Just a reminder, 12/20/2012 is less than two years away.  Is your pantry loaded?

I really don’t have much to say in regards to another year down and another year in the future.  I’ve had better years and worse years than the proceeding one and I’m sure this cycle will continue to repeat.  Without the downs there are no ups; you just have a flat line.  And flat-lined is generally not a great place to be.  A little cardiac failure humor there.

But I do wish for you a better year regardless of how good the past year was.  Or good it was not.  Just try to remember that People as a ‘whole’ generally suck although a Person can be the best thing about and in your life.  And Life really is out to get you.  And it’s going to get you in the end, the best you can do is fight a delaying action and hold onto it as long as you can.  Anything good that comes to you in spite of that should be that much more enjoyable as a result.

Anyway, best of luck to your and yours in the upcoming months -

“All good that a person does to another returns three fold in this life; harm is also returned three fold.”

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I’ve added mobile phone formatting to the site so if you hit it with your mobile (palm, windows, htc, iphone etc) you’ll get a pretty sweet way to view it. I’m using WPTouch which is braindead simple to installed.  Just upload the plug in and activate and voila, you have a way nice auto format when someone hit’s your WP site with something other than a PC. (And before someone brings it up, Mac’s are PC’s in the strict and original sense of the word before it became the shorthand for IBM based PC running Windows).

If you run into any problems let me know.

Just wanted to post a quick review of the SnowBall microphone by Blue.  You can find them on Amazon or Newegg if you’re interested.   Right now it’s cheaper at Amazon.

It’s a USB mic so you’ll need a PC of some kind to use it and you won’t be able to feed the input through a mixer or anything like that.

Previously I was using the mic on a Logitech Pro 9000 webcam as my mic.  If you’ve listened to the podcast you can tell the quality isn’t all that and that’s after extensive cleanup and tweaking.

I think you’ll find the next podcast release to be significantly better in quality with everyone audible and without overload.  Probably doesn’t hurt that I parked the mic in front of me on the gaming table and put Temple at the far end of the table.

I’m not an audiophile, I don’t really know cardioid patterns or impedance or pickup sensitivity.  I do know that the recording with this mic is very acceptable to me and although I cringe at the price, its worth it IMO.

D

I just monitored page hits and my Contact Me page gets flooded with hack attempts.  I’ve made it password protected, using KOC as the password.  Or you can simply view any post individually and use the contact link at the bottom of it.  I hate spammers, they f*ck up stats, consume huge amounts of bandwidth and in general cause the internet to be a craptastic experience.

Honestly, the only reason it works for them is the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent that wonder about the benefits of \/1@grA and would rather risk their money, credit card information, identity with someone who needs to send a billion spam emails touting their security and confidentiality than use their common sense.  It costs them $0 to send the emails.  If even a single person gives them money?  It’s a huge profit deal for them.

So think of the children trying to surf Nickelodean the next time you start to click a link to some chinese web site to get a little blue pill or some russian site that’s going to guarantee your high pagerank on google and just remove your hand from the mouse.

That is all.

I’m going to be making some dice towers in the next week or so and will probably have a couple of spares.  If there’s interest I could make these available for purchase.

As they’re ‘alpha’ bare bones basic designs I’m thinking $25+shipping ($5 to $10 depending on zip for USPS) for them, its roughly $12 for materials counting waste and the rest is for my time which works out to well below minimum wage on an hourly basis FYI.  You’d need to have a Paypal account in order to pay for them as that’s the simplest and least risky for me and it’s strictly as supply is available on a first paid for, first served basis.

If the $12 seems high for materials well you try cutting 3/16″ slots in 2′ boards that are straight and uniform using nothing but a circular saw and see how much waste material you end up that’s good for nothing but template spacers.

The tower will include a catch tray that will be of a size that tower will nest into it when you’re not using it.  You could line it with cork, rubber, foam or felt to reduce the clatter noise but I’ve found personally that the noise isn’t too bad and anything but hard polished wood just causes the squarish (d6’s, d8’s, d4’s) dice to tend to pile up at the mouth of the exit hole.

They may be unstained or stained with black walnut or golden oak depending on what I want to try and will be coated with two coats of polyurethane (either gloss or semi-gloss depending on my on hand supply of poly).  The plexiglass will probably be left clear although I’m going to try a frosted look using an orbital sander on the inside portion and see how that looks.

If you contact me while I still have unfinished towers then you can try requesting specific finishes and stains.   As mentioned the only stains I have on hand are black walnut and golden oak (I might have a honey oak somewhere) and for finishes I have semi-gloss and gloss in polyurethane and I might have a  semi-gloss in crystal coat which adds very little coloring to wood unlike poly which has a tinge of yellow.  Really on matters for unstained wood in either case.

If you’d simply like a more detailed photo log of  the process I use to make them so you can build your own I’ll be happy to post that if there’s any interest pending me getting more raw materials as all the material I had on hand I cut already over the weekend.

Use the contact form to send me an email or you can send it to my anti-spam account which is spam at armsnake dot com.

Upgraded to WP 2.8 and lots of issues.  Bear with me.  Of course if you’re getting the 500 internal server error then you won’t see this so it might not help much.

UPDATE – I think the worst of the bugs from the upgrade are taken care of.  I need to figure out why the RSS feed from Wizards is fubarring my CSS but other than that I think we’re okay.

Just some screen shots of the double decker gaming table topper (DDGTT?).  This is after painting although the top needs another coat or two but unfortunately I ran out of green paint.  I only had one can and that was a fluke that I’d bought for another project several months back.   Otherwise it would be solid white.  But since I’m going to be puting a big sheet of plexiglass on top of it I thought I’d use the green since it could be slimy dungeon floor or a grassy meadow or something else that’s green in color.

That’s one of my sons, one of the twins actually, in the background on his bike.  Ignore the mess, my garage is always in a state of semi organization.  I can usually find what I’m looking for so it’s not as haphazard as it looks.  The black car doors my son is in front of belong to my mustang, 1967 coupe, that I took off an embarrassingly long time ago to rework the innards of and haven’t put back on as of yet as I’m going to strip the interior to replace the dash and wiring etc. Some day.

Anyway, I didn’t have much else going on that I’m willing to share but I thought people might be interested in the status of the new gaming table.  Well the top to it.

Just a quick pic (poor quality due to using my blackberry as a camera) of the double deck addition to the gaming table. That’s my wife holding the light in place for the picture purposes as it all needs to be actually assembled and finished before I can screw that down.

It’s constructed of two sheets of 1/2 ’smooth one side’ or rought craft grade plywood.  I went cheap here for a couple of reasons, one they didn’t have 1/2 oak or birch plywood at the store, I’d of had to order it special and I didn’t want 3/4″ as it was too thick.   Two, the top piece is going to be covered in something with a plexiglass mapping sheet on top of that so good wood would have been wasted.   The bottom piece I’m going to paint white for light reflecting purposes so again we’re wasting good wood under paint.

Now the center piece that separates the two pieces of plywood I did make out of oak, primarily for strength and just because I was able to get precut pieces that are perfectly square which makes the parts go together stronger.

The two sheets of plywood are exactly 35″ by 64-3/4″ and fit inside the well in my gaming table with about a 1/16″ gap on all sides to allow for expansion and easy removal.

I’ll be screwing the center divider down onto the lower piece of plywood.  The top will be attached to the divider by a peg and wedge system so that I can take it off easily just in case.  I’ll attach some 2x blocks of oak to the underside of the top that will fit inside the divider snuggly and then drill a hole through the divider and into the blocks and use pegs to affix them to each other.

The reason I want to be able to take it apart is I’ll be mounting a power strip inside the divider and running the wiring into it so there’s only one cord coming out of everything to power the lights.

The light is a cheap little 24″ flo I got at Lowe’s for $9-$10 as a test to see if it works well enough.  It’s not actually that ‘hot’ a light, the picture just contrasts it that way but still I’m not sure if I’ll be adding one to each location or one to each side.  (4 lights versus 6).  6 would work ‘best’ but not sure if it’s necessary until after I get the wood painted white and see how it all reflects.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing with my evenings the last couple.  Working with wood is a slow process as you’re always waiting for glue or stain or poly/varnish to dry before you can continue working and those generally run into the 24 hour blocks for best results.

Okay after experimentation with some scrap and taking some measures and the like I’ve simplified the map topper for the table.  This is the second iteration.

The topper will be constructed of 1/2 plywood probably oak but maybe birch.  One piece will fit into the existing playing field indent to bring it level with the rim of the table.   I may leave it ‘unfinished’ i.e. just sanded, stained and then a few coats of poly on it to protect it or I might use some poker ’speed’ cloth on it since it doesn’t pill up.

The bottom will be screwed and glued to the stand which will be 8″ high.  The stand will be cross braced and corner braced (I hate fragile things) on the interior.  This will then have another sheet of plywood screwed and glued on top of that.  I’ll then cover that most likely with green felt that I have left over from another project that will wrap around the edges.  The stand and underside portions I’ll sand and prime and then paint a bright white for light reflecting purposes.

For lighting I’ll put in a 40″ (ish) inch florescent fixture on the sides and a 16″ (ish) fixture on each end and mount these under the edge.

And that should give me the functionaly I’m looking for.

In the interests of not throwing out the work I did on my current gaming table I’m thinking of making an addition to it, see the image in this post.  It’ll be an insert that fits into the existing playing surface that adds a map deck about 10″ or so above and then is inset a bit in the bracing so that there is more room for the players to put their character sheets, power cards, etc.

Right now there’s just too much contention for map space from player’s paperwork for any encounter room of significant size. This gets their items off the actual map field and if nothing else adding lighting directly over their bits and pieces makes them easier to read.   And it’ll give them a creature’s eye view of the battlefield which might be interesting.

It’s going to be damn heavy though.  I build things tough so there’ll be something like three sheets of hardwood plywood there.  1/2 inch minimum.  I want it to be removable you see so it has to be tough enough to handle being taken off and put back for when I want to use the table as a board game table or card games etc.

Anyway, just thought I’d share.

I have to say that Facebook is not very intuitive and this from a 20 year IT professional with more flipping acronyms at the end of his name and experience at the lowest and highest tiers of support and implementation than you can shake a stick at.

In the paraphrased immortal words of Loomis – “Please god! I need a feedtool!  One lousy fuckin’ feedtool!”

But I persevere.

My wife and children are out of town for Spring Break with the kids grandparents and for that and other reasons I’m trying to keep busy around the house.

One of the things that’s bugged me about our house is the the cabinet doors and drawer fronts are all this heavy old world solid oak, literally an inch thick with a lot of recessed areas.  I’m sure it was ungodly expensive when the house was built back in the late 70’s, the story is our house was the development owners house and I do tend to believe it, it’s got a lot of high end woods in it and is the biggest house in the development in terms of rooms and square footage (3200) but still it’s not very attractive to my eyes.  The 30 year old vanish/lacquer is not in the best shape in the lower cabinets/drawers in the kitchen from water splashes over the decades and general bumps and bruises.

Longer story short I’ve started taking off the doors and drawers and I’m using a fine grit pad on an orbital and hand sanding on the convulations to get the top layer off and then restaining it with golden oak stain.  I wasn’t really sure what it would do, the first one was an experiement as I really want to replace them all anyway.  But to my surprise they ‘healed’ right up very well.  The stain recolored the wood where the old coating had worn away and you literally cannot tell the difference.

I’m also going to be painting one of the downstairs bathrooms, the ‘public one’, which still has the old texture paint from the prior owner.  Her idea of painting was heavy faux finish done really badly.  I can only guess that she did this bathroom last because it was only ugly, not OMFG THAT’S HORRIBLE LOOKING!!!?! ugly.

When we moved in I repainted everything except that one bathroom.  By the time I’d gotten to it I was just too tired to care and it didn’t look so bad after painting 4 bedrooms, kitching, dining, two living rooms, halls and a playroom as well as multiple ceilings which as far as I can tell have the original %R@)*%!*& popcorn from 1978 and coat of paint.

Anyway, I’ve fixed the horrible job of patching they or someone did in covering up screwholes for towelracks that had been yanked out of the wall and taped all the edges off and hope to put a coat o’ primer on tonight and a nice Misty Lake tinted premium which is a pale foggy green aka greenish grey.

DnD news has been pretty light of late.  I guess everyone’s just doing their thing rather than talking about it.  I still don’t have a copy of the Players Handbook 2 but the Avenger class that Wheaton aka Al played in the Penny Arcade Podcast sounds interesting and worth a look.

It’s just rather disheartening to see the power creep that keeps on edging in.  But I guess it’s inevitable.

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I’ve implemented a Widget Cacher to the site here, that along with WP-Cache significantly reduced the page creation size.  It’s typically sub 1 second to create the page now and there’s only around 20′ish SQL queries per page hit which is pretty good.

What does this mean?  Nothing much, it’s a geek thing but for the end users (you and your brethren) this means the page will load faster.  Of course you still have to pull in all the images which if this is your first time here can be costly.  1&1, my host, recently screwed up something and now my thumbnail generation doesn’t work so all the images for the last few posts are resized full size images rather than actual thumbs.  This isn’t the first time they’ve screwed this up.  We’ll see how long they take to fix it…

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Darnit, I was hoping to catch the fifty thousandth visit closer than 50,064.  Oh well, it’s still cool even after the fact.

Sorry about that, the comments weren’t working properly. I was thinking I was simply getting empty spam comments but after awhile I thought, huh, those are all empty. WTH? So I tried to post one and it was empty as well. Long story made shorter it’s fixed and both the comments and the email comment option should now be working properly where appropriate and visible to the end user (that’s you). Sorry about that.

In other news which I’ll go into more detail later, ran my module.  We got through 4 combat encounters and a couple of non-combat encounters in about 4 hours.  That includes children interuptions, unfamiliarity with their powers and such.  I’m pretty happy with that right now.  With experience that should easily drop to 3 hours even with the multiple bad guy encounters.

If you’re using Word Press and are having problems with HTTP or Internal Server Error 500 errors when you upload an image then try putting the below in your .htaccess file in the root of your Wordpress install folder.

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

This forces your server to use php 5 rather than defaulting to php 4 when it does the image upload/resize/thumbnail create.

Well I’ve got nothing to offer you other than random musings and ramblings.   The forums have dried up on me, there’s very little activity on Enworld and very few posts worth reading on Gleemax (official forums) much less actually recording for posterity here.

One thing that some people are doing is ’speeding’ up game play.  This has taken a slim variety of paths but it seems to fall into the allowing players to use their encounter powers more than once per encounter and their dailies more than once per day.  Getting rid of or altering healing surges is another prime candidate for change or using them as currency to allow more frequent usage of their powers.

One thing that struck me as interesting is one group’s removing the long rest and instead make their powers ‘episodic’.  You get what you get at the start of the gaming session and you don’t get more until the start of the next one.  BUT they’re also doing average damage (end result is the same but it does remove a great source of low and high points to me) and they’re making Dailies once per encounter, Encounters at-will.   They seem to be having fun with it but the DM admits his group is a bit on the power gamey side.

I think, now that I bother to think about it, that most of the people for whom ’spamming the same two attacks at-will) is lame, lame, lame are the ones who’s idea of RPG’s are MMOG’s.  Anyone brought up old school where every combat round was, except for the mage and to very lesser extent the cleric, *roll d20 and see if I hit* and just repeat that for however many attacks they got.  The cleric was typically, roll a d20 to hit maybe, run around and cast Cure [blank] Wounds primarily.   To us actually having two different attacks on top of the basic attack which is all anyone ever used to get triples our options.

If you’re a fan of Zombies, computer games and first person shooters then Left 4 Dead can’t be recommended enough.  And you can get it from Amazon right now for only $46 which is a small bargain with free shipping.  Of course you could get it from Steam for $49 and not have to pay shipping either or taxes or wait for it to show up in the mail.

If you have a friend or two then I’d recommend getting your own dedicated server.  They’re $12 a month most places and you’re gaurenteed low latency, availability and the like.  Split that 4 ways and you’re only paying $3 a month each.  Unless you have a horse of a machine and a lot of outbound bandwidth trying to run a listen server on your desktop while you play is going to suck for anyone trying to connect, not to mention going to the trouble of getting the right ports forwarded through your router and unblocked at  your local firewall etc.  Heck for $12 I’d rent my own personal server if we didn’t already have a group one.

I’ve been working on hacking L4D mapping out while we wait, impatiently, for the real mapping tools to be released and have working maps but they’re not quite ‘there’ yet.  The navigation tools aren’t working so you can’t build your navigation areas quite properly.

Any maps/campaigns I do I’ll post here for your bemusement as well.

The car picture is an example of the 67 mustang I’ve got and working on restoring.  It’s a slow process, I’m spreading out the expenses of parts over the long haul and the waterfall costs never seem to stop.  To run a set of air tools and possibly repaint the car back to it’s original color is going to need a good sized air compressor.  That’s going to require a 220 volt circuit in the garage.  That’s going to require a new sub panel off the main panel and wire run from pretty much as far a point in the house as you can get.  The panel is on the diagonally opposite side of the house from where the outlets would be needed.   Of course a 220 would also be needed for a decent mig welder.  So it’s always one thing after another.

Found a freebie poster printer that might be useful for printing big maps that you can then cut out and tape together to play on to give your battlemap a bit of a visual uplift rather than jagged lines draw with a swipe of a vis a vis marker.

It looks quite useable and if you have something like CutePDF installed you can could just print it to a PDF and have it printed out at your local print shop and save your ink cartridges.  Remove any copyright notices though as some places can be a pain in the arse about that.

The official forums are down so the usual chain reaction of servers going down is going on so there’s not any news not that there seemed to be a lot when I was able to glance through them.  Things are slowing up definitely as people get more familiar with the rules, the initial flux of “Oh this is missing, I have to add it.” content folks have gotten what they wanted made and in general things are just a little slower.

I’ve got Adobe InDesign installed, the company has extra licenses actually and they didn’t have a problem with me using one with the caveat that if they ever need it back I give it up.  Being in such a large company you can sometimes get perks like that but you also have a lot more stringent policies on licensing.  And as I’m one of the ones that has to enforce things like that among other things I really shouldn’t be one of the ones breaking the rules.

I mention this because it’s so ungodly nice using a real page layout program.  I was getting just so incredibly frustrated with Word since I’ve been a casual user of Quark and Pagemaker among other layout programs.  I started with an awesome layout program back in 85/86 or so on a Commodore Amiga that put the current iteration of Pagemaker at the time to shame.  It could print high res output on a flipping dot matrix printer.  Although it did use up a ribbon pretty quickly.

So now I’ve transferred my labor of painful effort on Word 03 and 07 to InDesign and am working on a premie module.

For lack of anything of any importance to post here that I’ve found I’m putting up this old saw that you should read through and have your BBEG try to pay attention to.  They key one is having a sexy daughter that turns on you after becoming infatuated with the sexy hero.  Remember Solitaire from Live and Let Die?

Obviously you’re not going to be giving the intraweb to your employees anytime soon in a DnD world, well I suppose if you steampunked it or it was Eberron *lip curl* then you might but typically the internet isn’t going to be available.

But anyway here you go (NOTE: I didn’t write this although I’d change a couple if I had an I haven’t a clue as the originator of the original is thanks to Mdonle for pointing this out if your interested in the origins of this list):

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The Top 100 Things I’d Do
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord

1. My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones.

   
   

2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.

   
   

3. My noble half-brother whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon.

   Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry for the trouble but my host is apparently having some server problems with the server this site is on.  My other sites are working okay, it just appears to be this actual server.

Bear with while I send a snippy request for someone to look into it off.