Golden Anvil

As I mentioned earlier, I'm working on writing a program that will generate families for use in roleplaying games. Well, things are coming along rather nicely. Today I got a good chunk of the visualization routines in place. That means I can now view my output as something other than raw XML. There are still some issues that I need to take care of. Some things aren't aligning properly, I'd like to display more information about the dates when things happened, and for now, family members who died without children are not displayed (in order to save display space), but I'd like to show all those compacted into a single box so that their presence isn't lost.

One way or another, it's still good progress. Probably it's well enough along that I start doing more work on improving the simulation engine (adding details, making it customizable, tracking major events, etc). When it's done, I should be able to make builds available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. We'll see.

Err... I hadn't expected to post again this soon, but someone at work asked me if I wanted to go to Barnes & Noble, and who was I to say no.

This time I came back with the 4th season of Futurama, the extended edition of The Two Towers (our old copy went bad), and the extended edition of King Kong (the Peter Jackson version). At $60 for 14 hours... so, about $2 per person per hour, it not quite as efficient as the last purchase, but still a good price for entertainment.

I'm pretty sure we're set for over a month of viewing (well, unless we go berserk and spend our entire Saturdays watching).

Barnes & Noble periodically has a sale where you can buy two movies and get the third free. My wife and I usually save up our movie buying for this sale, and it looks like it just started up again. Many of their movies have an extra 10% off the list price, plus as members we get 10% off, so that's essentially two thirds of the 20% discounted price for boxed sets that usually run around $40. That comes to about half price (if you buy your movies in sets of three that are all about the same price (which we do)).

So, today I'm bringing home the 2nd and 4th season of the  animated Batman series (completing my collection), plus season 1 of Dharma & Greg. That's 27.5 hours of movie watching (not counting rewatching) for about $75. That's about $1.50 per hour each for the two of us. Not a bad price for entertainment.

Stay tuned to find out if I bring home something tomorrow too...

Hmm... I'm sure I've posted dozens of times lately. They... uh... must have gotten... um... lost in the system.

Right. Happy Mother's Day (Mothers' Day?) to everyone out there who's a mother.

We decided to stop by the theater to take advantage of the fact that most people wouldn't take their Mom out to see Spiderman 3 on Mothers' Day. Heh... Guess what? Either there are a lot of Moms into comic books, or there are some Dads that have funny ideas about how to celebrate with their wife. It wasn't jam packed, but I'm certainly glad that we got there early. There were a lot of younger kids there too.

Anyway, not a bad movie. Mrs. Kheldar and I enjoyed it. I think they've very much improved on the computer animation for Spiderman since the first one. Yeah, there were some weak points, but eh... I'm easy to please. I was entertained.

...is that I end up rambling about a variety of topics instead of staying focused. Ah well. Such is life. Want to know what I've been up to lately?

You must, otherwise you wouldn't be reading...

Let's see, my free time this week (you know, the time when I should have been writing nice posts for you guys) was pretty much spent playing Microsoft Flight Simulator. This game (yeah, yeah, the hard core fans would probably shoot me for using that term) has actually been entertaining me even beyond my expectations. I've had fun flying around all sorts of places I'm familiar with. I've enjoyed going through the tutorials and flight instructions, and I'm just now starting into some of the various missions.

Yeah, yeah, it's been a while. Mrs. Kheldar suggested that perhaps I should tell you all what I've been up to since last time. Well, I'll give you three guesses...

a) I've been ballooning across Asia.
My computers exploded and I haven't been able to get online.
c) I've been playing Vanguard.

...ok, so perhaps you didn't need three guesses...

I have been enjoying the game though. I've been intending to take some screenshots, but I keep forgetting. I did get one though.

This is Khalder the dwarf warrior (someone already had the name Kheldar). He's on his horse riding out from the main Dwarf city of Bordinar's Cleft.

Well, as you may or may not recall, in a comment on my first post I was wondering how often I'd be updating after the first month had gone by...

Look, I'm still here!

That bodes well. Now we'll just have to see if I can keep it up for another month.

What's that? Why aren't I playing Vanguard? Well, actually I just got on a couple minutes ago, and it crashed. I'm taking that as a sign, and I'm going to get some other stuff done today. Maybe get some reading done a little later.

For now, I do need to do some planning for tomorrow's RPG session. I need to come up with an interesting twist or two in order to keep the plot interesting. Since I'm not used to the whole WWII superheroes genre, I feel like I'm struggling to come up with an interesting story. Mrs. Kheldar assures me that she's having fun, but I'm thinking that she's biased.

Well, with some of our Christmas money Mrs. Kheldar and I took advantage of a Barnes and Noble special deal to pick up the first season of 24 and the first season of Lost for only about $60. Yesterday the shipment arrived, but unfortunately, although the shipping receipt was correct, we actually received 24 and Dharma and Greg. Then to complicate matters, we started watching 24, and in the second episode started getting very regular skips in the DVD.

Wonderful, and not too long after we got problems with the Batman series I got for Christmas too. Guess we'll be exchanging both of those DVDs.

Well, then this morning we continued watching Babylon 5, and it had the exact same skipping problem we encountered with 24 yesterday.

Well, this evening Mrs. Kheldar and I watched the movie Mazes and Monsters. Optiker and Big Louie (my folks) had picked up the DVD in a bargain bin, and I just had to borrow it from them, since I'd heard plenty of things about it (nothing good). Well, it turns out that it was not quite as bad as I'd figured. It's definitely a B movie, and it is a little bit non-complimentary of role playing/role players. However, it was fun to see a very young Tom Hanks (and surprising to see how many of his acting mannerisms haven't changed at all), and at least this one had a reasonable plot, unlike the movie MASH, which was an absolute and utter waste of time. Still, I did have to ask Mrs. Kheldar how many movies Hanks has been in now that end with a scene on top of a sky scraper in New York (she's thinking just two).

Yeah, yeah, I said I wouldn't post today.

Fortunately for us we watched the first disk of The Fellowship of the Ring before church. Otherwise I think we'd have had to take a raincheck on the last disk.

They did such a great job on those movies. Despite the fact that Mrs. Kheldar took an average of one nap per movie, she said she thought it'd make a nice tradition to rewatch them every year.

On a bad note, the second disk of the second movie has been having worse and worse problems each time I watch it. I had to skip over about 6-8 tracks this time during the battle of Helm's Deep. grrrr I guess we'll have to repurchase that second movie. I hate having to do that...

I also reremembered that tomorrow is a holiday from work for me. Perhaps I'll make some more progress on memTrainer after all...