to do, but sometimes it feels like it’s as much about being around awesome people as actually producing a paper. And you pick up a lot of good skills too. (And, if you’re still in school, it’s excellent stuff to put on your resume.)

Not really sure what else to say about it.

San Francisco

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I am in San Francisco through Friday. Yay San Francisco.
Photos!


Plane. Yay plane.

Southwest in Vegas has these nice ceiling-mounted boarding signs instead of the poles they have at other airports. I think these are nicer.

There’s a tech company ad on the BART based on insanity wolf. This is rather… bizarre.

Sunday dinner, as always, was all-you-can-eat pizza at Local. This time I went with Ian, Trisha, Ben, and Mark.

Afterward, we went to Jeremy’s for games.

Monday dinner was Stone with teisenbe and Kempy.

Dinner tonight was Xanh in Mountain View with jgrafton, Jack, Krieger, Ben, dfontain, Gopi, Raphael, and Erik.

Automation, cards, yay

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life has gotten an update that brings it up to present day. Yay life.

I’ve also posted Tartan photos at photos.

While I was batching photos today, it occurred to me that I should learn how to write Photoshop scripts to do the watermarking and resizing for me. (Previously I had been using the standard Image Processor to resize, then watermarking manually.)
The result is this script that opens the watermark files, then resizes and watermarks all jpg images in the selected directory.
Yay scripts. Maybe someone will find it useful.

In non-scripty-Photoshopy news, I’ve been working a bit on cards for the next People Wars expansion, Celebrations.


I mostly just like this image. Josh is over 6’5″ and Jen is shorter than 5′, and it’s amusing to see them together. (Yes, they’re both standing up. Here’s what happens when he kneels.)

Their individual cards are also interesting because of the effects I gave them.

I think it’ll be interesting to see how these work out in the game.

Yay things.

Life

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Life has been up and down lately. Mostly down. Mostly due to work and (sometimes) feeling like I’m drowning in work and that there’s always so much work to do that I will never finish it all.
I guess I also feel bad because the poor QAs on our team are super stressed. And because Greg is super stressed. I really have no right to complain about anything given how horribly busy Greg *actually* is, whereas I have the luxury of 9-5 hours and being able to go do non-work things and keep myself from going crazy.

But that is not good to think about. So let’s not talk about that.

This weekend there were games. There was a very interesting 3-player game of Power Grid where 4 of the high-level green plants were removed from the game and all of the high numbered plants came out early. The result was much unhappiness and a resource track that actually became completely depleted at one point. There was also an interesting game of Carcassone where all of the large city pieces came out at the end, resulting in a 12-point unfinished city for Keith.

Oh yeah, which means that I bought Power Grid last week. It was a good purchase, and I’m very happy with it. I also ordered a copy of Puerto Rico‘s anniversary edition (with nicer pieces) that should be here in a week or two. Board games are nice things to buy, because spending time with people and being social is an awesome thing.

If anyone has suggestions for other games to buy, I will gladly accept them.

The new People Wars expansion set is out. I like the new templates with the larger images. Your mileage may vary.

So yeah. I guess stuff goes.