Category: Personal

Trip to San Carlos

We took a trip to San Carlos 10/26 – 11/2 with a friend of ours. To get there we flew into Phoenix and rented a car. It takes about 10 hours to drive from Phoenix. In town we did our standard neighborhood walks, beach time, and restaurants. We also did several geocaches. All of the caches were a bit of hike to get to and one was on an island that only has land access at low tide. On one of the cooler days we hiked the Nacapule canyon trail. The Nacapule canyon is a few miles north of town and part of a national park. We also went into Guyamas to check out a pearl factory and the Three Presidents square. It was a fun trip and I’ve put up a gallery of photos here.

Year in Review – 2015

This is my second annual “year in review” post. It’s like a lazy Christmas card to the internet.

Overall we had a good year. We are healthy, enjoying our free time, and keeping busy making software and games for the touch table. We did a lot of traveling this year with trips to Boston, San Carlos Mexico, Essen Germany, a Mediterranean cruise and a couple trips to see family.

Mesa Mundi invited us to PAX East again this year. We stayed with the Mesa Mundi team in Sharon, so we got to spend more time hanging out with Toby, Rebecca, Laura and Matt.

In April we drove down to San Carlos Mexico to relax, enjoy the warm weather and spend some time on the beach. On the way back, we checked out the Very Large Array Radio telescope and stopped in Santa Fe and Taos. The VLA was a bit of a detour, but it was well worth the time.

To celebrate my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary, we joined them on a Mediterranean cruise with my brother and his family. It lasted two weeks and we got to see a lot of interesting sites. It was also nice to spend time with brother’s family again, and the food on the cruise ship was excellent.

In October we celebrated our 42nd birthdays by doing something geeky and going to the biggest board game convention in Essen Germany. We had a lot of fun at the convention and also saw the Zollverein coal mine complex. We played and saw lots of new games and have ended up adding quite a few of them to our board game collection.

We went to Kansas for Thanksgiving and to Idalia CO for a mini family reunion in June. It had been quite a while since I had seen some of my aunts and uncles and we got to spend time with a couple cousins that I haven’t seen in years.

Along with travel and travel planning, I spent a lot of time this year writing games for the touch table. I wrote five games this year: Puerto Rico, Vegas Showdown, 7 Wonders, Caverna and Muck. Vegas Showdown was the last game that I wrote in the Torque game engine and 7 Wonders, Caverna and Muck are written in Unity. I’m enjoying working in Unity. The Unity editor is really good and makes laying out the graphics for a game much easier. It is also nice to write code in C# instead of Torquescript. Another big advantage is that the Unity community is a lot more active and there are assets and plugins that are available for Unity that can save a lot of time.

I also wrote a new version of my Timeline program for tracking major life events. I added the ability to track health metrics collected by a fitness tracker to the application.

I am still practicing the violin. I had a recital in May and stopped taking lessons in August. I may start lessons again someday, but for now I am learning on my own. We are also still hosting bi-weekly game nights with friends and have started attending a local gaming group meetup on the off week.

 

Next year will probably be a little less busy than 2015. We don’t have nearly as much travel planned. We hope to continue making touch table games. If we continue at our current pace, we will reach fifty games sometime next year.

Anniversary Cruise

We took a cruise of the Black sea and Mediterranean with my parents and my brother’s family to celebrate my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary. It was a 14 day cruise with stops in Greece, Istanbul, Bulgaria, Romania, Valletta, Sicily and Italy. The ship docked at a new port most days, and we would either tour on our own or take a tour organized by the ship. We got back on board for dinner as a group each night and the ship moved on to the next port while we slept.

It was a great trip and it was very nice to have time with my family. I’ve posted a bunch of pictures here.

Continue reading “Anniversary Cruise”

Violin Recital 4

I am preparing for my fourth violin recital. I am going to be playing the second and third movement of “Summer” from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”. The “Four Seasons” is a very popular song, but people are most familiar with the first part of Spring. The part that I am playing is less famous, but still fairly popular. The “Four Seasons” is intended to evoke the seasons of the year in the listener, and the music even has little descriptive notes describing what is happening. In the second movement of summer, is is a hot afternoon and a shepherd is trying to sleep through the approaching thunderstorm. In the third movement, the storm has arrived and there is thunder, wind, and hail.

Here is a recording of me practicing for the recital. I have another week to practice, but I’ve already been working on this movement for five weeks, so this is about as good as it is going to get. I am playing at 92 beats per minute while professionals would play at 120 beats per minute. Some parts of this piece sound significantly better at full speed, and while I can play at nearly full speed, I make more mistakes. At the recital, there will be piano accompaniment which should help.

Edit (post recital): The recital went fairly well. We didn’t do a warm-up period; so the recital was shorter, but it was a bit harder to play without the warm-up session. I was a bit less nervous than at the prior recitals and played a bit better. This was the first year where I made it through the piece without having to stop to recover from a mistake.
I brought my camera along and got some video of some of the students to provide a feeling for what the experience is like. The final performance is by the teacher.

Edit 2: I was wrong about not improving much more in the final week. With another week (probably 15 hours) of practice I did get a bit faster and more consistent. I think that some of the tricky parts are a bit cleaner too. I’ve replaced the original practice video with on that I recorded the day after the recital. Sorry about the bad focus on the new video.

Year In Review – 2014

I don’t mail out a Christmas card, but I’d like to provide a brief summary of my year to family and friends who I haven’t gotten to see this year. I also enjoy doing a bit of reflection at the end of a year.

It felt like a busy year, and I think it is because of all the travel that we did:

  • In March we went to Effingham Illinois for my Uncle’s 50th wedding anniversary.
  • We took the scenic Amtrak train ride from Denver to Glenwood Springs with Bill’s parents for spring break. (Photos)
  • We took a two week tour of England, Ireland and Scotland with my parents in September. (Photos)
  • In December we went to Chicago for my cousin’s wedding and took in a couple museums. (Photos)

We also went to two game conventions promoting our touch table software. In April we went to Boston for our second PAX with Mesa Mundi. We enjoyed the convention and getting to see all the Mesa Mundi people again. In July we brought our own touch table to the Conclave of Gamers convention which was held at a nearby hotel. This was the first time we have done a convention without Mesa Mundi. This convention was less busy, but the attendees stayed at the tables longer and we got to try a bigger variety of games.

In January we had a wedding reception game day to celebrate our legal marriage last year in New York. The wedding was a civil ceremony with just my brother and his wife as our witnesses, so this game day gave our friends and my parents a chance to celebrate with us. It felt strange to have a wedding reception after being together for so long, but it is nice to be recognized by our government, and I had a lot fun that day and appreciated the well wishes.

Right after getting back from PAX in April, I started a short term contracting job that lasted through June. Before this job, Bill and I created Fire Platoon. After the contracting job ended, I wrote Le Havre and Puerto Rico while Bill learned the Unity game engine and wrote High Score, Pair Soup and started on a space racing game.

In February I had my third violin recital. We hosted it at our house and invited my parents. I have been playing for five and half years and the rate of improvement has slowed way down. But is it more fun to play now, and I am still trying to practice daily. In August I fractured my shoulder in a biking accident and couldn’t really play for two months.

Overall we had a good year. We didn’t make it down to Mexico this year, so that will be a goal for 2015. Hopefully we will also get to spend a little time with my brother and his family next year.

Chicago

We went to Chicago for my Cousin’s wedding last weekend. We spent an extra day in town and went to the Field museum, the Museum of Science and Industry and the Baha’i house of worship.

Both museums were good. We particularly enjoyed the huge model train at the museum of science and the working labs at the field museum.

Photos are here.