FES Rowing in the Boston Globe

While I was away on vacation, it looks like our FES rowing project got a front page story in the Sunday Globe. Pretty cool.

Things I Learned On My Summer Vacation

1. Water parks are pretty fun.

I'll be 33 in less than a month, and thus wasn't really expecting much from an activity I haven't sought out in nearly two decades... and Jungle Jim's isn't the most impressive collection of water slides I've ever seen... but it was surprisingly enjoyable. I was probably the most dubious of the four of us about how much fun it would be, but finished second only to Anna in the "Just one more slide before we go" department.


2. I am not very good a miniature golf.

I was aware of this already, but apparently you don't get better by not doing it... who knew? Luckily, Anna is worse, so my ego was salved.


3. I still get sunburn in roughly a nanosecond.

They all laughed at me for the 70+ SPF sunscreen, but the only serious burns I got were when I went kayaking on the first day without any sunscreen at all. I also cowered under an umbrella the entire time we were on the beach, like an old person... but I'm not peeling too badly at the moment, so I'd say it was worth it. Score one for pale people.


4. Delaware doesn't allow you to get eye exams anywhere but a private practice.

You might be wondering how I found this out. Do I just have an academic interest in obscure laws regulating optometry? Well, no. In fact, I lost my glasses on the first full day of our vacation(same day as the sunburnt kayaking incidentally - so not a lot going right that day), when we were staying out on the eastern shore of Maryland. I went out sailing on a little one person sail boat... something I haven't done since I was 13 or so, and something I've never done well. A gust of wind came up and I sent the boat one way when I should have sent it the other and thus I ended up floating in the Choptank river. Unfortunately I didn't realize my glasses didn't come back out of the river with me until I was well away from area I tipped. While certainly not ideal, I had been wanting new glasses for a while and I'm fairly functional even without my glasses... so I wasn't completely incapacitated. We drove up to Dover from Lewes one morning, intending to walk in to a Lenscrafters, get me an eye exam, pick out a pair of glasses, and hopefully be back on the beach in the early afternoon. No dice... apparently Delaware, Rhode Island, and Oklahoma are the three states that don't let Lenscrafters and the like have their own in house eye exams, so it took all day to get me a walk in appointment at a local optometrist and get me glasses. On the bright side, we did get to spend some time in a mall and historic downtown Dover... which is about as exciting as it sounds. So in summary: If you lose your glasses in Delaware and don't have a current prescription, drive to a different state... luckily it's not very big.


5. Also in Delaware: Apparently steamed crabs don't come with Old Bay on them by default.

As seen above, I ordered a dozen crabs from Lazy Susan's and they came with absolutely no seasoning whatsoever. So, if you hate Old Bay, Delaware may be the place to go for your steamed crabs. For the rest of us, it might be a tad disappointing. I saw people in the restaurant eating seasoned crabs and they sold Old Bay and their own seasoning mix, but I wasn't asked whether I wanted them with or without... so part of me wonders whether it was some kind of mistake, but I never called to find out... and in places like North Carolina they do crazy things like boil them and serve them plain, so it wouldn't be so surprising to find that the people of Delaware also live like savages. Despite the closeness of Delaware to Maryland, I guess that's just another lesson that you can never assume people know what they're doing.

Here are some more pictures if you are interested. I'll try to put in some comments later in the week.

Off to the Beach

Anna and I are off to Delaware this afternoon, which, besides being the state everyone hates to drive through because they charge you like $30 to go two miles, actually has some lovely beaches (see above). The place we're staying(in the Lewes/Rehoboth area) doesn't have internet access, so likely no posting until we get back... though I will be checking e-mail occasionally at free Wi-Fi places. I'll resume posting sometime around the 20th.

photo by flickr user mmahaffie used under a Creative Commons license

MechWarrior Reboot

It seems weird to think about rebooting video game franchises... but it's a fact that there are current college students who weren't born when the first MechWarrior game came out... which makes me feel old and decrepit. Sigh. The above is, allegedly, in-game(or in-engine?) footage... and... uhm... it looks pretty darn good.

IGN:

This new MechWarrior is set on the planet Deshler in the year 3015, and places players in the role of Adrian Khol, a wayward nobleman who prefers partying and shirking responsibility over his training and studies. However, when House Kurita launches a massive invasion to conquer Deshler, resulting in the death of his entire family, Khol discovers a purpose to fight for.

There are ambitious plans for this new MechWarrior. The original MechWarrior games were limited by technology; now with modern computing power, the developers are hoping to really capture the sense that you're piloting a giant, walking war machine in the middle of an incredibly dynamic battlefield. While the two companies are still talking to potential publishers that could determine the final production budget, Weisman and Bullock explained that they plan to have a full single-player campaign, as well as support for a four-player co-op campaign, and a full multiplayer suite.

One of the key features is a sense of information warfare, using everything from unmanned drones surveying the battlefield from above to light scout mechs relaying information to teammates. Weisman and Bullock both explained how they want every class of mech to really matter in this game; it's not just a race to the heaviest, most powerful mechs. The designers want to reward you for picking a mech and sticking with it -- you will gain experience and become better at piloting your chosen mech, and that will translate into better accuracy and damage with weapon systems. This way, a player could specialize in a light mech throughout the entire game if they choose. It also means there are multiple playthroughs with different mechs. The developers also said the game will change based on your chosen mech class.

That sounds like a perfect game, but they all do before they've got a publisher or a release date... stay tuned.

That was fast

Today's xkcd, and then some apropos suggested search terms from Google:

Either Gödel, Escher, Bach is more popular than I imagined, or xkcd has some crazy Google mojo. I guess I should be pleased I wasn't the only one who needed to look it up.

Blood Bowl Multiplayer Thoughts

When I first gave my impressions of Blood Bowl, I wasn't yet certain how much I would be doing multiplayer... in general, except for games like Call of Duty, I'm more interested in co-op with friends than I am with competition with strangers. However, this is a game I suspect can never reach it's full potential unless played against other human beings. Even if the single player AI was awesome, which doesn't appear to be anywhere near the case, it seems you need human opponents to really learn the nuances of the game, since you'll encounter such a variety of different play styles and skill levels.

In fact, since I started playing online, I've only played a couple of games with my single player team... it just hasn't seemed quite as interesting. The main difference... besides interaction with so-called "real people"... has been the fact that you are forced to live with the results of bad decisions and events... and in Blood Bowl those results can be pretty disastrous. Now, in the single player game, the same things happen, but you can always revert to your last save if you want... nobody's making you try to recover your team from having its two best players killed by a rabid Rat Ogre. Is it lame to hit the "reset button" when you're losing? Of course it is. But when have I ever claimed not to be lame? For the most part I accept the consequences, but I admit to being so frustrated by my "bad luck"(read: bad coaching) that I've quit a game or... erm.. two... or, uhm, something like that... with no negative reprecussions. When you're allowed to do it, and nobody is watching you, it's hard to resist... at least for a person with low willpower.

So now that my lameness and lack of willpower have been firmly established... how is the multiplayer experience different? Let me illustrate with my first two games in the Penny Arcade Blood Bowl League. Game 1 was against a bashy Orc team... and it was going pretty well early in the first half... I scored a touchdown and had gotten some SPP(star player points - for leveling up) from hurting one of his guys... but then he loses his internet connection for a minute and the game ends. Kind of a hassle to have to replay it right? Well no, since he was defeated by his internets, I get a win and he gets a loss. I get both shares of the prize money, both of the MVPs, and two TD's assigned randomly(and the associated points). His injured guy? Still hurt. Pretty harsh right? Of course it is, since the idea is to dissuade people from pulling their internet connection when they lose half their players in a match. In this particular instance, since the guy clearly didn't do it on purpose, it was unfair, but that's sort of what Blood Bowl is about. What else? Well, one of my Blitzers leveled thanks to the SPP points from the disconnect... yipee! A pretty good haul for what amounted to about 6 turns of work... but what did I do? I picked the wrong skill... Grab instead of Guard (stupid G words!), where Guard is one of the most picked skills in the game because of it's utility... and nobody really even knows what Grab does since it sits in obscurity as one of those "Why did you pick that?" skills. In single player, I would have saved before I leveled up and reloaded to get what I wanted, but in MP I've got to live with "Grabby" the Blitzer who everyone is going to laugh at. Why is that a positive? Because once I was stuck with the skill I never would have picked, I had to think about what I would take next to try and make the best out of it... and I'm starting to get a little excited about the idea of putting Strip Ball on the guy, so that he won't just grab and pull players into squares they normally wouldn't be able to go, but also be able to get the ball out of their hands at the same time. Not what I wanted, but it could be handy... or maybe he'll die in my next match and I'll be free of his useless ass. Whichever.

My second game was against another bashy race... Dwarfs. This game however, was played to completion... and I won! 2-0! It was a pretty good game, though I was more lucky than skilled... but as you can see from the picture above, it was not a victory without cost. A dead Blitzer(pictured being fouled to death by meany-pants Dwarfs), one Lineman with a broken neck(-1 Agility permanently), and another with a damaged back(greater chance to be injured in the future). While still alive, both of the latter two player are out for my next game... leaving me with 8 players (out of 11) to suit up for it. Thankfully, the game will provide me with temporary replacements until I can afford a more permanent solution... and if those replacements have a really good game earning lots of SPP? As long a I can afford it, I can hire them after the match and they keep those SPP... which means my permanently injured Linemen get kicked to the curb... sorry, no injury settlements in Blood Bowl. Of course, now my Team Value has dropped to 900 from the 1000 start... despite the fact that I have a level 2 player. I don't think I would have bothered to try and climb out of that hole in single player, but now I'm fairly excited by the challenge.

So beyond playing with real people and accepting harsh consequences, how is the rest of the multiplayer experience? Fairly terrible, to be honest. The games themselves are great, but everything getting up to playing is poorly designed and kind of a pain. For example, the aforementioned PABBL is actually being administered by hand, not within the game's league system, since those "leagues" are in fact round robin tournaments... and thus you have a fixed match times with set opponents (I've not actually been in one of these leagues, so this is hearsay) which is a tremendous hassle with people in all different time zones, and not how the tabletop leagues are set up. In the "real" leagues, players play as often as they want against whomever they want... with the main stipulation that you can't play the same person more than twice in a row. At the end of some time period (a month in our case) the top teams based on some formula, like winning percentage times team value, will play in a tournament to crown the champion. Kinda strange that you can't set something up like this in the game, but you can't. So we had to create a dummy league, with fake teams we don't use, so that we would have a private chat channel to see if other players in the league were online... so that we can play games against each other with our real teams in the Public league (promising not to play games with randoms, but with no way to enforce it). Then, we have to PM the league commissioner with the results of our game so that he can keep track. Awkward, eh? The interface isn't any better, where even the simple act of challenging someone who announces they are "lfg"(looking for a game) in the chat channel involves: clicking a button, typing in the coach's name into a box, clicking the search button, identifying which of his teams he was talking about, and then hitting the "challenge button". I should be able to do that by just right clicking on his name in the chat window.

That said, I'm going to keep playing like mad, and hope they patch up the system, because the underlying game is simply awesome.

I heard about the Minstrel Show Transformers, but there's also a slutty Decepticon?

Apparently yes.

So how do the Decepticons plan to get the symbols, I guess?
Well, the Decepticons have very cunningly created a hot chick robot who they enrolled in the same college and put in the same astronomy class as Sam. And they made her a huge slut.

Wait.
Waiting.

There's a slutty Decepticon?
Yeah, she's a real ho. The Decepticons apparently have an incredibly powerful slut-making program, because she has it down, man. Anyways--

A pretty brilliant Transformers 2 FAQ at Topless Robot. The part about Transformers in heaven is epic... and apparently accurate.

My Day

After wasting so much time, I really need to get some work done, so no posts in the near feature.

Reason #783 to be thankful for not having cable

Kevin Drum:

The Michael Jackson tribute is currently being aired on 18 separate channels on my TV. Just sayin'.

And yes I know... but I'm not pretending I'm reading War and Peace while others waste their lives sucking on the glass teat... I'm just saying that wasting your life on the internet means you can avoid things like this pretty easily.

Mushroom Lasagna

A few months ago, when Anna was still new to the cheese thing, I made some four cheese pasta... it was probably this one($$$) from Cook's Illustrated, but I didn't blog it so I can't be sure... regardless... she really loved it. It was, I believe, instrumental in showing her that cheese can indeed be delicious... and not just something people throw on everything to irritate the non dairy consuming minority. She had been Vegan for like 10 years or something at that point, so pretty much all she knew about cheese was hearsay or faint rememberances from her youth... and one of the first dishes she had after deciding to do the dairy thing was quite a disappointment... so the pasta ai quattro formaggi was pretty key to her not just abandoning the whole venture. However, ever since then, she's wanted to make it with vegetables in it... because she feels guilty about betraying her principles... is worried about all the calories in cheese... or something. Unfortunately, no such dish exists as far as I can tell... if you are going through the trouble of getting four cheeses, you generally want to focus on them. Now obviously, there are all sorts of vegetarian baked pasta dishes, but the challenge was finding one with both interesting cheeses and interesting vegetables. I checked through NBR, Bittman, and searched the net... but nothing really jumped out at me, so I got on to Cook's Illustrated's website and started poking around.


Enter Wild Mushroom Lasagna($$$), which fit the bill like a champ... five types of mushrooms(porcini, oyster, chantrelle, shiitake, and cremini) and two cheeses (fontina and Parmesan)... score! Of course, the downside is that it's not always easy to find that many wild mushrooms... which we didn't. Of the three places we visited, we only saw some pretty sad looking oyster mushrooms and neither hide nor hair of chantrelles or shiitakes. Fortunately, the people at Cook's Illustrated anticipated this and provided a recipe for Wild Mushroom Lasagna($$$) that only uses portobellos, creminis, and porcinis. Not quite as exciting, obviously, but available at pretty much every supermarket. Next time maybe we'll head to Russo's instead of Whole Foods and have some better luck.


One important note... the recipe calls for Italian fontina and says to substitute mozzarella if you can't get it... not some other kind of Fontina. They mean it. I didn't listen to them, because I thought the knowledgeable cheesepeople at Formaggio Kitchen would give me the best possible substitute... and they did... flavor-wise. However, the deal here is hardness, which I didn't appreciate until we were getting ready to make our first cheese layer and had vastly too little cheese. Of course, we had the right amount weight wise, but because the Belgian fontina we had was very soft, it didn't shred at all really... just sort of made little balls of cheese. So instead of even layers, we ended up with pools of cheese interspersed within... not the end of the world, and the same overall level of cheesy goodness, but not ideal. We almost went to the store for some mozzarella at the last minute, but I worried we might overcompensate and make it too cheesy(yes, it is possible)... so we decided to just forge ahead.

Aside from the above fiasco, I think it came out quite well. The béchamel sauce was fun to make, as was assembling the layers of lasagna. I'm pretty sure we'll try it again with wild mushrooms and the right type of cheese!

Fancy Fast Food

I don't even know what to make of this blog, but it's definitely worth checking out. Apparently, they take fast food and... well... make it "fancy", I guess. Some of it's fairly visually impressive, like Spicy Chicken Sushi, but the real test would be to get people to pay $30 a plate for it... but I'm guessing the taste doesn't match the presentation. Still, it's pretty awesome.

Lynn Woods

Anna and I didn't do a whole lot this holiday weekend... we stayed local, nerding out via War of the Ring, and drinking Planter's Punch to remind us of Jamaica, instead of watching fireworks. However, we did get some exercise and spend time in the sun(!!!) by going for a hike in Lynn Woods with another couple on Sunday. I didn't GPS it(left my Garmin at work) or take any pictures (didn't want to disrupt the flow of the hike), but I can give a short take: it's pretty nice! Only about 10 miles from Boston, it's easy to get to for us... though it's off of hellish Route 1, which I hate and fear almost as much as 93 South, which is saying something. For such a nice park, it was also not particularly crowded on the first nice sunny Sunday afternoon in weeks... though it's clearly a popular destination for dog owners.

You can get a trail map(PDF) from Friends of Lynn Woods, which you will definitely need. We're were trying to follow directions from a hiking book that were fairly vague, and if the other couple hadn't brought a map, we would have gotten pretty lost... not disasterously so... it's not that big of a park, but it's still annoying to not know which way to go. However, even with a map, the park is a little hard to navigate. It has a system of marking intersections of trails, but not every intersection is marked... or at least not obviously so. In addition, their blazing system seemed a little... haphazard. I think it might take a trip or two to really get your bearings, but it seems that if you lived nearby you could walk there pretty often and, because of the number of trails, not get bored.

It doesn't have a lot of elevation or steep inclines, but you do get some views of Boston if you hit Mount Moriah and Steel Tower, and you can trek close to the various ponds. While there are flat old roads that go throughout the woods (the most heavily traveled areas) you can pretty much avoid these and stick to rougher paths to get a nice secluded hike.

One thing I still don't get is what's the deal with Lynn having a Walden Pond? If the real one is in Concord, isn't putting one in Lynn just being mean to tourists?

Photo by flickr user d4vidbruce used under a Creative Commons license

That's some impressive facial hair

detektor's new family member. If certain people's wives didn't have "all rights reserved" set on their flickr accounts, then I could be like all the cool kids and post other people's pet pictures on my blog.

Palin to resign?!

That just doesn't make any sense... from a political perspective, at least. Would she have a shot at the nomination as a 2.5 year Governor? I can't imagine so. There's gotta something more here, or somebody is giving her terrible advice.

Krugman: Be happy you still have a job

Now I feel bad about complaining about working on a holiday... Krugman brings the sunshine:

Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs — and as that grim employment report confirmed, it’s continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up with a growing population, we’re about 8 ½ million jobs in the hole.

And the deeper the hole gets, the harder it will be to dig ourselves out. The job figures weren’t the only bad news in Thursday’s report, which also showed wages stalling and possibly on the verge of outright decline. That’s a recipe for a descent into Japanese-style deflation, which is very difficult to reverse. Lost decade, anyone?

Wait — there’s more bad news: the fiscal crisis of the states. Unlike the federal government, states are required to run balanced budgets. And faced with a sharp drop in revenue, most states are preparing savage budget cuts, many of them at the expense of the most vulnerable. Aside from directly creating a great deal of misery, these cuts will depress the economy even further.

Unsurprisngly, he advocates for another stimulus. Since the majority of analysts thought the last one was too small, I tend to think he's right... but I'm not optimistic about it happening for all the reasons he states in his article.

How exactly can we get 60 votes in the Senate for another stimulus?

I'd rather be playing Blood Bowl...

Yeah, still addicted to that. Played my first multiplayer games last night in the public league, and ended up a glorious 0-2-1. I only really got stomped by a Chaos team... the other two were winnable, but I made some dumb mistakes. Live and learn.

If you see me online feel free to challenge me... my Coach's name is ArmLion.

However, you won't see my online today, since I'm at work... like seemingly no one else in the city. Working in hospital system, since doctors and nurses and such often need to work on holidays, we don't get any official holidays... we just get extra vacation time to cover them. Logically then, it makes more sense to work those days when you don't have plans and use them at your preference. Fundamentally, this isn't any different than getting credited vacation time when you choose to work on a holiday, but psychologically it feels much different to get "extra" for working versus having to take vacation... so invariably I choose to work. But every single time I do, I find the city asleep and nobody on the train and wonder why the hell I didn't take the day off. At least it will be quiet.