Time to ring on the new year

I hope everyone has a great 2008. See ya in 2009!

Sent from my iPhone

Best Buy Rocks!

Ok so in today's society it is very rare for a consumer store to impress me. Usually the customer service is rude, and the sales people don't know what the hell they are talking about. However the exception to the rule for me this year was Best Buy. I bought GHWT for my daughter for Xmas back in November. From there it sat up in my attic for over a month and was wrapped up nice a pretty for her come Xmas day. Anyway the day after Xmas the clip on the drums that hold the drumsticks broke off on the inside. Now I give Best Buy a call and I talk to a girl and ask her if they have any more GHWT for the wii in stock. She says no but to call back in a couple of days. I ask if I need to bring in my busted one now, and they say no, just wait for more to be in stock. So yesterday I'm cleaning up my garage and see the GHWT box sitting there and I think to myself ( Games and stuff come in on Tuesday I should call Best Buy ). So I call and they have GHWT wii in stock. So I tell the guy my problem and that I don't know where the receipt is. He asks for my phone number and pulls up my receipt for me. He tells me that I bought it on 11/25 and in theory that is over the 30 days to return it, but tells me to hold for a second. He comes back on and says just bring it in and we will swap it out for you. I ask him if I need to bring in the whole game or just the drums. He says just the broken part. So I bring the top of the drums in and they give me a new one right out of the box. In and out of the store in 5 minutes. Everyone I talked to knew what they were talking about, friendly, and solved my problem. So like I said in the title Best Buy Rocks!

Post from my iPhone

Ok so I'm testing the ability to write a blog on my iPhone. So far it seems to work pretty well. Just for the record the iPhone kicks the blackberry's ass any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Blackberrys suck ass!

So a bit of a rant here. So for starters I do NOT own a blackberry, my wife does. Let me set the stage:
About 2 months ago my wife started looking for a new phone. She had an old razor that was working for her, but she needed something more. As the family schedule maker, group party planner ( for all of our extended family and friends ), she really needed a PDA type phone. Now at the time I had the Samsung Blackjack which I think is an awesome phone. I had reconfigured the entire home screen via the xml files, added apps for yahoo, syncing lotus notes email, then gmail, then gcal, yahoo cal, ect. At the end of the day with my cheappy little winmo device I had every app I needed for work and home without even using a memory card! Anyway she asked me what phone to get. I said I really like my phone, the only issue I have with it is when you try and dial phone numbers not in your addy book it is a pain because the full keyboard is always there. I recomended something that had either a touchscreen, or a dual slider, or combo of those ( tilt, G1, ect ) to fill the void. She looked at me and then said she would ask our friend who works at a cell phone store.
After talking with the guy he pushed the blackberry perl. It fit her requirements ( or so we thought ). It was a full pda, it was small, and it came in pink ( yes that was important! ). She asked me what I thought of blackberrys and I said " well I have only helped a couple people configure their mail on them, and I thought the interface looked cheap, but alot of people swear by them, and I have never really USED one so I dunno".
So she bought the phone! The blackberry perl to be exact ( you know the one that doesn't have a full keyboard ). Anyway she gets the phone and hates it for the first week, because the keyboard is weird. But she got used to it and proceeded to use the phone.
So here is the funny part, she chose the phone for the PDA power. She chose the phone because it had the ability to run her calendar. Wouldn't you think it could sync online with her yahoo calendar? NOPE! The "bad ass" enterprise business phone needs to be plugged in to a computer to sync to yahoo calendar! Are you fricking kidding me! what a POS! My cheap ass original Blackjack could do that out of the box! Anyway so my wife asks me to figure out how to sync it. So I think, well maybe they have a really cool app to use to do it. So I search......They have Yahoo Go! it's even a partnership with RIM! survey says! no syncing, but you can view your cal in yahoo's slow ass interface! Lame!
So I start researching today. After about 45 minutes I come up with the following "workaround" ( or hack depending on how you look at it )
I took my personal server and installed outlook 2002 ( my home version I have ), installed yahoo's desktop sync app to sync the calendar to outlook. Then I created a gmail account, then downloaded another free app to sync google cal to outlook ( note I couldn't use googles sync tool because my outlook version is too old! Finally I need to install the blackberry google cal sync tool on my wifes crappy ass phone when she gets home. So I take the following notes:
1) Blackberrys do in fact suck ass! ( unless you work for company that uses them for work, and you have a corp exchange server with rim server software installed )
2) yahoo needs to work on their toolsets
3) google kicks ass
4) good thing I have a server :)
5) I really love my wife - if it was my phone I would have taken it back and got something else!

Narrating text based rpg session

So I"m pondering something. Lately my crew and I have been doing some online chat RPG sessions. The first session and the latest session ( session 7 ) were audio sessions, however sessions 2 - 6 were all chat logs. The latest audio session we recorded and created an mp3 file. The nice folks over at rpgmp3 mentioned that we could post in on their site, however I realized that that single session wouldn't make much sense as you don't have any of the previous sessions to go over. So my ponder was this: What if we got the crew together and narrated the chat sessions ( as well as an overview of the first session ) and created audio sessions for these as well to post? I mean it isn't real game time, but it might actually add some thespianism to the whole thing. Anyway anyone have any comments?

Proud of my wife

So I'm a little late in posting this, but I've been a little busy lately. So my wife walked in the 3day breast cancer walk. She had to raise 2200 bucks and then walk 60 miles, sleep in a tiny tent with her sister, eat crappy food, and be away from her family when she really needed their support. Now don't get me wrong, we were there at almost every checkpoint, bringing propel, stickers, signs, and just plain encouragement. On the second day in, she had to have her feet lanced so she could get her shoes back on and finish the walk. The medics took so long that they wanted to bus her, but she just sucked it up, ran up the hill, got yelled at for running, proceeded to walk really fast, to beat the buses, and made sure she walked every step of the way. I have no inspiring words or awesome way to finish this, because everything I wrote above is the awesome part. I'm just the dude writing it down.

Good Job Honey! I love you!

Kids are the best comedians

So I have to start by saying this: My wife is walking in the 3 day. For those that do not know what that is; it is a 3day 60 mile walk to support research for the cure of Breast Cancer. I'm very proud of her for this, and I think it is an amazing thing, but not the point of this story....

Anyway most of the planning meetings for the walk are at our house, where the girls discuss shirts to order so they match, what shoes to wear, stuff to take to tent ect. Anyway they have these meetings and the kids are around so they pick up on things you don't think about.

So the other afternoon, I'm talking to my 2 and 1/2 year old son:
"where is mommy?" he asks.
"She is at work." I reply.
"Why?" he retorts....( currently Why? is his 2nd favorite saying on the planet - next to "Yo Joe!" )
"Because she is making money!" I answer back.
"For her BOOBIES?" he asks completely straight faced!
at this point I could not respond because I was too busy laughing my ass off!!!!!

Canned adventures redux

So I went ahead and tried the whole "create a canned adventure" for the Session we are currently doing. I mean I basically had a good idea of where I wanted the adventure to go and what not, so I started typing it up. On the good side, it really helped me design a quest that used the strengths and weaknesses of the chars that are currently playing. However even with spending as much time as I did planning out all the possible outcomes, they went and did something I didn't even think about. Here is where I think the "canned" adventures throw me. When your GM'ing and you are doing it off of a vague idea, or a basic set of notes, you are pretty much prepared for anything that the chars throw out there, because you are not expecting them to do anything. However when you write up the way the story "should" unfold, if they don't stick to the (your) plan, it is easy to feel like a deer in headlights. That being said, I think I'm going to continue to create notes and basic ideas of how the quest should go, and layout combat (create monsters, villains, ect), but try not to detail every little thing, and have the chars do what they want and fit the story to them. Because after all, the story is about them, I just provide the backdrop :)

Paper pushing pansy

I'm officially a paper pushing pansy. I spent my Sunday morning and afternoon, laying Sod in my parents backyard. We laid about 1600 sq ft, and by the time we were done, I was exhausted and my back was killing me. Outside of being injured, I've never really been that sore before. It was terrible. After I got home, got cleaned up and then we took the little guy to the pumpkin patch with some friends. By the end of the night I wasn't swore anymore, but I was ready for bed by 8pm. So It's official I am now a Paper Pushing Pansy......

pregenerated adventures vs. top of the head adventures

So in the realm of RPGs there are two main times of GM'ing:
1) PreGenerated Adventures aka "canned"
2) Top of the head Adventures

So which one is better? Coming from a Palladium Fantasy background myself, we always did top fo the head GM'ing. Usually our quests revolved around whatever our current favorite movie was, or something we saw in the book and wanted to throw at the players. We only tried a couple of the "canned" adventures, and they were always way to complicated to navigate the pages, and it seemed to slow down the story. So I used to be very against them. Anyway, I have since started listening to rpg podcats, from penny-arcade, as well as rpgmp3, and I have noticed that they are using "canned" adventures. I have to say, that they adventure itself moves very fulid and the story is really good. So I though to myself, maybe I just wasn't ready for "canned" adventures when I was young. So I found myself an adventure ( actually a free DnD 3.5 adventure, and I'm going to mix it into my current campaign and see how it goes. ( currently converting the stats and items over from DnD rules to palladium rules :). So I'll post more feedback on my thoughts about which one is better and why, when I finish.

Why am I that guy?

Why am I the guy that is always fixing everyone's computer? I don't even do hardware anymore, yet every time one of my friends, my wife's friends, or my family's friends computers break, they end up on my desk. Ugh! So here I am just finished up with my actual work, to be greeted by a busted laptop that won't even boot to windows. So I look around in the case....they had to send their OS disk, so I can run a repair right? I mean do they really expect me to have Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 just laying around? O wait these are the people that send me their computers, of course they expect me to have that lying around...... O well I guess it's another night of little to no sleep.

Why do people blog?

I found myself wondering about this very question a couple years ago. My friend asked me to create a myspace page, because he was posting a book he was thinking about publishing as blog posts on the site. However you need to have a myspace account to read it. So I complied, and like any certified geek, I tried really hard to adapt the new "social networking" site into my life.....it didn't work! It was my first step to feeling like an old man. "My wife has a myspace and she lives on that thing" I thought to myself, so I tried even harder. Filling out stupid surveys, questionairs, updating my profile over and over, and tried to add as many people I knew to my friends list.....and nothing! It did nothing but suck up time....by the time I realized what I had done, I had a facebook, and a myspace, and people giving me crap for not "socializing". Now I consider myself a pretty verbose and friendly guy, so for ME to be anti-social, there must be a problem. So I solved it. I removed myself from both services. No more myspace, no more facebook....and my life was simple. So on to blogging. I read certian blogs, yet outside of people that provide some service to the public....web comic artists, actors, politicians, ect. I never really saw the reason an average everyday user would have a blog....I mean who cares what joe nobody is doing at 2am in the morning? And what is with all these problems and stories people post? Then I realized what it is.....it's a place for people to vent, and talk about things they can't talk about with the people around them. For me, it is my nerd side. My wife is normal, my kids are normal...I on the otherhand am a complete and total nerd. I read about 10 web comics daily, I live on my rss feeds, and love tabletop RPGs. Unfortunatly not many people whom I "socialize with" share these interests. So I realized I needed a way to share my feelings on these nerd'isms and found the perfect outlet....a blog. I don't care if anyone reads it, I don't care who knows about it. It's just my free shrink to share my nerdy thoughts that nobody cares about.

your friend,
joe nobody :)

Interesting Day

For the first time in a while, I actually felt really productive at work today. I usually get the same amount of work done, but for some reason, I actually felt ahead of the game today and it was really nice. Hopefully this trend continues. As everyone in the tech industry is probably accustomed to, there is this desire to cut back workforce so that everyone is doing as much as they possibly can. I went from a team of 3 to 1 a few months ago and since then I felt like I was just treading water. A few days here and there felt productive, but today I actually felt like I was ahead of the game, not just having a good day :) Ironically I think part of it is the time I have been spending working on my personal dev project at home. I only get sparse sections of time to work on it, with work, family, and sleep getting in the way of making too much progress, but in the last week or so, I have made progress on this project in leaps and bounds. I think this is what is giving me the drive to push past the hump and work. So basically I get to kill 2 birds with 1 stone. yeah me!

First Blog

This is my first attempt at a blog. Don't really have much to say right now, but I'll work on that later.