Well now, I have a new toy. ... Well I tried to go out and find a link but the reason it only cost me $20 is because it went out of production.

Anyway it's a Hamilton Beach Flatbread MealMaker Express. It's got a heated press to make tortillas, pitas and other flatbread with a griddle on top to cook the fillings. Pretty nitfy. I'm taking it over to Lorie's tonight to make something for them as they rearrange the furniture (again?). I've been wracking my brain all day to try and find something to cook since she's started back in on the vegetarian thing again (she used to be and then stopped for awhile). I'll let you know how it works out.

Games

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I'm about 2/3rds of the way through the new NeverWinter Nights expansion, Shadows of Undrentide. Kind of an unwieldy name for the Underdark (Undrentide) but I suppose they may have wanted to avoid copyright issues. Still it's proving to be pretty spiffy (as Vonne says). Five new prestige classes (I'm trying a shadowdancer and an arcane archer first), new spells, new skills, new feats and a bevy of new development tools. Now that I've gotten back into it I'll have to go over to the Vault at http://www.planetneverwinter.com and see about trying the best modules people have posted. I found a good module there for "editing" characters so I got them up to 1st level in the prestige class and started over.

I haven't tried the new clicky game, Shadowrun Duels yet but I've got a demo kit. They're no longer minis since they're the size of GI Joes! They're calling it an "action figure game".

I played Medal of Honor on the Xbox long enough to decide that I may get a copy of it (used anyway). Burnout 2 was pretty slick looking but I only played the crash game. It was a hoot (I got up to $7.7 million in damages).

Stuff

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I went down to the "Twilight Festival" last night with Jeff's family. His neices are cute as anything once they get used to you. Lorie joined us and we had a great time. The girls wanted to have their faces painted so we were on a quest!

Work

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I got a sticky piece of php finished today. Well okay, not finished but I (with some help) fixed the function which had been vexing me for a few days. It reads a directory listing and constructs a pull down menu from the contents. Now I need to rig up a mail to option to send the form results to me.

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Well I guess this is all for today. Have a good weekend.

I spent some time getting further along in my Star Wars d20 Campaign planning. We're just now getting to the really neat stuff I ginned up almost a year ago now for the campaign. It's set in the "Tales of the Jedi" period, four thousand years before the movies (an "unspoiled" era??). Just before the "Great Sith War". In fact, it's called "What did you do in the Great Sith War, Grandpa?" Of course that title makes certain assumptions about the characters actually surviving what I have planned for them (insert sinister DM laugh here).

Stuff

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Lorie is back from the war. It's strange how I felt listless and empty while she was gone. <g> She's all happy because her old roommate has finally finished moving out and her new roommate has arrived. Now they get to do a ton of moving furniture. Apparently that's nearly as good as shopping for shoes with some women.

Games

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Not much for the gaming this week. Star Wars d20 tonight and that's it unless I decide I want to play MechWarrior tomorrow night. Jeff's family is in town so most of the other stuff is on hold.

Not going to Origins since Jeff's not going. Strange that. He won't make GenCon either but there will be a crowd from here so there should be people I know there (besides the Fantasy Flight crowd).

Speaking of the Fantasy Flight crowd they have a new guy named Rob. He's been working on the Midnight stuff that Jeff has been writing. I really love what Jeff has been doing with the idea (Middle Earth a hundred years after Sauron wins). What was supposed to be a playtest for background material became the source for the third book in the series and a campaign book called "Crown of Shadows" (note: there was no crown in the stuff we ran whatsoever so don't ask me where it got it's name). Jeff submitted his stuff and Rob apparently wanted a bunch of changes which would have made it not what he wrote (and introduced lameness that was lacking in the original). So Jeff called him and they (apparently) negotiated a settlement, so to speak.

Well now that the book's out it seems that Rob ignored nearly everything Jeff said. Anyone who knows me knows how vociferiously I defend my friends when I feel they're being ill-treated. I wasn't quite ready to drive to Minnesota but I wasn't far off. I don't think I'll say anything to him (Rob) until after I read the book so I know how bad to lambast him!

Speaking of Minnesota, during our last WitchFire game one of them posed the question "With all the accents in the LotR movies, what would it have sounded like if the Elves had Minnesota accents?" <'sota accent on> "Ya, that ring you got, that's a bad one, eh?" I posted that comment to a mailing list I'm on and the response was "What if they sounded valley?" <shudder> I'm sure Greg can tell us some tales at GenCon.

I got the expansion to Neverwinter Nights. They put the standard DMG prestige classes (arcane archer, assassin, blackguard and shadowdancer) in and one new one (harper scout). Of course I have to try the archer and the shadowdancer so I've had to start over on characters. It's a long haul so I'm looking for a training mod or something. I tried two last night and they both handed my ranger his butt!

Books

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Last Friday Erik, Mary, Jess, one of her friends and I went to a "thing" the University Bookstore had to celebrate the release of the new Harry Potter book. There were some cute costumes but most of it was blase. Jess had fun though and that's really who it was for. We got 30% off the book price but I saw it the next day at Wal Mart for five dollars less!

What is it with the media these days? Now CBS has been trying to convince Jessica Lynch to give them exclusive rights and the New York Times is calling them on "checkbook journalism". And her notoriety (sp?) is from having survived a wrong turn and then getting her fat pulled out of the fire by the Special Forces! (not that I'm diminishing the soldiers, marines, airmen or sailors who were involved in Operation Iraqi Freedom - who makes up these names? - in any way) The SF troops should be the ones being wooed for book and movie deals!

Anyone who knows me knows my position on the media (they haven't reported accurately on the military since the Crimean War!). But when the news people are IN the news it must be a slow news day. I would say "sorry" to any journalist who read this but that would be hypicritical, I'm not sorry. For every good gal or guy in the media there seems to be fifty Geraldos around (and he's PDL - pretty damn lucky - his stunt didn't get any soldiers killed or wounded or he would have found himself reporting on a courts martial from the "wrong" end!).

And that's another thing, what's up with the 's' at the end of court in "courts martial"? Yes, it's not a misspelling and that is the way it's spelled (UCMJ - Uniform Code of Military Justice and the "Manual for Courts Martial").

Games

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Gaming goodness for this week starts tonight with Vampire. And that is always a long day because I have to be in to work early to man the Op Center. The game rarely ends before midnight and I'm up at 6. "Pshaa" you say? Well I'm getting old and need my beauty sleep! Why do people use that phrase? Especially those of us who would still be homely if we were beat to death with the "beauty stick"! (you know there is one since everyone is always talking about the "ugly stick" and there has to be balance!)

I pre-ordered the Neverwinter Nights module yesterday. And then I found out someone out there in Internet Land is trying to work up an Iron Kingdoms NwN module. Hmmm.

'Puters, or is it Work

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They (the ubitquous "they" as in the CDT = Central Directorate of They) must have gotten a new machine or reinstalled the OS on the one in the Op Center. I got in and had no preferences so I had to set everything up again.

Stuff

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Hmmm. Seems to me there was something else I was going to post yesterday but I didn't and can't remember what it was now. Oh well, it's not like this thing needs a whole lot more of my rambling (unless it's funny!).

I did fiddle with my menu bar again but it seems to be okay now.

Games

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Okay, the next question is whether I'm going to pre-order Star Wars Galaxies. Erik has been in the closed beta and some of the things he's been able to talk about make me question their design philosophy. It's going to be very difficult to become Jedi but then it does take place between the second and third films so Jedi are extinct (or nearly so). But then once you get there you can't use your powers or you'll risk permadeath. And the whole concept of having a character you could lose permanently after putting who knows how many hours into developing is iffy at best (at least in a computer RPG, I still mourne the death of Kaleb Whitefire, my 6th level half-elf monk in Jay's Pale Campaign, he was just fixing to get some of the cool monk abilities!). I'm not sure I'll enjoy the game so I don't know if I should pre-order or if I should sink the $70 into the collector's edition. I mean who cares about figs you won't ever use or books signed by the development team. The art book might be cool but the "in game wearables" are iffy.

The next set of Crimson Skies plane pack is due out Wednesday. I should have pre-paid Katie last week but I forgot. Maybe I'll stop by the store tonight on the way home. Some of the planes look pretty cool. I've been thinking about writing up some strategy articles and submitting them to the WizKids site. Now all I need to do is to work out the tactics and see if the idea I had will work.

This weeks MechWarrior scenario looks ineresting. Six hundred points but only three orders and you have to have three mechs. And a whole set of ice rules.

Tuesday is the second from last Vampire game. And Thursday I'm running Iron Kingdoms Witchfire again. Friday we're camping out at the University Bookstore to get a copy of the new Harry Potter book. A full week of geeky goodness! Although I saw an interesting article about the Potter phenomena. It was written by an Indian woman and focused on interpreting the themes of the book in terms of the cinderella story that is J.K. Rowling's success.

More Games

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Okay, Knights of the Old Republic is coming out this month. I've seen emails for pre-orders but after getting burned badly pre-ordering Pool of Radiance, the deal has to be pretty damn sweet before I'll fall for it again. But the game is everything I wanted in a Jedi game. Placed in the "Tales of the Jedi" era (about four thousand years before the movie) it's the height of the Jedi's Power. The council has yet to be formed but the Jedi aren't as hidebound as they become before the get eated by Darth Vader and the Emperor. However the Sith are invading the Galactic Republic so there's lots of bad guys for you to face off against. Mmmmm, Sith. Ethen Phillips (Nelix on Voyager) and Ed Asner are some of the people doing the voice work for it. Should sound good!

Last Sunday we had a baby shower/game night and Jay showed us "Burnout 2" for the Xbox. The racing part of it wasn't what we saw, however. Apparently there's a sub-game in which the objective is to crash into other things (cars, buses, buildings, etc.) causing as much damage as possible. Your score is recorded in the dollar amount of damage you do. I broke $400k but Jay hit half a mil easy!

The Crimson Skies Xbox game is supposed to be coming out soon too. Mmmm, planes, Jedi and crashes, how could you lose?

The title bar menu seems to be okay now so I should stop monkeying with it. Those of you who program know, however, that this just won't happen! We'll see how long it lasts.

Stuff

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Not much for this topic today. Maybe later.

Games

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Okay, I hate when I do that. Last night we played Iron Kingdoms at Andy's house. It's a good location, close to campus, pretty centrally located for those who live scattered all over the city (not that Columbia is that big) and he's got lots of room with a nice big dining room table. While sitting for all those hours I sometimes get "wallet butt". Sitting on a wallet with too much junk in it gets uncomfortable. So I take it out and set it on the table next to me. Now we're talking about a guy who has everything you could ever think of in his bag (which changes shape from time to time - my Army classmates used to call it the "Everything Bag" because if they asked for it, I could pull it out of the bag). Lately it's been in a cloth sack that my BMW motorcycle boots came in. (I keep using it for nostalgia's sake since I can't ride bikes anymore on pain of being disowned by friends and family)

So this morning we get back from our break walk (we called it GOYA (said in a gravelly deep voice), short for Get Off Your A$$) I realized my wallet was missing. After much cubicle searching, a drive home to see if I even put it in my pocket, retracing our walk steps (including stopping at the bank and the coffee place to see if someone turned it in) it suddenly occured to me that last time I "lost it" I had left it at Jay's after a D&D game. So I tried to call Andy but he's working at a law firm this summer and I don't have that number. Then I sent email desparately asking if I had left it. Finally I realized that I might have picked it up with all the other junk I had out last night and put it into the BMW bag. Sure enough that's where it was. Finding it is a nice feeling, obviating that sinking feeling you get when you realize you'll have to call all the credit card companies, the bank and The Lord Above to cancelling everything.

Oh and the game was a blast too!

What's the deal with these dumb popups. Even as I'm writing that sentence, I lost focus from the browser as my copy of Ad-Aware prevented another popup from claiming my attention. This is more annoying than those phone company calls during dinner asking you if you wanted to change your long distance carrier. At least with those you could yell at the poor telemarketer, slam the phone down on the hook and mutter curses under your breath.

And that's one of the things about Windows I don't much like. You'll start a program which opens a window. Things seem to be taking awhile so you'll open another window to do something else. All of the sudden BAM you're back in the first window because what you started there is finished. Outlook/Exchange is notorious about that in my experience! I always want to say to it "Stop that! I'll come back to you when I'm ready, you just wait patiently over there!". Of course Windows is like a puppy who always wants to be the center of attention and will pee on the carpet if you glance away for a second!

Now I tried to correct the Life of Riley (which is updated weekdaily now) URL on the bar (points to the top of the blog). Figured I'd add Foxtrot since I try to read that daily now too.

Stuff

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Okay, did I get the html code right? (the code for the headings and those nifty little lines under them) We'll see when I actually post this thing.

My leg is getting much better but it's a bit stiff today. For those who haven't heard I had a hematoma left over from my motorcycle accident last October. It got infected about two weeks ago (during a Vampire game no less) and I had to go back into the hospital for surgery. This was on a Thursday evening and things were rough on Friday as I fought off the infection. It's not much fun when you're under three blankets and still shivering one minute and ten minutes later you're sweating your flimsy little hospital gown off. To top that off they left the incision open and I had to "pack" it with gauze for two weeks. That ooked a lot of people out when I told them about it!
;-P

Games

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I played MechWarrior last night. It was a pretty cool scenario. Your 300 point force was falling through the atmosphere in what they called a "hot drop" so all your units had to have jump jets special equipment. You place one of your units then the other guys places one and back and forth. Then for the first four turns of the game you were falling and could only move 2" instead of your normal move. I lost. Twice. Of course. My dice hate me and I don't bother to devote enough attention to picking out my units to actually win but it's fun to play (except for a few people who take things WAY too seriously) and so I often get the fellowship prize because I have such a good attitude about it.

Tonight we continue our Iron Kingdoms Witchfire campaign. They should find some interesting things and the story should proceed significantly. If I say much more then my players may get wise to things! But we're all having a lot of fun with this. I'll try and post some good stories from the game now that I'm updating my blog more frequently.

Lorie is gone this weekend so I'll probably play some Dark Age of Camelot. I play on Gaheris (Izradain/Izrador) sometimes but mostly on Guin ... (I can never spell this) Guinevere with my guild Nature's Shadow (Bondevid/Kerraldan/Gebwyn/others to numerous to mention). If anyone reading this catches me online then say hi!

Work

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Okay, I seem to be getting back into the html/perl/php/whatever mode pretty easily again. I finally finished a mysql query/perl script to find out some stuff another group wanted yesterday. It worked so well I did another chunk of data today and although it was bigger and took longer to do what I wanted, I wrote the code all myself with only one question to one of the other sysadmins. Pretty soon I should be back in the groove. Now I just have to get a php page finished and then I can actually get some work done!

Okay, now it seems to be updating.
Well, I updated this and but some board like tags (with brackets instead of angle brackets) up and it seems to be taking awhile to get it updated. Sorry!

Stuff

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Okay, it's finally time for me to get back to this thing and (perhaps) to keep it a bit up to date. At least so that my friends who aren't in Columbia can keep up to date on what's going on here. A few things first.

One of my old Army Buddies, Tony Funkhouser (yea, go ahead and laugh at his name, some people already have, but I know he's cool) has left for Iraq. He's taking command (he's a Lieutenant Colonel now - oh, and I guess I'm a Major) of the 5th Engineer Battalion (Corps)(Mech). They'll probably get to do some real construction, which Army Engineers never get to do in garrison because it might impact local contractors and whatnot. He flew out on the 30th of May and takes command on the 18th of June. I got an invitation and a few guys at work have tried to talk me into going but I don't see it happening. I doubt I could get a visa and I don't see the Army letting civilians into the country. In addition it seems disgruntled Iraqis have taken to using mortars in their ambushes. My dad got pissed enough at me when I had a motorcycle accident, I don't want to imagine how peaved he'd be if I were killed in an Iraqi ambush pulling a stunt like that!

Lorie, the woman I've been seeing, has advanced to the status of Girlfriend, just for those of my friends who need a label. Things are going well though we both seem to be pretty busy a lot of the time. Everybody loves her and I think she's Pretty Spiffy(tm) too!

Work

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Work seems to stay the same as always although now is the time when we get to actually do changes to the servers since class isn't in session. I'm working on some changes to the bigbrother server I run which require I dredge out my php knowledge but that should be a good thing.

Games

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I just finished Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (Xbox version) for the first time. I'll probably go through it with the elven sorceress and the dwarf fighter so it will be two more times before I pass it off to Jeff or Jay or one of the other guys who has an Xbox.

Brute Force is out and I've been working on that slowly. And I got the Crimson Skies game that came out a few years ago. It's not supposed to run under XP but we'll see. The boards seem to indicate many people get it to run.

Speaking of Crimson Skies, WizKids came out with their click game. Pretty slick. Fun and graphical with the painted, 3D planes. The released two squadron packs (4 models) and an "aces pack" with two minis and two planes (still only 4 models). The next installment was supposed to be the same size (an ace pack and two squadron packs) with only four more models coming out at the end of July. They pushed one of the squadron packs up to next week and one back to August with the aces early July. Nice.

To add to the gaming goodness I get bombarded with, they also released the next MechWarrior expansion, which has HELICOPTERS!!! Anyone who knows me knows I'm a helio fanatic. I haven't gotten to play much with the new set but it looks good so far.

The Midnight campaign is long over now. All the notes got finished but I'm not supposed to advertise the URL since people who might buy the book might see it and they're worried that it would hurt sales if they see a "preview". But we all had a blast and I think it's different enough in it's final form to not have that much of an impact. But it's not up to me. The main book has been out for awhile now. The second book, something with prestige classes, feats, etc. is out now too. The campaign book should be hitting stores any time now.

The Iron Kingdoms Witchfire campaign is going well. We're about a third of the way through the first book and everyone is having a blast. One of the NPCs in Act I was pretty spooky (an old bum who lived in a graveyard). I role played him so well that one of the players said "Jim seems to have many Gollum like qualities" to which someone responded "Heck, Gollum has many Jim like qualities!".

'Puters

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Still haven't put that new hard drive in. But I have a cable modem now. Nice. All I need now is a router so I can hook up the Xbox and get Xbox Live. Although none of the Live games have really grabbed me so I'm not in a hurry right now. When Jeff moves to Colorado then I probably will be so I can still play Halo with him.