First Day of Winter

Saturday was a fine autumnal day in the Bay Area, cool & slightly overcast.

Then, on Sunday, we had our first day of winter. It rained for two or three minutes in the morning, then much of the day was gloomy and overcast. By the time we went out to get groceries a bit after 8pm, that quiet, chilly gloom that promises long winter nights had descended.

We'll have a few more summer days, though the middle of October or so, but there's no doubt now that winter is coming.

Donnie Darko

Sunday Kimberly & I also saw the new director's cut of Donnie Darko. It was a fine movie, just as it was the first time. I couldn't really tell too much what had been added, other than some clumsy full-screen book pages that were meant to clarify the movie's central (and odd) philosophy. I'm sure a lot of deleted scenes got added too, but given that we probably watched them on the DVD, I couldn't really make them out.

People bitching about changing music or the movie being too "obvious" now are high. I still can't imagine it'd make much sense to a first time viewer.

Anyway, after Donnie Darko, Kimberly & I went to get an early dinner at Sun Hong Kong. It was a very cheap Chinese dinner, since it was during their "happy hour", but they burned both our noodles. Nonetheless, my Mongolian beef was tasty & appropriately spicy.

And Such

The rest of the weekend was pretty non-memorable. Gaming on Thursday, as usual. We played a bunch of games of San Juan before Eric R. finally showed up, and afterward we have a game of Erzo that seemed to click a bit more than some of the earlier ones of "part two".

Kimberly & I finished up season two of The Shield, which remained brilliant, and we started on a DVD set that we'd actually purchased many months ago with extra tax money, Buffy Season Four, which remains good.

I continue to read A Clash of King, the second book in George Martin's fantasy series, and the first one I hadn't read. Long book.

No games at home this weekend; I'm awaiting a new game order I recently placed which should arrive later this week. It's got a few big-box games I've been wanting, Keythredral and Maharaja, as well as a few tiny card games that might do well at pre-RPG festivities.

Onward & Upward with Mozilla

Friday was Mozilla day, because upgrades for Firefox (1.0PR) and Thunderbird (0.8) were both available, and thus dutifully installed. www.mozilla.org.

Firefox (Browser)

If you're not already using Firefox, you should, as it's the best browser on the market and getting better week-by-week in leaps and bounds. As with other Mozillas, it's got nice tabbed browsing and is quite stable. Unlike the original Mozilla browser, however, it's small, sleek, and quick.

Here's some of the cool stuff:

• Integrated & expandable search bar. I've, for example, got a search bar for TvTome built in, and have also submitted search bars for RPGnet and BGG that I hope get made available soon.
  
• The ability to tie additional search engines to keywords in your main browser bar; just right click (or however you get contextual menus) in a search box and choose "Add a Keyword for this Search". For example, I can type "rpgnet catan" in my browser bar now, and hop to the list of Catan reviews on RPGnet.
  
• A special bookmark toolbar which lets you keep 6 or 10 bookmarks on a bar at the top of your browser.
  

However, the other big advantage of Firefox is the fact that it's freely expandably with user plugins. Here's some of the plugins that I use the most:

1. Web Developer Toolbar: A cool toolbar that helps you better understand what's going on with a web page. My top uses for it have been to outline boxes (which I used to have to do in the actual HTML) and to view info on a form. They've both saved me quite a bit of debugging time. Even better, it's easy to hide the bar when I'm not using it, so that it's not always cluttering my browser.
   
2. Foxy Tunes: A tool that lets me control iTunes from my browser. There's just a little set of buttons down at the bottom of the window.
   
3. Deepest Sender: The LJ client that I'm using to write this (though it unfortunately has some bugs related to LJ tags and the developer has gone mostly inactive).
   
4. Translate: I don't use this a lot, but I can use it to translate a web page just by pulling down a menu, rather than having to go out to babelfish and back.
   

Thunderbird (Email Client/Cheap Booze)

This mail client isn't nearly as exciting, mostly because it's got a number of bugs and bad features related to IMAP. It continues using a half-assed subscription service that I've never found intuitive or useful, and also stalls out on me sometimes when I try and call up a folder I haven't used in a while.

Other than that, however, it's very clean and much faster than my previous client, which saves me a lot of time every day. It also has a neat junk mail function where I can mark stuff as junk mail, and theoretically it starts learning what's junk mail and what's not. I'm not yet sure how much use there is here, but psychologically, clicking the "Junk" button instead of the "Delete" button is a big win.

With TB's junk mail features on top of spamassassin, spam is well under control.

Unplayed Games

I've been relatively serious about board games since, more or less, last GenCon. Just the last year. In that time there are several different games that I've purchased, but managed not yet to play (for a variety of reasons).

Here they are:

1. My Word! - August, 2003. One of my GenCon purchases, a set of 3 games/$20 that I got from Out of the Box games based on Reiner Knizia's name. As a word game and a fairly light one, this has just never made it to the table. I see that it supports two players, so I should see if Kimberly wants to give it a try sometime.
   
2. Wheedle - August, 2003. Another of those GenCon OTB purchases. Looks too light and too chaotic, and thus has never gotten table time. I hadn't realized that it was, more or less, Pit.
   
3. Verrater - November, 2003. An early purchase from Funagain.com. I picked it up because it was one of the predecessors to Citadels, which I'd enjoyed some time before. It doesn't seem long enough to be a "main" game, but it's too complicated for me to just pick it up and play as a filler, so it hasn't enjoyed a play yet. Probably the fact that it has tiny bits of German in it doesn't help.
4. Wyatt Earp - December, 2003. Part of an order that I made after I sold my Titan last year. It's essentially a Mystery Rummy variant, and Kimberly & I played a lot of Mystery Rummy toward the end of the year, so it seemed like a nice variant. Unfortunately I got this just when Kimberly went into a period of no game-playing due to anxiety or depression. That, combined with the facts that: (1) the game has some complex scoring mechanisms; and (2) everyone says it works best with 3, has kept it away from the table. However, I do really want to play this game so that it can look good on my shelf next to San Juan, rather than continuing to sit on the "to play" table.
   
5. Digging - December, 2003. Another Knizia game, purchased in the same order as Wyatt Earp. It's a partnership card game, and that's not an easy game to get to the table, let alone the fact that I've heard bad things about its play. Purchased mainly because it was a Knizia game that I expect to drop out of print soon. That's no longer good enough reason for me, but last December it was. I should note: this order was my last with Funagain.com due to their continued slow service.
   
6. Babel - January, 2004. From a small order possibly placed with Christmas money. This is a two-player game that I got because I'd heard good things about it and it was going out of print. I'm still excited by it, but am leary to play because now that I've read the rules, I think it might be one of those games that will upset Kimberly, and it's got a couple of stone pieces.
   
7. Medici - March, 2004. Part of a set of games that I bought to help me out with an article I was writing about auctions. This was a purely reference purchase, so I'm not surprised that I still have a couple that I haven't played. I just reread the rules for this, and it looks neat. I might have to try out the "two humans and a cat" rule variant at BGG for two people. Not played yet mainly because I have to ration out the auction games, as they can be too much in a clump.
   
8. Fantasy Business - March, 2004. Another auction game, this one a sort of weird one with price fixing. Again, purchased mainly for reference, and I haven't played yet due to the 2-3 hour expected play time.
   
9. Industria -April(?), 2004. I think this was purchased from proceeds from my sale of my Outpost game, and I think that was in April, but I'm not entirely certain. I got it based on the fact that I liked the other Queen Games game I had at that time (Alhambra) and had heard good things about this. Thus far, no play because: (1) THe components have more German than I'd expected; and (2) It's 3-4 players, which is too many to play with Kimberly, and often too few to play at myr egular gaming. Still looking forward to it.
   
10. Mu and More - April, 2004. Part of that same order. The main game is partnership trick-taking, and so it's never gotten dragged out. There's actually five games in the rules, and I've just played one of them, Safaru, since I started writing this list, so technically it shouldn't be here any more. Well, except there are four games, including the nominal one, that I haven't tried.
    
11. Tichu - April, 2004. Got it based on my enjoyment of other card-climbing games, particularly Gang of Four, and DougO's recommendation. Hasn't been played for the same reason as many of the others: it's a four-player card game.
    
12. Princes of the Renaissance - April, 2004.Purchased based on the great things said about Martin Wallace's game design. It has one of the worst rulebooks I've ever read. Entirely confusing, to the point that I read it twice and I still don't know how to play the game. Bleh. I have a suspicion this one is going to get traded away after I finally get around to playing it.
    
13. Battle Cry - June, 2004. One of a triad of games that I bought with the last of my tax refund money, while I was on vacation for a week. I wanted new things to do! This is a variant of the two-player Memoir '44, but for the Civil War. It never got played because I haven't wanted to interrupt our progression through the D-Day scenarios, and then interest in M'44 died down. (Also in the same set was St. Petersburg which I've played, but only 2-player, except in computer games.)