Heading out to California

Wow, I suck at this internet thing. My blog is never updated. Maybe I should update more.

Soon I am going to be heading to Cali for a work trip and a little snowboarding on the side. The fam can't come so that's sad but hopefully we'll have some fun. Maybe I will even blog about it when I get back ^_^

Back from Hawaii

Sorry for the lack of posts but we just got back from a trip to Hawaii! I presented a paper at the AAMAS 2007 Agents conference. We had fun in Hawaii, especially Eris. Check out the latest pics on my flickr photostream.

Do you see what I feed...

I just found something interesting in my preferred feed reader, Google Reader's, interface. It has a "shared items" thingiee where I can mark any post in any of my subscriptions as "shared". These shared items are then re-feeded to a custom feed that anyone can subscribe to (for me, this feed is here). So subscribe to this feed, and I will mark any really interesting stuff as shared. Who knows, maybe you will find a cool new feed to read.

Jet Set Part 1

I just got back from bidnezz in Monterey, CA. It's a pretty nice city with a couple neat things to do...I went to the aquarium and 17-mile drive. Both are entertaining (if expensive).

On the 17-mile drive sits the Lone Cypress, "one of California's most enduring landmarks". It's a pretty cool 300 year old tree that sits on a rocky outcrop overlooking the Pacific. When I got there, I saw this sign:



Jeez, a trademarked tree?! Well how do you like these apples:



:P~ on you Pebble Beach Co. And your drive wasn't worth the $9 I paid either. For the same price I can get into Shenandoah and go on a 105 Mile Drive!!

Nerd Alert!

One of my hobbies is playing the card game Magic: The Gathering. I am a relative newcomer to this game and I only started playing about two years ago (during the "Kamigawa Block" for the other magic players out there). I do enjoy playing, I think it's a fun game.

One of the manufacturer Wizards of the Coast's tricks is that they constantly print new magic "sets" of cards, and "rotate out" old sets. The sets older than about two years are no longer legal for so-called standard play. Old cards can be played in other types of tournaments ("Legacy", "Extended", etc.) and in casual play. This is one of the ways that they keep interest in the game alive, or for the more pessimistic of you out there, how they keep us addicted.




A magic player may try to buy cards and build interesting decks to play against others. This is called "constructed". Another option are tournaments where you must buy unopened packs of cards and make decks from this limited pool and play against others doing the same. This is called "limited".

Recently I changed from attempting to be a good constructed player, which I don't have the skill, patience, or money for, and change to pretty much a limited-only player. This makes the game a lot cheaper to play since I can only play limited tourneys maybe once a month at about $20 bucks a pop.

Yesterday, Dream Wizards, DC's local crack dealer, ahem, card store, held a pre-release tournament for the latest and greatest magic set that's coming out. I went and played, had a lot of fun, but didn't do too well...overall I went 3-7 in games and only won a paltry amount of prizes (2 packs, worth about $6). Maybe I just got unlucky....or maybe I just suck at magic.

If you're gonna spew...spew into this

So Eris was sick this week with some kind of stomach virus. She had to miss three days of school. Not to mention she honked in the car (the word "projectile" was used). This is what a virus does to a 3.5 year old:



She's feeling a lot better now though. Today Uncle Joel is giving her an reading test! I'll report back on that later.

Eris and Ethan bowling

A couple of days ago my brother in law Rett and I took Eris and Ethan duckpin bowling At Perry Hall Lanes.




Duckpins are fairly closely tied with my hometown of Baltimore. It's like ten-pin, but the balls are smaller, the pins are smaller, and you get three rolls instead of two. Fun for kids right?

Well...

Next time we'll go to a place with gutter bumpers. Perry Hall didn't offer them. Combine that with an uneven lane that rolled balls to the left made for kind of a frustrating game for the kids. They still had fun as kids will but it could have been a lot better. Duckpins are hard! I rolled a mighty 49. Eris "won" (she insisted she did anyway).

The place was very Bawlmer, and it even had snowballs. They weren't great, but hey, I have to drive 20 minutes for snowballs out here in Frederick. Freez-King out here makes good snowballs but doesn't have egg custard flavor. Snowballs were pretty huge when I was growing up. We used to walk to the snowball stand for a buck and then the second-run movie theater for another $2 when I was a kid growing up in Arbutus. Good times.