Anotherblog

Christmas

Christmas
Mostly quiet, but very, very filling. Anna’s mum managed to drive George over 100kg for the first time ever, and he has now sworn to reduce weight. I’m perilously close to not being able to have sugar again.

Otherwise, quiet. Yup. Relaxing.

Games & Music
Dave & Kyla & Jon & Kate & friend came over on Tuesday for board games. We played Roborally, Once Upon A Time, Burn in Hell, and Apples to Apples, and had a BBQ lunch, because we clearly hadn’t stuffed ourselves enough at Christmas. Good fun.

On Wednesday, Jon & Kate came over again and we played much music, using the new mixer to connect together the electric guitar, the bass guitar, and two microphones. Good fun all around. This time, we tried playing some Stella One-Eleven songs (and noted that, as the band members live in Marrickville, we could even look them up, walk over, and ask them how they did their chord changes), some Beatles again, and “Jessie’s Girl”. I think we’re getting more competent. We could scarcely get less competent.

And then we watched a couple of episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica TV series, courtesy of the Canberra folks. Very good indeed.

And now…
We’re all loaded up with traveller’s cheques, visa cards, plane tickets, passports, warm clothes, presents, and toothbrushes. We’re about as organised as we’re going to be for the trip to England.

Except, there’s this New Year’s thing tonight. Apparently, tomorrow is New Year’s Day. Allegedly, people do celebratory things tonight. I wander what we’ll do this year?

Film Forensics
I finally posted the “Secret Window” FF, and got Wordpress installed and converted FF to use it. So now there are a couple of indexing systems for the reviews, which are presently just on this side of manageable, but hopefully next year will actually need an indexing system.

Film Forensics. Let your friends know.

Work christmas party

Work Christmas Party
I finally got some pictures of the work Christmas party:

Anna as Scarlett O’Hara:

And me as Charlie Chaplin.

I won the “Best Dressed Male” prize (a Christmas hamper), though this picture doesn’t really show the costume to its full effect. The jacket was too small, and the pants were too big, and I spent half an hour studying old Chaplin films to get the walk right, which I think really helped when it came to choosing best costume.

So, there you go. Best-dressed male, for the first and probably last time ever.

Patent-o-rama

Patent-o-rama
I found a link to all the patents I’ve been involved in. Which is nice. It’s all public information, now. Read and mock; I’m an inventor.

Canberra

Canberra
Ah, what a lovely trip. Three and a half hours each way by car, with the newfound joy of cruise control, and then twenty-four hours of what would be called intense fun if it weren’t so relaxing. I spent most of the time talking with Dave and Ev, and admiring Fiona’s ongoing efforts on their extraordinarily large and beautiful house. Meagan and Alistair, housemates of Dave and Fiona, generously conspired to get me copies of the ongoing Battlestar Galactica series and the first ten episodes of “Lost”, all taken from US television via the internet. I’m very much looking forward to BG, and Lost sounds intriguing.

I had brought along my guitar and a video camera, and recorded Ev playing some more of his new songs and got Ev and Dave to do a new version of “The Chorus Rhymes with Fire”, which was done with much hilarity all around. We played back some of the video that had been done for Dave & Fiona’s wedding (specifically, Evan’s speech) and discovered that it was quite good enough and that we wouldn’t have to do another version of Ev’s song. So now I just have to put highlights onto a DVD.

Dave had to go to work on Monday, so Ev and I cruised around town and played a new game: “Burn In Hell”, that I picked up and which, curiously, David MM of Irregular Webcomics had a hand in - he contributed several of the card ideas. Anyway, it was rather fun, if a bit slow for beginners. There are so many possible combinations you can do, it’s rather easy to go into decision paralysis. It may be a tricky game for the lunchtime gamers to get into.

Anyway, really quite a delightful trip. Thanks, Dave & Fiona!

Dud & Pete

Dud & Pete
Did you know that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were communists, back in their “Beyond the Fringe” days? Card-carrying. They even took tests. Of course, Peter got higher scores. He was better read than Dud.

iPod

iPod
My iPod finally gave up the ghost last week - my soldering job, as it turned out, was only a temporary fix: the whole minijack unit was slowly ripping off the circuit board. I was having to solder it back in place every two weeks or so, and treat it very, very delicately to avoid the solder cracking. Anyway. I’d been meaning to get a 40G iPod as a reward for doing huge bucket-loads of writing, and I think 160k of Fork and 55k of Sea Of Washing count. I also bought an iPod Mini for Anna. We’ll take advantage of these on our flight to the UK on the 4th of Jan.

So far, the iPod is fine and lovely. Now comes the extended period of importing many CDs onto the mac.

Weekend
I’m planning on meeting up with Ev and Dave in Canberra - I’ll drive there on Sunday and back on Monday evening, listening to iPod music all the way, hooray! No plans for hideous quantities of activity while I’m there.

Losing streak
As I suspected, my Magic deck seriously underperformed. I lost the first two matches without even looking like I had a chance. So I made a radically different build, using all the colours I didn’t use in the original deck, gave it a try, and it has so far won 2/4 games, which I’m pretty pleased with. It’s a blue-white control style deck, a style I’m more familiar and comfortable with, and it has buckets of combat tricks to make up for its inferior creatures.

Depressed
I’m fine again now, but I had really managed to get myself into a bit of a funk over the weekend (and no, this was before I lost any of the magic games). There were a couple of days in which I went home, played computer games until 8:30pm, and went to bed. That seemed to sort it out.

Relaxing

Relaxing
I have finally gotten back into doing some useful things. After a protracted binge on the “Return of the King” DVDs and a week of general laziness, I managed to finish off one film forensics, and write an entirely new one. I’ll post ‘em up when they’ve gone through the reviewers.

However, I’ve not done so well with the car film. There is a bit of a deadline coming up: a number of the toy cars are being given to the Smith Family Christmas appeal soon, and I haven’t done any filming yet. I’ve been stuck on the script (even the film forensics, normally a procrastinating subject themselves, got done in order to avoid script writing) at about the half-way-redone mark. At least I’ve cleaned off most of the cars. The stickers on the top of them were very difficult and slow to remove, even with gunk remover. Anyway, I’ve got to do stuff over the next two or three days.

Also falling behind are my plans to dress up for the company Christmas dinner. The theme is “Movies”, so I feel honour obliged to come up with something good, but what? I don’t want to do something I’ve done before (and besides, the King Arthur costume isn’t much good without a beard) and I can’t think of anything new. I’ve got until Saturday.

On the bright side, now that my patents are filed, I get the patent bonus this year, which adds up quite nicely, especially since one of my co-authored patents has me as the only remaining person in the company (the other two left a couple of months ago), so I get all the money for it. This money will be easily eaten up by the plans to go to England in early January, which we only just booked, having finally sorted out Anna’s schedule with the shop.

Sick
Had a nasty cough yesterday, so I took off work and slept all day. It seems to have entirely cleared away today, which is a little embarassing, but oh well. Perhaps it was due to household dust. Anna had the same coughing fits during the night.

Sports
Badminton * 2 last week, and I sucked both times. I wasn’t even able to keep my annoyance in check in the doubles game, which was terribly embarassing. I thought I’d gone beyond all that, but it keeps coming back and hitting me. Aargh!

Games
Played my second game of Formula Deux today, and did almost as poorly by playing rather too conservatively. Next time I’ll be a bit more aggressive. We’ve started a Formula Deux league at work, so we have a leaderboard etc. indicating our positions each game, calculated on a running average. Anyway, I came fourth out of seven, beating only the players who spun out on the track and the one who spectacularly crashed. Mr. Irregular Webcomics, David MM, won.

We have also started a new Magic Tournament. This time, it’s a starter deck tourney - we start with one starter deck and two boosters, and have to make the best 40 card deck we can. Play all the other players (there are six of us), add a booster, repeat. And so on. There will be five rounds, though we’re only expecting to get through the first round before the new year.

And in D&D, my nefarious plans to tokenise everything are proceeding apace. My new character sheet, apart from the history, is made entirely from playing cards with stickers on them. All the stats and all the equipment are on individual cards. And I recently bought a large number of coloured glass beads and poker chips to function as money. The glass beads represent gems of various values (50, 100, 200, 1000 gp), and the poker chips map rather remarkably well into currency - red for copper, white for silver, yellow for gold, and blue for platinum. The GM is rather pleased with this scheme, and we’re hoping to convert the whole campaign over. The advantages? No more mucking around writing and erasing gp on the character sheet, no forgetting to cross money off or forgetting to add it, and a real sense of how much money you have. Unknown treasure and other items will be written on playing cards with the minimum description on the card itself, and an index with a more detailed description in a “treasure log book” kept by the GM. No more forgetting where the hell that gem came from! No more confusion about which magical ring we’re talking about! More details as we start working with it.

Finally, Anna bought me the computer game “Primal” for Christmas, but gave it to me early, so I was playing it on the weekend. Very Tomb Raiderish.

Herr Fellows

Herr Fellows
Chris visited on Friday evening, and we hung around all weekend chatting and watching DVDs. Good stuff. Always nice to talk philosophy with Chris: we discussed the effect of varying levels of pattern recognition on attitudes towards life, the proportion of fanatics that society can and should maintain, and lots of other stuff that is just too hard to coherently summarise, including some very excellent ideas for the short film about the cars, and a variety of book ideas that ought to take Chris up to 2014 to write.

We went to the Nanowrimo concluding dinner party, which was fun, and to Jon & Kate’s on Sunday for music, which was quite fantastic really. I took all the guitars, and we sat around playing our variety of Beatles and T-Rex and surf guitar music until quite late, while Chris drummed in his inimitable way. I vowed to become a better guitar player. I have homework.

And finally, when I got up this morning, Chris was gone. He had presumably already set off to the airport by foot - I was up at 7:10, and his flight was at 9:00ish. So, if you’re reading this, it was really nice having you over, and you’re (of course) welcome back any time!

Patents

Patents
I now have three pending patents. That is, the patents have been submitted to the USPTO (the US Patent and Trademark Office) and are in the several-year queue to go from “Patent Pending” to “Patent Approved.” Still, it is rather thrilling. I always wanted to be an inventor.

Only one of the three patents is only mine, however: the other two have other authors as well, and are actually patents done by other people with suggestions from me that improved them, thus getting me second authorship. I’m rather proud of my solo patent, anyway: it’s not (wholly) a software patent, which I personally feel are a bit of an iffy concept (while recognising that as long as they exist, we have to do them or we’ll get screwed over). I’d rather not describe exactly what it does yet - tune in again in three years if/when the patent is approved - but it is in the public domain now, so I’ll just say that it’s broadly to do with the microphones on video cameras.

D&D
We’re coming to the conclusion of our current campaign in D&D at the moment, and I’m thinking of retiring Lorenzo. I haven’t done his journal in a while, mostly thanks to other writing commitments, but to summarise, he has been dying fairly frequently lately, and with his new-found love of the easy life and the fact that he was never particularly cut out for fighting, he’s going to gracefully duck out and live a life of luxury in Westgate, supporting himself as a cleric of Mystra and trying to build his way up in the priesthood, and making a bit of money on the side as a sorcerer.

So I’ve been considering my new character over the last week or two, and I rolled the stats up with Richard (the new GM) last night, and it looks like they’re going to be rather good, which is nice.

Squash
I did a lot better at squash at lunchtime today: 4-4. Mostly thanks to my somewhat improved fitness and playing more reliably, ie. not perpetually going for risky shots near the lines. Good stuff. We’re pretty well matched.

Writing

Writing
I’ve finished. Well, actually, that’s not quite true: I got to 55k words in November, which was very nice, but the story is about 10k from finishing. I shall finish it some time next year when I have time. But for the moment, I’m luxuriating in not having as many writing targets. I’ve just gotta do the film forensics and tropfest film now, and I’ve got a bit of time to relax. Feels good.

Christmas Party
The season of Christmas parties has started with Anna’s work. We went on a harbour cruise on Monday night; about twenty-five people who were involved in various ways with Anshin, mostly therapists. It was good, though I couldn’t stop feeling stressed about not doing any writing. Fortunately, I was taking Tuesday off for writing, which limited just how guilty I was feeling. Also, by Friday my laptop computer had given up the ghost - fortunately without me losing any work, thanks to daily backups - so I couldn’t sneak away and do any writing anyway.

Weekend
Much music making with Jon & Kate on Sunday, after a good writing day on Saturday. We played many Beatles and T-Rex tunes, and decided we would try to learn “Cloud Factory”, by the Clouds. Anna and Kate on vocals and bongos, Jon and me on guitars. Kate was also learning the bass guitar, while I noodled on the classical and Jon (by far the most talented of us) played rhythm on the electric. Then we watched Space:1999 and laughed a lot, and the “Shaun of the Dead” DVD (borrowed from Dave & Kyla) which they thoroughly enjoyed.

Puerto Rico
I won my first game of Puerto Rico today, thanks to a strategy of going for a variety of crops, a factory, and the ten-point cards early (I got two). It was a very, very close game - I only won by two points, and nobody had any idea who was winning until we actually counted the points. Very surprised. I was especially happy, because until today I had always done rather poorly at the game.

Holidays booked
I’ve booked holidays for three weeks in January: off to see Mum & Dad & JP & CB with Anna. We had considered trying to fit in a ski trip as well, but gave up on that as a bad idea.