Diary of a Wolfeman

Just a quick post with a couple of pictures from the last event:

Marten makes a friend

Apparently praying mantis like black with white dots. marten’s little friend perched on his knee for most of 15 minutes.

New candelabra

The new candelabra made by Tolerant’s bro-in-law made its maiden voyage, to much appreciation by all parties. We had a scary moment with it when the wind came up and lifted the tent canvas, allowing the steel plate at the top of the pole to fall out and come crashing down on the candles. Luckily, only one glass candle cup got broken.

Turned out to be a good event, despite the heat and the field burning that nearly smoked us out of the site. (Lebanon, Oregon sucks in the summer. Of course, it probably sucks in the winter too.)

*ring ring*

*ring ring*

“Hello, director Rob Cohen here.”

“Hi Rob, it’s Brendan Frasier. I’m ready to do my scenes.”

“Brendan? We’re here on the set – where the hell are you?”

“I’m at home.”

“Well what the hell are you doing there? We’re ready to shoot, you get your ass down here now!”

“Well, I dunno. You couldn’t get Rachel Weisz to come back as Evie, you got this kid Luke ford doing a bad American accent when he really should have an English one – and he can’t really act anyway. Honestly, the only original cast member that’s even putting any effort into this is John Hannah – and he’s the comic relief. I’m just not feeling it.”

“But! … the fuck?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what i thought, Rob. Here, ready to record? Action! ‘Eviiiie! … Alex!! … I hate mummies!!!!!’ …did you get that? Good! I’m going to the beach.”

*click*

“…”

“Well crap. Looks like Isabella Leong and Michelle Yeoh are going to have to carry the movie. It’s not like Jet Li is doing any acting, he’s a CGI effect for three-quarters of the flick. To hell with this directing bullshit, I’m going back to producing. Someone get me a latte.”

yeah yeah yeah – it’s been like forever, I know.

Recent happenings:

Sea Dog Nights – fun wit’ da Family. A bunch of us trouped down to Lebanon for an almost-SCA event, and fun was had by all. It was also the maiden voyage of our new chandelier, a design that is probably best described as “Martha Stewart meets the Hell’s Angels”. Take three lengths of chain, weld them into concentric circles. Then hang them horizontally with the smallest diameter circle at the top, and hang the next one from that, etc. Now weld some pipe sections horizontally so you can set a votive holder in them. Voila! Gypsy chandelier, courtesy of Tolerant’s brother-in-law.

Work: is work. We’ve been just busy enough to keep me hovering on the edge of qualifying for a bonus. Just 3 more percentage points…

Movies: saw The Dark Knight on Monday, well worth the ticket. Folks have been complaining about the violence in this one, but it boils down to one thing: the Joker is an agent of Chaos, and he’s a sadistic, violent, psychotic sonofabitch. The director was right about that. The plot could have moved a little better, but the acting made it all worth watching. Ledger nailed the role, and someone else is going to have a helluva time living up to that performance if they ever bring the character back.

Tolerant: is still the WBGF.

The Ratboy: is all set to move out for the first time. He and his new roomies (an old friend and her boyfriend) are set to take possession of their new apartment on the 4th. The management just spent a bunch of money refurbing the building, so they’re offering some good deals to load up on tenants to pay for it all.

Computers: just tried to upgrade my laptop to KDE4.1, with limited success. It won’t boot into the new window manager, but it will run some of the new apps under KDE3.5. I just need to dig up the logs and figure out what the problem is – I just don’t have the time or the brainpower to do so right now.

And now it’s off to bed.

So Da Boys and I scrounged up and plunked down some electronic cash at Amazon a few weeks back and pre-ordered the new DnD release along with the first module, The Keep on the Shadowfell, and The Physicist and I decided that I would be the one to run the gang through the DnD stuff, while he would GM some Sci-Fi stuff. I’ve read through all the books, and last weekend I ran the party through the first part of KoTS.

These are definitely NOT your daddy’s kobolds. We’ll get more into that in a minute. First, I want to talk about the new system.

DnD, or more accurately ADnD, got me started in the whole RPG genre many years ago – roughly the third grade. I can remember in the 5th grade, a friend and I sat down with my Player’s handbook and commenced to code a character generator in BASIC that actually did everything you needed it to do – with the small exception that we didn’t code in the entire equipment list. This was on an original TRS-80. Had I actually owned a computer back then, I would probably have taken that program and added to it to get some of the tools available today.

While Wizards of the Coast have been promising us the “DnD insider”, a website with a virtual game table, character creator and various other things, they have stated that “it will launch when it is ready” – which of course bugs the hell out of me, because I hate waiting! You want to drive a Gemini nuts? Tell him you have something really important to talk about and then say “oops! gotta run! I’ll call you tomorrow!” Head splodey.

So, not wanting to wait until probably NOVEMBER to get the WotC versions, I went trawling the ‘Net for alternatives and discovered RPTools, a site with a number of RPG-related tools built in Java. The good news: it’s all open-source and free to use and modify. The bad news: 4thEdition isn’t fully supported yet, but the gang is hacking it as I type. In the meantime, the tools as they exist are still useful, just not custom-tweaked for 4E. So, for those of us who can’t seem to do anything without involving a computer, there are some very useful bits of code for you, even when you RPG.

Now, about those Kobolds…

The party consisted of a Paladin, 2 Rangers (one archer, one twin-weapon), a Wizard and a Warlord. They made it through the first encounter intact, but the second one was not so well fought. Kobolds are no longer ALL cannon-fodder; some of them have grown up and turned dangerous. Back in the old ADnD days, the only effective way to use Kobolds was en masse – by the hundreds, at least. Not so much these days – a mere 5 were able to take out the above party. That’s right – we got 5 characters killed by 5 kobolds.

The SHAME!

Honestly, the biggest problem the party had was bad rolls – the dice hated them, and I was rolling pretty good. Example: I rolled a critical hit against the Warlord. The Paladin says “I’ve got an encounter power that lets me turn that into a regular hit” – cool, no problem. I didn’t want to hit the Warlord that hard anyway. So what happens next? You guessed it: I rolled maximum damage anyway, in full view of the players, so I couldn’t fudge the numbers.

The players took it well, and I think they’ve got their second set of characters ready to go. This time, we have a Cleric, a slightly different Paladin, a Wizard and a Fighter – and that archer-variant Ranger is back – he’s my NPC, and he just barely managed to escape into the bushes while those nasty kobolds were burning the wizard… ;)

This weekend Pookie and I went by her old school to check out the park next door that they were re-opening after a long bout of refurbishment. Silly me forgot to bring my new camera to take pictures, but I was absolutely astounded at what I saw:

An actual, honest-to-$Diety all-steel play structure, and not a single foam pad in sight. There are no swings, but there are these chairs that sit on threaded poles; you can theoretically spin them all the way to the top and then spin all the way back down again in a maneuver guaranteed to induce nausea. There’s also a vertically-stationary spinny thing with $Diety’s Own Frictionless Grease on the bearings, because this thing really gets moving.

The best part? The climbing walls that are bolted to the thing go all the way to the top, about 8 feet in the air. Those top bars, however, curve downward at a nice angle. So nice, in fact, that moments after I noticed them, I noticed that one of Pookie’s classmates was scooting right up them so she could perch on the top. (I noticed a moment later that her dad was 15 feet up in the tree behind me – the monkey gene runs true in that family.)

Everywhere I looked at this thing, I saw places where an uncautious child could splatter themselves all over it. The only safety feature is the three inches of bark dust on the ground.

Every where I turn, I see nothing but Nanny-State mandated warning messages (lid of my coffee cup:Warning, contents may be hot) and here I am at a playground made of solid steel with no padding that can be climbed in about 10 seconds by an 8-year-old.

I think I almost wept with joy.

Our Dungeons and Dragons 4E boxed set arrived this week, and I’ve just finished the Player’s Handbook. Looks pretty good so far – I read the 2nd Edition books once and didn’t like the changes, then was kinda out of the circuit during the 3E and 3.5E days, so I can’t compare to those, but I like the way it’s changed since good ol’ AD&D. They’ve added some complications compared to the original, but streamlined it in other places.

Most impressive change: 1st-level mages and clerics are actually useful! I really like the idea of the At-Will, Encounter and Daily powers for every character. This takes away the sting of playing low-level characters who used to have just one thing.

Even better is the knowledge that even the ancient Romans were geeky – check this out.

I’ve recently been thinking about getting a digital camera for taking the occasional snapshot and posting pics of my leatherwork, and today I got assigned to do a site survey of a new client. Actually it’s a two-fold client, as the end-users hired $BigNationalMSP to handle their stuff, but $BNM doesn’t have anyone local – so they hired us at $SmallerLocalMSP to do the legwork in the event a remote session can’t fix things.

Anywho, $BNM has a 20-page survey form, and the last page says “take pictures of everything you can”, so I figured why not? Cameras have been coming down in price lately anyway, so off to the store I go.

What I got was a nice little Samsung S860, which had the two features I really wanted: Digital Image Stabilization (I’ve wobbled almost every picture I ever took with other cameras), and it takes SD memory (because I have a spare 2GB card already). It has some pretty simple controls, and a goodly number of features for taking pictures in various lighting conditions – it can even take movies. Best of all, it’s black :)

Now, the funny bit came when I decided it was time to try offloading some of the test pics I’d snapped around the house. I read the manual, and it was the usual crap for Windoze: load the driver disk, install the software, uninstall any crap I don’t want, etc. On a whim, I took it down to the garage and hooked it up to the new laptop that runs Kubuntu.

A couple seconds went by as it thought about it, and Lo and behold! A window pops up asking if I want to download pictures from the device with DigiKam. <click> and the program launches, scours the camera, and shows me a selection of the pics it found on the camera.

Poking around in the software a bit, I discovered that it has some fairly intuitive image-manipulation routines, so I don’t even have to wade through The Gimp to do a little touch-up and resize. What a relief! (The Gimp is exceedingly powerful, but also very complicated; for my needs it’s like using a bomb-pumped laser cannon to swat a gnat. Sure it looks cool, but I think I missed the target…)

So far, I like ’em both. The camera was just $100, so I should get my money’s worth and then some out of it.

Now I think I need to design a camera case for it. Where’s my pencil…

So, a busy few days. Let’s do a little recap:

Friday through Monday: The Pirate Gathering at Horning’s Hideout. Nice venue – it’s a privately-owned park. Would have been a lot nicer had the rain stayed away, but we still had a good time. There was actually enough of us camping that there was usually something going on in our main pavilion, so I was rarely bored. Always a good thing.

I did get to spend a fair amount of time playing with leather stuff, you’ll have to read the other blog for that.

Tolerant’s niece joined us this year, and had fun by all accounts, despite our inept attempt to find her a playmate. We’ll have better luck playing matchmaker next time.

Tuesday, I took the day off to recover from the long weekend, and ended up tripping down to Fry’s and buying myself a new laptop to replace the poor, aging Dell I have in the garage. Then I spent most of the rest of the day bashing the Vista install and installing Linux on the thing so I can actually use it :)

I started off with Kubuntu, and had it mostly bashed the way I like it when something irritated me and I went for OpenSuSE instead. Well, that went over like a lead balloon. (Wait – Mythbusters proved it possible. Make that a concrete balloon.) I was in dependency hell inside of 5 minutes just trying to get the ATI drivers installed. So, back to Kubuntu I went, and as of 30 minutes ago, I think I have it tweaked just right.

This will, of course, last for about a day.

For those who may be interested, I followed this guide to get the config down. Extremely thorough, with lots of pictures. Actually a bit too thorough, there were several things I left out because I don’t use them.

Oh, and the laptop? A Toshiba Satellite A215 with a Turion64-X2 proc, 2GB RAM and 160GB HDD. Not bad at all.

Not a whole lot of interesting stuff going on. Tolerant and I have been prepping for the upcoming Eventing Season, and that means finishing up all the projects we started over the winter – clothes, gear, etc. I finished the scabbard for the cleaver, you can check it out here. Tonight I managed to get a decent inventory of the gear in the garage, so that leaves tomorrow night for the preliminary packing and maybe a grocery run.

Zoom!

Do not, I repeat DO NOT let your bracing finger slip whilst punching a hole through leather and stab yourself on the inside of the first knuckle joint.

DAMN that hurt like a bitch until the nerve settled down. Or in this case, went numb. I can’t feel the outside of that finger now. I’m sure it will be fine in a couple of days, but nnggyahh!