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...

Well, with the new year firmly arrived, it's time to get back in the habit of writing blog entries. My objective is to have 2-3 posts per week. We'll see how long that keeps up.

It's been a nice vacation, and I'm not particularly looking forward to going back to work. Mostly I've had the chance to read, watch some movies, and play some games.

Still, I've found some time to begin preparations for a roleplaying game I've been planning to play with Sareth. It'll be a mixed political/action game where Sareth plays a prince who is trying to recover his birthright. I'll be using the Reign system, which I recently discovered. This system has rather interesting rules to handle characters who lead or are part of a large organization.

Andrew and I had a great vacation in Oregon - the trip went way too quickly for both of us. The weather was the typical winter rain/wind combination. Fortunately both Andrew and I came prepared with several layers of clothes, which made the "natives" chuckle. Dry cold is very different from wet cold, so even though the temps were about 10 degrees warmer than it is in Utah, we were freezing most of the time.

 Mom and Dad B, my brother, and Andrew and I braved the cold one day and took a short trip to the beach. After some pretty intense rain and wind on the jetty, we were able to cut down to the beach where we were sheltered from most of the wind. Shortly thereafter the rain let up and we even saw a patch of blue sky! It was fun to spot seals bobbing up and down in the water (at one point we spotted five). The waves coming in were pretty spectacular as well.

Welcome to my new blog site. Hold onto your seats and prepare to be amazed!

Err...not really. I'm starting to blog for three reasons. One - it is a good excuse to keep up with my writing (post-NaNoWriMo). Two - it will help me keep in touch with family and friends. Three - my husband set up this impressive site, and I love to support him in his projects.

I don't know how often I'll be able to post. With the holiday season ahead, who knows.

In my house, there is a room I pass each day. The door is usually shut. I glance at the door as I walk by, back and forth, completing my daily tasks. While I know its purpose, I don’t often stop to reflect on why it is there, or why it is shut off from the rest of my house; such a stark contrast from the open cheery rooms warmed by the sun on cool winter days.

But sometimes, sometimes I am brave. I open that door. I enter carefully, almost reverently, into a totally different world. I creep over to the blinds and open them, watching the sunlight fill this pastel green room with warmth. I am filled with hope.

In order to stay caught up with where I need to be for NaNoWriMo I have to write 1667 words every day. Yesterday was one of my normal weekdays where I have something scheduled in the evening. So I was only about to write around 1000 words. Fortunately, I got up this morning and wrote another 600, so in my mind I'm where I'm supposed to be. This evening and weekend I should be able to do a little extra and get myself ahead of the curve. I probably could have made the full amount yesterday, but Guitar Hero III arrived and we had to... uh... make sure it was working properly.

It was.

Anyway, Mrs. Kheldar started into her story. She got about 1800 words done, and she's pretty enthusiastic about it. So that's good. It looks like allyrapixie is off to a good start too.

Well, NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow. I think I'm reasonably prepared. It looks like Mrs. Kheldar will be giving it a shot, as will gauntman, and another of my co-workers. So, it looks like I'll have plenty of people around to help me stay motivated. Of course it figures that now when this thing is about to start, I suddenly have all sorts of computer game related things vying for my attention. My Guitar Hero 3 preorder has shipped. A friend is picking up Hellgate: London, and based off my playing through of the demo, I'm seriously tempted as well. I have other games I'm playing and enjoying of the PS2 (Shadow of the Colossus serious rocks)... So many possibilities, so little time...

Well, today I sat down and did a little bit of outlining for my NaNoWriMo story. I think I have a reasonable feel for what needs to be written in the first 3/4s of the story. I'm having some difficulty in figuring out exactly how to end things. I'll have to do a little more thinking and possibly rework some stuff tomorrow. I have to figure out how to provide a reasonable antagonist without expanding the scope of the story too much. The problem is that the "real" antagonist would require a huge scope, so I have to have a smaller antagonist who seems (for the purpose of this story) to be the real antagonist without shutting out the potential for a later story that expands the scope to the real antagonist. We'll see.