2006.04.29
Posted in House and Home at 3:33 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Mr. Strife will be making two upcoming appearances in my life. First of all, I’ve decided to order the statue of Cloud and Fenrir from FF7: Advent Children. I paid slightly more than I wanted to, but the damn thing is already becoming tough to find, and I still paid less than it’s already selling for on eBay. I had a tough time finding a store that had it in stock; Japanimation’s J-store was one of the few.
Second, I’ve ordered the movie itself from Amazon.
Both of them have shipped, so now it’s just a matter of waiting for them. I’m especially excited about the statue, though I’m not sure where I’ll put it yet.
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2006.04.29
Posted in Travel at 2:56 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I recently returned from a trip to Marco Island, Florida. It was a beautful location, though the trip was all too brief.
Something odd struck me on the flight home, however. My seat assignments on the flights were entirely too coincidental, and it was actually a little unnerving given what the seat assignments were.
Some background: to fly from Calgary to Fort Myers, Florida, I had to first fly to Toronto, and then on to Florida. On the way home, it was the reverse situation.
When I checked in for my flight in Calgary, The check-in clerk said that there weren’t any window seats left, and I told her that aisle seats would be fine. So I got my seat assignments as follows:
Calgary –> Toronto: 12C
Toronto –> Fort Myers: 3C
So far, things are looking OK. Both of the seats are aisle seats, and I gave it very little thought.
But something really odd happened when I checked in in Fort Myers to come home. The check-in agent never asked if I had a seat preference, and I never mentioned one. I got my boarding passes, and didn’t pay too much attention to them. Once I was getting ready to board the plane to Toronto, though, I noticed my seat assignments this time around were as follows:
Fort Myers –> Toronto: 3C
Toronto –> Calgary: 3C
So this made for three consecutive flights were I was in the third seat in the third row. A little creepy, even though I’m not generally superstitious.
Now, the logical explanation is that when I checked in at Fort Myers, they saw what the seat assignment on my last flight was, noticed that same seat was still available on the next two flights, and assigned me that seat. Without me asking them to, mind you.
As signs and portents go, I’m not sure what to make of it, but it certainly got my attention. Or perhaps it was just lack of sleep on the trip and this whole post is for naught. Who knows.
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2006.04.17
Posted in House and Home at 9:44 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I’m not sure where the whole Easter Bunny bringing gifts thing started (I’m sure Google or Wikipedia knows, but I’m lazy), but this year I got a few unusual things for Easter.
First up, a $20 Starbucks card (thanks, Lynn). Even though I’m not a huge Starbucks fan (I don’t drink coffee at all), it’ll get used.
And now, truthfully, all of the rest of these are things I bought myself, so technically they weren’t gifts, but here’s my other booty for the weekend:
- New hiking boots
- New sandals
- A car
- New battery for said car
- Parking pass for said car
I’m not sure the Easter Bunny will ever run around giving cars to people as gifts, and unless Mr. Bunny has some sort of fetish, I don’t think footwear is in the usual repertoire either. So, I had to buy them myself. Probably better that way anwyays.
Still, it was a fruitful (if a tad expensive) weekend. I even had the joy of buying gasoline for $1.04 / L for the first time. If nothing else, it makes me thankful I drive a Corolla and not an H3.
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2006.04.12
Posted in House and Home at 5:29 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I picked up the plates (or rather, plate, since I live in Alberta) for my car today. The registry location I went to gave me a plate starting with FAS.
In and of itself, this isn’t very noteworthy, but it struck my funny bone because of a story related to me from a coworker. Recently, he too had to obtain plates for a vehicle. The registry location they went to only had plates starting with EZY, and his wife didn’t want a plate with EZY, so they actually got their plates from another registry location.
So, when I told my coworker what my plate was, he just laughed. At least we share the same sense of humour about the whole thing.
Bearing all of this in mind, the real irony is that my FAS plate will be going on the back of a Toyota Corolla. As if foreshadowing this ironic occurence, I once saw (years ago) a bumper sticker that read as follows:
Speed kills. Drive a Toyota and live forever.
And there’s yet another layer of irony here, since the bumper sticker in question was on the back of a Honda Civic.
Or maybe it’s just my warped brain that can turn something as boring as a license plate into something extremely humourous…
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2006.04.09
Posted in Short Stories, Writing at 9:25 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
It’s raining. At first, it started with a few drops, but those few drops quickly became a shower. It’s warm outside, and I really don’t mind. This isn’t a deluge; it’s one of those rains that seems to cleanse everything it touches. The city, the cars, even me.
It’s raining on a Sunday night, and the city is empty. There’s concrete everywhere, dripping and running with water, washing away all the sins of the daytime and the weekend, of the worker and the partier, the resident and the visitor. Washing away everything. What’s left is the city itself. My city. Even though there are people around, the city belongs to me. The skyscrapers, the empty C-Trains rumbling by, the traffic lights and crosswalks. All shimmering with water, and all mine.
The rain is dripping from my shaved head and my grinning face. My coarse beard is wet and somewhat itchy from the water, but I keep smiling. The rain feels good. My pants are getting wet, but my fleece jacket is keeping me warm enough and dry enough that I don’t really notice. My shoes look clean for the first time in weeks, the water beading up on the black leather. For a moment, I am the rain, and I feel happy.
I look up at the sky. The cloud cover stretches as far as I can see from down here, but it’s not foggy at all. Just a nice cool rain. The clouds glow with that peculiar orange glow that comes from the thousands upon thousands of city lights. That same orange glow that you can see from sixty miles away. That same orange glow I saw every cloudy night when I was growing up and lived outside the city.
I watch the rain in the streetlights, dancing and flickering and shining. I watch the rain in the puddles, dripping and splashing and beckoning. I hear the rain falling all around, drumming and gurgling and pinging.
I just want to keep walking, and for the rain to continue forever. But I’m home now. Still, the rain calls me with the irresistible lure of its siren song against my window, and it plays its undeniable tattoo on the streets below. I make a cup of hot chocolate and step onto the balcony, and lean over the railing. Watching the rain cleanse the city, my home, and my soul.
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2006.04.09
Posted in Board Games at 11:22 am by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Yesterday, Jason and I trekked down to Sentry Box to give Ticket To Ride – Märklin Edition a test drive. It gets released officially tomorrow, so we thought we would take advantage of the opportunity to try it out early.
First off, the set up is a bit more fiddly and takes longer than for either the original Ticket To Ride or Ticket To Ride – Europe, both of which I’ve played numerous times. The merchandise tokens are a little annoying, both during setup and throughout the game, since it’s very easy to knock over a pile or bump them accidentally. And if you bump the board, they’re not likely to stay still either.
The game itself plays a lot like the previous two in the series, with a couple of twists.
- The game does not include the stations, tunnels, or ferries from the Europe variant.
- The board contains fewer routes overall than either of the other two.
- There are two piles of tickets – long routes, and short ones. You can draw tickets from either pile at your discretion.
- There is another type of locomotive in the deck – the +4 locomotive, which may only be used on routes that are 4 or more cars in length.
- Rather than for the longest route, the 10-point bonus at the end of the game is for most tickets completed.
- Most notably, there is the addition of the passengers, along with merchandise tokens and passenger cards.
The passengers are by far the most interesting addition to this edition of the game. Each player gets 3 passengers, which they can place on the board when they claim a new route. The passenger can be placed at either end of the route just claimed. However, only one passenger can be in any given city, and you only get 3 passengers, so you need to use them wisely.
After you’ve got at least one passenger on the board, you can opt to spend an entire turn moving one of your passengers between a set of cities. You can use your own routes for free, and you can use your opponents’ routes as well, so long as you pay one passenger card for each of their routes you wish to use.
For each city the passenger moves through (including the starting and ending cities), they collect the highest-valued merchandise token from that city, and these get added to your score. Merchandise tokens range in value from 1 to 7 points.
Many cities will contain more than one merchandise token, but since the passenger always grabs the highest one in a city if there are several, it pays to move passengers early in the game. Of course, there’s always the temptation to build “just one more leg” on a route first before moving your passenger.
The end result of the addition of the passengers is that the game has another significant tactical dimension, and another way to score points. Moving a passenger can sometimes net more more than a long route ticket will, so it can’t just be dismissed.
Overall, the addition of the passengers, the slight decrease in board size (number of routes), the emphasis on tickets, and the lack of stations makes for a tenser game, but this comes at a price. It’s not as light as the previous two incarnations in the series. It also seemed to be slower, owing a bit to the fiddly merchandise tokens, and probably in a large part due to our unfamiliarity with the board and where the routes and cities are located (making ticket analysis slower). Probably after a few plays it would wind up being only slightly slower than a game of Ticket To Ride – Europe, owing to the slightly longer setup time and the higher complexity of analysis required to play the game.
Scott, who was running the demos, described it as the “gamer’s edition” of Ticket To Ride, and I would have to agree. The Märklin Edition probably won’t play quite as well with more casual gamers owing to its higher complexity, but the more seasoned gamers might enjoy it more.
If you haven’t yet tried any of the Ticket To Ride games, I would suggest starting with either the original game or the Europe variant to get a feel for the basic rules of the game (which are the same across the series), then trying the Märklin Edition. Learning it is much simpler if you already know how to play one of the other games, and you’re less likely to get bogged down in the strategic and tactical complexity that way.
I’m not sure I would buy the Märklin Edition, simply because I don’t think I could play it with my coworkers over a lunch hour, and I’ve already got plenty of games I enjoy playing with my gamer friends. I wouldn’t turn down a game, though, if someone else was organizing it.
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2006.04.08
Posted in Board Games, Music at 10:21 am by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Last night I once again played Power Grid, but this time there were 4 of us. Chris and Dave (aka DJ Phreak Gawd) joined Jason and I for a trip to Germany.
After a bit of a trying week at work, it was a great start to the weekend.
This game, I was the ever-polluting coal-loving power baron. I got locked out of the Wind and Nuclear markets until late in the game when I was no longer interested, and only at the very end made a foray into Garbage power. I once again tried my “stock up and push hard” tactic at the very end, and it worked, although just barely. I think I surprised Chris a little when I spent 91 Electro on resources in a single turn, but I’m pretty sure Jason knew what I was up to.
At the end, it came down to cash, since 3 of us tied, and I won by about 50 Electro.
I certainly made a few mistakes, though thankfully none of them unrecoverable.
- I ended up in the lead early on, and the other 3 were content to leave me there, trailing just behind. But because my position in terms of cities was precarious, I also couldn’t really afford to not grab more cities early on, so I stayed out front, and paid the price in terms of resources. Because I was so dependent on coal, it didn’t take much to really hurt me.
- Chris surprised me a bit with the city building, and outmanouvered me. Jason and Dave were pressing against my network’s other edge, and it was an uphill battle from there.
- I wound up short on cash several times because I didn’t pay enough attention to my cash flow when bidding for power plants.
- I obsessed too much over PowerPlant #34. It took about 3 turns for me to realize that I should focus elsewhere despite how cheap Uranium was.
In addition to playing a mean game of Power Grid, Dave brought over some of his musical creations, which ended up being a very fitting soundtrack for the game (thanks, Dave). Giving the tracks another listen this morning, I’m really impressed with them. They’re right up my alley, and I hope Dave continues his pursuit of the hobby.
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2006.04.04
Posted in House and Home, Music at 6:42 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Once again I’ve caved – I’m the (proud?) owner of a Motorola RAZR V3c, complete with unweildy service contract. What’s up with that? I mean geez… next thing you know I’ll be buying a car or something. Oh, wait…
But nevermind that. Thus far I’ve avoided the temptation of putting Madonna on the phone as a ringtone. (Yes, I can put whatever MP3 ringtones I want on this phone, and no I don’t have to pay anything to do it.) Instead, My current ringtone selection includes a few choice cuts from the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack.
So right now, it is quite possible that some unsuspecting stranger on the C-Train will re-live that moment in FF VII: Advent Children where Tifa looks around, confused, then realizes that the guy she just kicked the crap out of has the FF VII battle victory theme as his ringtone. That one’s on there. Cheesy, yes, but the only people who would think it was cheesy are Square Enix übergeeks like myself, so I figured, what the heck. I paid good money for the FF VII Original Sound Track, I might as well enjoy it. Most of you folks out there in cyberland have no idea what I’m talking about here anyways.
Note to self: Change ringtone before this year’s Otafest, or face the ridicule of hundreds of fellow geeks.
I’ve been thinking about other ringtones that might be fun to have for reasons other than their musical value (or lack thereof). For instance, it might be an interesting social experiment to switch my ringtone to a cut from Hang On, Here We Go by Jet Fuel the next time I’m in the USA. It’d be a sure way to see who the Canucks were, since I don’t think many Americans would recognize the tune.
By contrast, it’s practically a Canadian icon, a sort of Hockey Night in Canada theme for the MuchMusic generation if you will. I can’t think of many people of my generation who wouldn’t recognize the EC theme. Some of them would probably start dancing involuntarily. Now that would be something to see.
Any other ideas? What other crap can I put on my phone as a ringtone? Or should the phone stay on vibrate forever?
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2006.04.03
Posted in Board Games at 7:01 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Sunday was my second try at a game of Carcassonne: The City. We discovered that we had misplayed the two-player rules the first time around, and this time we played the game correctly. I underestimated the effect the rule change would have and did rather miserably.
My big mistake was sacrificing too many immediate gains for the long-term goal of having better position in terms of neighbourhoods and position atop the city walls. By the time I realized what was happening, I was nearly 30 points behind, and though I managed to close the spread by about 10 points during final scoring, it was too little too late.
I’ll definitely have to adjust my strategy next time around, but I’ve also gained a bit more insight into how to do so, and I still enjoyed the game a lot. I’ll get you next time, Jason…
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2006.04.01
Posted in The Web at 6:21 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Owing to today’s date, I’ve developed a surefire way to separate the wheat from the chaff as far as blogs go.
Real blogs, with worthwhile content, don’t bother devoting an entire calendar day (April 1) each year to fake news that’s supposed to be funny, but merely serves to annoy anyone interested in actual news. I like the occaisional April Fool’s prank as much as the next person, but most of the things posted to weblogs as April Fool’s jokes are lame, and not amusing in the slightest.
For instance, we get crap like OMG! Ponies! from some weblogs. Come on Mr. Malda – isn’t it time you grew up just a little bit? And feel free to go ahead and whine about how it’s your weblog and you can do whatever you want. I’ve moved on to sites where there’s actually some content worth reading.
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