Category: Personal

PAX East

We are headed to PAX East in Boston to join Mesa Mundi’s booth and demonstrate some of MCG’s touch table software. Mesa Mundi is going to have several touch tables setup and our software will be running on one of them.

We are planning to show off the new mini-games, which are on sale now at Mesa Mundi’s site, along with Hansa Teutonica and a new game in development where players can control the action with a web browser on their phone.

D20Pro will also be on hand at Mesa Mundi’s booth to show off their role playing system. It should be an exciting weekend where we can see how people react to the touch tables and our games. Mesa Mundi has a short write up about PAX here.

Violin Recital II

Tonight was my second violin recital. I started taking lessons in September of 2009 and have been playing for three and a half years. I have kept track of my practice time and am almost to 2300 hours.

This recital was much like the first. It was informal and everyone played together to warm up and then each person played one piece. This time, the teacher played with most of the students.

I was less nervous than I was at the first recital, but I still had a harder time playing accurately than I do in practice. Being nervous doesn’t help, and I am not used to playing with accompaniment.

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Home Inventory

We have just finished a whole house cleaning and inventory. The home inventory is something that we have done every five years where we catalog and photograph everything that we own. This activity probably sounds pretty crazy to a lot of people. It is a huge chore and consumes lots of time.

The inventory was useful when we were robbed, but that is not the main reason that we do it. It has also been fun to look back at some of the old photos of our stuff. Even if you never do a home inventory, I would recommend taking pictures of the rooms in your house.

The main reason to do the inventory is to know how much stuff you have. The home inventory is one of the nine steps in Your Money or Your Life. The point of the step is to look at the things you own with a critical eye. Which items are things that you really use and value, and which items are just a burden or clutter. Reading the book is what triggered our first home inventory in 2004. Continue reading “Home Inventory”

Dead iMac

We got an iMac in January 2009 to compile Hackers of 2073 for iOS. After finishing the game, we used the Boot Camp feature to set up the machine as a Windows box and set it up in the kitchen for recipes and web browsing. The machine worked well for this use and we really liked that it was nearly silent.

A month or so ago, the hard drive died. Unfortunately it is not included in the list of defective iMac’s which were sold after October 2009, so I wanted to replace the bad drive. This is something that I have done many times on my PCs. I knew that it would be harder on the iMac since it is an all-in-one machine. I imagined that it would be like fixing a laptop. Continue reading “Dead iMac”

Geocaching in City Park

We went Geocaching with Lucas, Jessie and their kids on Saturday. We did an elaborate multipart geo cache in City Park in downtown Denver. The geocache had a fantasy, chose your own adventure story behind it. We printed out the story and spellbook and set out on our adventure. You can see all the pictures here.

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Trip to Belgium and The Netherlands

We took a two week trip to Belgium and The Netherlands with my brother, his wife and my parents.

Since returning from the trip, I have spent a bunch of time going through pictures. I took  ~2200 pictures and trimmed it down to ~1750. I caption, geo-tag, people-tag and do some basic tuning for each picture. The pictures are finally available on this website here.

We stayed in four cities: Amsterdam, Delft, Bruges and Brussels. From there we did day trips to see: Hoge Veluwe, Haarlem, Enkhuizen, The Hague, Rotterdam, and Antwerp.

We primarily spent our time touring: going to museums, cathedrals, seeing the sites, etc.

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Violin Recital

Last night I had my first violin recital. I started taking lessons in September of 2009 and have been playing for a bit more than three years. I have kept track of my practice time and have now played for 1940 hours.

The recital was pretty informal. Half of the students were beginners and four of the six were adults. We started by playing music from Suzuki book 1 as a group. Then each student played one piece. Most of the students acted like they played worse than they expected, or at least worse than they do normally. I felt the same way; I was nervous and made more mistakes than usual. I had a particularly hard time with the timing. It could have gone much worse though. The accompanist was extremely good and I never had to stop and re-start.

Overall it was a positive experience. It forced me to put a lot of time into a single piece. I wasn’t patient enough to do that without the pressure of a performance. And it was fun to meet the other students.

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Rooting my Android phone

This morning I rooted my android G2x. The main motivation was curiosity, but there were a few things that I wanted to improve about my phone. T-Mobile didn’t pre-load too much junk onto the phone, but there was the T-Mobile app-pack and Mall, Nova and Tegra game stores, and the lite version of TeleNav. Also, to get a good ad-blocker you need to have root access.

So I took the plunge and rooted the phone. There was a point when I thought the phone was bricked, but it all worked out in the end.

Even without the mistakes that I made, I would say that the benefits do not justify the effort (at least for my phone). I am glad that I did it, but more for the experience than the end result.

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Southern Trip

We took a road trip through the south to visit friends. You can see all the pictures here. We had a good time and really enjoyed meeting N.R. and his family and visiting with Ian and Ingrid and meeting their daughters.

We traveled 4500 miles and tried to stop for a lot of roadside attractions. I wish that we could have spent more time with N.R. and Ingrid, but two weeks was already a long time to be on the road.

Here are some of the highlights:

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