The Sacramento Boardgames, Cardgames, & Miniatures Meetup Group held their first Saturday game day yesterday at the Arden-Dimick library. I’m pretty sure we had 26 people playing at one point, but I was too busy playing to keep track of people entering and leaving.
Kevin has put a list of games that we played on the ‘Geek. This list allows comments, so if you were at this event be sure to jot down your thoughts on the games you played or the event in general.
In this post I lamented the fact that I couldn’t realistically use my iPod Shuffle to listen to podcasts. Well, I finally broke down and bought 
a “real” iPod to give podcasts another try.
I’m listening to Mark Johnson’s Boardgames To Go podcasts, trying out the features I wasn’t able to access with my iPod Shuffle. I beat my head against the wall trying to find out how to place a bookmark using my new iPod until I discovered that this feature isn’t available on non-AAC encoded material. (BGTG is MP3 encoded.) To find out which encoder was used for a podcast, control-click (or right click) on the podcast in iTunes and select the “Get Info” or “Properties” item. To change an MP3 file into AAC, select the “Convert to AAC” item from the same menu. My PowerBook G4 does this conversion about 18-20 times faster than real-time, but even so it takes 2-3 minutes to convert each episode. (I foolishly selected all 29 episodes for conversion–18.4 hours of material took almost exactly an hour to convert.) I made sure that I sync’d an AAC-encoded podcast and started playing it, but I still couldn’t find any way to bookmark it using the iPod. 🙁 I think I’ll just post this in it’s current state, because I’m getting a little frustrated.
I’m still waiting for a microphone for my iPod, so I can’t even try making audio notes about podcast content. I’ll put some more notes up when I get to that stage, hopefully in a few days.
I had to reset my iPod while fiddling with it. (In fact, I’ve had to reset it relatively often since I started listening to podcasts.) I found this site, with instructions for resetting a “white iPod”, which didn’t work for me. I tried the iPod Mini instructions, which did work. I would guess that the distinction isn’t white vs colored, but rather how new the model is. I have one of the newer color-screen iPods. Anyway, here are the reset instructions which work for it:
One more thing I want to include on this post is a link to podsites. I haven’t spent much time on this, but it looks potentially interesting, and I’d like to come back to it later.
I found this little “IQ test” on Kevin’s blog, (which unfortunately doesn’t seem to allow links to individual posts). I took the test and did pretty well, so it must be accurate! 😉 Give it a shot, and link back to this post.
| Your IQ Is 135 |
 Your Logical Intelligence is Genius Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius Your General Knowledge is Exceptional |
The Sacramento Boardgames, Cardgames, & Miniatures Meetup Group held their second game night at the Arden-Dimick library last night. Turnout was a bit light, only eight people, probably because of the plethora of gaming opportunities available–four events in the past week plus three or four in the coming week. If only we had this “problem” more often!
Games played were Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers and Star Munchkin. I’ve been wanting to play the Munchkin card games for some time but had never had the opportunity before, so last night was my introduction to Steve Jackson’s silliness in the form of Star Munchkin. The game is almost absurdly simple–there is very little in the way of strategy, not a whole lot of thought required. Normally this would be the type of game I wouldn’t even think about playing. But the flavor text on the cards, and even some of the illustrations, are so hilarious that all the deficiencies of the game were summarily ignored. I don’t know what the “replay ability” of this game would be: the simplicity of the game would seem to detract from this, and the humor of the cards might eventually wear off, but there are a lot of cards in this game. Even the cards with duplicate text have unique and amusing illustrations, and it seemed to me that the players who were thoroughly familiar with the game got a kick out of all the new players’ reactions to the cards. I’ll have to play this a few times before I decide to buy it or not.
I didn’t play Carcassonne myself, but Kevin did. He posted a geeklist with a recap of the games, including details of the Carcassonne game.
One of my wife’s co-workers asked for our recipe for Tabasco chicken. Here it is.
> Ingredients:
>
> – 3 lb chicken breasts (boneless skinless)
> – juice of 2 limes (1/4 cup?)
> – olive oil (same amount as lime juice)
> – 1-2 Tbsp Tabasco sauce (chipotle)
> – 1/2 Tbsp paprika
> – 1/4 tsp seasoned salt
Combine marinade ingredients in a large zip-lock bag, add chicken and turn to coat. Marinate in refrigerator at least 4 hours, (preferably overnight), turning occasionally. Bring to room temp before cooking, otherwise the olive oil will still be solidified from the refrigerator. Barbeque over low heat (about 30 minutes) and enjoy!
I don’t actually measure the ingredients myself. The measurements given are my best guess at how much I use. Always adjust to taste, freshness of seasonings, etc. Go easy on the seasoned salt–it’s easy to add too much of this, and if you do the chicken tastes pretty nasty!
A few days ago I was browsing the ‘Geek when I found another cool feature: session reports by gaming group. There’s not much to this–it merely allows one to search the session report database by gaming group, but this simple addition to the feature list could be a great help to members of groups (such as the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup) who want to find session reports on BGG by and about members of their group.
There is some discussion among the session report authors in the boardgames meetup about the group name we should use. Since this is a freeform text field, and the group name must be a case-insensitive exact match, if we do not agree to a single name then the feature will be almost useless. Currently the two contenders are Sacramento Boardgames Meetup (no reports as of 2005-08-15, merits include being the official group name) and Sacramento Meetup (for brevity, “boardgames” being somewhat redundant on a site called BoardGameGeek).
Other groups of interest (to me) include:
My daughter and I played Candamir again tonight. This was the fourth game for both of us, so we were equally experienced. Until very near the end, “Leif” (red) and “Gisla” (blue)
were within one point of each other, with the lead going from one player to the other several times. Leif won the roll for first turn, but that was about the only good luck I had this game.
Gisla used her scout ability to good effect–she managed to find all four pieces of equipment, most of it early in the game. But she failed to leverage the +2 bonuses provided by it, as she shied away from fighting bears and wolves, helping the lumberjack, and taking adventure cards unless absolutely necessary.
Leif’s ability to turn snakes into potion ingredients proved worse than useless as nearly all “catch snake” attempts resulted in lost endurance instead of potion ingredients. Dumping experience points onto Agility only seemed to draw faster snakes or lower die rolls.
Gisla was able to explore very effectively, taking 14 of the 24 tiles by the end of the game, including 4 of the 5 cattle/goat victory points and the aforementioned equipment. (Just mentioning it again. I’m really not bitter about this. Not much, anyway.) However, her unwillingness to help the lumberjack often left her unable to build anything since she lacked lumber cards.
By game end Leif had only 9 of the tiles, due to frequent snake bites. He often went out of his way (literally!) to help the lumberjack. This proved to be a winning strategy as he was almost always able to build something while in town. Leif also actively pursued adventure cards which enabled him to take (and hold) the “adventurer” victory point.
In spite of being plied with mead by Gisla several times near the end of the game, Leif was able to make a final trip to the mine. Upon returning to town, he built a weapon for Candamir, laid down his 10th victory point cube and claimed the win.
Final score was Gisla 7, Leif 10. The game took approximately 1.5 hours, including setup time.
Lessons [re-]learned
I received the following email today:
This month and next, Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Because of uncertainties due to the way Jupiter’s gravity tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be sure that Mars has not come this close to Earth in the last 5,000 years, but it may be as long as 60,000 years before it happens again.
The encounter will culminate on August 27th when Mars comes to within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in the night sky. It will attain a magnitude of -2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide.
Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. Mars will be easy to spot. At the beginning of August it will rise in the east at 10 p.m. and reach its azimuth at about 3 a.m.
By the end of August when the two planets are closest, Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point in the sky at 12:30 a.m. That’s pretty convenient to see something that no human being has seen in recorded history. So mark your calendar at the beginning of August to see Mars grow progressively brighter and brighter throughout the month.
Unfortunately, according to this article, it’s not true. The closest Earth-Mars approach in history happened in August of 2003. But don’t fret overmuch since Earth-Mars oppositions occur about every 26 months. The next one will be in November 2005, and while it won’t be historic it’ll still be worth seeing.
It was too hot to cook tonight, so my family decided to try Hagen’s Orange Freeze in Carmichael.
I’m pretty sure this used to be the original Merlino’s restaurant, and the new owners apparently are sticking closely to the Merlino’s freeze recipe! We’ve tried several flavors of their fruit freezes, and even the “worst” one isn’t bad:
The next flavors up in the tasting order are grapefruit and watermelon. FYI, the small freeze looks pretty tiny to today’s “super-sized” eyes, but you’d be amazed how long it takes to finish!
The food’s okay–not great, not bad. We came back for the freezes, and incidentally got some food. They have a selection of hot sandwiches, but the burgers are the best things we’ve tried so far. Four burgers, four small freezes, and two large fries (which are pretty good) cost us about $25 tonight.
Hagen’s is located at 2520 Walnut Ave, just north of El Camino Ave, in Carmichael. Phone 916-489-7842. As far as I can tell, they’re not on the web, but they have a “yellowbook” ad.
“Recent comments” added
I had a few folks post comments on some of my older posts, and I didn’t notice them right away. The problem is that I rarely use the WordPress “dashboard”, which is the easiest place to find recently added comments.
For several weeks, I’ve been meaning to bolt the Recent Comments plugin by Krischan Jodies’ onto the Journalized-Blue theme that I use. So I’d like to thank jim wilde, Bitcloud, and RTO Trainer first and foremost for commenting on my blog. Additional thanks are due for giving me the best incentive to get off my butt and get the necessary hacking done! While I was at it, I made some minor cosmetic changes to the interface, the most visible being the longer “top tags” list.