Memoirs of a Board Gamer

My 2T Infrant-Now-NetGear ReadyNAS power supply has given up the ghost. After checking the NAS in multiple outlets I yanked the power supply and sure enough...the coil is black and it looks exactly like those posted in the ReadyNAS forums. After navigating my way through numerous levels of NetGear support I managed to eventually get connected to somebody who knew about the product. After 3.5 years of service, the power supply is still within the RMA warranty so they'll be sending out another one for me. Unfortunately that means I'll be without the files on me file server for about a week...and that sucks eggs.

I received a BGG email informing me that Marquand.net got some press coverage in the July 13th edition of Phoenix's daily newspaper, the Arizona Republic News. The short article, concerns the rise in popularity of playing board games and the benefits of the social aspects. A link to Marquand.net is referenced in a sidebar of places where you can "try before you buy" listing my implementations of Clans, Coloretto, Ingenious, and Lexio.

Back in April, 2006 I bought an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. A four disk Network Accessible Storage device that, at the time could hold up to 1.5T of usable space all RAID protected so you can lose a disk (depending on your RAID level) and not lose any data. I've been happily upgrading firmware through the years and have never upgraded the two 250G mirrored drives but I decided that with the new firmware, I can extend passed the 2T limit and put in 2 1T drives while it's running without bringing anything down.

Two 1T SATA drives (Seagate Barracuda's ST31000528AS) arrived today and I yanked one 250G drive and installed one of them and the NAS happily emailed me that it detected a RAID event and that it saw the new disk. It estimated that it would take about 8 hours to format and sync the new disk with the data on the remaining 250G drive. Once that's complete, I'll yank that drive, insert the other new 1T drive and let it sync the data from the other 1T drive. Then with a reboot, the NAS will detect the expanded storage capacity, and it will automatically reconfigure the RAID configuration and I will have quadrupled the disk space I have available to my 4 computers while having all of it automatically mirrored on another drive.

Since I bought the NAS, NetGear purchased Infrant but the NV+ model is still going strong, has an active online community, and is still a flagship product for them. I've never been happier with a purchase.

I've always felt a bit of remorse about selling my Mac Mini but I'm back in the game with my recent MacBook Pro purchase. I've dubbed the machine Lexio for several reasons: it's short, easy to type, easy to remember, and it's a board game. After attending a software developer conference recently I realized just how many Macs you see these days. I'm not going out on a limb to say there were greater than 50% Mac laptops at the conference and if you limit it to the presenters it was closer to 90% (even the .Net guys were using Macs!) My Dell 640M is still doing pretty good but it's starting to become something the kids ask for when they want to watch a DVD.

I'd recently started trying to use the Dell laptop as my "development" machine but given that sometimes it was occupied by one of my kids I decided to get another machine and jump back into the Mac arena with both feet. With this purchase we now have two desktops and two laptops in the house.

So, I've spent the last couple of nights setting up the development environment (mostly for Ruby/Rails/MySql development). I've got some ideas around developing an online, turn-based game written in RoR but I'm still a long way off. We'll see if I ever get it done but I'm having fun in the meantime. And no...it's not Tigris & Euphrates. That's just my desktop background image.

Kite Aerial Photography on MAKE: television from make magazine on Vimeo.

A very interesting art form. Some cool panoramic shots from Scot Haefner and from Charles C. Benton, the professor of architecture at UC Berkeley and the KAP site.

The four primary life rules from Scott McCloud's TED Talk. Seems to be a good four regardless of what you do in life or how you pass your day.

1. Learn from everyone
2. Follow no one
3. Watch for patterns
4. Work like hell