David Morgan-Mar – Page 149

Aussie care package

Today I had a task to go up to the supermarket and select some Australian goods to send to someone overseas – someone who had no experience sampling typical Australian snack foods. I started i the sweets aisle, and I basically went bananas. By the time I left the aisle I had a dozen different types of sweets, mostly in bags, but also a few chocolate bars. Of course I chose the iconic musk sticks, although I’ve yet to meet a non-Australian who can bear to eat more than a single bite.

I had so much stuff I completely forgot to get anything savoury, and even neglected to get some Vegemite. I went straight to the post office to get a box to pack it all in, and did that at home, then went back out to mail it. It cost nearly twice the cost of the sweets in postage, but that was inevitable. The person I’m sending this too is sending me a return package, full of American goodies. These packages will probably take a month or more to arrive, but it will be cool for both of us to open them up and see what’s inside.

New content today:

The Australian Museum

I had a strange dream about baseball last night. I was part of an amateur Australian team who had travelled to the USA to play one of the professional Major League teams. The pro team was so much better than us that one of their batters scored 64 runs in one at-bat. Not a whole inning, just one at-bat (I know this is impossible by the rules of baseball, but nonetheless). The team figured this was plenty of runs, so they didn’t bother finishing their inning and let us bat (again, against the rules of baseball as far as I know).

I was now up to bat. The pitcher threw a ball, then another ball, with me being savvy enough not to swing the bat. The pitcher indicated to me that this next pitch would be right over the plate, so I better swing at it. He threw it well wide, and again I didn’t swing, and the umpire called it a ball.

I said, “As if I’d swing at a pitch like that!”

At this, the other team took offence and walked off the field, refusing to play because of this deathly insult. I was forced to apologise to the pitcher, the opposing coach, and to their entire team, before they would agree to continue playing.

Now, I know baseball and I know this is all extremely unrepresentative of how it’s actually played, but it in the world of dream logic it seems this was all perfectly reasonable. The dream ended at that point, so I don’t know what happened next.

After waking up and having breakfast, I took a train into the city to visit The Australian Museum, the largest museum of natural history in Australia. The’ve been closed for 15 months for major renovations, and only reopened a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to go check it out before summer holidays start for the schoolkids.

It was a rainy day, but that’s no problem. There was a considerable queue to get in ten minutes before opening time. Entry used to cost money for the past couple of decades or so (it was free when I was a kid), but it’s now free again after the reopening. They had a special exhibit on dinosaurs for which you had to pay, and most of the visitors today were going in there first, so I had a very empty remainder of the museum to walk around in.

The First Nations gallery (above) has many examples of cultural artefacts from Aboriginal peoples and Torres Straits Islanders.

This T. rex skeleton is part of the free permanent exhibits on dinosaurs, not part of the special paid exhibit on dinosaurs (that I didn’t see).

This is the Long Gallery, which was one of the original display galleries in the museum. I remember coming in here when I was a child, and this was always the most exciting part of the museum.

This is very cool. It’s the fossilised skeleton of a pliosaur, from the early Cretaceous period, about 110 million years ago. But it was fossilised in the place that would later become Coober Pedy, South Australia, which is one of the largest opal fields in the world. The same geological processes that created opals here mineralised the skeleton, turning it into opal.

Honestly, I was expecting more from the refurbishment, especially after more than a year. I’d assumed they were doing major construction work of some sort, but nearly all of the rooms and galleries were pretty much as I remembered, and even most of the exhibits were the same ones I’d seen many times in the past. What they’d done is given the whole museum a thorough cleaning and a new modern look – removing old faded signs, dusty cabinets, etc, and replacing them with brand new fittings. So it’s all shiny and new, but generally mostly the same stuff behind it. The did remove the old special exhibition space from what was a courtyard in the original building but is now enclosed space – it’s now a spacious interior foyer space. I didn’t see the new special exhibition space on the lower floors, so I suppose maybe that’s all new.

Anyway, it was fun looking around, and great to get free entry again to one of the best museums in the country!

New content today:

Secret planning diagram

Not much I can report today, as I spent most of the day working on a plotting diagram for Darths & Droids, setting out planned future story events in great detail. Obviously I can’t show the result without revealing major spoilers for the story, so there’s not really much more to be said about that.

Um. The weather is cool and a bit rainy. Tomorrow we’re supposed to get heavy rain. I have a trip into the city planned – to do some Christmas shopping, and also to check out the Australian Museum, which has recently reopened after a major renovation, before it fills up with schoolkids during the imminent summer holidays. So tomorrow I should have more to write about.

New content today:

Thoughts on designing games

Prompted by an online discussion, I had occasion today to think about designing various types of games. Specifically roleplaying games and board games. (By “roleplaying games” I mean things like Dungeons & Dragons – the original RPGs – not video games that many people nowadays seem to think you mean if say “roleplaying games”.)

I remember when the only RPG I owned was Dungeons & Dragons, but I wanted to play a science fiction game. So I did what many young gamers do and tried to design my own game system to support it. The result wasn’t great.

When you try to design something given only one prior example, you can easily get stuck into thinking that things have to be done the same way, and the design space that you explore tends to be very restricted. When you encounter a different example, suddenly whole worlds of new design space are made evident and open up to you. You don’t have to use 20-sided dice. You don’t have to make rolling higher numbers more desirable. You don’t have to have armour make a defender more difficult to hit. You don’t have to assess damage by subtracting points off some numerical total.

To really get good at designing RPGs, you need to be exposed to a wide variety of designs. You need to read different rule sets and play games with different mechanics. You need a breadth of experience. I have something over 20 different RPGs, possibly up to 30 (which is actually not a lot compared to many gamers), and so I now realise the first attempts I made at designing RPGs were laughably narrow-minded and amateurish.

On the plus side, designing a roleplaying game is actually not as complicated a task as what may seem easier: designing a board game. A board game is much more restricted in what the players can do, whereas an RPG is open-ended and allows players to do virtually anything. But paradoxically this very difference is what makes designing an RPG relatively easy. In an RPG, if a player wants to do something and the rules don’t cover it, you can wing it. If you’re experienced enough, you can even wing it so seamlessly that the players never notice.

In a board game, on the other hand, you need a clear cut rule to cover every possible situation that can arise in the game. You can’t just tell the players to “do whatever makes sense” or for one player to decide what happens. You have to design the rules carefully and meticulously enough that this problem never arises. That’s really hard.

Finally, in a tangentially related topic, I was playing Scattergories online with some friends today and needed to name a title that people can have, beginning with W. Other answers included the valid Wazir and Wizard. I opted for Walgraf, which I honestly thought was a noble title from some European culture.

However, searching the internet for confirmation turned up virtually nothing! The only two seemingly confirmatory hits were the rulebook for a LARP (live action RPG) named Blackspire:

12.12 Titles of Nobility

…

12.12.6 Viscount/Viscountess

12.12.6.1 Recommended title for serving a term with excellence as Champion in addition to winning the kingdom Weaponmaster tourney.

12.12.6.2 Recipient may substitute an equivalent title name for this rank such as Vicomte, Viconte, Visconte, Vizconde, Visconde, Walgraf or Pasha.

And the second is a campaign log for a D&D game set in the Greyhawk campaign setting:

There are a few snickers in the small crowd of nobles, especially from Lord Galans and Walgraf Deleveu. Lord Galans owns lands that now border on the Watchlands, and Walgraf Deleveu holds title to the lands between the Watchlands and Celene.

Now… it’s odd that both of the references to the noble title of “Walgraf” on the net are related to RPGs. I thought it might be possible that the word was invented by an RPG author and I’d learnt the word from some of the old RPG books I own. I checked the World of Greyhawk books, and they have a list of noble titles, which includes “Graf”, but not “Walgraf”.

So this is a mystery. From where did I learn the word “Walgraf” as a noble title? And why does it appear in two places on the net, both of which are related to fantasy roleplaying games? I am truly stumped.

New content today:

Saturday breakfast out

This morning my wife had an appointment up the street, and suggested I walk with her and Scully, so I could look after Scully outside while she went in. So we did, leaving early, before we’d had any breakfast.

Afterwards, she suggested that rather than go home, we continue walking to North Sydney and have breakfast at a cafe near the library. Normally on a Saturday I have a very simple breakfast of Weet-Bix with milk. But when I go out I like to order eggs benedict, because I can’t be bothered making it at home, so it serves as the “fancy breakfast” that I get on the very rare occasions when I buy breakfast. Eggs benedict traditionally comes on a muffin, but it seems people like doing all sorts of weird variations these days – sourdough bread seems to be popular. But this one came on a brioche bun, which is kind of the opposite direction, being softer than a muffin, rather than harder and chewier like sourdough bread. It was a little odd, but okay.

We didn’t get back home until after 11 o’clock. Then I wanted to go into my Saturday housework, cleaning the shower and bathroom, vacuuming the carpets and floors, changing the damp absorbers in the closets. I also cleaned up the balcony and washed the floor out there, so it’s nice and clean. Which was good because tonight we ate dinner out on the balcony, in the cool evening air – something we don’t do often enough.

Oh, here’s one of the drawings from last night’s game of Sketchful, by one of my friends – you need to identify the thing being drawn. I completely failed to guess the answer, but all the other players managed to get it. It’s two words, (4, 3) letters.

Answer

MEAT PIE

New content today:

Dog party!

Today was the Christmas party organised by the regulars at Scully’s dog park.

Here’s Scully with Scout, and the table of goodies in the background. Surprisingly, almost none of the dogs tried to jump on the table and eat all the food!

Here are just some of the dogs at the park. There were maybe 25 all together.

Apart from that it was mostly another comic production day, and then dinner out with my wife at a local Indian restaurant, before joining my friends online for a virtual games night, playing some things on Board Game Arena.

New content today:

Shopping chores

I went out this morning to pick up some new prescription lenses for my reading glasses (after having an eye test a couple of weeks ago, which concluded that I need to up my prescription a notch). They had made the lenses, but needed to install them in my existing frames, which they said they could do in about an hour if I dropped the old glasses in first thing in the morning. So I planned to get there when they opened at 9 o’clock, and do my weekly grocery shopping while they switched the lenses.

But when I got there, the lady told me that it would take about two hours to change the lenses. I didn’t want to hang out around the shops for two hours. So I decided to leave the car in the car park, which was free parking for up to three hours, and catch a bus a couple of suburbs over to a much larger shopping area, where I could get some new underwear from a department store, and also some replacement water filters for our water jug.

I got there, and was still doing this shopping, when the optometrist messaged me to say my new glasses were ready -just an hour after I’d dropped them off! So I could have done my original plan and just done my grocery shopping, picked up the glasses, and then gone straight home. Instead I was now two suburbs over and had to finish shopping then catch the bus back. And then after picking up my glasses I decided I may as well do the grocery shopping now anyway, as I was there at the supermarket.

Anyway, I ended up not getting home until 11:30. I did a bunch of little chores: getting the mini Christmas tree from the garage, and the lights. I added another new greeting card design to my Etsy store. I made a couple of comic strips. Did a bit of cleaning up. Made fried rice for dinner.

It was a real bits and pieces day.

New content today:

Catch up lunch

Today I had a lunch appointment with a friend to catch up and have a chat. We don’t see each other much since he left the company we used to work for, so I like to schedule lunch every now and then, where we can just chat and share stories about what we’re up to. This guy is a major creative inspiration for me, and he’s always working on various projects. He’s into creating board and video games at the moment, and told me about the interesting game mechanics he’s using, and the creative backstory writing he’s trying to do.

We ate at a place called the Old Paint Shop Cafe, which was indeed an old paint shop, now converted into a cafe. My friend recommended the burgers, and I had one, which was both amazingly good and amazingly good value.

Apart from the trip to lunch and back, I relaxed after yesterday’s exertions on the golf course, and worked on Darths & Droids comics, writing and production. That’s about all to report for today.

New content today:

Boomerang Golf

My golfing friend invited me today to join him for a round at Boomerang Golf Course. This a shortish 18-hole course about 60 km south of the city centre. It’s situated on top of the Illawarra Escarpment, a plateau that drops off in a cliff to a narrow strip of land along the coast. So in some places on the course we had views of the ocean, and also back north along the coast to the city. It’s not a particularly fancy course, but was nice enough. It has three holes where you have to hit over water hazards.

This is the 5th hole. You have to hit over the water and towards the yellow flag in the distance (between the two golfers). This was scary, because I’m still getting the hang of hitting my driver with the new techniques I picked up during the lesson I had a couple of weeks ago. On the first four holes I’d hit poorly with the driver, sending the ball skimming low across the grass. So I really needed to hit this one well to clear that water. Fortunately I managed to connect cleanly and made it over easily with a nice drive.

A couple of holes later is another water hazard, this course’s signature hole:

Hole 7 is a short par 3 across this small pond. This photo actually shows my ball after I hit my tee shot. It landed on the green, about 40 centimetres from the hole (I saw the pitch mark where it had bounced), and rolled a couple of metres further behind. I had a chance at a birdie if I’d sunk the putt, but I needed two putts, so scored par.

I did however manage a birdie on a later hole, the par 4 13th:

The tee shot here is blind, with the green behind a clump of trees. I hit around the left of the trees and ended up here as shown in the photo. I did a pitch over the sand and landed on the green, about 2.5 metres from the hole. And then I putted it in for the birdie! That was the highlight of the day.

My friend had invited me for this round as it was his birthday. He said he hoped to score under 100 as a birthday treat. Totalling up our scores after 18 holes, he had scored exactly 100 strokes. I scored 103. I was very pleased with that. Previously on 18 hole courses I’d been scoring totals around 130-140 strokes.

We finished at lunch time, so stopped on the drive back to have lunch at a place not far from the golf course. Then it was the drive back home to his place, where I’d left my car, and I drive home from there. I got home around 3pm. Exhausted, but having had a really fun day out.

New content today:

Just another menial Monday

I had plans for today, really I did.

First up I had to take my car in to be serviced. The service place opens at 7:30. I got there ten minutes early, and there were already ten people queued up in front of me at the door (which wasn’t open yet). However they process drop-offs very quickly and I didn’t have to wait too long once they opened up. From there I walked back home – about a 25 minute walk.

Back home, I spent the next 3 hours troubleshooting my email, which had started acting up yesterday. If you want to skip the gory details, scroll down to Long story short: near the bottom.

Playing with Thunderbird, I managed to coax it to bring up an error dialogue, reporting that the security certificate for the mail server was not valid. It looked valid, so I did what everybody does in this situation, and clicked the “Trust” button. (I can see the cybersecurity experts out there cringing. Yes, I know, I know.) Unfortunately this didn’t fix things, and Thunderbird went into another endless attempt to contact the server. I tried quitting and restarting Thunderbird several times, but it always did the same thing.

I checked my webhost’s status page, and it reported that email was working normally. I logged into the webmail interface and accessed my overnight emails that way. Then I tried checking mail on my phone… It also failed to connect to the server, and it also gave an error message saying the certificate was invalid.

I figured there must be some certificate error on my webhost’s mail server. I decided I’d contact them for support. Their support interface first tries to channel your through their KnowledgeBase, to see if you can find the answer yourself, and I found a page about certificate errors. It suggested you might need to explicitly tell your mail client to trust a new certificate, and contained this image, showing you the button to hit on your iPhone:

iPhone certificate trusting

My error looked essentially the same as that image, except there was no “Trust” button! I mentioned this to my friends in chat, and one said:

A lot of things used to have trust/ignore buttons, but some wiseacre realised that the whole system is useless if people just click “trust” every time they get an error. Then rather than coming to the correct conclusion that certificates are indeed useless, they got rid of the trust button instead.

Digging around further in the KnowledgeBase, I found a page with email server settings. It indicated that I should use the webhost’s domain for the mail IMAP and SMTP servers. My mail clients had been configured to use my own personal domain for the servers. Now I recalled that many years ago when I originally set up my email with this webhost, they said to use my own domain for the mail servers, but they changed that a couple of years ago, recommending moving to the webhost’s domain. Since my email was still working, I didn’t want to fiddle around with the server settings – on the principle of if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. But now it seemed that with the expiry of a certificate, they’ve removed support for the old server names.

So now I had to try changing the server settings in my mail clients. I tried changing the server names in Thunderbird, but after extensive fiddling and restarting and trying different port numbers and security methods I couldn’t get anything to work.

I gave up and tried changing the server settings on my phone to see if I could get that to work. No luck. Now I was getting to the point where I considered deleting the entire account information from the mail clients and setting up a new account. I know from hard experience that in Thunderbird at least editing an existing account often fails to do what you want and the best thing is to set up a brand new account from scratch. Since Thunderbird had all my email downloaded already, I didn’t really want to do that unless I had to, so I decided to start with my phone.

I deleted my mail account from my phone, and then set up a new one, using the mail server settings as recommended by my webhost’s KnowledgeBase. It asked me for the password for the mail server, which I typed in. It said the password was incorrect!

Now, I thought I knew what password I should use, but it was telling me it was wrong. If it was wrong, I had no idea what else the password could be, so I decided to log in to my webhost’s account administration system and change my mail password. I picked a new password, typed it into the password field, and the verification field. The I typed it into my phone’s mail server settings as the password… and it worked!

I now had restored access to mail from my phone. Buoyed by this success, I decided to bite the bullet and delete my account settings from Thunderbird and set up a new account with the recommended server settings. I set up the new account, confirmed with a server ping that the server and port settings were correct, typed in my new mail password, and hit go. Thunderbird told me… my password was incorrect.

I retyped the password, it must have been 5 or 6 times. No luck. It kept telling me it was wrong.

At this point I decided to give it a rest for a bit, because there was some urgent stuff I needed to do – updating Sunday’s Darths & Droids comic with notes from our commentator Keybounce, who had mailed them in a bit late. I really wanted to access the comments on my desktop, so I could copy and paste them. But now I only had access to email on my phone. I thought for a minute how I could copy and paste from my phone to my desktop, and then I realised I could use webmail on the desktop and copy from there.

I went to webmail and logged in with my new mail password…. And it told me I had the wrong password. I tried again a few times. No luck – wrong password. What the heck was going on?!?

At this point I tried setting up mail on my iPad. I deleted the old account settings and set up a new account exactly as I had on my phone. Typed in the new mail password, hit enter… and it told me my password was wrong! Wait – this was exactly the same settings as on the phone, which had worked, but here it was telling me my password was wrong??

I tried to think what possible scenarios could have resulted in the password being incorrect on Thunderbird and iPad. I thought: what if I had accidentally mistyped my intended password in both the “new password” and “verification” fields when setting a new password, so that the password actually had a typo in it. And then when setting up the new account on my phone I had mistyped it with the same typo? As unlikely as that sounded, it would explain it.

Since something was clearly up with the password, I tried resetting it again. I typed my intended password, taking extra care not to typo it. After changing it, I checked my phone, and mail said I now had the wrong password! I typed the new password again, carefully, and it worked!

I went back to Thunderbird, and had it try to connect to the mail server again… and it worked! I opened my iPad… and it already had two new mail messages waiting for me, having connected automatically now that the password matched what was on the server! So everything was working again… and I think I got into a mess by accidentally mistyping my password not once, not twice, but mistyping it the same way three separate times before I managed to type it the way I intended to.

Long story short: I spent the entire morning up to lunchtime troubleshooting my email and not getting anything else done. But in the end I succeeded. Phew.

After lunch I did a bit of photography sales related stuff, preparing files for printing, and boring stuff like paying invoices and updating my spreadsheet for tax return calculations.

Then at 2:30 I had to go pick up the car. It was badly in need of a wash, but I’d put off washing it because I know when they service the car they give it a wash as well for free. Except when they phoned to tell me it was ready, they said the car wash machine was broken, so instead they’d give me a voucher and I could bring the car back another day for a free wash! Which is useless because I don’t want to take the car over there and hang around for an hour in the middle of an industrial area with nothing to do while they wash it – it’s easy and faster just to wash it myself at home.

I took Scully up with me on the walk to the car service place, and once we had the car back we drove over to the dog park to play there for a bit with the other dogs and owners.

For dinner tonight I’d planned to make an Indian style curry, with chick peas, potato, and cauliflower, to use up a bit of coconut milk that was leftover from when I made Thai curry last week. Only I’d soaked the chick peas and chopped onions and potato and went to the fridge for the Indian curry paste… and there wasn’t any. I’d forgotten I’d used the last of it a couple of weeks ago, and hadn’t put it on the shopping list. So now the only sensible way to use up the coconut milk was to make Thai curry again!

Wow. What a day.

New content today: