Memoirs of a Board Gamer

...waiting on a boardgame trade to arrive today or tomorrow and then realizing you can't obtain the tracking number because it's stuck in the BGG Trade Manager and BGG seems to be unavailable.

But honey, I need to know exactly where the package is at all times!

Ahhhhh...that's better:

Receiving immediate feedback that your actions are rude seems to be inversely proportional to the number of people who would view your actions as being rude. For example, people who cut in front of others in traffic rarely pay a price yet everyone else around that person can see that it was rude. Through some sort of planetary alignment or through dumb luck, I was graced with seeing the mother of sweet retribution today.

On my way to have lunch with my friend Keith, a pickup truck in the lane next to me was zooming out on a turn only light in an attempt to zip into the lane in front of me while I was turning. While he zoomed on the green light, looking out his side window to get in front of me, the car in front of him hit the brakes in mid-turn. The zoomer caught the brake lights out of the corner of his eye and slammed on his brakes just as he had started to fade into my lane for the cut off.

Meanwhile, the cooler in the back of his truck started the long slide forward towards the front of the bed just beneath the rear window of the truck. When it hit, the lid popped off the cooler and fluid of some sort came gushing and sloshing up and out of the cooler onto the back side of the cab.

The pièce de résistance was that most of the liquid shot through the open rear sliding window of the cab and into the passenger area. As I slowly came around him, he had his arms up in the air and was looking at me like it was somehow my fault.

Ah....there is a God.

The white noise makers here in the office are currently off for some reason. This is only the 2nd or 3rd time I've ever experienced them being off in the 3.5 years I've been at my current software consulting gig. I've never realized that spiders stomp their feet and that you can hear it from over 20 cubes away...

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Pros and Cons

...going out to lunch with a developer and his manager, eating some of the best BBQ in town (City Barbeque), and sharing a humorous story only to have the manager spill his drink all over the table while trying to grab a napkin to wipe the Mt. Dew that was shooting out of his nose.

I'm very close to being able to offer a working alpha version of my implementation of Ingenious. However, I pushed the code to Marquand.net and began running it over a live web server and immediately found a known bug in IE. This bug greatly affects the performance of the game due to IE's lame caching 'feature'.

In short, IE forgets to use it's cache when rendering images inserted into the DOM either directly through the Javascript DOM-API or through insertion of HTML using innerHTML. Instead, IE runs back to the server every time causing image flashing, time lags, etc. My implementation of Ingenious relies heavily on the Javascript DOM API as well as innerHTML support and images represent the lion's share of the components being inserted. ARRRRRRGGGGGG!

Firefox caching isn't broken in the same manner so if you're a Firefox user, then you're good to go. IE users...well you might have to wait a bit.

Internet Explorer and AJAX image caching woes, Microsoft's Feature Explanation

...being halfway through the implementation of my next bot-based game for Marquand.net when I came across this statement from the interview with Reiner Knizia by Ward Batty:

"I think it turned out very well and a lot of people mention it to me. There will be a CD ROM version coming out soon that will have tweaks and extra challenges."

Well, I guess Ingenious was a good choice to implement but I have now lost my desire to finish it. It had drag and drop tiles and everything....

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Eurogames, Boardgames, Game Night,

I missed the FedEx ReadyNAS delivery on Friday and when I got home the driver had left his cell phone number on the "Sorry we missed you" tag. So I called him and he said he would have come back if I'd called him 10 minutes earlier but he was already on the freeway heading back to the warehouse.

So I called him again this morning and we worked out an 11 o'clock delivery to my house. I rushed home and he arrived about 11:10 (Excellent!) and proceeded to walk towards my house with a box that looked like Jim Carrey had used the box for months of practice for his opening scene from Ace Ventura - Pet Detective. This box was destroyed, crushed, spindled, and mutilated!

I'd never ordered from EXcaliberPC but after seeing this, I wouldn't recommend them. The FedEx guy said the box looked like it had been used several times before! When I opened it up, the two NAS boxes (well packed from Infrant) seemed okay but they were bouncing around inside with two small pieces of foam, 2 cups of styrofoam peanuts and some paper. I doubt disk drives would get more abuse if they were strapped to the side of the shuttle during launch.

If that wasn't enough, after signing for them, I bent down to pick up the box and felt my back muscles tear out a bit more (thanks for the genetics dad!).

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Computers

What a beautiful morning it is. Blue sky, crisp air, sunshine...and the clicking of my #$&(*@#$ @#& #$&(*#$&& newly dead Maxtor 160G hard drive!

I hate computers. I really do.

I think the machine is hosed. The floppy was constantly pulsing on and off so I pulled the plug on that and then I yanked out the 2 160G drives. I then booted it up (expecting failure obviously) but got no BIOS display, the DVD-burner wouldn't eject it's tray, and I could still hear an intermittent power on/off sound from something but can't tell what it is. The LEDs on my cooler aren't a steady brightness so I'm assuming it's the power supply and/or the motherboard. I'm not going to put any money into fixing it and I'm not going to assemble another one from scratch so it looks like I'm going to Dell this time.

Unfortunately, I need to run a corporate invoice and run payroll for my company soon after the end of March and I've got corporate quarterlies to get out.

When it rains it pours.

Thoughthammer has raised their minimum dollar limit for free shipping from $100 to $125 starting January 30, 2006.

Pay the shipping...buy another game...pay the shipping...buy another game... Decisions, decisions.