Went out for lunch today, as I often do when I'm free on Saturday. It was so nice out (surprisingly so, given predictions of cool and wind) that afterward I decided to keep on biking. Fortunately, I keep sunscreen in my backpack for such emergencies.

I headed straight north, up the Ohlone Greenway. I now know the best way to get around the construction in Albany. Sadly, I discovered that the trail in El Cerrito is under heavy construction too. And, it's not as easy to go around that. I ended up on either on busy streets or hilly streets, which was no good.

When I reached Richmond, I turned west onto the Richmond Greenway, and took that to its end. There's still a discontinuity in downtown Richmond, but I did see a map today that marked that area as "incomplete". So, hopefully, some day ...

At the end of the Richmond Greenway there's this intersection that always feel full of possibilities. To the east you have the Richmond Greenway. To the north you have continuous bike path up through the Wildcat Canyon intersection and beyond that to the landfill. To the west you have Point Richmond and Miller-Knox Regional Shoreline. To the south you have Richmond Inner Harbor.

It was another spur of the moment decision to head out to Point Richmond. I explored the (teeny) town for a bit and even found the Masquers Theatre that Chris & Marie have taken us to a couple of times. I also saw the recently reopened Richmond Plunge, a gigantic indoor pool (though sadly only the outside & the entrance). Then I biked through the tunnel to the Miller-Knox Regional Shoreline, which was my goal.

I love the Shoreline. It reminds me of Ed Levine park, near Milpitas, where I spent many summer days when I was young. There's lake and grass and brownish hills rising all around. But, bonus, unlike Ed Levine you have the Bay to the other side. I read out there for a while (Locke & Key, Volume 2) and biked around the Park. As in Point Richmond proper, I explored a couple of places I hadn't before. First, I went out to the old Ferry Launch, which is mainly falling down pier & railroad track, but still a neat view into the past. Then, past the yacht club, I biked out on a spit that cuts further into the Bay. It's got lots of fancy houses on stilts out over the Bay to either side. Very pretty.

Nice views of San Francisco all around, and a pretty unique view of just one tower of the Golden Gate, peaking out past Angel Island.

I'm pretty sure there's new Bay Trail just beyond the spit, but if so I didn't spot it. I was getting pretty tired, so I wasn't much for exploring any more by that point, in any case. So I biked back up over the hill that protects the area, then took surface roads to Richmond Harbor and from there through the salt marshes, past Point Isabel, and up more of the Bay Trail before cutting inland near Target and rejoining the Greenway past Gilman. It was a pretty standard ride home from there.

Total time out was about 3 and a half hours. Total mileage was 26. I was quite tuckered out from around the salt marshes, so it was a long ride for me.  

Finished up a complete draft of my rpg history article on Grimoire Games (and on Dave Hargrave and early RP gaming in the SF Bay Area). It's one that I'm very pleased with, because I think it does a really nice job of shedding a light on what the early RPG hobby looked like, at least on this coast. As I wrote in my intro to the history, it's the first one that I really wished had gone in the book.

This one was slightly exhausting to write because the written record of the company was so scant. I only managed to turn up three Dave Hargrave "interviews"; fortunately two of them were extensive bios in Different Worlds. The third was part of a semi-hit-piece in New West magazine which Greg S. was kind enough to put me onto. I'm aware of one more notable article by Hargrave, in super small-press Abyss #17, from Ragnarok Press. I'd still like to somehow get a copy of that article, but for now I'm content.

Despite the scant primary sources from Hargrave, I was able to get some pretty extensive help from Marc S. (on Arduin and the second edition) and Donald R. (on the early bay area gaming culture), so that was part of what made the article come out pretty good. Greg S., Steve P., and others helped too.! But it was still a lot more work than just reading a pile of interviews and design notes.

The article will show up in two parts in my Designers & Dragons column on 6/4 and 7/9. If you subscribe to the RSS, you should see new articles as they appear.

Amazon is the other company on my mind this evening, for they sadly disappointed me. We'd ordered The Amazing Race Season 4 from them, as they've started pressing on-demand DVDs, and we're happy to finally get to see the old seasons of a reality show we like.

Unfortunately, when we sat down to watch this newest DVD this evening, as a start-of-the-holiday-weekend treat (and also a treat for Kimberly who is sick), we discovered that our 3-DVD set had shipped in a 1-DVD box (indeed, with 1 DVD!). Kimberly called up Amazon and after talking to a somewhat clueless but very helpful service rep, got them to send us a new (hopefully complete) set of the DVD which is supposed to arrive on Tuesday. I have to give that credit as very good customer support.

Well, we can at least watch this first DVD, we decided. So we turned it on ... and found the DVD almost unwatchable, getting all pixelated and skipping several seconds at a time ... constantly. 

So that's strike two for Amazon's DVD on Demands program. Mind you, we've got the two previous seasons by this method without problem (though the DVDs occasionally got a little pixelated, showing off perhaps a not-quite-ready-for-prime-time setup). But, if this was my first experience, it would probably be my last as well.

Got a new bike computer in the mail today. The old one had been failing for a while, and I finally gave up on resetting it again and again a few weeks ago.

The new one is a Sigma BC 1009. Whereas before I got the cheapest bike computer I could find, this time I went with a manufacturer which had many models and got the second one up (as I've seen how much I used the old one).

Setup took about an hour between adjusting the default settings on the device and actually fiddling with the hardware. The display is very crisp, and the mileage seems a bit more accurate than the old one (which I thought might have been as much as 10% low, but I was never sure whether to trust it or Google's mileage). It has a few features that I like better than the old one (like the fact that average and max mph are recorded per trip, not per forever). And I was also able to enter the mileage from my old computer (something like 4427 miles, including all the recent resets). Oh, and where the old computer would have turned over after 9,999 miles, this one is good to 99,999.

To test it out, I took a ride out to Solano and back. And visited Pegasus Books there, of course. A bit too cold to be a really nice ride, but still a good excursion (totalling 5.47 miles, according to my computer, which is slightly longer than Google says, but I wouldn't be surprised if various inefficiencies resulted in that).

Apparently, I can also buy a "dock" to connect the bike computer up to my desktop computer and save data there. I may do that at some point in the future.

Staying home tomorrow evening so that my sister can drop off her cat, so I went for a bit of a bike ride today. Took College to 51st, up over the hill, and back down Grand. From there swung around the east and south of Lake Merritt. Then, over to Smart & Final in Oakland and back home via some of the quieter streets (mostly).

I forget that the over-the-hill route isn't as bad from the north as it is from the south. There are only three notable uphills, and all pretty moderate: up College to Broadway, up 51st, and up Grand past Piedmont. The middle of those, going up 51st from Broadway to Piedmont, is the only one that gives me trouble at all any more (and today I had no doubt I could make it).

While on Grand, I stopped by a used book store that I don't think I've visited before. Walden Pond Books. Fairly big. A bit labyrinthine due to close shelves. Overall nice, though I didn't buy anything.

As always, the trip around Lake Merritt was pleasant. I was pretty amazed at how many people were there enjoying the park ~7pm on a weekday.

On the way back home, I took many routes that I take with some frequency (e.g., a bit of Broadway and a bit of Telegraph), and I was surprised how different they look in the early evening sunlight. Riding that last bit of Telegraph, I was particularly struck by how attractive the Campanile looks, perfectly framed by the street.

Except that its lower half is blocked by Barrows Hall.

Stupid Barrows Hall.

12.5 miles. 100 minutes or so, but with stops at a book store and Smart & Final.   

On Wednesday at Endgame, Amy C. was handing about postcards about a showing of local Etsy artists at the STUDIO gallery. I knew Kimberly would like it, so I passed on the postcard to her, and we ended up going out there tonight.

The gallery was small, but very pleasant, and they had a huge amount of material from Etsy artists. There was quite a bit that we both found attractive.

Many, perhaps a majority, of the showcased items were "things you hang on walls". Amy had a few paintings variously of squids, tentacles, and cancerous growths. It was cool to see them in a gallery setting. I also quite liked some paintings done of bus routes and local streets, of all things. They were really tight shots, just showing a couple of blocks, and I thought they were pretty cool  (not part of the Etsy show, apparently). The thing that Kimberly and I both liked best though were some weird mixed media pieces that were broken glass on some type of colorful background, with words forming a shape in the middle (not Etsy, and I can't find samples of them on the site, which is a pity, as it's hard to describe their attractiveness). We considered buying one, but couldn't find any whose shape and form we found universally attractive (Kimberly later said she thought they were intended as gifts, so the words were supposed to describe the giftee rather than the shape, which might have been our problem). Still, I found some dragonflies and a yellow bird pretty cool.

There was also lots of cool jewelry, which is what Kimberly was looking for the most as she's gotten several necklaces from Etsy. I found many of them quite beautiful, though I'm not much of a jewelry wearer. Still, it was nice to look at them and see the various craft. It was like an episode of Project Accessory right in front of us.

Overall, quite a nice gallery and a fun show to spend 30 or 45 minutes wandering through.

Designers & Dragons, my RPG history book, has been taken up my brain a bit this weekend.

This afternoon, I finished the reread of the (published) book that I started in February on the plane to Hawaii. The goal was to redline many obvious errors, so that they could be fixed in a reprint. The book is now two months out of print, and has gotten pretty scarce on the internet, but there isn't immediate news of a reprint. So, that's work that might be of less immediate use (though I have no doubt it'll be helpful in the long run).

I quite enjoyed rereading the book, and I figure if it was engaging to me, it surely is to other folks as well.