Golden Anvil

I stumbled across somthing interesting this morning in one of the blogs I read. I'm linking the blog itself, because it includes a link to a fascinating YouTube video. Go check it out!

http://flowingdata.com/2010/06/25/music-animation-machine/

Well, while MrsKheldar and Gina were out running her half-marathon I went wandering around the base with LaMar looking for good pictures of fences for this weeks photography assignment. I ended up taking quite a lot of pictures, some even without any fences at all! Here are just a couple of pictures. Many of the rest can been seen on my Flickr site along with some other pictures taken at the dinner for the runners the night before the race and some shots I took at home after the race.

Well, as I think got mentioned, MrsKheldar and I got a new camera. While looking around for good websites to help us get better at photography, I stumbled across a great site that happens to have a forum featuring a weekly assignment. You take a picture that fits the theme for the week and post it in the thread. So, we decided to both participate. It should be fun and good practice as we try to learn to take better pictures.

Here's my shot for this week. The theme is "Still Life". I did do a little bit of editing to brighten the highlights and darken the shadows.

Back at the end of January I mentioned that I was starting work on programming a new game called One Small Step. Well, at last I have some screen shots to show off. Those will be down at the bottom. It's actually taken a huge amount of work to get to this point, and I thought I share some of the details with you (hopefully without boring anyone too much). This might get a little long.

Some of the difficulty has been in determining the equations used to calculate the exact position of a body in orbit at a given point in time. I actually ended up purchasing two text books to help me deal with this issue (although I expect the books to help solve other problems for this and future programs as well).

Tonight we played Last Night on Earth with 3 other people at work. It was me playing the zombies against the four of them with the heroes. It was an amazing game! The objective this time was for the heroes to find dynamite and gas cans and blow up three of the spawn points where zombies enter the map.

The game started off very lopsided. I had a really horrible start, and by the end of my first turn (the zombies move first) I had only 1 zombie on the board. Ouch! Normally I'd have had about an average of 7. So, the heroes had nice free reign. Plus the had the hero who's really good at searching. Oh, and they got really lucky and one of them started the game with a stick of dynamite! Yeah...

Well, tonight MrsKheldar and I played another game of Last Night on Earth. Mark couldn't make it over, so it was just the two of us. She was playing the heroes this time while I took over the zombies.

This time we were playing the advanced rules. This adds an additional 20 cards to both the zombie and hero card decks. It also means a number of additional scenarios. The scenario we randomly drew was Escape in the Truck. There's a truck parked in the center of the board. The heroes need to find the keys and find the gas and fuel up the truck. Then there needs to be two heroes at the truck at the end of their turn in order to win. The zombies win by killing off 3 of the 4 heroes (so that they don't have the required 2 to escape) or running out the clock (15 turns).

So, I do very much enjoy the Descent board game that MrsKheldar got me for Christmas, but it IS a long game, so our play times will be less frequent than desired. Plus, I'd allocated some of my Christmas money for another board game. So, this week I went out and picked up another game called: Last Night on Earth.

This is a game about zombies, presented in a fairly light style intended to bring about the feel of a horror B-movie. We didn't take any pictures this time, but you can see one here.

Did you know that TrackMania supports red/blue 3D glasses? I'd never got the chance to actually try it out, because I never could get my hands on a pair of glasses.

Well, I came home today and found a surprise waiting on my desk. One of MrsKheldar's friends had a pair of SharkBoy/LavaGirl 3D glasses from McDonalds, and seeing that she was planning on throwing them away...

So, I tried it out.

The main menu looked pretty sweet, with the UI hovering in front of a slowly spinning globe. The actual racing though was not overly impressive. There wasn't a great sense of depth (I suspect that too much of what you're looking at is too far away from the camera to get a good sense of depth), and of course the colors were pretty terrible (as expected).

Still, it was fun to try out, and I'll have to show anyone that happens to come over.

Today MrsKheldar and I spent most of the day playing Descent: Journeys in the Dark. This is a big board game with lots of counters and markers and such, kind of like Arkham Horror (for those of you who've played that). This was MrsKheldar's Christmas gift to me, and it definitely looks like a winner. We had a lot of fun playing, although the game too waaaay longer than expected, in part due to time to punch out all the markers and having to do a lot of searches through the rules as we were playing. I suspect our next game will be a good deal shorter.

On July 1, 1453, King Giorgi VII officially declared war on the Golden Horde. He'd only just arrived in Alania with the army and was still in the process of integrating the new mercenaries with the regular troops when scouts reached him with news that the Golden Horde was raising troops in Astrakhan. With some luck, the king hoped to be able to march in and disrupt the enemy troops before they were fully prepared for battle.

Out of courtesy the king had sent word to Ak Koyunlu and Shirvan who had pledged to join us in any war that might arise. Little help had been expected from them however, and sure enough, they quickly sent replies to the effect that they could not commit to any action at this time.