Asymptomatic

I saw this posted in a couple of places, and thought it would be fun to give my own responses.

How old were you when you first started programming?

I was 8 in 4th grade....

I just realized something interesting about rolling dice online. Forgive my geek side for showing for a moment.

I've been messing with modules for JibbyBot (a phenny bot for IRC), trying to pick up a little Python here and there, and something I thought to possibly implement is a dice-rolling module that would let you specify die-rolls in D&D format. I suppose a brief tutorial is in order.

In Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), there are several different polyhedral dice. When the game wants you to roll a specific die, it will specify the number of sides on the die to roll. So for the frequent opportunity you get to roll a 20-sided die, the game will specify this with a shorthand syntax, "d20", which is really short for "1d20", meaning to roll the 20-sided die one time. If the game needs you to roll a 6-sided die three times, the shorthand would look like "3d6". There are also things that let you add or subtract a constant value from the roll, like in "3d6+2", but that's not quite relevant for the interesting thought I have come across....

I've been trying to have my 401k from my old employer transferred into a new tax-deferred "vehicle". I finally managed to get all of the paperwork handled, and sent it all away to be processed. Recently I received a notice that there was a certified letter to pick up at the post office.

Digressing into my first annoyance- I am home all day, pretty much every day, because I work from home. Please, Ms. Postwoman, knock on my door instead of filling out one of those stupid little pink cards and making me trek to the postoffice, which is way off yonder toward Yellow Springs, aka "nowhere". Anyway...

So today I picked up the certified letter, which was sent from my old employer. Inside is a check with a post-it note affixed to it: "Don't know why sent here." The check was the value of my emptied 401k: $146,061.96...

When I was little, my brother and I would play in the basement in the dark. The basement was our spaceship. We drew ship controls on paper in markers and crayons and used masking tape to tape them onto work tables in the basement. We'd pretend we were going to far away places, pushing the buttons of our controls to operate our space ship.

I have a memory of receiving my first telescope. We were at my uncle's house and there was snow on the ground. We set it up in the frigid air and looked at the craters in the surface of the full moon. It was awesome.

My grandfather used to teach me constellations that he learned while manning ships in the US Navy. I never learned them as well as I should have, but I looked for them whenever there was enough night to see stars. I knew that if I kept at it, I would get closer to them one day, even if it was on a derelict battleship converted into a spacecraft with a giant energy weapon carving a hole through its center, or perhaps even inside of a spaceship shaped like a lion....

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?...