Origins 2008

I've recently arrived home from Origins 2008, and it was a blast!

This was the first year that we did the whole hotel experience, since we no longer live in Columbus. It was also the first year that my daughter Amelia went for the whole convention. Last year she stopped in for a couple of hours, but that was it.

Staying on-site was terrific. I had loaded my schedule with late night games so that I'd be able to spend time with Amelia during the day, so being able to make a five minute walk to a hotel room instead of a fifteen minute walk/drive home was great. Plus, Amelia has discovered she loves vacations, so she wouldn't have felt like she was on one if we hadn't stayed away from home.

The kids program at Origins is first rate. Amelia and I explored it while Lisa was busy going insane in a Call of Cthulhu game. They had games and toys for all ages of kids, but what Amelia loved most was the game of parachute they did each day. That's the one where you have a parachute like circle with handles, and everyone lifts it up, runs under it, etc. From that first day, Amelia made sure we never missed a parachute game.

I got quite a bit of LARPing in, which is always nice. I can usually get half a dozen people together for a LARP outside of a convention, but it isn't quite the same as playing with a group of twenty or thirty people.

Two of the LARPs were Call of Cthulhu games. One was a last man standing game that involved Boy Scout troops in the Appalachian mountains. The goal was to be the last person alive. The game started at 11:00pm, and was supposed to go until 3:00pm. I guess we were too good at staying alive, because it lasted until 5:00pm. I ended up being the last one alive by the luck of a few draws (the game used playing card draws rather than dice), and brought home a Last Man Standing t-shirt.

The other Call of Cthulhu LARP was a Cthulhu Live event set on a German Zepplin in the 1930s. Very cool setting, and many of the players went all out on costuming, with some very realistic looking German uniforms evident.

I also played in lots of table top role playing, including more Call of Cthulhu and a superhero game set in the Italian renaissance.

Amelia had a great time at the con, although the one game Sunday that she was going to help me play (a Fudge superhero game) was canceled since I was the only player. But we played lots of games in the kids room, and even found a game of charades in the board games library that we played Wednesday evening. I also found a card game in the dealer's room called Stoplights that she loves (a few weeks ago she started calling out Stop and Go when we're driving, based on the color of the traffic lights). So when she wanted to play Stoplights she would call out, "Stop! Go!"

There were a lot of kids oriented RPGs at the convention this year, although none were suitable for Amelia's age (three years old). One game had three years old as the minimum age, but it was a four hour game, and there's no way my active daughter would sit in a chair for four hours rolling dice. She's more of a LARP girl, she needs to move around; hopefully someone next year will have a kids LARP.

We'll definitely all be going again next year!

End of the Semester

It's nearly the end of the semester here, and as usual I'm behind in my grading.

I'm not as far behind as most other professors I talk to, but I'm still behind. And look at me, I'm writing a blog post instead of grading!

This week is the week before final exam week. Another week to get through, then exams to grade, and the summer can start.

I have a lot of tasks planned for the summer. I always do, and get to only a portion of them, but here are some of the highlights. Check back here in the fall to see what I actually managed to do.

Put Up A Slide

My daughter loves slides, so I want to get one that she can use and set it up. She also loves swings, so maybe it'll be a swing set and slide combination.

Research Project

I'm helping another professor with a research project, and this summer is when the bulk of my portion of the work should be done.

Origins

June is the time of the year for Origins, one of the two big annual gaming conventions. We go every year for four days of non-stop gaming. Then we come home and crash for a week.

Vacation

We haven't taken a real vacation in, well, forever. The sort where you take a week or two and go somewhere and enjoy yourselves. We're still talking about where to go, so if you have any suggestions, let us know.

Online Work

I do a lot of online work, creating websites for myself and others. That work will continue over the summer.

Prepare for Fall Classes

Every summer I tell myself that by fall I want to be completely prepared for my classes. It never happens, but I'm telling myself that again this summer. I want to have books picked, syllabi written, and notes and assignments created for all my classes before the fall semester starts.

Exercise

Before our recent move, we worked with a great personal trainer who managed to keep us more or less in shape. We haven't found anyone similar after the move, so we'll see what we can do on our own.

Family Time

I plan on spending a lot of family time this summer. My daughter will be three years old in June, and she's a lot of fun to be around. We'll probably make a lot of trips to local playgrounds.

And there are probably a dozen other things I've forgotten that should be on the list. That's okay, I doubt I'll get all of the ones I remembered done, anyway!

Stargate Goodness

Okay, so I'm optimistic.

I recently bought the big collection of all the Stargate episodes, over 50 DVDs full of every season of the show, plus all the "making of" specials that have been done. When this monster package first came out, it was priced near $300, I think. That seemed reasonable to me, but I didn't have the money.

I have the money now, so I hopped onto Amazon and found that the price was $160 something. I grabbed it, and the new Ark of Truth DVD (a made for DVD movie continuing the Stargate saga).

So when am I going to have time to watch 10 seasons of Stargate? I figure it'll probably be about the time my two-year old daughter goes away to college. Maybe I'll be lucky and she'll become a science fiction fanatic like me, and we'll cut a few years off that estimate.

Oh, and I must have bought when the stars were right...I just checked, and the price is up to $230. Lucky me!

Selling Your Life

I just ran across the website of a man in Australia who is selling his life on Ebay. For full details, head to his website, ALife4Sale.

The short version of it, though, is that he's tired of his life and wants a fresh start. He considered selling his house and just starting over that way, but eventually hit on the idea of just scrapping it all and starting over with nothing more than his wallet and the clothes he was wearing.

The idea of a fresh start can certainly be appealing, and all of us have things we're holding on to that we really should let go of. Stuff, old issues, whatever they may be.

Ian, the guy selling his life, has done a good job at putting together a package that represents his life. You're not just buying his house and all the furnishings, you're getting absolutely everything in the house, you're getting a two-week trial employment at his job, you're getting an introduction to his friends, etc.

Who would buy something like this? I imagine it would be attractive for someone else who wanted to get out of their old life and make a clean start. Well, however clean a start it could be when you're stepping into someone else's life.

An interesting idea, and another example of how to use the Internet in fun and quirky ways.

James Bond's Calling Card

Okay, this has to be just about the coolest thing I've seen lately.

For a while, before we started using Skype for long distance, we used calling cards. You could get some truly great deals, down to the 1 cent a minute level, in exchange for the annoyance of having to dial a ton of numbers and listening to an advertisement before getting to your actual call.

So I still look online now and then to see what kinds of rates calling cards get. And I ran across a calling card that allows you to fake the caller id that the person you're calling will see. Want them to see the number of the White House? No problem! Or Joe's Pizza Shop? No problem!

The card also allows you to change your voice through an automatic algorithm, in real time. You speak, but what the person on the other end hears is not your voice. You can even have your voice changed so it sounds like you're the opposite gender. All the while displaying a fake caller id.

The voice changing capability has a lot of potential for abuse, but they do keep records enough to be able to track back to you if they are served with a subpoena. Hopefully that will keep the abuse to a minimum.

You can also record calls.

They call the card the Spoof Card, a term carried over from computers, where one computer pretends to be another computer.
A fun idea, but it'll be interesting to see how it works out.

Update: the same company has another calling card I just found, called Liar Card. You make a call with this card and ask the person on the other end a question, and their computers analyze the person's voice stress when they answer the question, and tells you whether they lied or told the truth. According to the web site, it's over 95% accurate.

New Healthy Recipes Website!

Lisa and I started a new website as a place to feature our collection of homemade healthy recipes.

The site's still being added to weekly, but there's enough there that you can get a feel for how the site will be laid out and how it'll all work.

The focus is on the recipes that Lisa has created over the years that we've changed our eating habits from the traditional American diet into something healthier. Everything has been taste tested by us many times.

Some of the highlights our vegetable lasagna recipe, which is always a hit, and Lisa's banana muffins recipe. We've also got an applesauce cake recipe that Amelia loves...that's her chosen birthday cake.

The page on natural organic food has links to the substitutions Lisa usually makes in recipes to make them healthier. She's always creating more substitutions as she experiments, but the page lists the most common ones.

Oh, and I can't forget to mention the banana smoothie recipe. That's Amelia's favorite summer treat, and is healthy enough we don't mind her having it every day.

Enjoy what's on the site now, and check back later since we're always adding something new.

A Green Survey

I get emailed about a lot of these surveys, and I pass on most of them.

This one, though, was about environmentalism, so I figured I had to take it. Here's the results:

Insurance Woes

Wow, two posts in a day!

I've needed to rant about insurance for quite some time, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Mostly the rant is about health insurance. Car insurance and Home insurance, for the most part, I don't have a problem with. Life insurance also seems okay, if not quite the investment now that it used to be.

But health insurance is another matter.

We're generally healthy, but we keep insurance against some catastrophe happening that would require extensive hospitalization. Along with that insurance comes a wide variety of services that are covered. It sounds great when you read the policy.

We're pretty picky when it comes to doctors, so it takes us a while to find a doctor we like. We'd found one in Columbus we went to once a year or two, for a physical. The doctor was in our insurance network, so we figured everything would be covered.

Wrong.

The visit to the doctor's was covered, but lab work that the doctor sent out to an out of network lab (the only lab that doctor used) was not covered. Even though that lab work was required by the in-network doctor.

We've also had doctors we liked stop taking health insurance at all, because of what the hoops the insurance companies make them go through, and the effect on the cost of services. This seems to be a growing trend.

I'd love to see some sort of change in the way health insurance works. We'd be happy if, for a fraction of what we're paying now, we could get only catastrophic health insurance. We'd gladly pay for doctor's visits, which happen infrequently and often aren't covered anyway, ourselves.

Let's hope that this becomes one of the election year issues here in the United States.

End of the Semester

It's nearing the end of the semester here, so my schedule has shifted into "hurry hurry" mode.

I'd caught up on my grading a few weeks ago, so I don't have that much of a backlog to get through, but there is some. I also have to print and copy exams, make sure that I've put review notes up, verify when all the exams are to be held, etc, etc.

Next week are the actual final exams, so I'll have a lot of grading to do then. Luckily, my exams are mostly spread out through the week, so I'll try to grade Tuesday's exam while the Wednesday crowd is taking theirs, and so on. Hopefully by the weekend I'll only have one set of exams to grade.

Grades are due Tuesday the 18th, so everything has to be done by then, regardless. No matter what, it always seems that I'm rushing around that Monday trying to put the finishing touches on grades, and last minute emails with students who aren't happy about their grade or want to make up an assignment they missed.

After Tuesday, though, the semester is officially done for me. Then I get to start preparing for the next one!

Gaming, Gaming, Gaming!

I spent part of last weekend at a gaming convention.

I normally go to this convention every year to run some games and to play in some games, but this year I had something else to do part of the weekend, so I was only able to run a couple of games.

One, Saturday night, was a Wild Western horror game. I got to the convention about 6pm on Saturday, and my game was at 8pm. They have signup sheets pasted on the walls, and I could see that only one person was signed up. I needed at least four people, and could take up to six. So things weren't looking good.

I spent an hour or so trying to convince people to play, only to have them go into other games. I also hadn't realized when I scheduled the game at 8pm that the convention was having a couple of parties at the same time. Only hardcore gamers pass up parties for gaming, so it definitely didn't look good.

I went down at about a quarter till eight, and saw three people signed up for the game. I could work with three. Unfortunately, those three never showed up!

While I was waiting for them, a group of people started eating at the table I was supposed to use for the game. I got to talking a bit with them, only to find out that they were big fans of the game system I was using to run the game. When 8pm came and went without the other players showing up, those six played in it instead.

So it all worked out.

The game Sunday was a straight Wild Western murder mystery game, no horror involved. I ended up with 12 people playing it it, which is a good number. We got started a bit late, and had to end early, so the game was a little rushed in spots, but I think everyone had a good time.

I was pretty beat by the time I got home Sunday, though!