ITG, 7 Blunders, BBQ, and Keith Manor

Posted on by

Life has been full of stuff recently. In roughly reverse order:

The ITG machine at the storage facility in the South Side exists, and it is awesomely full of charts I love. In the year-ish absence from ITG, it seems my reading has not suffered at all but my stamina is gone. I can’t even make it to the jacks in Perfect Cherry Storm anymore, and probably generally can no longer pass an 11 (although I didn’t try). The fact that the place is a small, enclosed space with no cooling other than fans probably doesn’t help either.
It’s good to have ITG machine access again, even if it means a bit more work than previously to access.




7 Wonders is one of my favorite board games, and it gets played around once a week. I already have the Leaders and Cities expansions, as well as the promo leaders, wonders expansion, and extra fan-made boards from board game geek (for a total of 23 wonder boards). We decided to try a variant of it last games night that Max affectionately titled “7 Blunders”. The goal is to get the lowest score possible, but you’re subject to the 2-player-style rules where you can’t sell a card unless you are forced to, cannot buy resources if you could make them yourself in some way, and must build for free if you can. It makes for a very interesting game, especially depending on whether your wonder gives you lots of points or not… do you save the wonder stages for burying large-point-value age 3 cards, or do you take care of them early so building is harder for you due to lack of resources?
We’ll certainly play it again and see how that goes.

Chris and Rob hosted a last-minute Memorial Day BBQ, and it was tasty.


In other other things, Keith’s kitchen is sad. His ceiling had been cracking (I guess one of the screws holding the ceiling up came out or something…?), so we spent a Saturday helping him remove his kitchen appliances and stripping the wallpaper from the room (which ended up being quite the experience due to the painted double layers of wallpaper, going as far as 4 layers deep at the top where there was trim). Apparently his ceiling came crashing down on Monday (which was the alternate day for wallpaper removal), so it was a good thing we did it when we did.




Also here’s us being crazy after midnight at IHOP, attempting to recreate various bad stock photo scenes.





Life, Washington, Kickstarter

Posted on by

life has been updated. The photo journal is now current to today, and the stats page includes updated photos from the last 4 months. I feel like I should probably add more Pittsburgh people into stats (like Austin, Michael, Yubin, and Max), since I’ve known them for long enough now that stats will actually be somewhat interesting.

In any case, we got back yesterday from our trip to Washington, D.C. Photos are here.

The trip was primarily because Greg wanted to see Eddie Izzard, and the closest place he was performing was Washington. (The tour later added Pittsburgh and Cleveland locations, so we probably didn’t have to make the trip out… but hey, D.C. trip!) Headed out on the Megabus Thursday evening and came back Sunday afternoon.

We stayed with Mark, Greg’s friend from undergrad, and his wife Christine. They had cats. The cats were adorable.



The Eddie Izzard performance itself was pretty awesome. This was my first time seeing him perform, but he was a lot better than previous comedians I’ve seen.

Interesting thing I learned: Apparently the place is not “Washington D.C.” but rather “Washington, D.C.” as it’s the city of Washington in the District of Columbia. For some reason I’d always assumed that the entire place was just the district, whose proper name was “Washington.” (Apparently D.C. was supposed to have had some other cities it in, that either were returned to Virginia or gobbled up by Washington itself? So the entire district is one city, so I’m not entirely off in thinking that.)
Whee.

In any case, we weren’t there too long, so we didn’t really get to see very much. But we did take up a lot of time (most of Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday) seeing the Newseum, which was quite interesting and awesome to visit. Greg and I lamented over the lack of exhibits for editing and layout, but what was there (covering all forms of reporting and media) was well done. I particularly enjoyed the exhibition of Pulitzer-winning photographs. It was also interesting to see front pages from papers from all 50 states. On Friday, the most popular front-page news item seemed to be Spiderman 2 (followed up by Obamacare enrollment articles).


There was also, of course, time spent photographing… in particular, we wandered around the Tidal Basin at night photographing the Washington Monument (unfortunately still closed) and the Jefferson memorial (which apparently has a museum in its base O_o).



The low photo trend continues, with only 644 photos from the trip (representing 911 shutter releases).

In other, totally-unrelated-to-anything stuff, there is a new Kickstarter for art. Because art is awesome. (Also my friend David has art in this anthology.) So you should back it.

Yay for life.

Movies, photos, People Wars, work

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.