Diary of a Wolfeman

A few weeks ago, we stumbled upon Catan Universe, which is at this point an online, faithful representation of the game and it’s various expansions. It has multiplayer and as a bonus, it offers AI players so you can still play even when your buddies aren’t around.

The AI players all have typical German names, but quite honestly if you have an AI player in a game with live players the AI might as well be named “Victim”.

The wife and I both love to play games, but our circle of buddies has shrunk rather alarmingly in the past couple years, especially since we moved to the West side and my former roomie Greyduck opted to get his own place, so this has been a great way to get back into the swing of games.

The problem with playing a lot of two-player games, however, is that there’s only ever one winner, and they might not feel to well about that. Not a big deal if it’s just your buddy, but when it’s your significant other, well, something needed to be done. So, the wife and I have come up with a standard forfeit: the winner has to scoop the litter boxes.

“You pulled Longest Road AND arched wool in one turn?!? Well, have fun scooping, I’m pretty sure Wasabi let off a stinker in there for ya :)”

My Mom and my Old Man divorced when I was fairly young, and after a couple years of wrapping her head around it, Mom started dating again. Years go by, and she eventually settles down with the man who will become my stepfather. He’s about 10 years younger than Mom, I figure she just wanted someone easily manageable, rather unlike my Old Man.

My stepfather – I’ll just come right out and call him Jackass for the sake of convenience – well, Jackass wasn’t the smartest of men in some areas, but he was gifted in others. Game strategy and daily math he was an ace at, but other skills just weren’t in his wheelhouse. (Don’t ever play Cribbage with him; play Scrabble instead, he can’t spell worth a damn.) Some other skills that most modern Americans seem to have absorbed through the osmosis of modern pop culture just never managed to seep into his head though. Read the rest of this entry »

So you spend weeks and weeks trying to be productive, constantly worrying about how much work you’re producing and complaining about how you don’t get any time for hobbies.

Finally, you get a break in the schedule and plan a vacation, thinking about how many hobby projects you’ll be able to work on.

Then the vacation time rolls around, and you spend hardly any time at all on the things you had planned, and instead devote most of that time to basically fucking off.

In 6 days away from work, I have spent about 3 hours on hobby projects. Am I a slacking slacker, or was the time really better spent just goofing on the web and playing video games?

Hard to tell.

Since we’ve moved to the smaller apartment, Trouble has been missing having a racetrack, and Wasabi, well, he’s just got energy to burn, so we took a recent windfall and splurged on a One Fast Cat exercise wheel. They get good reviews, and people say their cats are happier, so it was worth looking into.

Wasabi agrees:

Zoe hasn’t been gone long, but there has definitely been a cat-sized hole in our lives ever since, and Trouble has been especially mopey, since he’s here all alone for most of the day while we’re out at work. I also happened to take this week off from work and would have the rare opportunity to just hang around the house with a new cat and get in some bonding time. So, we took a trip down to Sherwood and met with CAT – the Cat Adoption Team. (@CATAdopt for you twitterers.)

We met with a happy and helpful lot who kindly introduced us to a grey, almost-spotted medium-hair kitten. The family he fostered with checked off all the boxes on his personality form that we were looking for, and well, he’s just so darn cute we couldn’t resist.

Allow me to introduce you to Wasabi Six-toes:

 

Yes, he’s polydactyl!

He’s also everywhere! I swear the little guy has a nuclear battery pack, he runs at about mach 4.

Trouble seems to be warming up to the idea of having a rambunctious fluffball running around the house – he spends about 15 minutes every evening trying to pin Wasabi down to groom him. Wasabi thinks it’s a wrestling match and breaks away to scramble up onto the chair and then jump on Trouble in full Death-from-Above style.

(I almost named him Robin after our lost Mr. Williams, voice of “the un-containable Genie… of… The Laaaaaaamp”.)

[Crash!]…[Zoom!]

I should probably go try to distract him with something before he knocks over a bookshelf…

Shortly after The EMC and I moved into our first solo apartment after getting hitched, she surprised me with the gift of a little black ball of fluff – an American Longhair cat that we christened Zoe The Monster (because she was fluffy like Sesame Street ‘monsters’ – it made sense to me…). I don’t have any digitized pictures of her from before 2009 – primarily because most of her pictures look like a pair of eyes floating in a puddle of darkness, as seen here in the Xmas 2009 album:

This picture is about the best one I have as far as getting any visual detail is concerned: Read the rest of this entry »

So, we’re all moved in to the new apartment now, and I’d forgotten so much about apartment living in the years spent at the last place.

We’re on the first floor, so I have upstairs neighbors – and of course they have a small child. A stompy child. (Not that the parents are any better, mind you…) Thankfully, they’ve figured out they should keep it down after 9pm, so it’s just during the day that it drives me nuts.

My assigned parking place is of course next to an un-assigned one, and the most-frequent denizen of that space had a habit of parking way too far to one side of the space making it hard for me to get in the car. Last time he did that he out-and-out parked over the line and I had to leave a polite note on his windshield. He’s been good since then, but he’s still pissing me off because the car is a rust-bucket with expired Washington tags and I want it towed.

Bitch! Whine!! Moan!!! getoffmylawn!!1!

Okay, rant over.

On the good news side of things, I talked to the maintenance guy and there’s no rule against some light wood working on the patio, so I don’t have to drag my desk all over town to find someplace to do rebuild it as a leatherworking bench.

I bought all the materials last weekend and had them cut to size, so all I have to do now is glue and screw it together. Mounting the monitor on the spring rod will be a bit more challenging since I have to make some custom brackets, but nothing I can’t manage.

I think the hardest part is going to be dragging the needed tools out of storage.

Welcome to the world, little girl!

Hmm… Grandpa? Grampa? Gramps? “Hey Old Guy”?

Moving Day – a phrase that strikes fear and loathing into the hearts of most, with only those blithely possession-less folks able to resist the call to despair at the thought of picking up all your crap and lugging it somewhere else. When I moved to Las Vegas shortly after high School, it was no big deal – just two duffel bags and a box of books. Leaving Las Vegas 8 years later, however was an entirely different proposition involving a 14-foot box truck – and if I hadn’t got rid of the TV, I would have needed a bigger truck.

15 years ago, I packed it all up for the 29th time and hauled it to my current digs. I was 29 years old. Some of the places I have lived had seen me for several years, while other had been mere temporary stays of a few months. None of the long stays exceeded 4 years prior to this last residence.

Now, however, this run must come to an end. The landlords have realized that we were getting away with exceedingly cheap rent considering what the market will bear, and decided to rectify that to the tune of an $800 per month increase that my budget simply will not bear. So, out come the boxes from the cardboard hoard and off to the dump we go to start seriously offloading 15 years’ worth of accumulated crap to pare down to human-movable volumes of stuff.

Bleah.

For many years, I have been perfecting ways to compare computers to cars, since most of my clients know nothing about the magic box under their desk, but they usually know at least a little something about your average car – you change the oil, replace the tires, take it in for a tune-up, that sort of thing. Recently, a similar thought struck me about cell phones – specifically, smart phones – that compares rather well to certain brands of performance cars:

The iPhone is a Porsche 911

Think about it: back in 1963, Porsche unveiled the 911, and it has been in continuous production ever since, with only incremental changes. Tweak a little here, update the technology behind that thing over there, and roll it out onto the dealer lot with a minor incremental change in the type number. Porsche loves the 911 so much, that it can be argued rather well that in fact it is the only car they make, considering that the other models look more like they took a 911 through a funhouse and took pictures of the reflections in the funny mirrors than as car designs in their own right. (That’s right, Panamera, I’m looking at you…)

Well, we have the same thing with the iPhone. Any changes to the iPhone in each generation have been merely incremental tweaks – a slight change to a curve here, a slightly updated processor there, just enough to make sure that the end-users don’t think they are stagnating and not moving forward with the times. iOS compares rather straight across to the venerable rear-engine Boxer arrangement found in the 911 – which was air-cooled until 1998.

So, if the iPhone is a Porsche, then the other major brands can be equated to BMW, Audi, Mercedes and the like. While the iPhone sticks to that rear-engine Boxer, the other brands put the engine in front with Android, using a number of different engine configurations, body styles, performance packages and trim levels. Everything from zippy little two-seaters (your humble feature phones) up to massively overpowered station wagons that you can’t fit into your garage pocket (Samsung Galaxy Note).

Now, don’t get me wrong – the Porsche 911 and the iPhone it compares to are both capable machines – but sometimes, you have to wonder if maybe the designers have taken what was a good thing and dragged it out too long. While the other major players have been out there innovating and developing and taking risks with design, the iPhone has been playing the same song. With the release of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, it’s really playing catch-up with the other guys.