Sacramento boardgames tied with Chicago!

Posted on 2005-08-12 by Jim Vanderveen

Woo hoo! Thanks to Hugh, we just caught up with Chicago for the third largest boardgames meetup in the world! If you’re in the Sacramento area, check out our event calendar and come see why a cow town like Sacramento can overshadow a major city like Chicago. We’ve got an awesome group of friendly gamers, and we’re adding new events to our calendar all the time.

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PL/SQL errors in Oracle packages

Posted on 2005-08-11 by Jim Vanderveen

I can never remember how to get a list of compiler errors from Oracle PL/SQL packages. It’s annoyingly simple, but I wish they would just show up in my SQL*Plus session without requiring me to remember the stupid command!


SQL> @ pmtalloc-pkg
Warning: Package created with compilation errors.
SQL> show errors
Errors for PACKAGE PMTALLOC:
LINE/COL ERROR
-------- -----------------------------------------------------------------
2/13 PLS-00103: Encountered the symbol "HERE" when expecting one of
the following:
:= . ( @ % ; not null range renames default

The line and column numbers above may or may not be helpful, depending on how you format the SQL file.

This is version 7.1.3 of Oracle. (Yes, I’m aware that it’s incredibly outdated). I don’t know if they’ve done anything about this, but I doubt it. I don’t mess around with packages enough to have this little trick ingrained in my memory, but hopefully I’ll remember to search my own blog next time I have trouble with this.

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“Sacramento Spotlight” magazine

Posted on 2005-08-10 by Jim Vanderveen

I ran across an issue of Sacramento Spotlight Magazine, (SSM) which I had never seen before. Looks kind of like an arts/media-focused rendition of Sacramento Magazine. NB: this is not a compliment! Many of the articles seem to be puff pieces, written by the subjects themselves, or are at least highly flattering, a la Sacramento magazine (minus points). I hadn’t heard of most of the artists profiled in this issue (vol. 3 iss. 4), which is a “plus” to me. I decided to check out two of the artists–an author and a musician.

The author is Ron Montana. I looked for his work in the Sacramento Public Library and on Amazon.com. The library was a complete bust. Amazon was a little better–they had 4 of his books in stock, but the prices were outrageous. ($22.99 for a paperback?!?) I decided to buy one of the used copies of Ride a White Zebra. It should arrive in a week or three. I’ll post a review in the blog and on Amazon as soon as I read it.

The musician is Mike Comfort, former lead singer and songwriter for the band “Thirst”. Thirst is gone now, but Mike is still playing. He’s got four tracks from his album available on his website. “In my Eyes” sounds particularly good. His CD isn’t available on Amazon, but I was able to buy it directly from his website. He uses PayPal (boo!), but at least you aren’t required to have a PP account. (Good thing, too. It would have cost him my business!) I expect to receive the CD reasonably quickly, assuming that shipping time will only be a few days tops. Again, reviews will be posted on the blog and Amazon as soon as I’ve had a chance to listen to the CD.

I’ll see how these two artists stack up, and that’ll pretty much be my review of SSM. If the artists are reasonably good, I’ll overlook the gushing tone of the articles. If they suck, I’ll be out $20 and spend much time and effort talking smack about SSM.

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Harry Potter discussion tomorrow night

Posted on 2005-08-09 by Jim Vanderveen

The Sacramento Harry Potter Club and Meetup groups are going to get together at Naked Lounge in Sacramento to discuss the latest book in the series. See the event page for details, RSVP, etc.

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A touching story

Posted on 2005-08-09 by Jim Vanderveen

A little bit of humor courtesy of “The Punk”. Thanks for the email, Becky!

Here’s a truly heartwarming story about the bond formed between a little girl and some construction workers that makes you believe that we CAN make a difference when we give a child the gift of our time…

A young family moved into a house, next door to a vacant lot. One day a construction crew turned up to start building a house on the empty lot. The young family’s 5-year-old daughter naturally took an interest in all the activity going on next door and spent much of each day observing the workers. Eventually the construction crew, all of them gems-in-the-rough, more or less adopted her as a kind of project mascot.

They chatted with her, let her sit with them while they had coffee and lunch breaks and gave her little jobs to do here and there to make her feel important.

At the end of the first week they even presented her with a pay envelope containing a couple of dollars. The little girl took this home to her mother who said all the appropriate words of admiration and suggested that they take the two dollar “pay” she had received to the bank the next day to start a savings account.

When they got to the bank, the teller was equally impressed and asked the little girl how she had come by her very own pay check at such a young age.

The little girl proudly replied, “I worked last week with the crew building the house next door to us.”

“My goodness gracious,” said the teller, “and will you be working on the house again this week, too?”

The little girl replied, “I will if those assholes at Home Depot ever deliver the fucking sheet rock!”

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Is Harry a horcrux?

Posted on 2005-08-07 by Jim Vanderveen

If you haven’t finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince yet, don’t read this post!
Continue reading →

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New game at home, “Candamir”

Posted on 2005-08-06 by Jim Vanderveen

Last week I picked up a new game, Candamir: The First Settlers.
Candamir box cover
I’ve played it a few times so far, and it’s pretty good. I thought I would share some analysis I’ve done on the tiles and movement cards.
Continue reading →

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Crock pot BBQ’d beef

Posted on 2005-08-06 by Jim Vanderveen

My wife got this great, easy recipe for BBQ’d beef from Judy Shields, one of her co-workers.

Ingredients:
– 2.5 lb beef roast (a pot roast worked very well for us)
– 12 oz bottle of beer
– 1/2 onion, sliced
– garlic salt
– seasoning salt
– ground pepper
– 1 c BBQ sauce (Uncle Dougie’s are our favorites)

Put everything except the BBQ sauce in a crock pot and cook for about 8 hours on low or medium. Add the BBQ sauce, turn the crock pot to high, and cook for another hour.

At this point, you can pull the beef out and slice it. It’s pretty tasty this way, but if you can put the crock pot in the frig overnight and shred the cooled beef the next day, it’s even better. Strain the juice back into the shredded beef and you’ve got some awesome BBQ!

We’ve also made this using a cross-rib roast, but this cut didn’t have enough fat for the beef to be easily shredded–we had to slice this roast. Still very good, just not as easy to arrange on a bun this way.

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My BoardGameGeek profile is active again!

Posted on 2005-08-06 by Jim Vanderveen

I registered a profile on BoardGameGeek (BGG) back in February of 2004. At the time, I was using a dial-up connection which was only reaching about 30 kbit/s. This proved to be painfully slow for the BGG site, particularly when I was trying to enter all the games in my collection. But I’ve now got a nice DSL connection which makes the site pleasant to use, so I’m back on BoardGameGeek. Hopefully all my gaming friends from the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup, the Sacramento Boardgames Club, SABA, and the Sacramento Gaming Community will drop by to check out my boardgame collection once I’ve got everything entered. My only problem now is that most of my games are in storage until my remodeling project is completed. 🙁

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We have a dishwasher!

Posted on 2005-08-03 by Jim Vanderveen

Remodel journal 2005-07-28 thru 07-31: (NB Somebody emailed asking why I dated these journal entries. I try to take pictures while I’m working, but I usually don’t have time/energy to write up a post or tweak and upload the photos at that time. I write up the post at my leisure, and leave the posting date as-is, but I put the work date in the journal entry.)

VERY nice dishwasher in cheapass \"cabinet\"
I spent a few vacation days and the weekend getting our new dishwasher hooked up. This is a big win for us–not so much because of the automatic dishwasher itself, but because it doubles the amount of counter space we have available in the kitchen. (Not having to wash dishes by hand is nice, too. But the counter space was critical!)
Continue reading →

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