Asymptomatic

We're going on a trip to Disney World this month where we're likely to be standing in a lot of lines waiting to get on rides. Because the kids have such great potential to be annoyed at this, and at the suggestion of a travel book, I have considered what it would take to keep them occupied while waiting. The book specifically suggests notepads and paper for particular kinds of lines, and I got to wondering what kinds of games we could play to stay occupied.

There are a few other games we could play that don't involve paper at all, and those are fine. I worry that Riley will be inconsolable standing in wait for everything, and that we'll constantly need to attend to him to keep him appeased. In that case, having some activities to keep Abby entertained would probably be a good idea. So what pen and paper games can we play? What sort of games can you play with just pen and paper?

The classic that Abby likes is Tic Tac Toe. She hasn't gotten so old that she's figured out how to tie every time, but she's getting pretty good at it. We have a long-running series of tied games. I seem to be the only one that doesn't let her win. But I'm sure that game will run out of steam quickly. So what else is there to do?...

On page 74 of Web Designer magazine #130 is an article on making tag clouds in PHP. I suppose you could do it their way, but a few little things left me puzzled about their implementation, and I thought I would give it a go myself.

I'm a big, big fan of associative arrays in PHP. Most people who know arrays know that they are variables that contain a set of elements indexed by numerically, but PHP can index arrays in two ways. An associative array allows you to use a string key to identify each element of the array, rather than a number. The strings have to be unique, but for the purposes of creating a tag cloud, this is perfect because we only want to list each element once.

Using an associative array for the tags makes a huge difference in the amount of work you need to do. Using some smarts in other areas can offer some improvement, too. Let's step through the process and document it a bit to see how it goes....

I've been part of the top-secret beta program over the past month or so of Microsoft's new Home Server product, and since it's now been released CTP, I can finally talk about it.

The software is actually really cool in concept. You basically allocate a box as your "home server". Many of us are getting so many computers around the house that it's becoming impractical not to have a dedicated server machine for sharing files and running printers, so it's a good idea to offer software that helps automate some of those tasks.

The Microsoft Home Server software looks like a kind of stripped-down version of Windows 2003 Web Server, but with a few dedicated applications for interacting with your home network. You access the main control portions of the Home Server via a "Terminal Services"-like client. It only allows you to connect to your Home Server, and does not provide you access to the Home Server OS, but a dedicated Home Server control application. When sitting at the Home Server system itself, you have access to a very pared-down version of Windows Server....

I wrote this entry on June 20, 2006, but did not post it until today.

After a nice evening dinner and playtime in the park - spawned by yet another evening of a completely uninhabitable eating area at home - we returned home to prep the kids for bed and another day's cycle of painters-gone-wild self-inflicted eviction.

Riley was the first to bathe, and Abby whined insistantly (a habit that I am soon to break her of in likely unpleasant ways) that she wanted to spend a few minutes across the street with her friends. With Berta occupied, I was the only one "available" for the task, in spite of the growing mound of after-hours work that isn't being done due to - dare I mention it again? - the blasted painters. ...

I used to roleplay. You know, Dungeons and Dragons, World of Darkness, that sort of thing. It's not that I wanted to stop playing, but it seems everyone I used to play the games with has flaked out on me, and not I have thousands of dollars of books that won't be useful to me until my kids grow up, and even then will probably be outdated enough to replace.

Still, I have a few memorable moments from my roleplaying days that I thought I would share. I'll start with my early memories, and work my way up.

I first started playing Basic D&D back in 4th grade. Mike Cochard was the only other kid in school who would even talk to me. At recess at school, we'd stay inside and write up characters and invent games to play. I stayed overnight at his house once where his dad actually ran the game for us. And we played Colecovision until Mike passed out from fatigue.

In high school, Derek, Allen and I used to play D&D at Derek's house. We set up our things on Derek's diningroom table, and played for hours. We had charaters so advanced that we moved onto epic wargames with miniatures, where our characters would command whole armies. At these nights at Derek's house is where I learned to eat jalapeno relish, jars of which we'd dump into some Cheez Whiz and call it a snack. We made characters for other games that we never played, simply for the joy of character creation. more