Just about what I expected…

Several years ago, they repaved Monongahela St. right at the end of our block. Shortly after that, there was a water main break or something, and they had to dig up the road to fix it. Of course, this left an annoying patch, which quickly turned into potholes.

The next year, they completely repaved Monongahela St. in the same block again. Once again, there was some kind of problem which required digging up the street a few months later, and once again, they patched the spot and it quickly turned into potholes.

I think they must’ve finally removed the trolley tracks there or something, because it’s been a few years since they repaved there. But all around town, it seems like they’re digging up the street for utilities only a few months after they do a complete repave of the street.

So, in early August when they decided to repave our block of McClure, I was cynical. It’s a quiet block on a one way street, so they haven’t repaved it in the 11 years we’ve been here so far. But it was full of patches and potholes, and I’m glad they kicked us off for a few days to repave.

I thought, “I should write a blog post about how they’ll probably dig up the street next week.” But that’s not very interesting unless they actually dig up the street the next week, so I didn’t write anything.

Well, less than 2 weeks after they repaved, our next door neighbor had some problem with their gas line, which required digging a big hole right in front of their house and patching it (quite poorly, of course). Gah!

It’s annoying, but it’s also just about what I expected. Sometimes it’s no fun to have your expectations met.

Game Review: Dominion

Dominion is a card game sold in a board game box. It’s a Eurogame with many features of a typical collectible card game, without the “collectible” part. Our gaming group really enjoys this game, but I wouldn’t recommend it for those who dislike games which could be described as “mutiplayer solitaire.”

The basic idea of Dominion is to use the resources in your deck of cards, which somewhat abstractly represents your dominion, to increase the size of your deck. In the end, the player with the best deck wins.

There are three basic kinds of cards: treasure (money), victory points, and actions. Treasure is used to buy more cards, but is not worth anything at the end of the game. You win by having the most victory points, but VP cards are useless and use up precious card draws while you’re playing. Action cards increase the effectiveness of your deck by giving you more things to do on your turn, but are also worthless when the game is over.

The basic gameplay is simple: play at most one action card; buy at most one card; discard all of your cards; then, draw up to a full hand of 5 cards. The rest of the rules are on the action cards, which let you do things like play more actions, draw more cards, buy more cards, and so on. Cards don’t stay “in play” on a tableau, they’re constantly cycled from your draw deck, through your hand, into your discard pile (which is reshuffled as needed: often).

Dominion does a fairly good job of capturing the deckbuilding aspect which is implicitly present in other collectible card games, but it’s done during gameplay instead of between games. Most of the strategy is in deciding which cards to buy for your deck. You need to find a combination of action cards which work together while protecting you from other players’ attacks, while maintaining a good balance of action and treasure cards and ensuring you have enough victory points to win the game.

The game comes with 25 different action cards, but only 10 are chosen to be available during each game. This greatly increases the replayability of the game. Acitons which seem useless in some games may be very important in others when different cards are in play.

As someone who enjoys playing CCGs, I find that Dominion provides many of the same small, enjoyable moments that CCGs do. There is the enjoyment of building a good deck, and the satisfaction of actually drawing the cards you need to pull off a “killer combo.” You also cycle through your deck very quickly and discard your whole hand every turn, so it’s easier to just do the best you can with each hand instead of having to decide which cards to use and which to save for later.

As I’ve said, player interaction is very limited in Dominion. There are a handful of “Attack” action cards which typically have a minor negative effect against all other players unless they have a “Response” card to prevent the attack. This method of interaction makes it impossible to take down a runaway leader, but it’s also impossible for a third place player to play “kingmaker” and decide the match between the first two places.

The overall feel of the game is a “race to the finish” with no one around to spoil your plans: you just need to come up with the best plan to get there first.

Although the gameplay is very different, Dominion shares many traits with another card game we also like a lot: Race for the Galaxy.

  • Quick play time (usually under an hour for 2-4 players)
  • The basic gameplay is simple
  • Most of the rules are on the cards
  • Indirect and limited player interaction (“multiplayer solitaire”)
  • Not much downtime between turns
  • Fun to play even when you lose
  • Enough randomness, but not too much

I highly recommend Dominion to players who enjoy CCGs or used to enjoy them before they went broke or finally kicked the habit. But even those who have no experience with CCGs will find something interesting here. Since there is so little player interaction, the game plays just as well with 2, 3, or 4 players, which makes it good for couples as well as game night.

I’ve played probably 20 times over the last few weeks, and plan to play even more. I’m likely to pick up the Dominion: Intrigue expansion soon, for more action card options and the ability to play with more than 4 players at once.

Update: Starcraft

We’ve played Starcraft: The Board Game a few more times, so I thought I’d update my opinions of the game. Those of us who have played the Starcraft videogame enjoy the gameplay and mechanics well enough, but our overall feeling tends to be of disappointment once we’re finished.

Reading the boardgamegeek.com forum discussions, there seem to be two main opinions about the game:

  1. “It just Ends all of a sudden…”
  2. “You’re doing it wrong.”

Well, we must be doing it wrong, because just when things start to get going, the game “just ends.”

Those of us who enjoy it will probably play again, because it’s still fun enough before it ends. Maybe we’ll even start to “get it” and stop being surprised by the ending. Or, maybe we’ll tweak the victory conditions to make it longer. However, the attic is Really Hot this time of year, so we may wait until it cools off for a while first.

The other problem we have with Starcraft is that it suffers a bit from Event Card Syndrome, aka “The Golden Snitch.” The game progresses, and everyone is working towards their goal, when all of a sudden, Poof! An external force (an event card, or the golden snitch) comes along, and hands victory to one of the players arbitrarily, making the effort put into the rest of the game somewhat pointless.

We’ve managed to get the playing time down to a reasonable length, but since it’s not really satisfying when the game ends, that may not be exactly what we’re looking for.

Starcraft is a typical “Ameritrash” game: it’s deeply tied to its theme or source material, and ends up being somewhat fiddly because of that. If you’re familiar with the theme, this isn’t necessarily a problem, but it’s probably best to play with people who care about Starcraft the video game, or at least who have played it before.

Live Music

The Internet Archive project is an online library dedicated to archiving media in digital form. One large collection they host is a Live Music Archive, which currently has over 67000 concert recordings available for free, legally, for you to download and listen to. Most of them have an in-browser music player available. All of them have documentation of the artists’ permission to host the shows in the Archive.

There are some obvious selections: over 10% of the concerts are by The Grateful Dead. There are also some surprising omissions. Apparently Phish hasn’t given permission for their shows to be hosted.

Besides these big names, I’ve found shows by many other artists I’m already familiar with, and discovered some new ones I wasn’t familiar with. Here are some suggestions:

  • Yonder Mountain String Band played for free at Hartwood Acres last year, and also seem to have a large following on the road
  • Donna the Buffalo is another bluegrass band that appears every year at the Grassroots Music Festival
  • The Horse Flies are a somewhat more neurotic bluegrass band
  • Rusted Root is a local Pittsburgh band I listened to a lot in college, who have recently started touring again.
  • The Ditty Bops are a singer songwriter duet who did a cross-country US tour by bicycle a few years back
  • Soul Coughing is an excellent band, whose lead singer Mike Doughty is also on the archive
  • The first CD I ever owned was by Camper Van Beethoven. Some of their members went on to form Cracker and the Monks of Doom before CVB finally got back together again.
  • Mogwai is an interesting indie band which I always expect to be noisier when I listen to them.
  • I discovered Godspeed You… Black Emperor on the Archive, and I really enjoy their apocalyptic instrumental music.
  • Listening to GYBE led me to Explosions in the Sky
  • There aren’t many Jim’s Big Ego shows available, so if you have more, post them!

I’ve probably forgotten some other bands I’ve listened to there, and I’m sure there are others I know but haven’t thought to look for yet.

What good live music have you found on the archive?

Managers and Diplomats

“I had a dream last night, but I forget what it was
I had a dream last night about you, my friend
I had a dream–I wanted to sleep next to plastic
I had a dream–I wanted to lick your knees
I had a dream–it was about nothing”
— Camper Van Beethoven

I had a dream last night. The pertinent part started when I found myself in a swimming pool, with about five other guys who were going to move into the basement of my empty house in South Side. (Don’t ask me, it was a dream.)

But there were also a few young women in the pool. One asked, “Is there a manager here?”

It sounded more like “Is there a doctor in the house?” than “I’d like to speak to a manager.”

“I’m starting a job as a manager tomorrow, and I have some questions.”

I offered that I was a manager, and talked to her. It was immediately obvious that she was highly but awkwardly educated: she new all the words, but had no experience to give them any meaning in the real world.

The conversation seemed to turn into an e-mail exchange. She explained that her book said that managers were diplomats, but her glossary only contained a definition for “Diplomatic Palace,” which referred to a building used in ancient Rome to house diplomats. She was confused because she wasn’t really sure how that applied to her new job.

I agreed with her, and then woke up to the sound of trucks ripping the pavement off our street.

But I remembered my dream, and thought it made a good point. Although I am not exclusively a manager, some aspects of the managerial part of my job are very similar to what a diplomat does. Dictionary.com’s second aspect of the noun “diplomat” is defined as “a person who is tactful and skillful in managing delicate situations, handling people, etc.” This also applies.

As the head of my team, I have the job of interacting with representatives from other departments in the company. I have to negotiate solutions to their problems, while keeping in mind the restrictions and interests of the members of my team. I build a working relationship with the other departments, and learn to navigate their systems, so my employees don’t have to. I maintain an alliance and friendly negotiations even if our departments decide they’re at war.

The rest of my management tasks are just as the traditional aphorism describes: “Managing programmers is like herding cats.” The key to success is finding well-behaved cats (and wearing claw-proof gloves).

Middenheimers

I decided to try painting some miniatures again, to see if it would capture my attention as my next “thing to do,” or not. The verdict is still out, but I did finish this batch of figures at least.

Here we have: one goblin, two treasure chests, and five Middenheimer warriors armed with axes, swords, and crossbows.

I never manage to take good pictures of my figures, most likely because I can’t produce enough light.

I did an adequate job painting these, but not a wonderful job. They’re fine for table gaming, which is all they’ll ever see (if they’re lucky). I haven’t painted anything in several years, at least since Ezra was born, and these figures I’ve had sitting in a box for probably 5 years or more, waiting to be assembled.

I have no clue where the goblin came from. It’s a random metal casting I picked up somewhere, not a Games Workshop piece. I started painting it last time I was painting, and decided to finish it while I was working on the rest, so it’s really out of place here.

The rest of the pieces are plastic models from the Games Workshop game Mordheim. I like the “mix and match” and posing you can do with these multi-part plastic models. In Mordheim terms, these are human mercenaries from Middenheim, but I tried to make them passable as pirates as well. I chose a civilized blue and green color scheme: maybe they pirated a shipment of fine French high school band uniforms?

There’s an equal likelihood that we’d play Blood and Swash with these. Martine’s just getting old enough for this, so maybe my secret plans to create a new opponent will finally reach fruition? She can handle the rules, but probably won’t like it when her guys start dying. Last time I tried playing with Martine, she convinced me the guys were going to start talking to each other instead of fighting. We’re going to have to work on her social skills. *

Blood and Swash is always really fun at conventions. It’s a simple, fast-paced skirmish scale miniatures game, originally designed for recreating barroom brawls in the age of Pirates. We played most recently on a regular Saturday game night, using some of Martine’s Playmobil soldiers and terrain (after she was in bed: she didn’t mind them dying when she wasn’t around). It worked really well: when Andy and Theresa’s guys died they took over a snake and a T-Rex, and chased Frank and I until we fled with the loot.

Blood and Swash has the fast gameplay of a miniatures wargame without any of the rules lawyering, combined with the open-ended nature of a role-playing game without any of the role playing (or rules lawyering); but the rules can be explained in 5 minutes and played by anyone who can count to 20. So it makes a great introduction to miniatures wargaming, but it can also be great fun as a light hearted wargame where how you kill someone is at least as important as whether you succeed or not.

It also doesn’t require many figures per player, to get started. However, I could probably use a few more just in case…

* Just kidding. Remember that post where I mentioned I like to say obviously false things for ironic effect? Besides, I think she has become much more caustic since last time we played.

Sunflowers

Martine’s birthday party last weekend ended up being a lot of fun for kids and adults alike. Between slaying the home made dragon piñata with a sword I turned, and cutting the castle cake, Martine posed next to the ample sunflowers for a few pictures.

Yes, they’re as big as they look: taller than me, anyway. They were volunteers, and they’re sort of taking up all the sun. The flowers aren’t all there yet, but they’re getting there. We’ve had a lot of rain this week so they’ll probably sprout up again.

Behind them, the hops are doing fine. They’re not ready for picking yet, but some of the flowers are pretty close. I won’t get the “average 1 lb” yield this year, but I wouldn’t use that many hops in a year anyway.

The sunflowers are also obscuring our tomato plants, among other things. Those are getting too big for their racks again. It’ll be gazpacho season soon.

Pack Monadnock

Martine hiking on the Wapack Trail

Shortly after I bought a new bicycle in New Hampshire, I decided to go on a bike ride. I think it was still the 4th of July, the same day the bike shop was inexplicably open for me to buy the bike. A few miles later as I climbed up a hill, I had a flat tire. Bah.

Luckily I found dad’s patch kit, and hacked the pump into working well enough for Presta valve stems instead of Schrader valve stems. It was enough to get me home, but not enough to inspire confidence for a longer ride. A close examination determined that I needed a new rim liner: the one that came with the bike was unsuitable for double walled rims.

After the stores opened up and I got the needed supplies, I set out again on Wednesday. This time, I was bound for the top of Pack Monadnock, a small peak nearby.

This whole “peak” thing may require a bit of explanation for those of you who live way out West in the Pittsburgh area. Unlike here, New England has peaks instead of just ridges. Even where there are a lot of hills in Pittsburgh, none of them lead to a distinct high point with a scenic view in all directions, topped by Big Sky. Peaks provide a much greater sense of accompishment than ridges and rolling hills.

And so it was that I set off towards Pack Monadnock, south summit. My route took me primarily on back roads, and I very quickly realized another difference between cycling in New Hampshire and cycling in Pittsburgh. In the city, I need to go on long rides just to find a little bit of “middle of nowhere.” Even then, I’m really just riding through specially zoned suburbs and not the True middle of nowhere. In New Hampshire, I hit the edge of Nowhere within a few miles. If I lived in New Hampshire I’d probably get lazy, because I wouldn’t have to ride nearly as far to find a nice winding, hilly forest road.

Wait a minute. Where’s my pump? I forgot it! Oops, I probably won’t need it, right?

The day was warm, but the ride was cool and shady under the trees. When I got to Chase Rd. it looked a bit more like an overgrown grassy entrance road to a 200 year old cemetary. Luckily there were a few summer employees there. “This is a through road, right?” “Yep. A bit rocky though, be careful.” Soon it changed from grass to gravel, and then a proper dirt road through the woods.

Next came the first challenging hill. I pretty quickly wished I had my wimpy Pittsburgh gearing, but the Nishiki’s lowest gear was the bike boom standard 40/28. This hill was too soon, I wasn’t warmed up. Or maybe I was out of shape already? Whatever the case may be, I had to rest. Already? How would I ever get up to the top of Pack Monadnock? What a wuss.

The rest of the ride to Miller State Park was uneventful but enjoyable. There were more sections of dirt road, and almost the whole ride was through forests. Just before the park entrance there were a few miles of 8% grade, but that wasn’t too steep. That’s good at least.

Once I entered the park, the road was closed. This was half expected. But bicycles are small, so I decided to see if there was any good reason for the road to be closed or not. It turns out there wasn’t: people were hiking on the road, and a car even came up and passed me on the way.

The last 1.25 miles had about 800 feet of elevation gain, and wasn’t a constant slope. That’s an average grade of around 12%, which is nothing to scoff at. It was hard, and I had to stop several times. Most of the time it didn’t feel as steep as the Dirty Dozen hills I’ve done around here, but it was longer than most of them, and I had a much higher low gear.

I got to the top, looked around, and then went back down. I continued on Route 101 for a while, down the 9% grade on the other side, and missed my intended turn onto Mountain Rd. That turned out to be a good thing, because Mountain Road was another tiny dirt road which was much hillier than the route I ended up taking, and I was basically out of water at this point.

The first store I hit was in Temple, where I got some liquid and energy, and continued on. Eventually it started raining a bit. It was enough to earn me a skunk stripe and remind me why all my bikes have fenders, but not enough to soak me through from the top.

In the end I rode about 40 miles, and had a great time. I didn’t need the pump, which is good because I didn’t have tire levers either. I did have a cell phone, but I’m not sure I had any coverage where I was riding. The only technical problem I had was easy to fix: the clamp-on downtube shifters were apparently a bit loose and slid down the downtube.

A few days later, we drove out and hiked to the top with Grandpa and the kids. This time I wasn’t riding a bike, but I was on very rocky trails with Ezra on my back. We took the steeper, rocky Wapack trail on the way up, and the tamer Marion Davis trail on the way down. As usual, we came across several stone walls. Even way out here in the middle of nowhere, halfway up a difficult rocky forested slope, the land was once cleared and used for the grazing of cattle. The trees have grown back across much of New Hampshire over the last few hundred years, but I bet the originals were much larger.

This was also a very good trip, and I’m glad we did it. It was good to get Martine out in the woods, that’s usually difficult. She did a good job of keeping up with us on the hike, and then she was full of energy for the rest of the afternoon when we got back.

Mount Monadnock, from the summit of South Pack Monadnock

Going up Pack Monadnock stood out as one of the most enjoyable parts of our trip to New Hampshire, I’m glad we decided to do it. Maybe next time we go out, the kids will be old enough to get up Mount Monadnock, which has several miles more hiking along its shortest route. Both of these are small mountains compared to the presidential range in the North, but they’re accessible and very scenic, and that counts for a lot when we have kids in tow.

Essential Skills

BoingBoing recently posted a link to 18 Essential Maker Skills and referred to a Heinlein quote:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

As a dedicated Jack, the last line resonated with me: Specialization is for insects. I’m reminded of a quote which Google just helped me attribute to Nicholas Butler:

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.

There is certainly value in becoming a Master. But the important part of this journey is to never consider yourself a master. As soon as you do, you essentially claim you have nothing else to learn.

I don’t consider myself a master, but I’m well trained as a know-it-all. If you aren’t skeptical enough, you might think I know what I’m talking about. But if you aren’t skeptical enough, you get what you deserve. I’m the sort of person who finds it humorous to say things which are obviously false for ironic effect.

As for the specific 18 Essential Maker Skills presented in the link above, well… “they’re wrong and I’m right,” of course (see “know-it-all,” above). Those skills are all very useful. But if I had to choose only 18 “maker” skills out of everything anyone has ever done or made, I’m not sure those are all the best choices. Many of them are too domain-specific, not universal enough, and too dedicated to the use of special purpose tools.

I’d probably start with the basic necessities in life, and move on from there. Let me be clear: I don’t claim to have all these skills. I only claim that I think they’re important.

  1. Learn how to learn. The most important skill, and the basis for all others, is knowing how to learn new skills. Different people learn in different ways, you need to know what works for you.
  2. Make a meal, from earth to plate. Whether it’s vegetable or an animal, know where your food comes from, and how to get some if you can no longer go to a store. At the very least, learn to make your own meals well enough that you’re willing to eat them.
  3. Make clothing. Again, get as close to the earth as you can.
  4. Make shelter. If I were getting more specific, I’d say “use an axe,” as this is another very basic and important skill, but that may only be because I grew up in the forest instead of the desert.
  5. Set a broken bone. Good idea, Mr. Heinlein. As you can tell: I believe staying alive is important.
  6. Make something from nothing. Become comfortable with thinking and with constructing models and ideas in your mind. Even if your ideas never take physical form, being able to think ensures you will always have something to do. Writing is a good approximation of creating something from nothing. So is computer programming, which is just writing in a different language anyway.
  7. Use tools. The only people likely to read this blog may find the concept very silly, but many people don’t know how to use even basic tools such as a screwdriver, wrench, or hammer. I remember someone who learned how to change a car tire: “That’s it?” Yes, that’s it. Just because someone else says something is difficult, that doesn’t make it difficult. You may just not be skeptical enough: try it and find out.
  8. Fix something. Anything, it doesn’t matter what: make something work, that previously did not.
  9. Make yourself happy.
  10. Ask a question. Learn to figure out what you don’t know, and how to express this in the form of an answerable question.
  11. Tell the difference between success and failure. It’s a lot easier to do well if you can tell the difference between doing well and doing poorly. When starting in a new hobby or learning a new skill, find a master and try to figure out how what makes their work masterwork. As long as you think you’re just as good as they are, you aren’t making progress.
  12. Find the value of things. Value is a very personal concept: the value of something is how much you are willing to sacrifice to attain it. If someone else values something more than you do, they may place a price on it which you don’t want to pay. Become confident enough in your ability to assign value to things that you won’t sacrifice more than you want to, when attaining them.
  13. Take something apart and put it back together again. Make sure it still works, or at least that you know exactly why it doesn’t work anymore.
  14. Formulate a plan. Can you tell someone else how to put together the thing you just took apart?
  15. Follow instructions. When you come back a year from now, can you follow the plan you just formulated for putting that thing back together?

In many ways these skills are restatements and combinations of a few concepts. Learn how to think in the abstract, solve problems, and to map between abstract concepts and real-life objects.

Another Bicycle??

Last week in New Hampshire, I borrowed my dad’s bike to go for a 14 or so mile ride to Silver Lake and back, early in the week. It was comfortable enough, but I wouldn’t have wanted to ride much farther on that saddle. The bike was a bit too small for me, but I could manage.

Then, I went to the “bike shop” around the corner. This is basically a big tent in a guy’s driveway, with 50 or so used bikes lined up under it. He does repairs and sells parts out of his ancient garage/barn.

I walked up and down the rows of bikes a few times. Half of them are kids bikes, and half of the rest of them are mountain bikes. Within the selection of road bikes, most were heavy old indestructable monsters by Columbia, Schwinn, Ross, Huffy, and so on. And then there were a few more interesting bikes. A bike boom Gitane? Nah, you can’t get any replacement parts for French bikes. The Univega looked interesting: most of them were made by Panasonic or Miyata in those days.

Then I saw the Nishiki International. It has pretty, fancy lugs, and uses double butted chrome moly tubing so it’s fairly light: probably lighter than the frames I ride here in Pittsburgh. All the parts are aluminum, and relatiely high quality for the time (though not all original). The Suntour Cyclone rear derailer was one of the best available in its heyday, from a performance perspective (but you could easily spend three times as much if you needed the Campagnolo name brand and inferior shifting). The Suntour Power Shifters are smooth and work well.

Maybe I’m just used to city Craigslist prices, but it was a good price for the bike. After doing a bit of research on the component manufacture dates on the Vintage Trek web site, and decoding the serial number in a guide I found online, I determined it’s a 1980 model.

Why do I need another bike? Actually, I don’t need one at all, I’m happy to admit, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want any more. I’ll use it when I’m in New Hampshire, and I enjoy it. At least it wasn’t something new, and it’s not that expensive all things considered: the price of filling a tank with gas a few times, these days.