shannon_a

Been a busy week. Kimberly was feeling ill toward the start of the week, so I played Dominion with her Monday evening, then with her and her friend Lisa on Tuesday evening. Wednesday, Donald was in the area, so Kimberly and I had dinner with him before I headed out to Endgame. (He stayed to play ... wait for it ... Dominion.)

With regular gaming for me on Wednesday and Thursday, RPG prep on Friday, then the actual RPG game today, plus grocery shopping, I'm tuckered out, as is sometimes the case on Saturday evenings.

(Though I wasn't that burned out on Tuesday or Wednesday, despite the high level of peoples, I think because I kept my interactions pretty brief. Though I actually may have been a bit more intolerant of slow gaming than usual, now that I think of it.)

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We have continued watching new TV shows. Here's a few more thoughts.

After the second "A Gifted Man" appeared on the Tivo, I decided I didn't really give a damn about it. Kimberly feels likewise and will be deleting the season pass. I now see that its' ratings were suboptimal in any case. I'd bet it's cancelled before the end of the year.

Tonight Kimberly and I watching the second episode of "New Girl" and were pleased to see that it continues to be funny. We were however, both a bit nonplussed by them replacing a black character with another black character, like they're all interchangeable. Mind you, if they'd replaced a black character with a white character, we might have thought they were white-washing the cast. So, they were probably in a no-win situation when the actor playing said character found his previous TV series very unexpectedly renewed.

We started watching "Alphas" some weeks ago (catching up on all the old episodes thanks to a "Syfy" marathon ... though we're still weeks behind). Accepting that it's the weak pablum that Syfy offers up as science-fiction nowadays, it's pretty good. Great characters and a fun scientific setup for superpowers. There's also been some hint of a wider arc, though I don't trust Syfy to push on it very much. But, well worth watching.

"Haven", meanwhile, is a returnee from last summer that we started watching again this summer (and we've got two episodes left to see on our Tivo). It was based on a superb Stephen King novella, and the series has been ... OK. Kimberly liked it more than I did in season 1, though in the last couple of episodes they did some surprising things that really redeemed it in my eyes. This season that excitement continued on for 2 or 3 episodes ... then things mainly reverted to normal and the show became a highly predictable procedural (with a supporting character, Duke, being the only one with a particularly interesting character arc). Both Kimberly and I somewhat groan as it comes on now. We'll probably keep habitually watching it, as summer is often pretty vacant, but I'm not convinced it's actually worth it. Maybe they'll interest me again with the season finale though ...

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Came to the realization lately that I've been working on iPhone euro games for something like 2 years now, with 5 games to show for my trouble, plus 2 more approaching completion. I think that's started to burn me out a bit, and that I need to push on to some other things after these games get put to bed. But, I was kind of considering that anyway, because I'm not convinced that the iPhones euros are our best thing to do going forward, as the market has worsened as it's saturated over the last two years. So, we may cut down on the euros and try some other things.

I actually spent much of last week translating one of our iPhone games to the Mac. It's the kind of work that somewhat terrifies me, as I'm throwing myself pretty fully into an area where my expertise is pretty limited. But, a week later I can play the game through on my Mac and I've got a pretty clean code base that I can continue to use for Mac and iPhone alike. And, my expertise is considerably improved. I've still got a lot of fiddling to do to get all of our subwindows working well, but it's increasingly looking doable, which is a relief.

We'll see how this new direction does, as the Mac App Store is much less mature at this point ... I've love it to do well and push all of our games over ...

Auction! Saturday was the Endgame auction, and I stopped in there for about an hour. As someone said while I was there, there's something fun about watching people bid for games (and occasionally exchanging comments with friends while doing so). I did myself bid on a Liberte (which I didn't get) and a To Court the King (which I did). The latter went for all of $6, pointing out how much of a buyer's market the Endgame auction is ... but many of us sellers also find it sufficiently convenient that it's worth lower prices. I saw about $100 of my own games sell in that hour. I do have some concerns if all of my stuff sold because there was a huge glut of games, as Robert brought in 300-450 from his collection(!). Nonetheless, Aaron cleared somewhere between 60 and 90 games in the hour I was there, which looked like a good start. (Just glanced at the Twitter feed, and it said 5 hours, 500+ games, so he apparently maintained or improved upon that rate. Wow!)

(I'll find out when I go in on Wednesday, but I'll bring my panniers just in case I have stuff to go back home ... and if I do have unsold games, it won't be a big deal like it would have been in previous years, because we'll soon be using our garage for storage, pending the floor being smoothed out and Bob building us some shelves.)

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Gaming! I only stayed at the auction for an hour because I had my normal KingMaker game later on Saturday, which was run from my home. Munchkin tormented the cat-allergic people for a while, but other than that the game was pretty normative. We stopped just short of the final battle for book one of the adventure path. Overall, I'm pleased that I decided to run this campaign at a slower speed, else I think it would have just blinked past us (given that we're looking at 60-75 session based on the current speed things are going).

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A Bit of Biking. We had some late rain on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. When I went out to lunch on Sunday I was hoping that it'd clear up enough that I could bike a bit before returning home. And, 'lo and behold, it did. I'd been considering riding the Ohlone Greenway, which I'd been wanted to do for weeks. Ultimately, I decided that I didn't want to spend that much of my Sunday biking, as my freetime still feels very valuable. I did bike through the hills of north Berkeley up to Solano Avenue and back, though, which was a very nice ride on a surprisingly nice day.

Last rain of the (water) year??

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About that Free Time ... I've been relaxing pretty well since I finished work on the RPG history book. In fact, I've be astounded by the amount of free time I have in evenings and weekends (especially with RPGing biweekly or so at the moment).

I've had so much free time that as of last week I was ... starting to get a little bored. Only so many books you can read, eh? So I think I'm going to be starting on my next freetime project in a week or two, which will be an iPhone adaptation of my friend Eric's Armorica game (and something which I'd actually started last year before the RPG history book ate my mind).

Just heard bells ringing downstairs. Or thought I did. Tai Chi (Guest Cat) has a belled collar you see, and so we heard jingling back and forth for 9 days while he visited. But Mom Melody and Jared picked him up late last night and took him home. So no actual bells downstairs. He was a real pleasure to have this time, as he was pretty well integrated into the house. Not much hissing really at any time, and not much Tai-Chi-retreating-to-the-office-to-hide. But Lucy did chase him a lot.

Feeling a bit spacey today because I'm sick. Again. Dammit. Another cold that I hope passes as quickly as the last one. Because I've been sick while in Hawaii before, and that's just a waste of sunlight. We shall see. I'm feeling better tonight than I was this morning. Hopefully tomorrow will be better again. But I could feel worse instead.

It was a bad day to come down sick as today was my day to get Michael Schacht's Gold! out the door. Fortunately I'd arranged my time pretty well, and I really did have just slight polish to do today. But everything took twice as long. Then another stupid bug in Apple's upload software cost me some time. So it was still more than a day's worth of work, or at least a sick day. But it's uploaded now. It's scheduled to go on sale February 3, which is the same day the physical game goes on sale, which we're trumpeting as a first, and probably is for any mass-market publication.

Well, that's all true if Apple doesn't reject the app, of course. We've been good so far, and in fact they've approved at least one that I wish they hadn't of because of a bug on a platform I hadn't tested for. But in any case I figure if they reject one, it'll be the one that we have a set date for. But I've got my bets hedged via a laptop that will go with me to Hawaii. Once I submit all my code and sync it over, I'll be able to build from there in the (hopefully unlikely) case that the code gets rejected.

Probably all the work on Gold!, which I really cranked on for these last two weeks, plus all the work on my history book, which I've really cranked on for the last two weeks, is what set me up to get sick. I cut back these last two days, realizing I was chancing running myself into the ground, but apparently too little too late.

Which leaves me figuring out how much I can do on the history book before I leave for Hawaii without it being too much.

(And there is certainly no work being done in Hawaii, absent that potential for problem.)

Still hoping to get my three new articles done, which I'm half-way into.

And hoping to be feeling better very quickly. Tomorrow will tell. Or the next day.

Garage Hi-Jinx. So our builders came out on Monday to do Day #2 on the construction of our garage. Well, really Day #1, since they only put in a couple of hours previously before running into the gable-roof problem. And really, the destruction of our garage, but you get the idea.

They went at it for a good 7 hours or so and in the process pretty seriously destroyed the garage. They took out the side brick wall, which I've been afraid was going to come down, as far back as the side of the house, then started more slowly peeling it back from that point. Somewhat to my surprise, they unearthed wood shingles on the side of our house, behind the garage wall.

(I did know the house used to have wood shingles, as they're still on the wall of our sun room upstairs.)

Afterward the builders took out the front of the garage, then the little pillar that remained in the northwest corner. The destruction certainly isn't complete, as there's the back couple of feet of the roof and the back couple of feet on the west wall, but it's close. (The south and east walls are staying, both because they were in good shape and because we can't take out all of the walls of the structure. But mainly because they were in good shape.)


(See what it looked like after their previous 2 hours of destruction)

As the above picture shows, our "garage" looks a lot more like an empty space with debris in it now. We've got a chunk of wood lying across the front to try and discourage stupid people from mucking with the debris.

Unfortunately, the builders also found a problem. Or really two problems. First, the foundation of our house is about 18 inches above the floor of the garage, which is not up to code (and probably wasn't when it was done either, based on the various things that were done to this house before we lived here). Second, the roots from the Acacia that we took down last year have gotten under the foundation.

So, we'll probably need to put a pylon in under that corner of the house, tearing our roots to do so. It'll cost more money, but if that's all that's required, it should be OK. (I panicked a bit at first when Kimberly described the roots as growing through our foundation, which would have been disastrous, but that was just because she thought the foundation was at sidewalk level, not 18 inches up.)

So now the builders have taken a break while they again talk with the architect about what to do. I thought he was overpriced when he just drew up the plans (but not him specifically; architects in general), but if he keeps figuring out problems like this, I'll revise my estimate.

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Gold in Them Thar iPhones. This afternoon I passed around my first alpha test of the next Skotos iPhone game, which is Michael Schacht's Gold!, which we'll simultaneously be releasing on the iPhone alongside the tabletop release (if all goes well).

I've been very pleased at how well the coding has gone, because so much of it has been well supported by the card library that I've now built three games upon. I've theoretically been working on it for six weeks, but I've been pretty extensively revising our other games and library at the same time, so I've got maybe two man-weeks of actual effort into it. Having a feature-complete version of the game in that timeframe is great, especially with many bugs and UI issues already squashed.

That release is going to be February 1 if all goes well.

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I'm Dreaming of a White Thanksgiving ... It's been cold here in the Bay Area lately. The intellectually-challenged ex-governor of Alaska is no longer my least favorite export from that state. It's once more these darned Alaskan storms that freeze us to death.

Today when I went in to EndGame I wore my winter warmest, which included pants, a shirt, an overshirt, a windbreaker, gloves, and a "Jayne hat" pulled through my bike helmet. Glad I wore it though because it was a teeth-chattering 39 degrees when I headed home. Brrr.

(And I smirk at my dad telling us how cold it was last time we were in Hawaii. It was in the high 60s.)

Hot! After a couple of hot days last week, we've got a couple of hot days this week too: yesterday and just today, according to reports. I usually hate the heat, but this year it's been very welcome after the long, gray summer we've had. Yesterday was the first day I can remember when I was working in my office on a hot day and didn't feel particularly warm (mind you, it was in the 80s, which usually roasts my office, but I think I was just basking in the unexpected heat).

It was so nice yesterday that when I rode home from EndGame at about 11pm, I was just wearing my t-shirt and jeans; no jacket. I love evenings when I'm out and it's still warm enough to have light clothes on. Perhaps it reminds me of summers in Missouri. It's very uncommon here because the fog rolls in from the Bay every evening. But yesterday was a nice exception.

(Mind you I don't always think it's nice when I try to go to bed, since our upstairs retains heat in the summer, but there you go ...)

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AI. I've continued to work on Reiner Knizia's Kingdoms for the iPhone/iPad these last couple of weeks. It's been going well, but I'd been having increasing problems with the AI. So yesterday afternoon I started hacking apart my long mass of decision-making code into individual choices like isBetterCastleCell:thanSet:forPlayer: and isAcceptableCastleCell:forPlayer:.

Chopping the entire routine into individual decisions is really clarifying things for me, making it more obvious where individual AI choices should go, and also helping to clean up some so-so code. It's nice to see something come together like that. So I'll be doing more work rewriting the rest of the AI today and then it should be a lot easier to do some improvement and differentiation work that's on my list.

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Rides & Birthdays. When up to Chris' house on Sunday for his birthday. It's been a while since I've ridden to his house in the hills and I was very pleased to discover it was much easier. I used to have to walk up good chunks of those final hills and I'd still arrive at this house pretty light-headed. This time I did walk two sections, but no more than 100 feet or so each and that's much less than I used to (and with more weight, as I was carrying games). Also, I was fine other than being a bit sweaty when I got there. (Note to self: next time bring an extra shirt.)

The party was low-key. Some talking, some bbqing, and some gaming. The games were a bit slower than usual since folks were less used to then, but it was a fun evening. I got to chat with Chaz and Ken a bit, both people I saw occasionally at our old offices but haven't seen in ages.

On the ride home, I was quite surprised how dark it was on those roads up in the hills. Whew. It was really road-in-your-headlights riding. (I was also surprised by the same last night when I took College Avenue part of the way home from Endgame.)

Anyhoo, back to AIs.

I just haven't been managing to write here lately. And here's another week gone by.

A Weird Saturday. An unusual Saturday this week, with gaming at my house because EndGame was having one of its mini-cons. Kind of nice as a change of pace, though I did miss getting my Saturday bike ride.

And our Saturday gaming's been going great. We've been on a 3-out-of-4 week schedule for 6 weeks in a row now. Much better than the one-game-a-month of the early year.

A Lost Weekend. I'm not even sure what I did the rest of the weekend. Some writing on various things on Sunday, I guess. K. and I had considered going to the dog park, but she ended up being too sick to go.

Much Coding. I'm at the starting point of my next coding project, which is Reiner Knizia's Kingdoms. I'm having more luck this time with not slacking off at the start of the project, but I'm also finding more code cleanup that I want to do, which is slowing things down. Still, hopefully continuing to improve the code. And, I'm making sure to hit some benchmarks week by week too. I hope to have a largely functional game, minus the AI, by the end of the month. Of course there are still other issues, like art ...

A Target Evening. Today K. and I biked down to Target to get some toothbrushes and new sheets. We marveled at the new grocery section that Target has. I think we browsed it for an hour. Very good selection and very cheap prices. Well, compared to the super-small and super-expensive grocery stores that proliferate in Berkeley like vermin. We're talking about maybe biking out there to get our groceries on occasion. It's only about 5 miles, but the trick will be carrying everything back. I'm going to look into options to make my bike better able to carry stuff.

Thursday Problems. We seem to have hit a bit of a problem with our Thursday games since John left. We missed critical mass last week and might this week too. I have a bit of a backload of reviews to write, so it's not a huge problem at present, but I'd like to fix it soon before we all get out of the habit. I probably need to give up on our newest person who'd said he wanted to game with us and to issue a new invite. I had a couple of people I'd love to see here on Thursdays ...

So after doing very well for about six months, Cobweb has started seeming sickly again. She's been having digestive problems for at least a couple of weeks and that appears to coincide with a bit more than a half-pound of weight loss. Now, we did try and move her back to dry food over the same period, but that was very successful, and she seemed to be frequently eating, so I don't think it's an issue of eating less food because of the change.

But, in any case, we are moving her back to wet food twice a day as of today, because she was doing better one way or another with that. Hopefully she will be again. Me, I'm wondering if she might have developed a food allergy to her dry food, and if that could be the source of her problems. That'd be nice, because it's be a correctable solution.

We'll go another month and see if things stabilize or turnaround, else it's back to the vet.

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I've been a bit disturbed by the increases in gang violence lately in this area. There have been a number of shootings in Oakland and South Berkeley lately, some not that far southwest of us. However a shooting futher down in Oakland about 10 or 12 blocks west of EndGame earlier this week was more disturbing. There was a candlelight vigil for someone who had been murdered in East Oakland previously and kids showed up and started shooting people at the vigil (killing one of them).

What kind of monsters kill people at a funeral?

There's since been yet another shooting on that same street, 8th, even further into West Oakland.

Though they're not on my regular routes, I've ridden through many of these neighborhoods with all these shootings, which makes me nervous too.

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The RPGnet release of High Society is almost done and I'm pretty much burned out on it. That's how it goes with a release: more and more minutia the closer you get to done until it seems like you've got Zeno's Paradox.

Makes me pretty happy that we've got solid deadlines on these games with the designers, because it means they can only lag so far before you have to let your baby go.

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On the bright side: Martin Wallace's Age of Industry tonight, as I try out the other map before I write my review.

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Oh, and a bit of humor. I was gaming at EndGame last night and ended up chatting with a few people I didn't know. After I introduced myself to one, whose name was Tatiana, I think, she said, "Shannon??" and I said, "Yes." and she said, "Oh, I thought I'd misheard because I haven't met any men named that."

(And, it's certainly rarer. I've known only one or two male "Shannon"s over the course of my life.)

A minute later another person sat down at the table. Shane, I think. And I introduced myself, and he also asked to hear the name again and then he said, "Ah, that's what I thought you said. That's my brother's name."

Brother, not sister, you note;).

Well, I've just spent an exhausting week programming. I was going pretty full-bore early in the week, but then on Thursday I put in about 12 hours, yesterday I did about 14 hours, and today I slacked off, finishing the last 4 hours or so of tweaking.

The goal was to get a version of Money that was updated for the iPad to Apple. I may or may not be able to talk about the specifics because of Apple's NDA for their unreleased versions of the iPhone SDK, so I'll go with not. I'm going to prepare an article on the topic for my iPhone blog next week (and release it whenever it becomes OK to do so).

Anyway, now done. It has every feature I wanted to get in there, which includes a bugfix going back to 1.0 and a feature that I'd wanted to go into 1.0 but couldn't get done. Most importantly: support for a 5th player on the bigger screen.

Very tired now. Taking a few days off work. I'll get my undealt-with mail cleaned up on Wednesday, then get back to High Society on Thursday.

When I came to Berkeley in 1989, I was leaning toward the law as a career. The internet and the vision of an interconnected world that lay ahead changed my mind, and so instead I ended up in computer programming. It was something that I'd been involved in for years already, since I used to program in BASIC and in Turbo-C on my old Heathkit computers. Now it was something that I was looking to turn into a career.

Just as Berkeley had changed me the first time, within four years Berkeley had changed my mind again. Thanks to the bureaucracies of a public university, multiplied by the bare ignorance of so many of the students (likely the ones who had just gone into computers for the money), the fact that the vast majority of the professors didn't actually give a damn about teaching undergrads, and the unfortunate obsolescence of the computer science program--which in 1989 was still teaching programmers to wire together electronics on bread boards and which really didn't touch upon OOP in the main curriculum--my interest in computer programming was largely extinguished. I ended up turning toward IT and technical writing instead when I left Berkeley.

Thanks, UCB.

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It's been a long road back, but in the past several years I've been programming increasing amounts. For most of that time it's been Perl and PHP work, first at Skotos (where I largely rewrote one of our games and wrote a simple content-management system), then at RPGnet (where I've coded tons of stuff including somewhere around 50,000 lines of code/HTML for the Gaming Index).

The last two years have been even more active, with learning Objective-C, learning the iPhone SDK, writing a book about it, writing many, many articles on the topics, then finally writing a couple of complete apps, of increasing complexity.

The result has been very fulfilling. Much more than with the Perl & PHP work I can see the beauty of programming again, with elegant libraries of objects working together with each other in harmony, while still offering up reproducible code that can be carried for project to project.

Twenty years after I started at Berkeley, I'm enjoying programming more than I did any time in that interim.

Thanks, Apple. And Skotos.

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So I finished up the gold release of Reiner Knizia's Money last Wednesday and sent it to Apple. Though we've released an RPG app already, this is our first full game, based of course on Knizia's card game of the same name.

If you've heard horror stories about Apple's rejection of apps, they're entirely overblown. They always have been. The squeaky wheel gets all the blogosphere attention, or something like that. When I submitted the app, their queue stated that 99% of apps were currently approved within 14 days. It took almost exactly 48 hours for Money to be approved.

It actually hasn't been released yet, as I requested a release date of a week from Wednesday, so that I could correlate some articles with it. I'll post here when it's out, for anyone interested.