My latest online addiction is the gleemax site hosted by our friends at Wizards of the Coast. They are in alpha (i.e. free) testing of this online boardgame site. It has several of WotCs best acquisitions: Acquire, Axis & Allies, Guillotine, Vegas Showdown and the one that I can’t stop playing, Robo Rally. You can play solo against bots or you can try to get some other humans to play. I can only speak to the AI for Robo Rally (as that’s all I’ve played), but it’s pretty good. The bots are hard to beat. The code is being worked on and they appear to be responding to user feedback. I’ve seen one update so far. I haven’t come across any major bugs. My big complaint right now is that it can get laggy when you play with other humans. It’s all in java, so it works great on my Mac and should be fine in linux and that other OS. My handle is (of course) HazMatt, join me for a game sometime.

There’s definitely something funky going on with the weather when it snows on April 19th.

Last year (2007) saw a record low for this day at 35 F. Today just about matches that. Oddly enough, 2005 holds the record high temperature of 68 F. Weird.

There are a small handful of windows apps that I think are pretty useful and don’t have better Mac equivalents. BgInfo is one of these. It used to be an independent freeware app, but microsquish thought it was cool enough to acquire - at least it’s still free (for now). What is does is simple: it aggregates a bunch of different bits of information about the system it’s running on and merges it with the desktop background. This may not seem very useful to most people since most people only use one or two different computers and don’t really care about things like their Default Gateway or MAC Address. However, for those who work in a dev/IT environment where they switch between a bunch of different machines or better yet, have a lab of boxes that they don’t use regularly - this is extremely handy.

Now I could not find a utility that does what BgInfo does for the Mac - at least not specifically. Then I remembered about GeekTool. GeekTool is the Shopsmith to BgInfo’s hand drill. I plan to write another post dedicated to Mac utilities where I’ll go into more detail on GeekTool, but for now we’ll just get started. If you know of something else that does what BgInfo can do on the Mac, please let me know - I’m not totally addicted to big hammers.

Here’s what you do:

• Install GeekTool
• Paste the following ruby code into a text file and save it somewhere like ~/scripts or ~/Library/Scripts as sys_info.rb:

@user = `whoami`
@system = `scutil --get ComputerName`
@ip = (`ifconfig en0 | grep netmask`).split
@vers = (`sw_vers | grep ProductVersion`).split
@hw_info = `system_profiler`
@up = (`uptime`).split(',')
 
if @vers[1].include?('10.5')
  @hw_name = 'Processor Name'
  @hw_speed = 'Processor Speed'
else
  @hw_name = 'CPU Type'
  @hw_speed = 'CPU Speed'
end
 
puts "User: #{@user}"
puts "Computer: #{@system}"
puts "IP: #{@ip[1]}"
puts "OS Version: #{@vers[1]}"
puts @hw_info.grep(/#{@hw_name}/).to_s.strip
puts @hw_info.grep(/#{@hw_speed}/)[0].to_s.strip
puts @hw_info.grep(/Memory:/)[0].to_s.strip
puts "Uptime: #{@up[0].strip}"

• Open the GeekTool preference pane and add a new entry. Select Shell from the pop-up menu.

• In the Command box, enter: ruby ~/scripts/sys_info.rb (change to your path and file name)
• Set the refresh for 300
• Now you should see a box somewhere on your desktop and it should have 8 lines of juicy info.
• Play with the other tabs to set the font style and background.
• You can drag and resize the box to wherever you like.

I know this works on OS X Tiger and Leopard and it should work fine on Panther. BTW - GeekTool works great on Leopard.
If you have any suggestions, changes or additions to this, please share.

At 11:30 on a Friday morning, have the executive assistant send a company-wide meeting invitation for 4:45 - 6PM that day.  Make the subject something like: ‘All employee meeting’ and don’t give any other details.

Watch the fun ensue.

Sadly, the box that several of us shared and used as a web/ftp/wiki/etc. server is going away. We did really well with a Mac mini and some spare bandwidth that some of the guys employer didn’t mind us using. On the plus side, now that I’m paying for hosting I’m getting a whole bunch of added admin features that were difficult to access before and often required a lot of hand tweaking of server settings and conf files that I didn’t always feel comfortable making on a shared server. I’m now with Site5 (http://www.site5.com) and so far they’ve been great. The plan is reasonably priced, they have almost all of the apps/tools that I want and performance has been good. Plus their admin control panel web-app is great. Look for some content and cosmetic changes coming soon.

At my last job there was an established group that met every Friday during lunch to play euros. I was a regular participant. This is something that I have definitely missed since starting my new job downtown. So I did something about it.
I posted a message to one of the Portland games related email lists and to a local Portland forum on the geek. I suggested meeting weekly in the mezzanine of my building. I didn’t get a huge response, but of the few people that did express interest, a couple of them have become regulars. Once it looked like this would happen, I started a google group for us.

So far we have had 2-3 people each Thursday. We’re played Ra, Yspahan, Category 5 and Blue Moon so far. The space is actually pretty nice with a lot of tables and chairs. There’s plenty of room for more people.

The group still feels a bit tenuous with only 3 of us, as it’s hard for all of us to get there every week. I need to publicize this a bit so that we can get a few more regulars. I may sign up with meetup or try to find a directory of local gaming groups that I remember seeing once.

Regardless, it’s been great to get a bit more gaming squeezed into my busy schedule and meet some new people. Drop by sometime, we meet at 11:30.

I hosted a game session at my house two Fridays ago. A number of us wanted to play some more 18xx, especially after a night of it at Chris’ recently. With some pre-game discussion via email, we decided on 18EU. The reasons included: we had 4-5 players, none of us had played it before, we all had played at least a couple of other 18xx games before, I could get it setup ahead of time as I own it and the rules were available online (so we could read them in advance). As it turned out this extra level of planning really made a difference to the length and pace of the game.  The group ended up being: Kent, Mike, Eric, George and Myself.
18EU differs from many other 18xx variants in that there are no private companies. The opening auction is for the 15 minor companies. It’s similar to a dutch auction and they all have to be sold before the first operating round. Having not played before, it was difficult to judge the relative value of the different starting locations that the companies offered. I think everybody guessed that the ones that started in Paris, Vienna and Berlin were probably more valuable, but even those didn’t get bid up very high. We all ended up with 3, mine were all in France and their proximity worked out fairly well for me.

We all started building track and running our 2 trains. For the most part we were trying to maximize revenue and looking forward to merging our minors into corporations later. What we didn’t realize was that the minors are really just stepping stones to get the corps open. They are not very useful otherwise. This has a lot to do with their tile placement restrictions - they cannot upgrade tiles. They get yellows and that’s it. Not understanding the impact of that made for some challenges. If you hadn’t planned specifically for merging (often at the cost of some operating revenue), it got very difficult to connect your minors so that they can merge.

A couple of us opened corporations and we all started to figure out what needed to happen. We lingered in phase 2 for a long time as people made some decent money with their 2 trains. Finally, Mike killed the 2 trains and we all upgraded ok, but then he killed the 3 trains and that hit us hard as his company operated first and few of us had any trains.

From this point on, the phases moved at a quicker pace. Before long all the corporations had been started and the board was getting crowded. We all hit our certificate limits. There was a bit of stock selling and one corp. changed hands, but overall it was not an especially turbulent market. Generally we seemed to be optimizing our routes more than sabotaging others - this was true of token placement as well.
We were well into phase 8 when the bank ran out - or at least came within 100 pounds. Mike won by a good couple thousand, I came in second. We ended up finishing in about 4 hours with 5 players. That’s a very reasonable time for this game and happened because we had all reviewed the rules in advance and made a conscious to effort plan our next actions during other players’ turns.

This is a good 18xx game with several rule idiosyncrasies that I believe will make future plays a lot more interesting. There were several ‘ah-ha’s for me. I also want to note that the copy I have is from DeepThougt Games and the production is excellent - the board is well mounted and the laminated hexes and info cards are very nice.