Golden Anvil

Well, the plan tonight was to play Og. But... two of our four players revealed to me that they weren't going to make it (and seemed surprised that I wasn't aware of that fact), so we decided to postpone Og until next week.

Instead, we played another game of Power Grid. It would have been four of us, but another guy at work joined in so we had five. It was pretty fun, although I think I'm pretty much played out on that game for now. Not that it's a bad game. In fact a number of people at work have been playing it fanatically for the last month or so. I just don't feel a big urge to play again.

Anyway, so the whole roleplaying preparation bit is pushed back another week. (Well, except for the forum game, but that's a little more flexible on starting date.) Guess that means I've got another week to goof off before I have to get cracking!

Enough for now. It's late, and I need to head to bed.

Well, Friday I blogged about what I was planning to do this weekend, so it's only appropriate that today I take a look at what I actually did this weekend.

Longtusk by Stephen Baxter

Rather than continue where the first book left off, this book jumps back some huge amount of time and covers the life of the great mammoth hero, Longtusk. Each of the three parts begins with a myth about Longtusk as told by the main character in the first book. The book then goes on to tell the story, and you find that it's the real story from which the myth grew. This is a nice little touch to help draw the two time periods together.

Well, last weekend I spent a lot of time playing different games. I think mostly that was because it was nice to have a weekend without any obligations. Well, this weekend I think it's time to get back to some of my normal tasks. Mind you, I'm still sure I'll play at little. In fact, I ordered Gears of War II for the XBox 360 because there was a great sale on it (and I was intending on eventually buying it anyway), and it's likely to arrive this weekend. I'm not sure if I'll be able to hold out for long against the lure of playing that. And Angela and I would like to play another game of Arkham Horror this weekend. And some Castle Crashers. And I'll have to put some more time in on TrackMania. And I'd like to play some more Titan Quest with Dad. Oh yes, and we'll be playing Guild Wars on Saturday.

Err... So much for not doing much game playing this weekend...

Silverhair by Stephen Baxter

I'm a big fan of Stephen Baxter. I've got a lot of his books. He does however tend to have a couple very common themes in his books, and if you aren't fond of that general theme, then he could put you off. That theme usually involves the destruction of the human race (except for one member), and/or the evolution of the human species. He usually tells a pretty interesting story, but it's frequently very centered around the concept of evolution.

This particular book is told entirely from the perspective of a mammoth, apparently one of the last few remaining alive. Mammoths are intelligent and have a rich history stretching back millions of years. The story is about one mammoth who is forced to interact with humans, that dreaded species which has taken over all of the world.

I was looking around the room for inspiration on what to blog about this evening. Nothing much was coming to mind. To me, that's the sign of a fairly good day. Nothing particularly noteworthy happened, which means I'm feeling pretty laid back.

I did have some things suddenly come together in my current project at work. All of the sudden, some things I've been working on for a while just started getting finished up and I can finally see a bunch of the pieces all in action together. Kind of nice!

I would like to get back in the habit of reviewing books as soon as I finish reading them. So, lacking a better topic, now is a good time to start. I will always do my best to avoid any real spoilers.

The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues by Harry Harrison

This is book 3 according to the chronological order of the 11 book Stainless Steel Rat series. This sci-fi series is a humor series whose main character (Jim) is a master thief with a heart of gold. In this particular book, Jim is blackmailed into leading a team down to a prison planet in order to retrieve an alien artifact which was accidentally lost during transport. The team will be going in under cover, disguised as a band who was sentenced to the planet.

My car is finally fixed.

Wednesday while I was on the freeway headed to work the light came on that indicates that the battery isn't charging. Not wanting to deal with a dead battery, I pulled off about halfway there and stopped at a Les Schwab. Interestingly, the light when out when I dropped to city street speeds, although I could get it to come on again by revving the engine. They checked it over (for free, that's why I like Les Schwab), but couldn't find anything obviously wrong. So, I drove the rest of the way into work, gritting my teeth and ignoring the light (la la la la).

The other day I picked up Castle Crashers for MrsKheldar and I to play on the XBox together. Yes, I know I just bought a bunch of games recently because of Steam. However... it turns out that when we find a game that my wife wants to play with me, all my resistance to spending money just goes straight out the window!

I'm sure Hameed can empathize with me on this, and most likely others as well...

Today was one of those days at work where I felt like I was going backwards. I was working at trying to implement something in the program I'm writing that changes the underlying structure of how some data is accessed. I had just about got everything working finally, when today I ran into the issue of trying to get the data saved. Unfortunately, at this point a nasty design issue raised it's head, and I realized that in order to solve it I'd have to rip out some of the features that I thought would have been nice, but which I didn't think we'd technically need.

Ok, so I ripped out the features, and got saving implemented, and was moving on to the next piece of the problem when I suddenly realized why we needed  those features in the first place. Unfortunately, I need the features, but they can't be successfully implemented because of a basic assumption of the overall system design.