Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Vonage
February 24, 2004

I ran into a site today that looks kind of interesting. Basically, it's internet telephony.

You hook a box to your broadband connection, and then hook your regular phone to the box. A phone number is assigned to the box, and when people call you, the phone hooked to the box rings. You can also hook the box to existing home wiring, so all of your home phones work.

ZVue Voluntary Recall
February 23, 2004

I got a letter in the mail today from HandHeld entertainment regarding my ZVue video player.  I have spoken about this at length before, but this is the first real bit of new (and unexpected) information I have received about the player in some time.

Apparently, some of the players have had problems with their battery packs shorting out.  I assume this could lead to battery explosions, depending on the severity of the short, although the letter doesn't mention this.  It does mention that the short may cause shortened battery life and possibly toxic chemical leaks from the battery.

New RPG ideas - card mechanic
February 22, 2004

I've always fancied a light mechanic for my games.  I do not enjoy the tedium of linking attributes to skills to feats to adjusted totals and adding certain dice rolls to acheive an equally cryptifying target number.  It's all too mechanical.  As a GM I would rather let players get away with dramatic actions based on their describing of their happening as an element of the story than of rolling a die well, and not just because rolling poorly seems to be a running theme among my game-playing friends.

So I've been trying to assemble a game that we might play (although I admit that we are so far into our 30's and 40's that we'll never stop playing D&D, but I wouldn't mind starting my daughter off right) that lets players drift through trivial obstacles and combats without the tedium and randomness of die rolls.  I posit some of my ideas here for comment, since I'm fairly alone in my development of anything of this nature, as it would stray so far from the well-worn path of my bretheren.