Archive for the ‘Gaming’ Category
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
Really this is meant to be ‘Two months redux’, but I still need to work out what I want to say about them, so here’s the last week instead, and hopefully we can work on getting on track, seeing as some of my adoring public are requesting updates 
- Played “Dominion”, and the Seaside variant. Pretty cool.
- Finished Richard Morgan’s “Woken Furies”. I do like his stuff, but I’m reading it faster than he’s writing it…
- 500Gb Western Digital Scorpio Blue is giving I/O errors. Fortunately looks like it may be still under warranty. Might go Samsung for a change this time though.
- Movember morning tea raised some $100+
- Tempura Fish and Chips in Mosman Park. Basa, white snapper, and red spot emperor. The red spot emperor seemed the favourite (IMHO as well) but of course is smaller and more expensive
- Made it to team breakfast
- Ordered some bearings for my reprap, thereby committing myself more to building one. Assuming they don’t go to Washington or Austria or something. Now all I need to do is find a source of the circuit boards who aren’t Makerbot supply constrained.
- Buying more chook food, getting some freebie mulch, walking around Lake Monger, buying a replacement HD, getting annoyed by a JB Hi Fi salesdroid who suggested maybe I should buy something other than what I wanted.
- Zoo visit with our generation of the family (and the next one, I guess Got to see the elephant (I’m assuming Tricia) get taken for a walk through the park at lunchtime, which was great
- Astrofest at Curtin Uni. Puggle got to launch water and air rockets. Saw the Scitech guy get his arm sliced up by plastic shards when the LN2 demo exploded prematurely. Good thing he was wearing his safety goggles and didn’t get hit in the face. Don’t try this at home kids!
- Excellent dinner at the Essex restaurant in Fremantle for our ‘kiddie dinner’ (ie no kids . I must remember not to order chowder, it’s rarely remarkable. The rest of the food was great. The French botrytis semillon from Saint Croix du Mont (Something de Pavillion) was astounding. Service was excellent.
- Unfortunately Cygnet was upchucking so we didn’t get to linger over dinner and were recalled.
- Cutting down the rat access paths to the roof. Unfortunately I think that means they’re now trapped in the roof…
- Bunnings doesn’t look much good for Reprap parts, they either don’t deal in sizes that small or they don’t have the bits in the quantity I need, so Radio Spares it is.
- Making lamb and spinach curry. Lacked something, not quite sure what
- Cygnet is taking multiple steps. Bilby is playing the recorder. Puggle is playing the recorder, and is getting pretty good at associating new information with what he knows so far (frequently, in Latin . And both are speaking a lot of French vocab.
- Not going to have much of a novel at the end of this NanoWriMo
Posted in Bilby, Cygnet, Education, Food and Drink, Gaming, Life, Puggle | No Comments »
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
I am in the local city farm supply store, buying some chicken life support material (shell grit, vegetarian feed (no prions , and some straw). Having just been to see MacHeads I’m wearing my “Mac Geek” t-shirt. I get to the checkout:
Her: “I like the shirt”
Me: “Thanks, it doesn’t get out much these days”
Her: “Wear it with pride”
Me: “Oh, I do” (I think that’s what I said)
Her: “I’m not a nerd I’m a 50th level paladin”
Me: “I think you spend too much time on Facebook”
Posted in Gaming, Humour, Life, MacGeekery, Net, SF | 1 Comment »
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
Has been a while since the last update
- The liberation of a beer fridge from the roadside
- The bottling of 150ish bottles of beer.
- Attempts to drink the same are progressing
- Played Wasabi, and Pandemic, much fun!
- New tyres on the battlewagon
- Battlewagon got panelbeated after the necessary parts finally arrived
- Watched “The Italian Job” (the original)
- Arsonists destroyed my folks palm trees (and some other people’s cars!). This was before others of their ilk destroyed big chunks of Victoria, so barely seemed worth mentioning
- Interment of the cat. RIP. Some new plants planted which might barely survive the summer.
- Start of semester
- Pancakes
- Summer colds, blecch
- Puggle can pretty much officially read
- Bilby is having a language explosion and putting together longer sentences
- Munumanup! Watching The Muppet Show with them. Do Do De Do Do.
- Cygnet can get up on all fours, and smiles a lot
- Finished the Adventures of Doctor Dolittle
- Our 10 year anniversary of getting together (including 8.5 total parent years or so
Posted in Bilby, Books and Literature, Cygnet, Food and Drink, Gaming, Life, Movies, Music, Puggle, Seasonal | No Comments »
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
Visit nocleanfeed.com to get informed as to what you can do to stop Stephen Conroy from crippling Australia’s internet access.
Tags: no_clean_feed, stephen_conroy, stop_internet_censorship
Posted in Art, Books and Literature, Education, Gaming, Health, Movies, Music, Net, Politics, Religion, SF, Science and Technology, TV, Words and Names | No Comments »
Saturday, May 10th, 2008
A moment of insignificance to the greater universe, but not to me. Today Puggle put together a 48 piece jigsaw puzzle unaided! And I think Bilby said “star” and pointed to it in the book.
Tags: jigsaw, Puggle
Posted in Bilby, Education, Gaming, Life, Puggle | No Comments »
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
Saturday morning we headed off to The Amazing Race, organised in honour of a friend’s 40th birthday. Complete with initial “Amazing Race” style running to the starting line (apparently on the real show they film it a couple of times to do the closeups!). Then it was digging around in the sandpit, throwing balls into a bucket, and off to the train station and in to the Art Gallery to do some impromptu sculpture, out to Subiaco to find the café for lunch, off to either The Roundhouse or (as we did) catch the Ferry to South Perth to construct either a waist high tower (fortunately Bilby has a low waist , or a kite (we did both, with a low degree of success .
After that we caught the ferry back, hunted some statuary and then caught the train back to the car. Along the way we had to collect photos of various objects, and a treasure hunt list of actual objects.
We debriefed and tallied the scores. Apparently a few innocent bystanders had asked “Where are the cameras?”. Then it was time for pizza, birthday cake and three rounds of Dark Zone laser games (for me at least). It’s hard to play with 10kg of child on your arm, especially if she’s sticking her hand over the laser, but she seemed to enjoy it. Then it was time to stagger to the car, barely able to walk.
Tags: amazing_race, dark_zone, laser_games
Posted in Bilby, Food and Drink, Gaming, Life, Puggle, TV, Travel | No Comments »
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
“Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.” — Commissioner Pravin Lal
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. -Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)
You don’t seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help. – Jean Kerr
When the rich wage war it is the poor who die. – Jean-Paul Sartre
Being Poor means sitting on your rooftop while your house is submerged, seeing helicopters rescuing those around you and knowing that you “cannot afford” to be rescued by one. A lady said that in NO two weeks ago, and that made me cry. – blog commenter on John Scalzi’s Being Poor
It is not life and wealth and power that enslave men, but the cleaving to life and wealth and power. -Buddha (c. 563-483 BCE)
Tags: buddha, censorship, einstein, god, poverty
Posted in Finance, Gaming, Life, Net, Politics, Religion, World | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
I was somewhat amused by the press release about the Bentley Technology Precinct (“It will be Australia’s Silicon Valley – but with soul” – Minister Fran Logan, which wouldn’t be hard, most people in Silicon Valley probably leave the deserted landscaped wasteland or their corporate campus enclaves go to San Francisco for soul . Given that I’ve previously worked in Bentley Technology Park, I thought I had some observations to make.
“Cafes, bars and restaurants will become boardrooms and central, shared facilities will provide mentoring and support for companies at all stages of commercialisation. Sustainable transport options will be explored and pathways expanded for a pedestrian friendly location.”
Well, when I was there there was one cafe, which served any sort of quiche (or egg-and-bacon pie), and pretty poor coffee (although unsurprisingly faster than UniClub). Pretty much everyone took their internal combustion engine vehicles to Karawara shops or Vic Park for lunch. Sustainable transport options (ie buses) didn’t run when you had to still go to work but Curtin University was on student break. Anyway , we don’t really need to ‘explore’ sustainable transport options, we already know which ones aren’t sustainable (cars with one person in them!).
As far as shared facilities go, when I was working in Tech Park the State Government stopped providing internet access to everyone, so most people wound up getting their own fibre laid (thankyou Amcom).
Mr Logan said numerous ICT companies from around the world were looking to move into the precinct.
The US-based company Interzone, which develops online entertainment products, has already established its game development studio within the precinct.
Cos games companies are cool at the moment and other states have them too so we’d better mention ours
A blog site has been created to promote discussion and participation.
Edit – I realised the other thing I forgot to mention was the power! For a tech park you’d think they’d have a decent power supply, but it seemed like there were constant interruptions to the mains. Whilst it’s bad for a computer company it’s not insurmountable, but the biotech companies and the pathology labs can’t afford to lose power at all. It wasn’t long before they started installing their own diesel generators.
Tags: bentley_technology_precinct, bentley_tech_park, fran_logan
Posted in Education, Environment, Gaming, Jobs, Life, Net, News, Politics, Programming, Science and Technology | No Comments »
Monday, March 24th, 2008
Tags: swancon, swancon_2008, swancon_2008_state_of_the_art, wasff
Posted in Art, Books and Literature, Education, Events, Gaming, SF, Science and Technology | No Comments »
