Mid-April Update

Hey all, long time no post. Sorry about that. Work has been pretty crazy this past... jeez, month or so now? So I haven't had a lot of time or energy to do any posting, either here or on my 40k blog.

Anyway, my customers are upgrading/going live on the 14th of May which will be... interesting. Right now it means a lot of work getting them prepped for the big day, and then it will mean 10 days pretty much straight of 12 hour days on site, including one ridiculous day of flying back and forth from Madison for Home Day while providing command center support the entire time. So, basically if I can survive through June I'll be good to go, but I still have 6 weeks to look forward to.

But not everything is all doom and gloom. My first performance review ended up well- apparently I'm doing better than average for my time at the job! I also go to teach my first class which was a lot of fun and turned out really well. I also got to go to Chicago to briefly see Des in between attending Adepticon, a big Warhammer 40k tournament/convention. I also went on a go live to Minneapolis and got to see people up there for a day, which was great if not the best timing. Plus, Spring is finally here and it feels GREAT.

So, that's about it. Wanted to let you all know that I'm alive but busy. Posting might be rather infrequent until June, but I'll try to keep this updated somewhat regularly, if for nothing else than to get steam out.

All right... back to work!

The past week at work was a bit crazy. I spent a lot of time studying at home and spending 10-13 hour days onsite with early morning tests and late night project work. Fortunately I think most of that crazy work schedule is behind me, at least the working at home bit. From now on I'm resolved to leave my work at work, as it'll take enough of my time away doing just that.

Fortunately I had plenty of ways to relieve stress over the week and over the weekend. On Wednesday I finally got to play a Warhammer 40k game that turned out to be quite fun. I took part in a demo game with an older gentleman (who is responsible for the pic above, btw) and we just had a blast going over the rules and integrating pretty much every single one into our game. Hopefully I'll be doing that more often in the coming weeks, as it's a source of fun that I've been sorely missing.

Rachel and I also recently went to a "Post-Halloween Smug Fest" where we ate dumplings. This was an awesome party, as not only were the dumplings delicious but I got to debate comic books and Star Trek pretty much the whole night. Plus I came away from the party with a borrowed copy of Snow Crash, which I've heard from many people is a book that I really need to get into.

We also tried to get some karaoke in over the weekend but kind of failed. We got to sing along with a lot of the people who got to go up on stage but unfortunately I apparently needed to bribe the DJ beyond my $1 entry fee to actually get up on stage and sing. Still, pretty fun, and I learned that apparently you CAN sing death metal karaoke style if you really want to. Cool the first time, kinda sad the second...

I've also started working with a trainer at my gym to build a work out, and I've figured out that I'm pretty out of shape. Hopefully working out 3-5 times a week will change that around as I really don't have the time or opportunity to do much else- guess I'll just have to make the most of it!

Finally, I've been watching AMC's new series The Walking Dead and it's amazing. Granted I'm a post-apocalyptic fanboy and zombie apocalypse tenured professor so take my recommendations with a grain of salt, but I have been blown away with the depth that they've managed to get out of the ol' Undead Apocalypse. The impact of seeing your loved ones turned into ravenous corpses was definitely the focus of the first episode, leading to a lot of emotional scenes as the survivors try to cope with the changes in their world. The "walkers" as they are known in the show are also frikkin' creepy, especially since they still exhibit certain echoes of their past lives- the little dead girl picking up and clutching her teddy bear before trying to eat you, the dead wife coming to her old house every night and trying the door knob... great, chilling stuff. That combined with the great production values makes for some pretty terrifying ghouls.

If you're interested in getting into the series the first episode is streaming on the AMC website- definitely the place to check it out. Unfortunately it looks like they won't be streaming any of the other episodes, but I think most of you know some... "alternative" ways to get your programming so I won't go into that.

Well, that's it for now. Lots of tests and projects this week like last week so wish me luck!

Until next time...

"Each man is afraid of his neighbor's disapproval--a thing which, to the general run of the human race, is more dreaded than wolves and death."


- "The United States of Lyncherdom" by Mark Twain

*Images used without permission from

Ave Imperator

New 40k centric blog DEFENDING HUMANITY is now up and running.Go and check out the progress I'm making with my army, battle reports and various musings on the game in general.

Victory In Our Time

So, I return the blog triumphant! The foul GRE has been slain, my computer has been restored to me, and the geekiness has begun to flow once again as water. Life is good.

The GRE: The couple of nights before it I couldn't get sleep to save my life, so I thanked the Lord on High for allowing me 10 hours the night before the test. I showed up to the test bright and early along with all of the other test takers, only to find out that a) the place we were supposed to take the test was huge, and b) there were no indications as to where the test was to take place. We panicked for a little bit, but eventually the proctors showed up and we were able to find our rooms. I was a bit nervous at first, but as I got into the test everything became calm. Sure I didn't know how to answer some of the questions, and I had to guess on quite a few, but they were educated guesses and I knew how to do many others. So I left the test thinking that I at least did well enough to get into grad school, and really that's the point, now isn't it?

Life after the GRE has been beautiful. I got pleasantly smashed throughout Saturday afternoon and evening, and on Sunday Rach and I got to go do a reading of Teagle's new work, "Pain in the Neck." The play is about a bisexual and lesbian girl in a relationship, their problems, and the maybe-vampire that is preying on one of them. There were some pretty tripped out fairy-tale sequences, a Co-op employee who is probably a superhero in her time off, and plenty of that classically witty Teagle dialogue. It had some problems, but for a first attempt it was pretty damn brilliant. Good job Teagler.

I've also begun falling into the black hole of geekiness and money that is Warhammer 40k- damn you Pechous! I've assembled my first box of Imperial Guard (men with flak vests and flashlights vs untold horrors from beyond time and space- go Joe!) and am eagerly awaiting a Poorly Planned Purchase that I made on eBay the night before the test (I was REALLY exhausted that night and impulse purchases of several hundred dollars seemed to calm me down... thank God I didn't win more than one auction). I will probably be starting another blog detailing my adventures in painting and battling with my army, so you won't have to worry about too much of that stuff filling up the hallowed pages of this blog (I mean, there's not a lot of geeky stuff in here, right? Right.). Suffice to say that I am having far too much fun posing my little men and am very excited about fielding a fully painted and built force in a couple of weeks.

Also, my new RPG campaign is going to start up towards the end of this month. Once again, there is another site where you will be able to follow on that vein if you wish called Obsidian Portal. It's an awesome site that allows me to organize everything for an rpg and present as much as I want to to my players. I had a tremendous burst of productivity on it at work because...

Work:... all of the computers at my company are down! Noone can log in, so we are all using my lab computers/laptops to survive. Unfortunately most of my completed work is on my compy, so I used this as an excuse to avoid work until the system is back up again. It's kind of hilarious actually, because the only computers that work in our entire multi-state company are the computers in the residential computer labs. Apparently IT is trying to fix the problem right now, but seeing their past progress I'd say they have a while before it gets fixed. Oh well, plenty of time for me to catch up on all of the stuff that I've missed since the GRE started. And besides, for most of my stuff I don't need any prep- an internet connection is enough to get my students all in a row and signed up for their programs. I'll do a post a bit later on the cool new programs that I'm doing nowadays.

And one final note for now, as I'm getting a bit tired of typing: it's BEAUTIFUL outside! It's been 50s for a week now, and next week it's supposed to be 60s! Man Alive I am excited for Spring! Speaking of which, watch out for an extra-special Easter post: there's going to be a lot of fun happening on Sunday!

Until next time...

"The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people."
- "The Enemy Conquered; or, Love Triumphant" by Mark Twain

The 41st Millenium... on your screen!

So I've been talking a lot about Warhammer 40k, but chances are that most of you have never seen the pieces, let alone an actual game. Well, I'm here to change a little bit of that with some pics of a recent game that I played. It was President's Day, and I convinced Pechous and Russell that games needed to happen. So we descended on the darkened environs of Chaos to play with little metal men.

IN THIS CORNER:



Russell and his 3000 pt Chaos Space Marines, featuring the combined might of the Thousand Sons and Khorne Berzerkers.

AND IN THIS CORNER:



Pechous' Loyalist Space Marines, the Ice Jesters, led by the heroic Marneus Calgar.

AND FINALLY:



My Eldar (aka Space Elves), defending the craftworld against the forces of Chaos.

We rolled to determine terrain and chose to compete using some older mission objectives. Across the battlefield we scattered 6 hidden objectives. Only one of them was the piece of intel/hostage/weapon that our forces wanted. Our goal was to have an infantry squad capture the hidden objective and hold on to it until the end of the game.

This is the field of battle. Objectives were placed in the ruin building, the patch of green forest, on the near side of the bridge, near the rocky plateau, and two others on opposite ends of the middle of the map.

The first round saw us with only our troops (common units, generally infantry) on the battlefield. Fortunately for me, my troops were all housed in dedicated transports... which happened to be heavily armed, flying tanks.

This meant that these fearsome looking Khorne Berzerkers were in for some trouble.

Unfortunately for us, Russell was about to start smashing our faces in with heavy infantry flaming Pechous' marines, axing my Dire Avengers, and Terminating more marines.



Fortunately for us, the mission didn't rely on annihilating one another, only capturing the objective that you can see on the bridge behind the demon. I managed to turboboost a unit of sword wielding wild women in a tank over to that corner of the board and take the objective on the last turn... but then Russell brought in some big guns.

That combined with a chaos space marine lord swinging a weapon so evil that it has a demon bound inside ended my poor red headed amazons and won the game for Russell. Still, it was fun, and I finally got to get some pics! Yay!

Until next time...

"BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD/
SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!"
-Khorne Berzerker Chant

If you are not a 40k geek, you can stop reading now

Really quick post here. First, this video:





Second, this link:

Scale Imperator Titan

You're welcome.

Gov't Money, An awesome weekend, and other stuff

So, I am now living on the support of the government. Yaaaaaaaaay. It turns out that applying for Food Support is actually quite easy if you have all of the proper documentation ripping and raring to go. Well, not ripping, but raring I think is still appropriate. Anyway, I went in, took my number, was immediately called up to a window where I filled out a blue form and handed in my previously complete CFAP (the form that gets you all the support you could ever need), then sat and waited for about 2 hours. I doodled a bit, drew up some new lists for teh geekedness, and was eventually called into Door 18.
Very few people get to go through Door 18, especially on their first try. Behind it are a bunch of people with computers, and you sit in a very short chair, one so short that you can barely see over the cubicle wall at the person processing your paperwork. It was a rather humbling experience, as the only way I could interact at all was to reach over this high ledge, like a kid handing reports over a kitchen table. If that was their intention, then bravo I say.
There I sat, handed over my documents, convinced them that I was in fact an Americorps member, and waited while the computer threw a hissy fit over my non-existant existant income (it's confusing, I know, but Americorps income does not count as income! Well, for the non-taxing gov't, anyway). Got my new form, headed down three flights of stairs, waited in another line in a surprisingly airport terminal-esque space, and got my EBT card (it's actually quite pretty and innocuous; bunch of fall colored trees, blue sky, looks like a credit card).

But the upside of that is now I can actually eat food without wondering how much it costs! Yay! And speaking of eating food, last weekend was pretty awesome. So one of Rachel's fellow AP people had a dinner party at her house courtesy of her host parents. It was in Edina, so we knew it would be a pretty good spread, but we were completely unprepared for the amazingness that was to happen. The couple were very friendly, and even had their own home brewed beer! (steam ale with an infusion of gooseberries- very crisp, excellent blend of hops that was not overpowering but definitely present, and a slight malt taste. The gooseberries added an interesting level of tartness to the beer, but in a very good way.) So there was a huge, amazingly delicious spread, plenty of wine and beer, and afterwards we had a poetry reading. This was actually probably the second best part (after the beer, of course), as we got to hear a lot of serious, funny, and homebrewed compositions that were uniformly interesting. I decided to be a bit ironic; you can find my submission here, once again by the inestimable Mark Twain.

On Saturday it was actually warm out, so after a good day at work (students at both classes!), Rachel and I went for a walk around the lakes, then headed out to see Waltz with Bashir. I really, really liked the movie on about every level. The narrative to the documentary was compelling, the subject matter interesting, and the medium it was told in was incredibly brilliant. It is also a very heavy movie, and can be disturbing, hilarious, and cause dumb struck silence in the span of 15 minutes. Rachel had some reservations about the film, though, particularly the fact that it only told one side of the story. This is true- the film is from the perspective of Israeli troops and no one else, which to some extent dehumanizes the Palestinians and the Lebanese. But still, any movie that causes the audience to be silent almost the entire way through the credits deserves a gold star in my book. I recommend it, but be prepared for a serious and kind of trippy movie.

Other things going on:
- won a game of Warhammer last night! My theory of flying tanks+lasers+undead, nigh indestructible giants=win was proven to be true, at least against Marines. Further tests will have to be conducted.
- I see faeries and their nefarious work everywhere
- studying for the GRE has begun once again
- I have mastered the art of scratch pizza making, and am now moving on to shepherd's pie

Until next time...

"If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the cannon's mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty. If it is loaded my immortal and inflexible purpose is to get over the fence and go home. My invariable practice in war has been to bring out of every fight two-thirds more men than when I went in. This seems to me Napoleonic in its grandeur."
- "Mark Twain as a Presidential Candidate," New York Evening Post, 6/9/1879

Not much to report over the past couple of days. Work at Skyline has been kind of a roller coaster recently- on Wednesday one of my headphones was stolen by a particularly ballsy kid, which put me in a pretty bad mood, but on Saturday my students actually showed up, brought more students, and we had a really nice class where I taught them to surf the web in cool new ways. Now on Monday the internet in the lab is down on 6/9 computers. The other 3 do, but when we tried switching the router on and off 1 of the 3 working computers stopped working and one of the disfunctional 6 started functioning, leaving me with no choice but to wait for IT.

IT and I have a special relationship now. I send them requests, and they comply with about half the request right away, but then take forever on the second half. 3 months ago I asked IT to take in a computer and fix it, which they did promptly. I still don't have the computer back, and to my knowledge it hasn't been fixed yet, leaving me with 9/10 computers in the lab. Other times they'll fix my half of the internet but screw everybody else in the building. I'm just hoping that the guy will be here quickly and fix the problem quickly, or I could have a mutiny on my hands.

Now for your geek report. The war is going badly for the Eldar. Even with evenly matched forces I can't seem to pull even a close match out against the daemonic horde. The autarchs have decreed that scatter lasers will win the day against our foes, but my hope for the two battles tonight are few and far between. Where tactics fail, strategy will have to win the day. Unfettered expansion on my western and southern borders will have to be enough to carry us through this long night. Meanwhile in Granada my brother/ghoul Niccolo has fallen to the unclean hands of William, Nosferatu primogen and all around dirty, evil Englishman. Massimo has gone into mourning, but will now use his increased wealth to hire and ghoul/embrace an army to take down William and anyone else who was implicit in Nico's death. Other weapons will have to be sharpened as well, in the event of the eventual fallout. Elsewhere, in the far North of the United States, on the shores of one of the Greatest Lakes of the World, a musty, black and white tome with the picture of a raven on the cover has been opened, its words sowing the seeds for a Year of Frost, itself merely the harbinger to a Day of Iron... have I mentioned I like foreshadowing?

Until next time...

"In America, we hurry--which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us...we burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime in Europe...What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!"
- The Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain

Damn it's cold out here!

So today the wind chill dropped the temperature down to -20. My power windows in my car are frozen shut, the doors were almost frozen shut, and ice glistens along every uncovered surface thanks to the 40 degree temperatures yesterday and all of that melting snow. Seriously, Minnesota, what gives? If you're going to be cold, then be cold- don't give me this wishy-washy, flip-flopping weather (though it was nice to finally get my car washed), as it seems to only bury us in even worse conditions than before! Grr...

So this past week has been pretty much the same as always at work- people come in, I deal with kids, and occasionally I help somebody. I've been working on a few projects simultaneously- trying to find free computers for a certain resident, working on some kind of recycling awareness program for the residents/staff, and still trying to get those #@#$ing GED orders through. It's kind of complicated, but basically I need 3 pieces of information about our company that nobody seems to know. Yay!

In non-work life, I've been spending a lot of time... and money... at Matt's game store, Chaos (located at Lyndale and Lake in Minneapolis!) Most of my time there has been spent dealing with the Warhammer 40k campaign that Matt is running. It looks like it's going to be pretty cool- we have a strategic map with all sorts of randomized terrain features on it like chemical plants, abandoned cities and whatnot. Some people got luckier than others with the whole randomized bit- Caleb's Tau got kind of screwed as he started with half of the territory that everyone else started with and kind of crappy resources, while Greg's Orks and my Eldar are pumping out resources like nobody's business. Pechous might have the greatest advantage, however, as he is in prime position to quickly triple the amount of territory he controls thanks to a multitude of strategically placed abandoned fortresses that he found... Well, I was planning on killing him anyway...

I also did some shopping at Chaos. Most of my christmas presents for family and friends is from there, and I also picked up the rulebooks for Changeling: The Lost and the new World of Darkness. Now, normally I wouldn't buy rulebooks because I can (and have!) just bittorrented them from online. But when I started that lucrative process I swore that if I was actually going to use one of those game systems for anything AND the book was not out of print I would purchase it.

So yeah, after Russell's game is finished I'll be starting a Changeling game. It's a different rule set, and the experience is very much different from vampire, but the game can go from glamour-infused whimsy to heart-stopping terror in two seconds, and all because you accidentally broke a promise to someone else...

More updates to follow as I have them. Until next time...

"A wanton waste of projectiles."
- Mark Twain's The Art of War speech, 1881

Return of the Blog

Wow, it's been a while since I updated this thing, hasn't it? Well, most of the reason for that was me studying for the physics GRE which absorbed my nights for quite some time. The GRE was last Saturday... but I didn't take it. The why of this is because ETS apparently never got the money for my test and never bothered to tell me about that until I called on the Thursday before the test asking for my registration ticket. Now, granted, there were a few things I could have done here- like, realize that there was such a thing as a registration ticket in the first place and check my credit card statements. But still... couldn't you send me an e-mail besides the confirmation e-mail that I thought guaranteed me a place at the test saying that you never got my money? Oyveh Maria...

Anyway, with that out of the way until freaking APRIL (grumble grumble death plot grumble) I now have a lot of free time on my hands. Some of this I have spent cooking things, and other parts of it doing geekier things... like brushing up on Warhammer 40K.

Now, before any of you freak out that I'm going to be broke playing this game, two things:
1. I'm already broke, how much worse can it get, and
2. I'm not actually buying any pieces, codices or books; just borrowing, proxying, and pirating like a good boy.
Since Russell is already gung-ho for Abaddon Chaos and Pechous wants to be the Space Marines I am forced to play with the Eldar, aka Space Elves. (No, seriously, they even have pointy ears and everything!) So I stole the codex from online and looked up army lists, deciding on Alaitoc because I love stealth and snipers, and they have them aplenty.

Another thing that I have done with my life recently is go up to Duluth to go see Rachel's parents and get my snow tires. While we were there the Carrolls took us out to Timberlodge Steakhouse (Would you like to load your [insert already kind of unhealthy food item here] with [insert incredibly unhealthy sounding dressing/food item here]?) and to a concert featuring the British Quartet Cantabile.

They were described to us as a "singing/comedy group", which sounded kind of wierd, but describes them perfectly. Basically they are an accapella group that has toured all over the world singing songs quite beautifully and/or disrespectfully, and ESPECIALLY if the songs in question don't have any words. For instance, their first song was a medley of a bunch of famous orchestral pieces where they sang all of the different instruments at once, mocking it along the way. They also sang some really beautiful pieces without a hint of irony; one that especially got to me was "Bist Du Bei Mir." It's a German song that can be sung in three or four parts, and I have sung it many times in my youth with my brothers and my church choir, and I also sung it the last time I saw my great-grandmother alive. Hearing it sung excellently before a crowd was really awesome and definitely put a smile to my face as I tried to sing along.

However, what was probably their best piece was also the last of their program, where they took a Frank Sinatra song and sang it as if it were a broken record, skipping their words, changing keys in wierd ways and speeding up and slowing down at random. All in all, hilarious.

Well, I don't want to bore you too much, so I'll talk about how work has been going in my next post. Again, sorry about the delay in posting, and hopefully I'll be able to keep more in touch from now on.

Until next time...

"The reason I dread writing letters is because I am so apt to get to slinging wisdom & forget to let up. Thus much precious time is lost."
- Letter to James Redpath from Mark Twain, 6/15/1871