The ongoing conversation
When I rediscovered classical music, I became especially interested in the music of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957). The bells in Symphony #4 hooked me, and the somber poetry in works like “Tapiola” and “Nightride and Sunrise” reeled me in. Times being what they were, I tried to find a “minimal-expenditure” path through some of his […]
Recently on Facebook, Thomas J. Kwiatkowski Jr. called me on my usage of the word “scleras”. The sclera is the white part of the eye, and it’s taken from the Latin. In Latin, its plural would be sclerae, and that it how it is often pluralized in medical texts (doctors being familiar with Latin pluralization rules in […]
Sam: I mean how much for the whole thing? Coach: Oh, six hundred bucks Sam, but the salesman said, the salesman said satisfaction guaranteed. Sam: Or …? Coach: Now, that would have been a good question. I was reminded of that clip from Cheers when reading the rules for The Resistance. They include a restriction […]
Another article resurrected from my previous website. This was intended to be an article for Pyramid magazine, but was too dry or too long for acceptance there. I’ve never updated it for GURPS 4th Edition. (Perhaps playes of that system could tell me what would need to be changed.) for GURPS 3rd Edition rules Witeout was pretty […]
I got to hear some short stories read by their authors this past Saturday. A Dayton publisher, Alliteration Ink, and a Centerville retailer, Epic Loot, brought some area authors (and their editor) together for a two-hour event in Centerville to read from Sidekicks! I took several photos at the event, as each author and the editor […]
I recently had to transform a set of data from typical date & measurement to a more compact date range & measurement format. The data in this case was very static: as the date incremented, the measurement was much more likely to be remain the same than it was to change. So storing the starting […]
I recently read a blog from the Wall Street Journal, “12 Debt Myths That Trip Up Consumers“. It includes many great tips, leading with the best: “Avoid debt.” But then toward the end, it stumbles badly with this one: Mortgage-interest payments can be deducted on your tax return, which can save you a bundle. The […]
Quizgle is live! Quizgle is a puzzle game where you have to guess the words that were used to generate the displayed search results. At a game of five rounds, you can share your result to see if your friends can beat your score. I had a lot of fun working on the database side of […]
Inspired by this comment, I decided to come up with a chess variant for RoboRally. I wanted to keep the programming aspect of RoboRally and the multiple pieces & capture-the-king goal of chess intact. Programming a “side” of 16 bots would be too daunting, but a king bot and a handful of piece bots (using chess […]
Neil deGrasse Tyson was a special guest at the Nutter Center last night, and my wife and I took the kids out to see him. The teens were skeptical about the event, since it meant giving up one of this week’s iterations of their League of Legends event at Epic Loot, but they enjoyed Dr. Tyson’s […]