Somewhat on the spur of the moment, I invited Kimberly to go on a bike ride yesterday. It was about 6.30p, but I figured it was a great time to take advantage of our long summer evenings. So we headed out with an intended destination of Point Isabel, where we'd watch the dogs for a while, then head home.

Unfortunately, the best route to Point Isabel goes over Golden Gate Fields, a racetrack run by liars and scoundrels who have delayed putting in a good Bay Trail path for years, despite having promised to do so when they got some variance a while ago. As it is now, you have to go through their parking lots, and their back parking lot is a partially unpaved mess.

I assume that's where I picked up a staple in my tire. It was really a flimsy little thing, but it managed to do the job, and my bike starting getting wobbly between Golden Gate Fields and Point Isabel. And, I hadn't gotten a mobile patch kit yet, as I haven't had a flat tire in years.

In retrospect, we should have continued up toward Point Isabel, turned up toward the hills, and caught BART from El Cerrito Plaza. Unfortunately I didn't suss that out until we were back at Solano, by which time we were in sufficiently familiar neighborhoods that we decided to walk the rest of the way back.

I'm usually annoyed when I get a flat, but this time I had company for the walk, so it was no big deal (though Kimberly was off in her own world most of the trip). We ended up on the Ohlone Greenway, which I hadn't walked before, and so I enjoyed seeing that at a slower, more sedate pace. Parts of it in Berkeley (after it gets away from San Pablo) are quite attractive.

Total walk back was 5 miles. Which is a pretty good walk. I'll get a patch kit I can carry with me from Missing Link, sometime soon. In the meantime I'll just Kimberly's bike to go to Endgame tonight. No stress.

Spent the day gaming at Donald's, as has been typical on Saturdays for the last several years (though not much longer). However, I'd have to guess that I haven't done so before on the 4th of July, because I would have remembered it. There was a constant barrage of of fire crackers all day. Also, several huge explosions that set off car alarms. And one sequence of loud *crack*s that I'd swear was a gun. Chris tried to convince me otherwise, since we counted 16 or 17 reports.

Any way, it kept me feeling a little out of my skin all afternoon, I think remembering the kid over in Oakland who got crippled from a stray shot last year (though not on the 4th; I think that was a violent shooting that just happened to hit someone blocks away).

Bleh. Stupid people.

We had some of those loud explosions late last night at my house too. They shook the house. But Kimberly said during the day today, there wasn't much, and indeed that's been the case most of the evening.

It's easy to think of Puerto Rico as being overhyped nowadays, because it's been so highly lauded for so long. It's also pretty easy to forget about Puerto Rico, because so much other highly hyped stuff has come out since; in fact, this was my first game of it in nearly two years. But, in playing it again, I am newly astonishing how at elegant the game is.

You compare it to something like Agricola (which I think I enjoy playing more), and it's so obvious that Agricola has so many warts and lumps, as opposed to Puerto Rico's really smooth veneer, where everything seems to just blend together seamlessly.

I usually write some about how the game works, here, in my analysis, but I'm not going to bother here, because if you don't know how Puerto Rico works, you probably don't care. So let's move straight on to what makes it a great game.

First up, Puerto Rico has a fun foundation. It's an economic engine game, where you're building up the parts to a machine and trying to fit them together. Building always gives you a sense of accomplishment, and that's clearly the case here.

The creation of an economic engine pretty much defines the strategy of Puerto Rico, but you have great opportunities for individual tactics too, where taking a certain role at a certain time can really advantage you and hurt your opponents. That's the best of both worlds, where you feel like you have a big game plan, yet every turn is quite important.

All of this combines to create an interesting differentiation of players. The strategy of my engine building helps to define my tactics in a way uniquely different from any other player.

Finally, I think that even today you can't write an article about Puerto Rico without lauding its use of roles. They've certainly gotten very common through the sub-method of worker placement, but Puerto Rico's use of them still seems clean, elegant, and intelligent.

With all that said, one of the reasons that I almost never play Puerto Rico is because of its biggest flaw (for me). It can be too strategic ... too programmed. Playing Puerto Rico with a know-it-all who understands all the best moves at every point is pretty much the definition of not-fun, and the almost-zero-luck of Puerto Rico encourages that type of gamer.

Nonetheless, it's deserving of its rating as one of the top Eurogames.

L1: Ra. A+. (Plays: 15) [ Read my Review ]
L2: Chinatown. B-. (Plays: 1)
L3: Taj Mahal. A+. (Plays: 7)
L4: Princes of Florence. A. (Plays: 4+) [ Read my Review ]
L5: Adel Verpflichtet. B. (Plays: 2) [ Read my Review ]
L6: Traders of Genoa. A+. (Plays: 3+) [ Read my Review ]
S1: Wyatt Earp. B+ (Plays: 2)
S2: Royal Turf. A- (Plays: 6)
L7: Puerto Rico. A+ (Plays: 11) [ Read my Review ]

As a postscript, I'll comment that we played San Juan right after Puerto Rico, and I was really struck by how different the games feel, despite being so similar. That's really a great combination of factors for a card-version of a board game.

Not only do we get to see season 3 of Torchwood in a couple of weeks, but the first of the Doctor Whos that hadn't otherwise shown on this side of the Atlantic, The Next Doctor, is on tomorrow. That's the premiere on BBC America, apparently, what luck!

And they're showing the less sucky Apprentice UK too, which I've been wanting to see the rest of ever since MSNBC showed 4 or 5 episodes, then decided that they'd rather offer 24-hour coverage on the financial meltdown.

("Hold on, just coming in, the Dow Jones is down 7. Wait now it's up 1. Now it's down 2 ....")

And, we now have DirecTV. How did it go?

• We got an appointment just 3 days after we requested the service.
  
• We got a customer support call earlier today from the person directly in charge of our account, who gave us a direct number to call if there were any problems were the installation.
  
• The installers showed up on-time.
  
• The installers seemed highly competent and friendly.
  
• When there was a problem with us not receiving all the channels we were supposed to, the installers got it fixed right away.
  
• Everything was up and running within about 90 minutes.
  
• Picture quality is crystal clear, as opposed to our sometimes pixelated picture from ComCast.
  
• The DVR seems to do what we want, with nicer, more modern looking graphics than TiVo, but I'm not convinced the UI is as intuitive.
  

Overall, lots of pluses.

Comcast's bandwidth grab at the expense of its customers, its horrendous customer support related to the same, its lying and/or incompetent reps, its spies here on LiveJournal, and its attempts to charge us for the privilege of them doing all of the above to us have led us to order DirecTV.

It will be $19/mo cheaper for the first 12 months, $2/mo more expensive thereafter and will give us around 50% more channels, of which one is of interest to me: BBC America. If you do the math, you'll see it's going to be about 10 years before DirecTV ends up being overall more expensive than Comcast.

Will write more about whether DirecTV's service is as horrific as their competitors; our install date is on Friday.

I'd saved away a book to read while I was away at Jason's wedding: the new Atticus Kodiak novel, Walking Dead, by Greg Rucka. And, it was a well-selected book for the occasion. I started it on BART headed toward Fremont and finished it shortly after we got back home.

Though I'm going to mark this post with my 'mystery' tag, Walking Dead is a really a thriller (as is generally the case for the Kodiak books). I don't read a lot of these but Rucka's are quite good, because he's continually grown the series and evolved the hero over time. This time around, despite being in a really morally questionable situation, Kodiak pretty much acts the hero, going after the daughter of a friend when she's taken.

It's a really good book, as is this entire series (though the first couple are a bit weaker than what follows).

We are back home again. The relay back was a quick two-hour trip, car with my mom and Bob to BART, then BART to home. We got in at about 12.30 last night.

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Yesterday morning we walked around Gilroy a bit. This was our general plan, to have some quiet time to ourselves between the peopled-ness of the Friday party and the Saturday wedding. We happened to chance upon a nice bike/pedestrian trail down by a creek, and walked that for a while, then cut back into the middle of Gilroy to pick up a snack, then headed back to the hotel to wait for the shuttle to the wedding (which was out at a winery, about 15 minutes from the center of Gilroy).

Though we found that very nice bike trail, I was struck by its lack of use. The only bicyclists we saw in the 30 or 40 minutes we were on that trail were two kids. The people were also few and far between; we saw more homeless people walking the trail (all in one clump) than other folks. But then, Gilroy was generally very pedestrian unfriendly. We didn't even have sidewalks all the way from downtown to our hotel. So if anything, I guess it's the existence of the bike trail at all that's weird, not its lack of use.

Beyond that, Gilroy is considerably more built up than last time I was there. And by built up, I mean strip-mall-strip-mall-strip-mall. US consumerism at its worst. At least that was a marked contrast to the back trails we took, just a mile or two further west. I plan to do some more research on Gilroy to see if I can find any maps of the trails there and northward, as it might be fun to plan a couple of days of biking vacation in and about the Gilroy and San Jose areas (with bike accessability provided by BART & CalTrain, which together can get us down there on a week day).

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We took a shuttle up to the wedding at 3pm. There was a bit of chaos because there were two different shuttles, and they weren't exactly on the same page. Once we got up there, Kimberly and I started helping to sort wedding favors. I did my best to be very helpful all weekend, remembering how hectic things can be for a wedding. It seemed to be well appreciated (especially my help the previous day, setting up things for the wedding rehearsal party).

The actual ceremony started at 4.30. Very promptly. I got grabbed at the last minute to walk my mom, the mother of the groom, up the aisle as part of the wedding party. There'd apparently been confusion about who was supposed to do that task, since my other brother, Rob, was the best man. It was totally no big deal, and I was happy to do, but my mom thought it was. Given that I'd been married nine years previous (and stood up for a couple of my friends at their weddings, for that matter), I didn't even think twice about this.

(Glad I got a new suit coat and shirt for the wedding though!)

The ceremony was short, original, and nice. I particularly liked their vows, which they wrote themselves. Especially Lisa's, which had a few funny bits in it. I didn't know she was funny, but then I barely know my new sister-in-law. I told Jason toward the end of the evening that we should really get together, the four of us, as couples. I hope they'll take us up on that, especially as we're nowadays their closest relatives, given that they live about an hour north of us.

After that there was pictures, appetizers, toasts, dinner, and dancing. Kimberly and I danced quite a bit. It's the first time we've danced in years, and it was quite nice. She was a little reluctant, even though she'd been talking about really looking forward to the dancing, but once she got onto the floor, she seemed to have fun. We also got to have some nice dinner conversation with my Uncle Dale and with Mike T., probably my favorite of Bob's relatives, as he lived with us for a bit when I was growing up. We're going to hopefully get together to do some biking out in Contra Costa county this yaer.

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Overall it was a beautiful and romantic day. Jason and Lisa both looked so happy, and it of course reminded me of my wedding too. When all was said and done, we cleared out of the winery about 10pm, and my Mom and Bob were kind enough to give us a ride straight up to BART, so that we could sleep in our own bed, with our own cats, last night.

Jason's wedding weekend has begun and thus we've done our great relay run to Gilroy. BART to Fremont then a ride with Bob to San Jose and finally a ride with Bob the Elder to Gilroy. There was a nice party in between the last two stops. I helped out including mixing up three pitchers of piña colladas, the first time I've ever mixed real drinks.

Will write more when not on my iPhone.

I was determined to bike today, as weekends have been taken up by tons of other stuff lately (and, again, next weekend). I was much more surprised to hear that K. was interested in biking with me today, as her back pain as been keeping her away.

Thus, we decided to head over the hills to Contra Costa Country. It's got lots of beautiful trails, and I wanted to ride one of them, as we're just on the verge of hitting summer hard enough that it gets too warm over there.

So, I offered K. a number of choices of rides, and we decided on the Iron Horse Trail, which we ended up riding from Dublin to Pleasant Hill. It was much as I remembered, except the ride was much easier this time, partially I suspect because I knew exactly where I was going, and partially because I've continued to get in better shape since Thanksgiving when I rode this last. The Alamo-Danville area wasn't quite as pretty as it was in late November, when the green-way has become a brown-red-and-yellow-way thanks to the autumnal leaves, but it was still very nice.

Of course, one of the nice things about living in this area, is as the seasons shift we can move our biking area. When it gets a little warmer, we can still ride comfortably in the east bay, and a little warmer than that and we can do some riding in San Francisco.