June2004Shrek 2, Sequels are Never Better30 June 2004 Saw Shrek 2 last night. Not a bad movie, but a pale shadow of the first one. Where first had a story line which made a point, the second was a bunch of parodies and references strung together. I just hope they don't make a third. The two moulded candles had cracks in the center which weren't a problem until the wick rapidly burnt down (being surrounded by air instead of wax). After Shrek 2 I trimmed the top of the shorter one and used it to fill up the crack in the (as yet unlit) taller one. Hopefully all is well now. The replacement for my IDE-to-USB box arrived today, now complete with fan. Hooray! In the Monday Ars Magica session our characters encountered Interesting Times on their way to visit the covenant of Journey's End. MyrdemInggala's character is four body levels down after being hit by multiple spears and I rolled 14 botch dice while trying to help sort things out. Thankfully there was only a single botch. Mould Ripping25 June 2004 Life at the moment seems to have been mostly coding, eating, sleeping and (of course) IRCing. We retrieved the candles by applying the age-old technique of completely and utterly destroying the moulds. We will just have to eat more Pringles if we want more candles. The candles themselves are v. funky. My room currently smells of honey. Last night I finished reading the second and third Sandman collections (The Doll's House and Dream Country) while MyrdemInggala caught up on sleep.
Candlemaking, Weekend23 June 2004 Last Friday we playtested Jessica and Philip's Icon DnD module. It had a cool Middle-earth feel and will probably be a decent module once it's been tweaked abit. They had a second playtest on Monday but I don't know how that went. Saturday morning we went shopping (for beeswax and a Father's Day present for MyrdemInggala's dad). Spend the afternoon napping (blerg, being ill is horrible) and reading the Dune cardgame rules. That evening played Dune with Kevin and Neil. Fun, but man is Dune complicated. Finished off with a few hands of Give Me the Brain since I wasn't feeling up to anything mentally challenging. Slept most of Sunday and had a quiet evening with MyrdemInggala. Monday I ran lots of errands before work (paying the money owing on Squeaks service, buying candlewicking, taking in washing) and arrived to discover that the weekly progress meeting had been moved forward 3 hours. After that caught up on the weekends mail and news so didn't get much work done. Monday evening we dipped candles at A&S. Was pretty cool, although slow going. Tuesday was mainly coding (I'm working on a small lexer and parser, woot!) and then more candlemaking in the evening (this time we tried moulded candles at home). Currently the candles are stuck in their moulds - we'll attempt to rescue them this evening. Also had a long discussion of the recent DnD 3rd revival taking place amongst various roleplaying groups we know. So only got to sleep at 02:00. Useful properties of our beeswax candles:
Brawl, HP3, Kill Bill Vol. 218 June 2004 Work this week has been spectacularly unproductive. Monday's car troubles combined with Wednesday's public holiday, feeling ill all of Thursday and taking my car in for a service over Thursday and Friday have resulted in very little coding happening. Saw Prisoner of Azkaban and Kill Bill Volume 2 on Tuesday evening. Both were very enjoyable. I thought PoA was the best of the three Harry Potter movies made so far and proper closed time-travel plots are cool (although I maintain that allowing magical time-travel into the HP universe was a mistake). The most enjoyable part of KBV2 was that stuff kept happening - which kept me interested even when not everything about the film wowed me. On Wednesday I DMed a short Ninja Burger module for Kevin, Neil and MyrdemInggala which we followed by a few games of Brawl. Brawl is a pretty interesting real-time card game based around the concept of a street brawl. This Saturday we'll hopefully be trying out the Dune card game. As mentioned earlier, I didn't feel well on Thursday and to top things off my car had to stay at the garage for an extra day. After work I got a lift to MyrdemInggala's house (thanks for looking after me and giving me yummy food) and then went home and slept. Tonight we're playing in the Philip and Jessica's LotR/DnD playtest. Hopefully my car will be fixed in time. :) Rain, Cars, Arrivals15 June 2004 After foolishly parking my car outside in the rain and not under the car port I awoke on Monday morning to find that my car wouldn't start. Blerg. After attempting to dry various important bits of the car with a dish towel I eventually got a lift in to work (late) with my office mate Konrad. Then after being in meetings and discussions all day, I left early with Colleen to go to singing. Hooray for 5 hour working days! Singing was decent. Mainly practiced Studentes (a.k.a 286). I think the basses sucked less than usual. Claire announced that she's fleeing to distant lands for awhile so we'll be choirmistressless for the next few weeks. Waynne announced his intention to wrap up the Ars Magica game at some stage in the near future. Probably not a bad thing overall since the game has really struggled for momentum over the past six months. Otherwise it was a fun session, although for some reason no one else was keen to meet unseelie royalty. The weekend saw another games evening with Kevin and Neil (I won the game of Hackers, MyrdemInggala won Free Loader). The weather on Sunday cooperated nicely and it didn't rain while we were playing frisbee (which had fewer injuries than last time). Saturday morning was clothing shopping which was depressing (as usual - at least MyrdemInggala got some cool stuff; all I got was a scarf) and fish buying (which was less so - we bought: 2 Black Widows, 2 Albino Widows, 2 Striped Danios, 2 Spotted Danios).
New Computer Bits11 June 2004 Hooray. Have finally ordered an IDE-to-USB converter from Buy Computers so that I can connect the hard drive I bought last year to my laptop and my work machine. Hideous storage space is mine! Have also ordered some RAM for MyrdemInggala's PC (so that it can run everything at once). Last night I read the first Sandman collection, Prequels and Nocturnes and also issues one and two of World Without End. Will hopefully finish the second and third Sandman collections over the weekend. In case you were wondering, MyrdemInggala has used her recently-acquired illgotten gains to go on a comic buying spree.
Comments!10 June 2004 Have found a small extension for PmWiki called XComment which allows posting comments to a PmWiki page. Have hacked it so that it now works when you have multiple comment forms on the same page. Then hacked XComment and PmWiki itself so that people with only read access can write comments. Other exciting news is that MyrdemInggala has a job as Java Developer (on Linux) and starts on Monday! Hooray! An added bonus is that work is within walking distance of her house. :) Shire Birthday, Presentations, Offices, Candles8 June 2004 Well, a lot has been going on since the previous post. Spent a number of evenings last week working on new SCA garb. MyrdemInggala now has a new light-blue underdress, I have green tunic with gold trim and we both have new cloaks. MyrdemInggala's sewing machine now needs repair though. Thanks to Jo for finishing stuff off for us on her one. On Friday evening we went to see the Inklings production of WyrdSisters at the H.B. Thom Theatre. Acting was patchy and the scene changes a bit slow but otherwise very cool. Thanks to Waynne and Jean for ferrying us out to Stellenbosch and back. Shire Birthday on Saturday was attended by a massive 63 people. A number of rapier authorizations took place, followed by the heavy fighting tournament (Wolf defeated Eckhard in the final) and usual feasting activities (dancing, eating). Patrick's Andalusian garb (made by Tracy) won the A&S competition. Belladona sang Sweet Kate and El Grillo. Probably one of our better performances. Frisbee on Sunday had lower attendance than the last few weeks since a number of new comers have returned home for the varsity vacation. Jim (knee), John (thumb) and Dave (ankle) all sustained minor injuries but otherwise it was a good (although rain-interrupted) game. On Sunday evening helped Philip put together PCs out of the piles of computer bits he's collected. After initially having little success (previously working machine suddenly stopped working, blew a power supply on the old Compaq) we managed to put together two "decent" machines (a 633MHz Celeron and Pentium II each with 96MB RAM). Yesterday I gave a presentation on the work I've been doing since arriving at SANBI. It seemed to go down really well which was pretty cool. Also, plans are afoot for getting traying on Crays while we're in the UK which would be Awesome. |