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03:56:17 Wednesday September 01 2004
Today I met with Katy as usual. Her new server, codenamed vane, is up
and running. I shuffled and reconfigured a bunch of CVS stuff for
her.
I had dinner with Terry, Lehmann, and Lita at the South Street
Smokehouse this evening. After dinner Terry went to bed. He has had a
tough schedule at work recently. The rest of us watched copious
amounts of Futurama. Lita stuck around until midnight and had a
birthday cigarette with me. Today (Wednesday) is Lita's B-day. Happy
birthday Lita.
00:03:46 Thursday September 02 2004
I almost didn't go to class today. I have been having trouble sleeping
and this morning I just wanted to stay in bed. None the less, I got up
and went to class. I learned about relational algebra. It was somewhat
interesting to see how something I already understand is
formalized.
After class I had some delicious chicken shwarma at Blue Nile. They
have remodeled the interior there and it is now very nice.
I threw together a quick fix for Professor Simonsen this
afternoon. Then I went to a meeting of the GSB. Apparently they are
short handed. They offered to make me treasurer. I told them I would
think about it.
I made a trip to the library, worked some more on the house,
patched together some networking nonsense, and paid the bills for this
month. I put in some time on my book cypher for wotmania as well. A
lot of small things accomplished today.
Tomorrow: phone interview with nfr.
02:25:30 Friday September 03 2004
I had a phone interview with nfr this morning. I believe that it went
well. It could have been better, but nothing is perfect. I got the
question "Name three ways that the static keyword can be used in C"
wrong. I can still only think of two (static memory location, and
static file "scope") even after the pressure is off. Does anyone know
the third? The interviewer (Kevin) was tres cool and very
clueful.
I put in some work on Professor Xie's project before lunch with Chris,
John, and Lehmann. We took a very long lunch which is just as well
because I have probably already worked my 20 hours for this
week. After lunch I put in some work on <gasp> the Wagstaff
project. This has been on the back burner for a long time. I suspect
that Wagstaff will be surprised when he learns that there is a
Wagstaff project.
This evening I got a very small amount of work done on the house. I
went to watch Lita dance at the ballroom callout. I watched
some Sports Night with Terry. I finished my book cypher for wotmania. Suppose anyone there
will puzzle it out?
03:25:54 Saturday September 04 2004
I had a very difficult time awakening myself this morning. I went on
to campus and had my weekly meeting with Professor Xie. After that I
sat in my office and did some work. I left campus a bit early and came
home. I edged the yard.
My father came up this evening to help me work on the house. His most
important contribution was helping me to buy supplies. There were
quite a few things on the list that I could not accomplish due to
financial constraints. Despite the fact that we did not get as much
accomplished as we would like (because of a gas leak) it was very good
to spend some time with my father again.
I am no longer overly hopeful concerning the nfr position. I expected
a yea or nay on continuing the interview process today.
03:45:38 Wednesday September 08 2004
It was a very interesting labor day weekend. On Saturday I went down
to Circle Center Mall for Lita's Geburtstag. It was interesting going
to an actual birthday party again. It was like grade school all over
again... well... never mind. It was MUCH better than grade school, but
it had a certain grade school flavor to it. We ate pizza and cake and
played video games for a couple of hours in the arcade.
After the B-Day party we returned home and played some texas hold 'em
(poker). Lehmann had a curfew and Terry was unavoidably called away so
Lita and I sat around and watched Futurama until the early hours of
the morning.
Sunday was mostly a wash. I was exhausted from the late night on
Saturday. In the evening I went over to John's and helped him clean
and get his ex-room-mate (Clayton?) moved out. Once we finished
cleaning we took our traditional walk around the
neighborhood.
Saying that my grandparents arrived earlier than necessary to take me
out to lunch on Monday is an understatement. They arrived before 10:00
and roused me from my slumber. They were kind enough to want to help
me get the house into shape. Unfortunately they never mentioned
anything about this to me so I did not schedule my day
accordingly.
After the house work and lunch my grandparents departed and I began
preparations for John's party. My attendance at the party was somewhat
sketchy as I appeared and disappeared at least three times. Orion
(pronounced Oh-rin) was there and it was good to see him
again. Playing munchkin was also one of the funnier things I have done
in a while.
During one of my absences from the party I went over to Lita's house
and sampled her delicious stir-fry. She, Ally, Terry, and I also
played a few hands of poker. I lost one USD.
Today was back to business as usual. Although everything seems weird
because of the late start this week. I did a lot of housework this
evening. I also figured out how to install and configure
WindowMaker. I like it because it is very AfterStep-ish. I have
promised myself that I will be ready for PUSH by this coming weekend.
04:02:36 Thursday September 09 2004
Class today was rather boring: SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE ...
I attended the ACM and PLUG callouts this evening. It is good for the
ego to be this repository of institutional knowledge and to be able to
sit in the peanut gallery at the callouts and taunt all the
officers who are struggling through all this for the first
time.
After the callouts I watched Jersey Girl with John. It was a
so-so flick, but it should be noted that I dislike movies about
children. I definitely feel that it is not Kevin Smith's best work
(which was of course Chasing Amy). The dialogue is better than
average, but it just does not pop like it does in his other
films. Overall: If you can see this movie for free it would not be a
waste of time, but I wouldn't pay money for it.
After the movie I made some severe progress preparing for the upcoming
PUSH game. It is all coming together now.
02:07:10 Saturday September 11 2004
Today was a good day. This morning I had what was probably the best
phone interview of my life. The manager interviews always make me
nervous, I always feel a bit out of my depth no matter how cool they
are. This morning the interview was with the hackers. I am so much
more comfortable around technical types, and I think it showed in my
performance. They are definitely a stand up bunch of guys.
After the interview I went to class. The weekly meeting with Prof Xie
was cut very short because she was baby sitting for her daughter and
the daughter of another professor. Apparently someone
ditched a stolen Budget Rental Truck near the child care center
and they played it safe and assumed the truck was filled with ammonium
nitrate.
I left work early this evening and went to see Garden State
with Chris (on recommendation from Sara with no 'h'). It is a quality
flick. I recommend it highly. It was even worth the 6 USD I paid to get
in.
After the movie there was more poker with Ally, Jack, EB, and Terry. John
(Lita's BF) threw a temper tantrum about the noise we were making
(without asking us to be quiet first). I cut out quickly after that,
but it looked like the house was quickly degenerating into a
melee. Everyone who lived there quickly joined in the blame game. It
felt like such useless Freshmen nonsense. I suppose I should consider
the fact that several of them are not much older than freshmen, but
it was truly pathetic none the less.
02:17:36 Monday September 13 2004
Guess what I love. Go on. Good try, but the correct answer was ilovebees. This morning Chris and
I went on to campus in an attempt to answer a pay phone. I guess we
got the wrong one, because it did not ring.
Apparently there are many more coordinates in this round than there
were when Chris and I played the first round. And since we don't have
to drive out of our way to get to the one listed on campus we decided
to start playing again.
Just for the record: I don't play halo. I was never very good at first
person shooters. However, this game with the puzzles and the thinking;
I am good at this. Besides even if the reward for playing the game is
just getting to listen to this fantastic audio drama
then it is all worth it. I am not kidding, this thing is fantastic. It
is like an old time radio drama, only over the interweb. The plot is
fascinating, and the voice acting is superb. Give it a listen.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Melissa knows.
I swear one of these nights I am going to find time to write my review of
Sock.
02:42:58 Wednesday September 15 2004
I built a bunch of static libraries and reconbobulated a bunch of make
files accordingly for Prof Simonsen last night. Strangely enough I had
never built a static library before. It is terribly simple. Just use
the ancient unix command ar.
At our meeting today Prof Simonsen was very pregnant. I suppose that
this is to be expected since she is due in a week or so. Biology is
weird. I suppose I will appreciate "The Miracle Of Life" more when I
am older. Right now it just seems like something out of Aliens with
strange slimy creatures popping out of people's bodies.
I sent out the official invite to the PUSH
Campaign this evening after doing some work on the web page. The
first game is materializing in my brain as we speak.
I hope the folks over at (nfr)(security) haven't forgotten about
me after my kickass interview last week. I found out that next week is
the industrial
roundtable.
16:15:28 Thursday September 16 2004
• Note: This entry is in response to a Game
Dream •
| When Role Playing Games are discussed, the subject of first-person versus third-person character narratives sometimes surfaces. When you play a character, do you assume first-person, using your voice as his or hers, or do you use third person, simply describing what he or she is doing? Do you switch between first and third person, or try to adhere to one? When other players are in character, does the use of first or third person affect your immersion in the game? |
Dialogue is always in the first person. Our gaming group has historically been small, so the more experienced members of my group often play two characters at a time ("Hey! Someone needs to play a priest!"). As a result the first person voice is sometimes confusing, but not nearly as often as you might think. The most experienced players tend to have characters with well defined personalities so between the content, context, and tone of the statement it is very often clear which character is speaking. Accents (which I will discuss in Game Dream 7) also help tremendously.
Descriptions of character actions tend to be in the third person. Again due to the possibility of having multiple characters to a player this is important to avoid confusion about where each character is located. First person is sometimes used to describe actions by players with a single character or where it is obvious. "I cast cure light wounds" clearly was an action by The Reverend Glen Drago and not by Sir Ariad Saint Claire.
I am fairly comfortable with both styles of play, but one thing that will get on my nerves (and negatively affect my immersion in the game) is when players insist on turning dialogue into third person declarations. An answer of "my character says _____" to each and every line of dialogue quickly becomes tedious.
06:06:31 Saturday September 18 2004
• Note: This entry is in response to a Game
Dream •
| One of my favorite plot complications that I like to introduce as a GM is to create an environment where the players are forced to deal with unsavory characters that they would otherwise destroy. From either a player or GM/ST point of view, what is your most vivid recollection of this occurring in your games? |
I am certain that this has happened more than a few times, but I can
only recall two instances that made an impression on me.
The first instance makes an impression due to the shear desperation
involved. The PCs were subjects of a kingdom that was about to be over
run by BadGuysTM. So the nobility of the kingdom sent the
party out to negotiate with a hidden group of Necromancers concerning
the possibility of reinstating their Tower (which had been
disbanded when necromantic magic was outlawed hundreds of years ago)
in exchange for military aid. The party did surprisingly well at the
negotiating table due in part to the fact that they genuinely did not
like the people they were bargaining with.
The second instance is notable mostly for its humor. A bard claiming
to be a scholar studying lost civilization X hires us to take him to
the subterranean ruins of X-opilis. Great, no problem. He sings
traveling songs along the way, because we all know that only bards
sing. Once we arrive he asks if he can go study
AncientTempleTM. Sure, no problem. We will keep the
monsters at bay while you look around. As soon as we make it to the
temple he makes a B-line for a gem sitting on some alter. It turns out
that wasn't just some gem, but in point of fact it was
AncientArtifactTM. He promptly picks it up and begins a
villainesque rant. "The power is
overwhelming... blah... blah... blah... Use it to destroy
everyone... You fools... etc" After the interminable speech it is
clear that we have been duped by EvilWizardTM who promptly
teleports away leaving us to fight TempleGaurdiansTM. It is
at this point that one of the slower players turns to the DM and says:
"Wait a minute! Bards can't teleport." Eh? I guess you had to be
there. It was all in the delivery.
01:49:23 Tuesday September 21 2004
NOTE: I modified the qblog system that I wrote to run this site
recently. The new system relies more heavily on CSS. There are
reports of this site rendering improperly in some browsers with broken
CSS. I will look into a work around, in the meantime you might want to
look into mozilla.
This weekend I ran the first game of the PUSH campaign. It went off well. I was hoping
that it would be excellent. However I had a hard time getting the
characters interested in the adventure and we ran short on time what
with character creation and all. There were many people here and they
all seemed to have fun, so on its most fundamental level I would have
to say the game was a success.
Today I was off my game all day. I went to class and all, but I
completely spaced a meeting (which in my defense had been rescheduled
THREE times). I went to the CS career fair this evening, then to an llnl information session. The folks
from llnl seemed to be interested. After the info session I skittered
into the w9yb callout
a little late. By the time that finished I was exhausted. I returned
home, cleaned up a bit from the game last night, called my father and
learned the magic incantation needed to light a water heater, and now
I am going to get some sleep.
03:37:17 Wednesday September 29 2004
Transmitting once again. It appears that I have solved the Internet
Explorer issues with this page. There is still a small stylistic issue
to work out. Observe that the text does not wrap around the image
below. I will have to ask Lehmann about that.
I have been quite busy recently. The weekend was busy. I had fiery
stir-fry of death. If anyone can read Chinese I need to know what this label says. On Saturday I went out
to Don Paublo's with Wanke to celebrate his new found
entrepreneurship. Terry and Ally wanted me to go out to the Neon
Cactus, but I just could not justify it. On Sunday I ran the second PUSH game.
Yesterday I slept through class. I pulled an all nighter working on my
database project as a "punishment" for myself. I sent my copy of the Dave Sim Letter for September
the 16th to the archive. I
wrote some tricky javascript to improve the audio page. I now have direct links to
various NPR programs. I even managed to squeeze in time to speed up
Professor Simonsen's mutation simulator for her post-doc Koen
Verhoeven.
I spent most of this evening making progress on the database
project. It isn't due until Monday, but I have alloted more time for
it because I need to brush up on my SQL and Java. I have not used
either of them for a while. People here in research computing seem to
want C all the time.
00:35:19 Thursday September 30 2004
Not a whole lot to report today. I got up a little late, and went to
class. After class I had lunch with jolsen and the folks from the ACM
office. After lunch I had a telephone interview with Northrop Grumman. I think that
went rather well. My skill set seems to be a good match for the kind
of work they are doing. My only concern is that I am not sure how
clearable I am. I will have to talk that over with their security
officer. He is scheduled to call me sometime late next week.
Once the interview was completed I went back home and took a
shower. This was important seeing as how I had missed my chance this
morning due to my late awakening. After that I just couldn't drag
myself back to campus. So I took the rest of the day off.
Tomorrow: BOSO
workshop and GSB meeting
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