Shannon A.

An Unusual Bike Ride

2009-07-08T18:17:35Z

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.

The 4th

2009-07-05T05:52:01Z

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.

Alea Analysis #9: Puerto Rico (Large Box #7)

2009-07-03T05:27:11Z

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.

DirecTV Bonus

2009-06-27T05:47:28Z

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 ....")

DirecTV Installed

2009-06-27T02:41:38Z

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.

G'Bye to Comcast

2009-06-24T05:50:10Z

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.

Walking Dead, by Greg Rucka

2009-06-22T01:41:41Z

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).

The Rest of the Wedding Weekend

2009-06-21T20:13:41Z

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.

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).

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.

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.

In gilroy

2009-06-20T05:17:03Z

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.

Back to the Iron Horse

2009-06-14T23:47:31Z

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.

Alea Analysis #8: Royal Turf (Small Box #2)

2009-06-12T06:00:10Z

Alea immediately followed up on their small box series with Royal Turf--though I'll have to admit to being befuddled as to why it was ever put in a small box, given that it's got a board and figures and everything. It's an interesting contrast to Wyatt Earp, because where the first was definitely a card game, the second is definitely a dice game. It's like a one-two of randomness in gaming.

Notably, this game was another pseudo-reprint in the Alea series, since it had appeared previously in a somewhat different form as Royal Turf Racing, which had been published in 1995.

In Royal Turf you're betting on horses, then racing them. Each horse has a set of four stats, which correspond to faces on a die. When you're ready to race, you throw a die, then move a horse of your choice. Depending on the face and the corresponding stat, you might get to move a horse a lot or a little. All seven horses have to be moved before you can move any of them again. At the end of the race, first, second, and third place score, and last place penalizes. Pretty simple.

I like it quite a bid for a few different reasons. First, it's fun. Knizia has correctly sussed out how to make the die roll exciting, because you're often looking for special symbols that can move a horse much more than he'd get to on average. On the other hand, it's relatively strategic too. You can manage your strategy at the start, by choosing a set of horses to bet on in such a way that you can always do something useful, no matter which die is rolled. (And, that's not the only betting strategy. You might go contrarian as well, for example.) Then, during play, you can be tactically clever, trying to keep your horse ahead and others behind based on specific rolls.

One of the things that impresses me about the game is that Knizia does encourage players to be nasty to each other, something that you don't see a lot in German games. That's because of the penalty for the last-place horse. Often slowing a horse down is about self-interest: you're just trying to be sure to not come in last. But, along the way, you're hurting one of your opponents too.

The betting in Royal Turf can also be quite interesting, if you use the hidden betting variant. I think it doubles the fun of the game, because it's great pretending the whole time that you like a horse that you didn't actually bet on, and watching all of the other players trying to stop it from winning (while your real horses glide in).

Generally, I think Royal Turf is another of Alea's stars, albeit a very light one. I just wish Winner's Circle (which is the copy of the game I have, as the Alea edition is long out of print) didn't have such bad coloration on the horses. There's two that I always have to watch out for, lest I get confused.

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)

Alea Analysis #7: Wyatt Earp (Alea Small Box #1)

2009-06-11T07:27:37Z

In 2001, Alea tried something new. They put out a game in a small box, primarily (one expects) so that they could sell what was essentially a card game without having to charge the large-box price. They'd follow this format for the next four years, until they decided to replace it with a new medium-box size (which has similarly been used for some games that are mostly card games).

The 2001 card game in question was Wyatt Earp, designed by Mike Fitzgerald as a "Mystery Rummy" game, then turned into a more Eurogame by Richard Borg, who sold it to Alea.

The game is pretty much Rummy at its core: you draw cards and you play melds. However, it's got two big differences from that traditional description. First there are sheriff cards, which let you engage in certain actions, like drawing extra cards or adding a new card to a meld of your choice. Second, exactly who gets points for a meld is determined by looking at the total value of all the cards in that color (which could include quite a variety of sheriff cards) and comparing totals.

When I first played this game five years ago, I didn't particularly like it. At the time I was playing a lot of the standard Mystery Rummies, and I found this one needlessly complex, mainly based on its scoring conditions. I just played it for the second time tonight, and I'm much more impressed with it.

The cool thing about the scoring is that it really encourages you to interact with the other people, to get your meld scoring more than theirs--or just to get your own value high enough that you earn something. This process is really helped along by the way the sheriff cards are designed. You have lots of situations where you can really make a meaningful choice for how your cards interact with your opponents'. (The secret for how this works is in the fact that many of the sheriff cards could be used to affect lots of different melds, so you're not just stuck with what you drew, like in standard Rummy.)

Beyond that, I think it's nicely thematic, with the increasing rewards (points), the shoot-outs (where some cards may have an affect based on a draw), and the names of everything working really well together.

And, it's not exactly lighter than the rest of the Alea series, it's just a different sort of game, a real traditional card game, revved up to the next level (and maybe the next level beyond that).

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)

More Comcast Lies

2009-06-10T20:15:02Z

K. talked to Comcast this morning and got them to reverse all of their charges, though she got pretty pissed at how the representative kept telling her how nice she was being and how all of the charges were entirely valid.

There were a couple more lies and generally deceitful behiavior that I wanted to keep track of for my complaint letter to the FCC & CPUC:

1. The tech service guy who I talked to on 4-May, and who finally identified the problem as being that they'd sent us an incompatible digital cable box then turned around and marked on his trouble ticket that the problem had not been with Comcast's equipment but with ours. That's why they tried to charge us $20 for that call.

(And I'll also note that at no time during the call did anyone suggest that it was going to cost money, making it entirely fraudulent no matter who's fault it was.)

2. The rep that K. talked to today tried to sell her a support package for our cable after K. got through explaining about how all of these services charges were illegitimate because they all were ultimately Comcast's problem. Not a lie, but certainly deceitful to suggest we needed it.

3. The ongoing fee that they were trying to charge us was for the original cable box, which incompetent-cable-guy left here when he (failed to) put in the new one. We finally got someone to pick it up this Monday (which Comcast again tried to charge us for). It'd sat here for less than a month. Comcast tried to charge us for a month and a half.

I think there was some other bold-faced lie that K. was told while on the phone, but I can't come up with it right now.

(And just for anyone who thinks that we're stupid: K. is now researching the precise costs for DirecTv. I think Comcast's insanely bad behavior that's being spotlighted as part of their digital land grab has finally cost them us as customers. But then, they probably don't want us, because we keep refusing to pay their extra fees.)

The Scum at Comcast

2009-06-10T04:37:50Z

Could Comcast, the company that forced me to waste hours of my time and ergs of my power, so that they could do something purely in their self-interest be any scummier?

Yep.

We just got the newest bill from the bastards. The bastards, I should note, who when they originally talked to K. assured her that there would be no charge for the digital cable box they were sending.

Well, we've seen before that customer support people at Comcast are pathological liars who'll say whatever they can to get you off the line and themselves onto the next call. This was no exception.

There was a $16 bill for sending us the box, a $20 bill for asking them why the box didn't have instructions for our Tivo despite the fact that they said there were instructions and a $8 or so ongoing bill for the box.

I was ready to just write off the one-time fees as not worth my anger, but when I saw that they're trying to fuck us with an ongoing fee that's only there because of their decisions, that blew me through the roof.

So, K. is going to call them tomorrow, and see what she can do about it. And I suspect they'll try not to lose us as customers, since they were just calling tonight trying to make sure that we were aware of their "digital initiative". If they stop trying to rip us off with that ongoing fee, I'll probably go back to the more-trouble-than-its-worth-to-change.

(Though, you know, it's really not even that any more, but rather if we went to satellite, we couldn't get a newer Tivo ever.)

But whichever way, as soon as I have the time I'm going to be writing letters to the FCC and the CPUC because I increasingly think that Comcast's behavior in this case has been borderline criminal.

Family, Family & Gaming

2009-06-08T05:24:57Z

Wedding. Went shopping today for a suit coat for Jason's wedding. I haven't had a proper suit coat for 20 years. Now I finally do. It's black with just a touch of gray in it. Should do well for the wedding, and would have been fine for some of the less pleasant events I've had to go to in recent years. It also seemed to fit pretty well. There were some cheaper suit coats that I could have gotten, but they didn't fit nearly as well, so I splurged (though I certainly won't complain about the price, at $105).

I also discovered that my pants from my wedding fit perfectly. That was a big surprise. They were too tight to wear for a few years. For Chris' memorial, they were just tight. And now ... fine.

I've been hoping to get into better health with the bicycling I've been doing this past year. I know I'd lost about 10#, but that still leaves me 10# or 15# over what I was when I got married. Which probably means I've got about the same body fat as ten years ago, but more muscle--leg muscle one supposes. That's pretty cool.

Surprisingly, I'm starting to look forward to the trip to Gilroy. We may or may not have time to wander around the morning of the wedding. I still wish we could go biking down there, but maybe some other time, when Kimberly is doing better.

Cats. We seem to have largely integrated guest cat Tai Chi into the household. Cobweb and Munchkin still hiss at him, but Lucy seems to have mellowed way out and he seems to have conquered some of his fear of the other cats. So, I've been leaving my office door open when home these last couple of days. He can go wander if he wants, and he can return to his safe home base, which he's most comfortable with.

I wouldn't have guessed that the week of being mostly locked away from the other cats in January would have helped him to integrate this time ... but sure enough. I'm pretty sure he remembered the house and the other cats remembered him enough to make everything more comfortable now.

I made the effort for two reasons. First, because it's nicer to have my office opened. Second, because now that him coming here isn't a one-time thing, I'd like to make it less traumatic for everyone in the future.

Gaming. So, we're on the cusp of changing campaigns at Saturday Gaming. This Saturday Donald ran the penultimate session of his Eberron campaign. He says that he thinks finishing it will probably take just an hour more. I'll believe it when I see it, but I've gamely agreed to prepare a couple of hours of Traveller on Saturday. (My Savage Tide campaign will then get going again after the wedding, with it and Traveller alternating in some manner.)

I was pleased to hear more comments saying that the Traveller game last week was a bunch of fun. Of course I'm still easing my way into a new system, so preparing a fresh, short adventure for Saturday will take some work ...

Of course Eric, my erstwhile co-GM seems to have disappeared from our group again, as life has once more taken priority. (Mary was very kind to retrieve my Traveller books I'd lent him, which I want to read and review soon.) I'm also wondering if Chris W. is going to keep showing up, as he's apparently working graveyards now. We'll see how things shake out, but with the number of people we've had lately, it'll be fine either way.

Wallace-a-thon: Waterloo

2009-06-04T19:46:00Z

Alright, one more Wallace game played: Waterloo.

I'm going to be writing a full review of this one, for publication in 13 days, but the short review is, "It's a wargame." The slightly longer review is, "It's a clever wargame."

I can certainly see the Wallacian influence in this one, because his like for accurate depiction of history has been taken and put through the roof. The different ways in which infantry and cavalry work is really great, especially if you're used to games where cavalry = infantry + faster.

There are a couple of other clever mechanics too, related to the uncertainty of how much time you'll get before your opponent can respond and the way in which wounded units are abstracted.

I think the game's biggest challenge is that a serious war game won't appeal to many Eurogamers (though I'll say I had a fine time; the game length of 3-4 hours would usually put it beyond my playing, but Joe & I talked about maybe playing it again in a month or so) while a war game with wooden meeples won't appeal to many war gamers. They're nicer than chits or blocks, mind you, I've just already seen a bit of grognardery about the meeples, both on the internet and in person.

Longs = Good ; CVS = The Suck

2009-06-03T06:26:42Z

So Longs Drugs was acquired by CVS last year. I was pretty stunned when I heard that all the Longs Drug stores were changing their names, because Longs Drugs is a well-known and respected pharmacy out here on the left cost, while CVS sounds like some corporate monstrosity where a board of directors came up with the name.

Sure enough.

I went out to the drug store to pick up a prescription today, and I noted that the signage was starting to change to stay CVS. While waiting in line (long, as usual), I noted that the pharmacy was even more crazed than usual. I got up to the desk, and they told me that my prescription which I'd called in yesterday was still not ready, and would I please come back in 1 or 2 hours.

So I came back 3 hours later. Things were even more crazed. People were getting turned away right and left being told that their doctors hadn't OKed their refills, that they'd just have to wait a day more, etc. Finally I get up to the desk (again), not feeling that great about actually being able to carry home any drugs tonight (not that I needed them tonight, mind you).

So the lady at the desk asks me to spell my name like 13 times, then goes into a hurried conference with a co-worker, which expands out to 5 minutes or so.

Meanwhile, I idly listen in on other conversations. "No, I'm sorry," says the clerk to the person next to me. "Your doctor needs to give us authorizations on all three meds." "I thought only one was due for renewal," the customer replies." "No, all three," says the clerk.

Finally my clerk wanders back and says, "We're having troubles finding your prescription." I say (because I'm still not sure she managed to get my name right on try #13), "Did you find it on your computer system?" "Yes," she says, then runs off before I can ask any more dangerous questions.

(Because, apparently, all questions are dangerous.)

A few minutes later, she says, "We're still having problems with your account. Could you sit down over there for a few minutes?" Now, not only am I getting aggravated by this point, but I'm also annoyed that they're not telling me if this a problem that's going to take one minute, five, or an hour. If it's one of the latter, I'll just come back later, you know. So I said, "What's. The. Problem?"

"Hold on," she says, and goes into another huddle with that other clerk. She then refuses to answer my question.

I'm getting increasingly annoyed, but K. is more so. She starts asking a bit louder than I what's going on, and finally clerk #2 calls us over.

And, here's the punchline.

In converting my prescription from their Longs system to their CVS system, they LOST THE PAPER COPY OF MY PRESCRIPTION(1) and so now WON'T FILL IT unless they can get in contact with my doctor. Suddenly all those other folks not getting their prescriptions makes sense (as does the circus atmosphere).

That guy who was told that the doctor had to reauthorize all three prescriptions, I'm sure he was being lied to. When the clerk implied that the doctor needed to authorize the refills because the number of refills was up, I suspect he really meant that the doctor needed to authorize the refills because they'd LOST HIS PRESCRIPTION TOO.

Oh, and they couldn't bother to figure out this was the problem the FIRST time I was there today. (When, among other things, my doctor's office was still open.)

Yep, a drug store that can't hold onto its customers prescriptions. That's what the CVS brand now means to me.

Great conversion guys!

Maybe you can now leak my medical data onto the internet too.

(1) Of course, given that my doctor sent that prescription in electronically, I'm not convinced there was a paper copy, but that's what they THINK happened, and they clearly LOST SOMETHING.

The Cat Came Back

2009-06-02T03:50:09Z

Guest Cat Tai Chi has returned because my sister is spending another week in Hawaii, starting tomorrow. He is now locked up in my office (+ sun room), shielded from the other cats. He was last here in January, and I was surprised to see that he actually seems to remember the place. (Or, at least, he seems pretty confident about me and my office, whereas last time he spent the first day or so hiding.)

The other cats also seem a little more understanding. Well, Munchkin ran over and hissed at Tai Chi right away, but for that not to happen, I think the rivers would have to run backward and dogs and cats would have to be living together (rather than cats and cats, natch). Thus, after Tai Chi has settled in today, I'm going to let him mingle tomorrow, and see if that goes OK.

Since it's looking like Tai Chi's visit might be a regular thing, I'd much prefer to not have to separate him from our cats every time.

(The big question will be how Munchkin and Lucy do, since the first was aggressive and the second pissy last time Lucy was here.)

The Coming Convergence, by Stanley Schmidt

2009-05-31T22:16:10Z

I just finished reading The Coming Convergence, by Stanley Schmidt. It's a non-fiction book ultimately theorizing about a singularity, where the graph of technological change goes vertical, but doing so by talking about how technology has evolved in the past and may in the future.

I found the central thesis of the book the most interesting thing about it: that big technological changes don't usually come about by advances in a single field, but instead by advances in multiple fields converging together and creating something that couldn't have been foreseen.

I think that's a good point and suggests why futurist prediction is so hard.

I was less enthralled by his look at things that might be just around the corner, like nanotechnology, telepresence, true AI, and much more. But, I think that's because I've heard it all before. Ultimately, I think Schmidt is trying to get the message out to people who haven't thought about what the future might very quickly bring.

Eye of the Storm, by Marcia Muller

2009-05-31T19:14:06Z

It'd been a while since I read a Sharon McCone mystery, so I picked up Eye of the Storm, the next in the series, at the library last week. I liked it quite a bit.

One of the most interesting things is that Muller really moved out of the series' comfort zone. This one was pratically a Gothic horror. It was complete with haunted house (an old mansion on the delta), a disaster keeping everyone inside (the nominal storm), and an old family mystery. I thought it was quite well done.

I'm also struck by how much trying-to-figure-out-a-major-life-change is a trope in these mystery series. Spenser had it when Susan abandoned him for three books. The Nameless Detective had his existential angst when he thought he was dying of lung cancer. Jesse Stone had his in his latest book when he finally put the issue of his ex-wife to rest. Here, Sharon McCone has a lingering sense that her life is going wrong, and decides to put it right when she gets home.

(Oddly this trope is also usually accompanied by some time spent away from home.)

Anyway, good book.

Running RPGs

2009-05-30T08:06:48Z

When I'm at my best when running RPGs, it drives my creativity. I become enthusiastic about the games I can run and the stories I can create. That's how I've been feeling about Traveller for weeks now. It's why I've just spent another evening on working on stuff for the game (tonight, including prepping tomorrow's adventure, updating my AP thread at RPGnet, and starting a new, related series of reviews).

I hadn't quite realized why I hadn't been having much time for my usual evening project of writing stuff for publication, and it's because I've instead been spending that time and energy on the Traveller game. (Note to self: pitch some articles related to Traveller, rather than my more common RuneQuest articles, and kill two birds with one stone. Note back to self: done.)

When I'm at my worst when running RPGs, they feel like a time sink that I have to fill on Friday nights, so that I can entertain people on Saturday.

I'm not quite sure why sometimes I feel the one way and sometimes the other, but I don't actually think it's a recent dichotomy.

Discrimination Now Legal in California

2009-05-26T18:59:54Z

Today the California Supreme Court stated that it was legal for the people of the state to put a proposition onto the ballot that discriminates against protected minorities and that the resulting law would be entirely valid.

It was generally an expected result (though, perhaps, we hoped otherwise). The California Supreme Court has, for years, supported the limitation of rights for prisoners and ex-convicts, and though they're surely not a protected minority in the same way, it offered considerable precedent for the majority being allowed to take away the rights of the minority in this state. Today's decision just codified and expanded the way things have been done since the Reagan years.

But if I was a minority in California I would now be very, very afraid*.

Edit: Here's a great analysis of the case:
http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2009/5/26/103947/856/17#c17

Including some discussion of the one justice who gets it:

In his concurring and dissenting opinion, Justice Moreno concludes that Proposition 8 is not a lawful amendment to the California Constitution because it alters the equal protection clause to deny same-sex couples equal treatment, explaining that "requiring discrimination against a minority group on the basis of a suspect classification strikes at the core of the promise of equality that underlies our California Constitution and thus ‘represents such a drastic and far-reaching change in the nature and operation of our governmental structure that it must be considered a "revision" of the state Constitution rather than a mere "amendment" thereof.’ " Justice Moreno points out that the equal protection clause is "inherently countermajoritarian" and observes that "there is no ‘underlying’ principle more basic to our Constitution than that the equal protection clause protects the fundamental rights of minorities from the will of the majority."

* And, indeed, I am. Non-hispanic whites became a minority in California in 2001.

A PDF/Staples Experiment

2009-05-24T07:24:46Z

I think we're at a particularly awkward place in our development of media right now, and it's shown most strongly by the PDF.

On the one hand, the existence of electronic media allows for the creation of many things which would never otherwise be published. And, electronic media can offer advantages over regular printed media, such as the ability to print out individual pages from a book and mark them up (which is particularly notable when you have, say, an adventure module and you'd like to write on some of the maps and character records).

On the other hand, PDFs just don't have the utility of books. You have to read them on a computer, and reading on a computer just isn't as comfortable as sitting down in your favorite chair. Or, you have to print them out, often costing a comparable amount to buying a book, and resulting in looseleaf papers that end up everywhere.

Until real, ubiquitous POD comes along, or super-thin, almost throw-away computer tablets, or household printing and recycling facilities, these PDFs are going to be an awkward form with advantages and disadvantages hanging in balance.

I'm not even convinced that the super-computer tablet is the ultimate media extension, because sometimes you want to spread a few books out around you, and you just can't do that without printed books. So, until we have holograms or something, I think printed material continues to have a very useful form, even for folks who aren't us old farts.

Thus, in my view, what it takes to get over this awkward media hump is the existence of the very easy ability to turn PDFs into professional printed books (and thus be able to utilize the benefits of both mediums as appropriate).

So last week I saw that Staples was running ads for its Copy & Print Service. They advertised that you could load them up a PDF over the Internet, tell them how to put it together, and that they'd then print you a copy that you could pick up at a local store. So, I decided to give it a shot.

The subject of my experiment was The Bowman Arm, a Traveller PDF that I own a copy of which depicts part of The Spinward Marches, which is where our new Traveller campaign is set. I uploaded my PDF to print, then started going through their system.

It's pretty snazzy. You tell it options, then it shows you what the book will look like in a little widget. Unfortunately, it also turned out to not be ready for primetime.

My biggest problem was that I wanted a couple of internal pages color, which the program said it could do. However, when I choose a page to be printed in color, it then started randomly putting blank pages in the book without explaining why. (I think it was trying to keep color and black and white off the same page, but sometimes it was putting a space on the next page instead, which I suspect was a bug.)

I also choose a saddle-stitched binding, as I've got books with spiral and velo binds, and they all take up more space than I'd like and don't feel like a book. (I think the spiral binding looks particularly bad on my shelf.) That seemed all fine, but caused problems when Staples got the order, because they interpret choosing to saddle stitch an 8.5x11" book as meaning that you really want it 8.5x5.5". I also could never came up with a way to say that the back cover should be the same stock as the front cover (which was, of course, necessary with saddle-stitching).

Then when my order got to actual Staples employees, they needed to change pretty much the whole thing. They couldn't do individual color pages at all. They had to ask about how the book should really be saddle-stitched (and fortunately were able to do what I really wanted, which was to print a full-size book). Then the fact that the book wasn't an even signature caused them conniptions until I just told them to add some blank pages at the end. Mind you, none of this was a particularly big deal for me. I spent 5 or 6 minutes on two phone calls with a knowledgeable and helpful Staples employee. However, as far as I can tell, it took them two hours to get the book printed. That's not particularly cost effective for them.

The end result is that I got a saddle-stitched book with a full-color cover. The cost was $5, $1.98 for the full-color cover, $2.35 for the 28 interior pages, $.25 for saddle-stitching it, and some god-awful amount of sales tax (thanks, Gov!). The text is very crisp and the grays are very good (better than a lot of RPG books I get, to be honest, the pixelation is all but invisible).

Two downsides.

First, even going for the relatively expensive cover, it's still clearly not a professional print. It was also tacky when I picked it up this morning (about 18 hours after it had been printed) and I smudged it a bit. I think it's probably better now though I expect it to still slowly smudge unless I put it in a protective folder, which defeats some of the point. But, there wasn't any option for coating or anything.

Second, the saddle-stitching leaves a bulge toward the spine, which is what I expected, as I have fanzines from the 1990s which were clearly printed at copy centers and do the same thing.

Was it worth the cost? I think so. I now have a book that I can actually read, not just reference. And, I can bring it with me to gaming when I need to.

I also have to say it was what I expected, perhaps better, but not what I'd hoped.

I'll be interested to see how PDF printing from the internet evolves. I think this is a pretty early stage that has a lot of room for upside.

If you have other thoughts for how to do this type of thing, I'd be happy to hear them, but I suspect Staples is out in front right now. It just needs to catch up with entirely-online companies like Lulu who are already doing this as a business. But, if they can, they offer a few great advantages: fast service and no shipping. Perhaps it'll even make Lulu moderate its ruinous shipping costs (which are largely what restrain me from shopping with them).

Wallace-a-thon: Age of Steam & Tempus

2009-05-22T06:09:35Z

I finished up my Wallace-a-thon with the ending of 2008, but I've since played two of the games that I'd wanted to play and missed, so I thought I'd write about them a bit.

Age of Steam is at this point Wallace's best-known game. I've always found it a bit too mathy, and thus I've preferred Railroad Tycoon (and I suspect the upcoming Steam) for the fact that you can take out loans whenever you want, which just makes everything much simpler.

On the one hand, I find Age of Steam somewhat separate from Wallace's other designs. There's a lot of geography and blocking that you just don't see in most of his non-RR releases. Those elements create a totally new and nice tension in Age of Steam.

On the other hand, there are a few elements that are very recognizable Wallace design elements. What strikes me most is how similar the whole concept of taking out loans and then losing income in Age of Steam is to Brass. They're just done in totally different ways (and, generally, I find Brass more intuitive and less stressful).

I'm also struck by how much the core idea of these games matches. They're both about creating continuing economic systems. It seems clear (to me at least) that when you make a delivery in Age of Steam you're building a long-term route, just like you're building permanent partnerships in Brass.

I think it'd be fascinating to dig through Wallace's whole series of linked train games (and Brass) and see how ideas were polished from one release to the next.

(Unfortunately I've only played a few of the more recent railroad games, and thus can't comment on most of them myself.)

I said last year that I wanted to try Tempus again without all the expectations that surrounded it at its release (e.g., that it was a "Civ Lite" game). I did tonight, and I was quite pleasantly surprised.

As I watched the civilizations slowly spread out, then start moving faster and further, I realized that I wasn't watching "Civilization", but rather "The Game of Life". I was seeing ecosystems from 100 miles up, as they grew, spread, and contracted.

Tempus is an amazingly tight game, and if you play with people who go quickly (as I did tonight), I think it's a pretty good one.

What also surprised me (sadly) was how vehement some of the people at BGG are about the game. They scream and shout about how its' garbage and who knows what else. You'd think Tempus killed their grandma or something, from how they go on. Though I can understand disappointment over the game's very high expectations, I can't understand that attitude.

Anyway, that was 2 more Wallace games. Much to my surprise today, I also got Waterloo in the mail, which I hadn't expected at all. A 2-player war game usually isn't my thing, but I know a few people at Endgame who be willing to give it a try so that I can review it.

Alea Analysis #6: The Traders of Genoa (Big Box #6)

2009-05-19T07:37:41Z

The Traders of Genoa, the sixth Alea game (and the last release before they rolled out their Small Box line) went back to the trends of the third and fourth boxes: more complexity, denser gameplay, and less randomness. At the same time it also returned to the mechanic of negotiation, last seen in Chinatown, one of the earlier, lighter games in the series.

In Genoa, you're trying to earn as much money as you can. You mainly do this via three methods: delivering mail from one point to another, delivering a small order of one good to a location, and delivering a large order of three goods to a location. I could imagine many different methods to turn those three goals into a game, and Genoa does none of them. Instead at the start of each player's turn he throws some dice to see where the "trading tower" starts, then he can move just a few spaces from that starting location, setting up opportunities for mail delivery and also providing the opportunity to take actions from various buildings. The negotiation comes in two parts: trying to influence where the trading tower goes and trying to purchase an action at some of the locations it'll visit.

In any trading or negotiation game, the question is always how you encourage the player interaction. Genoa uses a very simple mechanism: each player can only take one action each turn. Thus, as the active player, you (usually) want to use one of the actions to really benefit yourself, but it's usually in your best interest to sell off as many other actions as you can.

I find it interesting to examine Genoa in part by comparing it to Chinatown, which I wrote about two months ago.

They both have random elements, but in Chinatown it can make or break the game, with the locations you draw having a major impact on how well you do. You can similarly get a nice block of tiles in Genoa, but I think it's easier to trade for a comparable set and beyond that, the adjacent locales are just one part of the game.

Genoa also feels like a much wider game to me. In Chinatown you're just trying to collect businesses and locations, while in Genoa you're balancing 8 goods, various types of orders, ownership markers, and mail. There are many more paths to victory in Genoa, and I think that makes it a deeper and more fulfilling game.

The other thing that I really like about Genoa is the fact that you can meaningfully bluff. This is allowed because there are so many overlapping ways to earn victory points. You might pay someone 10 or 15 to deliver a small order very late in the game, but if you also deliver some mail at the same time, your gross of 40 turning into 70 can really turn the game in a way surprising to your opponents.

I also like the fact that to do well in Genoa you have to stay on your interpersonal toes. If other people are offering more profitable ventures, sometimes you have to leave aside your own plans for a while. It feels like real business, writ large.

If people don't like Genoa, it's probably because it's too much of a good thing. The negotiation is intense and repeated, and if you can't take that, you won't like the game. It can also vary a lot from one group to another. One of my recent opponents told me the horror story of a 5-hour long Genoa game: it can really drag on if you're in the wrong group.

In the right group, however, it's probably the best real negotiation game I've played.

At this point, it's getting increasingly hard for me to rate the games in comparison to each other, since they're so different, so I've just started offering grades:

#1: Ra, A+. (Plays: 15) [ Read my Review ]
#2: Chinatown, B-. (Plays: 1)
#3: Taj Mahal, A+. (Plays: 7)
#4: Princes of Florence, A. (Plays: 4+) [ Read my Review ]
#5: Adel Verpflichtet, B. (Plays: 2) [ Read my Review ]
#6: Traders of Genoa, A+. (Plays: 3+) [ Read my Review ]

Although recently out-of-print, this game was just rereleased in a brand-new edition called simply, Genoa.