Asymptomatic

I'm a subscriber to Pyramid magazine, and some days I think the only reason I have to do so is because it's an inexpensive, consistent flow of game news. It's because of articles like the one I read today that I fail to fathom why I continue to pay them at all when less expensive tripe can be obtained more abundantly from many other sources.

The article in question is available only to subscribers (sorry), but involves a game that I discovered while meandering around the exhibit floor at Origins. The game is Rock! by Out of the Box Publishing, and is one of the more interesting new card games I saw while at the game fair.

Here is the summary of what the article said about the game, Rock!, besides ranting for several paragraphs about the quality of the materials from which the game was built:

Sadly, the artwork and the tin are the best features this item has to offer. … Alas, Rock! doesn't really rise above its "source material," and the underlying game is an inexpensive way to pay too much for what amounts to a gimmick.

Not only does that make no sense ("inexpensive way to pay too much"?), but it's outright wrong. Let me explain what Pyramid completely overlooked about this game. more

Over the weekend, I visited Columbus, not just to hang out with skippy at ComFest and buy too much crap at Origins, but to attend and lead a session at PodCamp Ohio.

The side dishes to this entrée are actually better than the meat, but the meat was the point of the dinner, so that's what I'll talk about here. I'm all about focus here. Focus.

I showed up right on time for the welcome session on Saturday and checked in. I hadn't been able to show up for the Friday night meetup because of the previously mentioned "side dishes". I checked in and was shown to the "Speaker Lounge", marked off by signs with martini glasses (with olive!). After a brief welcome from another couple of session leaders in the lounge, we all shuffled down to Room A for the introduction.

I'm not going to do a play-by-play of the rest of the day, because that's already feeling tedious. Let me cover briefly a couple of sessions I did attend, and my overall impression of the camp. more

I feel obligated to write about the BBQ, even though as an event, I think it stands on its own. The people who came seemed to have a good time, and the people who couldn't come... well... maybe they had a good time, too.

First off, it was hot. Super hot. Outrageously hot. I wished we had enough room inside the house to hold everyone, but it all turned out ok.

About 45 minutes before the BBQ was to begin, the pig roast guy called to say that he'd had a little car trouble. Apparently, while driving to our house, one of the doors fell off of the company van. Fell off. Crazy. So that was our one thing that went wrong. Thankfully, things didn't get worse....

Habari's community is a sight in action. Two weeks ago, I threatened to make a significant change to the appearance of Habari's back-end admin, and the day afterward, I executed on that threat.

The Monolith design for Habari's admin had been on the slate for a long time, even prior to Michael Heilemann's announcement back in February. We've been striving toward user interface excellence. While there's been a lot of contention by those concerned over what constitutes the best design, I think it's impossible to deny that the design is handsome.

The Monolith source code had lingered in a branch of the source repository awaiting the day when it would be mature enough to merge. It became clear to me that although opening branches of our repository for non-PMC (Primary Management Committee) coders to work on special-interest changes to the core code was good for innovation, it wasn't necessarily as inviting in the spirit of our community-contribution nature.

So after a couple of months progress, and with the blessings of several other PMC members, I made good on the threat of merging the Monolith code to the main branch of the code repository, and over the past two weeks the flurry of contributions has been nothing short of amazing. more

I've had so much to say over the past two weeks, and no desire at all to write about any of it. It seems like I should do a dictation or something, and have my secretary write out my blog posts for me. Perhaps I will look into a service soon -- I've always thought that my blog entries would sound better if I read them instead of writing them. In any case, here's a brief summary of topics of things that I should have written about but didn't.

I got a shave two weeks ago - a real one in a barber's chair with a straight razor. I actually did write about this, but I wasn't near the internet when I did it, and I'm not sure where my notebook is at the moment. I'm sure that post will appear when I finally stumble across the notebook bag.

On that same day, I attended the PhillyCHI design slam. It was an interesting event in which we were broken up into small random groups and given the task to create a "table management system" for a fictional restaurant. Our group didn't do very well primarily because there was no cohesion between our members. We had some pretty good ideas, but they weren't realized because everyone wanted to go separate directions. Kind of stupid, really....