July 2008 Archives

I was not a fan of canned tuna as a youngster. But something Marty said a while ago about the sandwich made me try one. I found out that I like them now. But I am particular on how they are made. The bread must be high quality and should be able to stand on its own. The same goes for the cheese.

Melt two ounces of butter in a pan. Take two slices of H.E.B.'s jalapeno pepper cheese bread and soak up the butter on one side. Leave that side down on the pan and place a slice of Boar's Head Monterrey pepper jack cheese on top of the bread. Spoon half a package of Starkist chunk light tuna in water on top of one of the slices of bread. Season liberally with salt, pepper, Mrs. Dash, and red pepper flakes. Put the other slice of bread on top to complete the sandwich. Let the cheese melt and the butter brown. Help the process along by pressing the sandwich down. Enjoy immediately (even before you cook another).

The Simga 8mm fisheye lens was interesting to shoot with. The camera is leaning over the table at an angle and close to the plate. Even with two big lowel lights, there was not enough light on the cut side of the sandwich. So I used three 580EX speedlights. One one the camera as a master. And two held off to the sides in my hands that were slaves. All three were on 1/64th power.

The date is 07/29/2008

The players are:

I had some Strawberry Rhubarb pie at the Monument Cafe and just had to make it myself. It is simple to make too. Well, if you ignore the first attempt where I cooked the strawberries and rhubarb before it went into the pie. I was hoping to turn it into a jam-like consistency. Both both ingredients broke down completely and turned into mush. So, for the next attempt, I just dumped one 16 ounce container of strawberries and one 16 ounce bag of defrosted rhubarb into the pie after mixing it together with a cup of brown sugar, a fourth of a cup of ground tapioca, a tablespoon of cornstarch, some salt, some cinnamon, and some vanilla. The first problem with this version is the amount of water that came out of the berries and barbs. The tapioca and cornstarch was inadequate to soak up the liquid. But it turned out to be okay because I just poured it out after it came out of the oven. The other problem was that the heat of the oven had a dry roasting effect on the berries/barbs and not what I was looking for. But it was still tasty though.

Living in a UNICAT link1 link2 via

His noodly fireworks link via

Mamihlapinatapai link via

Galaxia link via

Defender of the Favicon link via

Vacuum Sealed Cookie Dough link via

Polyhedral Maps link via

Chocolate Cake In 5 Minutes link1 link2 via

After performing this trick with hundreds of celebrities, only these two chose correctly link via

Cameraphone link via

Talk about a complete turn about link via

IRC really does protect your password! link via

The 10,000 year gallery link via

Smile link via

Mushroom cloud cake link via

Stop an artist starving a dog to death for art link via

Time Capsule link via

Bush as the Joker link via

Flooded restaurant draws crowd link via

Recipies within Twitter's 140 character limit link via

Radioactive products (including chocolate) link via

Muppet show cake link via

Baconhenge link via

I make three batches of dough at a time. And I store the dough in the refrigerator. Which lasts for a couple of weeks before I have to toss it (the moist environment is a breeding ground for mold). During its time in the refrigerator, the dough will rise somewhat. I take the dough out of its container a couple of hours before cooking and let it warm up and rise the rest of the way on the night of the pizza.

But, for the last batch of dough, I tried storing the dough in the freezer immediately after mixing it. This dough should last for months if not years in the freezer. But it requires extra steps before it is ready to use as a pizza. I let it defrost in the refrigerator for a day. And then I stuck it in the oven with the light on to proof for eight hours. Which it did just fine. But it was now too late to make pizza. So I stuck it back into the refrigerator. The next day, I plopped it out and made pizza. I think sticking it back into the refrigerator actually helped a bit. Because the cold dough sticks to itself better. I can easily and carefully remove the dough from the bowl without deflating it that much. Which leads to an easier to stretch pie.

A case study in birdies: 1) close enough for a birdie if only a basket was there 2) and now there is a basket there.

Exxtra

We started off the night with a filler game while we waited for everyone to arrive. It was not much competition. Doug and I were fighting for first and the others were fighting for any points.

Easy Come, Easy Go

We still didn't have everyone yet. So we brought out another "E" filler. This one was tense towards the end. Everyone had two of the goals in front of them and were fighting over the final one.

Elven Gold

Since we have already played two E games, we decided on another E-named game. This is one we have never played before. So Ed was already in a bad mood. He doesn't like learning games on the fly. Fortunately, this one turned out to be easy to learn and play. It is essentially a bluffing game. You want to mine for victory points. And you have to decide if the markers on your spot contain a broken shovel on them. If they do, then you loose your equipment and get no points. Otherwise, you can either get the points on the space with a shovel or twice that many with a pick ax (which costs three dollars to buy versus the one for the shovel). I was able to guess correctly most of the time for the win. Amusingly, at one point in the game, Mike was out of money. So he was unable to bluff in where he put his bad marker. Since I went after him in turn order, I was able to dig where he dug on the spot which only contained his marker (which he knew was good).

Elfenland

To finish out the night's E-theme, we picked out another E-named game by the same designer: the classic Elfenland. This appeals to the computer programmers because it involves the traveling salesman problem. You want to visit every spot on the board without duplicating stops. Susan was fond of Unicorns that night.

Nick brought an IMP table for us to use in scoring. I don't think that it really helps our group, but it only adds another layer of confusion. That's Stephanie's belly hidden behind the pad of paper, BTW.

The date is 07/22/2008

The players are:

Hole number one is hard for me to birdie. So I guess that it is a shame that I birdied it when I was practicing and it doesn't count.

Six months must have passed by because Chapel is playing with us today. Good thing too since more hands equals more rocks tossed into the sky...

Wow, this course is a mess. Every hole has a pile of cans/bottles next to the tee box. I hope they don't shut this course down due the massive amount of vandalism.

For lunch we checked out Z-Tejas which was nice.

Vinci

Well, I broke down and bought a new lighting system. Two Alien Bee lights. And boy do they pump out light. My old pictures were usually (ISO 400, 1/60sec, f/5.6 exposure compensation pushing the default depth of field out to a more reasonable value) and now I can get (ISO 100, 1/250sec, f/10). That is like 8 times more light. I do need to halve it sometime, the flash is rather intense (even through a white umbrella and bounced off of the ceiling). Since it is lit 100% from the flash, shutter speed no longer matters. I can push it up to the max sync speed of 1/250sec. This will freeze the action at the table.

We started off the night with the classic Vinci. I haven't played this one over the web in ages. Ed still does and he was able to use his skill to come out ahead of me at least. Although Jon was able to win it in the end.

Tichu

We surged right out of the gate. Two tichus and one-twos gave us momentum. And yet, the other team flew by us at the end. Pushing out their chest just far enough out to break the ribbon.

Nick was not able to attend tonight. Fortunately, he was nice enough to set up a Renkoo invite so that others could still join. And three did. I did learn afterward that you can indeed raise your previous bid if everyone else passed.

The date is 07/15/2008

The players are:

Gallery of sawn in half cameras link via

The website is down (NSFW) link via

'Ghost' Photos through Quantum Physics link via

Grand Central Sunspots link via

Making Art with Javascript link via

A bike for the final frontier link via

How messed up is this? link via

Food photography link via

Animation techniques used in Wall-E link via

Never underestimate cheap, easy or stupid in home maintenance link via

How tiny Tim became a pitching giant link via

Creative Food Sculptures link via

MOE link via

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The Death of Gallium link via

Dymaxion map link via

Coincidence Photography link via

Visible supersonic shock waves link via

A soccer team scores on itself to potentially get into the finals link via

The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp link via

This is Mushroom kingdom! link via

Van Gogh's Starry Night in Second Life link via

Hamzy link via

Employees Only link via

Western Spaghetti link via

Rollercoaster Tycoon 3: Massacre link via

Unnecessary censorship link via

robotic duck that poops pictures link via

Man, construction is booming around this area. A house was quickly torn down and a huge field was cleared. I guess some medical complexes are going up here. Click on the picture for the big version.

I drove all the way out to Copeland, Texas for some Bar-B-Que. The original B.B.Q. plans fell through and I was jonesing for some. FM-1660 is quite the twisting and narrow road. It wanders from Jonah through Hutto to just Northwest of Copeland. The B.B.Q. turned out to be a disappointment, but I did pass a weird park or memorial or showcase or something.

The dam continues being slowly constructed. I wonder if you are going to be able to walk on the top of it since there is obviously a sidewalk further down the face of the dam. If not, I wonder how that will change the O.S.P.W.'s hole 3 and O.S.P.'s hole 16 since that is where the tees are located?

I got two back to back birdies. The first I can't believe it made it in. I threw it up so high, I thought it would hit the branches of the trees. But it didn't.

Tonight we explored the keep a little further. We actually did a little bit of tactics this time. We fell back and range struck a slow slime. Well, until our magic user was a little too slow.

My Warlock is turning out to be quite powerful. Usually, there are a bunch of one hit to kill minions that are associated with a boss monster. I found out that I could curse a minion, watch it die easily, and then gain 4 temporary hit points. These hit points last until the encounter is over and they accumulate. While my AC is not the best, the temporary hit points could be a good substitute.

Our evil Dungeon Master was unsuccessful in killing our party off this time!

McMulti

The group started off with McMulti. Which Ed has never played! And, of course, after we had finished, Ed spots numerous rules mistakes. So sad. But nothing major was broken since all of the players are affected equally. It did have the effect of causing more news events than should have happened. News is almost always a bad thing. And in this game, it really reduced us to the bare bones. But I was eventually able to slowly work my way out of the hole and build up a gas selling economy. I was able to buy cheap gas on the Foreign and Domestic markets and sell it to the Consumer market. I was pretty much unstoppable at this point and everyone called the game.

Tichu

After not completing the previous game, we tried for a game of Tichu. But even this game was not completed. Sigh.

Apparently, if you search on this URL: http://becker.com/?query=Dungeons%20and%20Dragons, you get this return code:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 GMT
Content-Length: 87.1 GB
Content-Type: application/quicktime;type=entry;charset="utf-8"
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<title>Dan's Hobbit Destroys You</title>
<updated>2008-07-09T18:30:02Z</updated>
<author><name>Dan Becker</name></author>
<content>A cool video.</content>
</entry>

The date is 07/08/2008

The players are:

For Sale

Ed held a somewhat spontaneous game day during the holiday weekend. So attendance was rather low. But I didn't mind since I was able to play games that I liked. I arrived just in time to play For Sale. It is a quick filler game that should not be sold.

Wabash Cannonball

Ed and Susan went off to play some Ameritrash game. But fortunately, Wabash Cannonball was easy to bring to the table. And it is a quick game too. Or at least it can be when everyone has played it before. My only failure is getting this game played immediately again. Apparently, people don't see the many different outcomes and there are too many other games to choose from for the next game.

King of Siam

But we played this interesting three player game. It was a tight game. First the yellow then blue then red then back to blue factions looked like they would end up on top. Paul backed the red faction too much. None of us could contest ownership from him so we both conspired another color to win. In the end, the yellow faction would win. I needed to get ahead of the other guy so that he would be forced to play his card after me. I ended up out of cards. And he could not play his last card because we would be tied in ownership and the last tie breaker was that the person who played the card last would lose. So he could do nothing but watch the battle resolve and let me win.

Imperial

I was happy when Imperial hit the table. I initially screwed up on the rules explanation and forgot that money is deposited in the country's bank during taxation. We figured that out when every country's bank was run dry. Fortunately, we only taxed once this game. So we played the correct way on the next turn.

This game has one flaw to it (ignoring that slow players turn this into a long game): you can lose ownership of any country. You then have nothing to do but watch while others play the game. This should not be a bad thing. As long as whoever takes control of your country runs it correctly, you will not lose standing in the game. You should have money in hand and sit and bide your time to buy any share you want. There are threads on the geek about this. Unfortunately for both Ed and Susan, I wrested control from them towards the end of the game. They went off to play a two player game and I ensured that they could not make enough money to be a threat to me. When the game ended, they both tied for second place.

I hope this experience did not sour Ed and Susan to put Imperial on their trade list.

Viva Pamplona

We finished off the night with a quick game of Viva Pamplona. It is a light and thematic game. And I was lucky enough to be able to roll dice that could ensure that I bully a lot of people around for victory points. The bull was just not cooperating for the other way to get victory points. He quickly ran off at the end leaving everyone but Susan out of the stadium. My hoards of bravery points easily gave me the win.

I braved the massive overcrowding at Old Settler's Park to watch the fireworks. I arrived around 7:30 and parked next to the water park. Strangely enough, with people parking on every available grass location, only a few people parked in this parking lot. I sat on hole 14 and waited. As dusk approached, four parachutists landed on the stage. What that had to do with fireworks, I do not know.

The sun took its sweet time to set. I had to relax and enjoy watching kids run amok -- tearing up the construction fencing and climbing up the hills of dirt for the dam. But all was not lost. I saw this police ATV run along the dam after 9 at night. Too bad I guessed wrong and poorly positioned the camera. The shutter speed was 30 seconds at this point.

The kids weren't all bad. They did provide me with a photo opportunity. These kids, which you can't really see (because they won't stay in one location for 20 seconds), are at least off playing in a safe area.

The single most annoying phrase of the night was "Oh, look. Fireworks!". No, really. Isn't that why you came here tonight? Finally, at 9:23, the show started!

It didn't really matter what exposure time I used. I set the camera to bulb and manually opened and closed the shutter. The tricky part is in guessing when a single firework would explode and how much of that process you wanted to capture. I kinda liked the non-visual ascents. Usually, when the shells were launched, you could see them rise on a rocket exhaust. But some of them were launched like a mortar shell. You could hear them being fired and then, some time after that, they would explode into brilliance.

The fireworks were over quickly this year. I decided to wait in my truck to see if the traffic situation would clear up. It was a solid line of parked vehicles trying to exit the premises. But after an hour of waiting, nothing changed and I decided to stop-and-inch my way out of the park. Even with both lanes rerouted one way out of the park, 79 was the bottle neck.

Monastery

We started off the night (well, day really) with the new Ragnar Brothers game about monks working in a Monastery to complete their prayer. The background was never explained to me, so I have no idea why three different factions of monks are competing to write their special prayer. This game is almost at the other end of the spectrum of rules cohesiveness as Antiquity. The special cases and different phases did not mesh at all.

It is hard to tell after one playing, but, with three players, it seems easy to get hosed. Initially, Ed was start player. He would move onto a spot needing four monks to complete and put two monks there. I would then fill it up leaving Susan all alone with not much to do. This happened a number of times. There is also a feedback mechanism to this game where you can buy more monks to bring in more money. Well, if you didn't get enough money in the beginning of the game, you are now behind the curve to others who were able to afford those monks.

Another aspect to denying players is to not help them complete a tile. There were situations when Ed places some monks on a tile, I could help him complete it, but I see that if I choose not to, then there is no way that Susan can work with Ed (even if she wanted to). I can get as much money elsewhere and deny Ed money.

And, just to pour salt on the loser's wounds, once someone completes their prayer, they can now penalize other people's prayers for a cheaper value than it would cost that person to place it themselves.

Tichu

We drove to Chuy's for some Tichu and Tex-Mex thinking that it would not be that crowded yet. Boy, were we wrong. I should have known better since it was a holiday tomorrow and that tonight would be a virtual Friday. But we were seated quickly.

Canal Mania

We finished out the night with another Ragnar Brothers game. It is a lighter Age of Steam -- although not quicker than AoS. We played with the second revision of the board (I don't really recall the first version being that broken). I was able to jump out to a huge lead in the beginning of the game and stay there. There were a lot of delivery cubes on my tracks and not that many on other people's tracks.

This game has been calling out for a F.S.M. to me for far too long. I have been trying to get Nick to create a FSM for the bidding convention, but he has been unmotivated. We are currently using this convention (but I don't know what its parts are called). So, this holiday weekend, I wrote a FSM in Python that reads in a recording of the cards that everyone had and their bids. It came out pretty nice. Although, since it is a character driven FSM, it can get a little ugly when it process words like 'double' or 'pass'. It has to have a state for each character transition. And, when its finished processing, it spits out html below. The players were (N: Stephanie, E: Wayne, S: Mark, W: JohnH).