KJToo

I had planned to do a complete session report for Marvel Heroes, the strategy board game by Fantasy Flight Games, but thanks to a long day at work on Wednesday I didn’t get to it right away and most of the details have evaporated. Instead of a full session report, here are some of the highlights I do remember:

• Unlikely Outcomes: When the Green Goblin goes up against The Incredible Hulk, the end result should be one squished goblin. Thanks to some truly awful dice rolling, it was the Hulk who wound up taking a powder, while the Goblin went on to threaten Iron Man. Also unusual: Avalanche beat down Wolverine and the Dread Dormammu sent Captain America packing. Some of this was due to bad dice rolls, but there was also some excellent use of villains as backups, which allowed for re-rolling, stats enhancement and other sneaky tricks.
• Awesome Soundtrack: Gus scoured his music collection to put together a excellent playlist of superhero theme songs (Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, The Greatest American Hero) and superhero-themed songs (”Superman’s Song” by Crash Test Dummies, “Superman” by Five For Fighting, and “Ode to a Superhero” an excellent parody of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” by Weird Al Yankovic).
• Cheap Victory: I led the Uncanny X-Men (Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm and Jean Gray) to victory in our first game, but a review of the rules between games revealed that I had interpreted one of the key rules incorrectly, giving me the Arch-Nemesis token throughout the game when it should have gone to Gus or Miscellaneous G™.
• The Learning Curve: It’s not all that difficult to learn Marvel Heroes, but we were all starting from scratch and it took me most of the first game to get used to the turn sequences and all the various phases and sub-phases within each turn. As a result, the game felt a little flat to me. It wasn’t until the middle of the second game that we really started to understand how Mastermind Villains worked (and even after two games we’d never had a hero and a Mastermind Villain go head-to-head in combat).

I definitely think Marvel Heroes will make another appearance at Game Night, and now that we’re more familiar with the rules we should be able to concentrate more on the heroics and less on the crunchy rules.

Posted April 30, 2007 Comments(9)

Here’s a little rundown on what’s been flipping my Geek Switch lately.

• Over the weekend I learned that Wizards of the Coast is releasing the Star Wars Saga Edition RPG in May. I like what I’ve read about the new system so far, especially the simplified Skills system.
• On deck for Game Night tomorrow: Marvel Heroes strategy board game from Fantasy Flight Games. I’m really looking forward to playing this and I’m sure I’ll have a full play report sometime Wednesday.
• I’m going to attend Origins in July, but I think I’m going to skip GenCon this year.
• TMNT was a fun movie. I really liked the style of the animation, the story was fun and fast-paced, and it didn’t pander to the under ten crowd too much.
• Forests of the Night by S. Andrew Swann is part sci-fi, part conspiracy thriller, part murder mystery. Oh, and it takes place in Cleveland, which is cool. The story involves a genetically-engineered tiger private detective who is investigating the murder of a human.
• Maximum Ride: School’s Out — Forever by James Patterson was a quick read. The chapters are each only a few pages long, so a lot of the book is white space. It’s an interesting yarn, but I could do without the talking dog. Really.
• I ditched my Song of Susannah CD set at Half Price Books today. I think Stephen King jumped the shark in the sixth installment of his Dark Tower series, and I’m not looking forward to reading (or listening to) the seventh and final book.
• I deleted ten episodes of Battlestar Galactica without watching them. New TiVo rule: if the idea of watching the backlog seems like a chore, just delete them; I’ve got better things to do with my time than feel guilty about not watching a blasted television show.
• Laura and I decided not to continue watching LOST after the show came back from its hiatus. How long can you string us along without really revealing anything? Two and a half seasons, I guess.
• SciFi Channel will be showing Lake Placid 2 this Saturday (28 April) at 9:00pm. The original Lake Placid — about a killer crocodile menacing a lake in Maine — was written by David E. Kelley, who co-created Doogie Howser, M.D. and was one of the main writers on Ally McBeal. Not surprisingly, Kelley didn’t write the sequel. Instead of Bill Pullman and Betty White, the sequel stars John Schneider and Cloris Leachman. I’m going to watch it so you don’t have to.
• The first season of The Dresden Files wrapped up a week ago on SciFi. Enough with these short seasons! I want a full twenty-plus episodes in a season! Raines, I’m looking at you, too.
• I watched Fire Serpent over the weekend. The movie was touted as being “from the mind of William Shatner.” Normally, I’m all in favor of open-mindedness, but after sitting through this stinker I’d kind of like Bill to close his mind a little bit.
• Speaking of Shatner, there are rumblings that his DVD club will be revived in the near future. Where do I send my membership fee?

Posted April 23, 2007 Comments(12)

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Yesterday’s 5 o’ clock shadow picture was taken a little after 9:00 at the Bonefish Grill in Willow Grove, PA. As you can probably tell, I was in a lousy mood after a second less-than-spectacular day at the office. I’ll skip the boring details; it should be sufficient to say that our upgrade did not go as planned.

In my college Creative Writing class, I learned that ascribing human feelings and/or thoughts to inanimate natural objects is called a pathetic fallacy. This was true when the rain stopped (”its work finished” or something along those lines was what I wrote) after washing Jimmy’s blood off the roof and I suppose it’s true now. The weather in Huntingdon Valley is overcast and rainy, reflecting the general mood here.

We’ll be wrapping up here shortly and then hopping on a plane back to sunny northeast Ohio. Surely it’s sunny in northeast Ohio.

Posted April 19, 2007 Comments(5)

As I mentioned recently I name my computers after characters played by George Peppard; my Windows XP box is Hannibal, after Hannibal Smith in The A-Team and my Ubuntu Linux box is Banacek, after the title character in the television show of the same name. Gerall Kahla calls this The George Peppard Paradigm and correctly observes that “hardware jocks” often give their rigs names that follow a certain theme.

In the past, I’ve used a Star Wars naming theme; before Hannibal was Hannibal it was Vader and another Linux box was FettThe same Linux box was also YTBN at one point: Yet To Be Named.. My HP 48SX calculator — arguably the first “computer” I owned — is named Torquemada, but I’ve never established an actual Spanish Inquisition theme.

Laura’s desktop, which she’s had about five years, is named Eeyore, after the donkey in A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories. When we bought her laptop in January I expected that she would name it Piglet or perhaps even Pooh (but certainly not Tigger). Instead, she named it Emily, after poet Emily Dickinson. The theme is a little more abstract than those I choose; Gerall might call it The Stuff Laura Likes Paradigm.

Do you name your computer(s)? If so, what inspires you to choose the names you do?

Posted April 15, 2007 Comments(15)

Back in early March, I bought an Ultra Wizard Mid-Tower case from Fry’s , not because I needed a new case, but because the case was $2.50 after a $40 mail-in rebate.This assumes the rebate actually arrives in the mail, which it has yet to do. The case sat in the box until late last weekend when I decided it was time to rip out Hannibal’sSmith, not Lecter. My PCs are named after George Peppard characters. It’s a good thing I don’t have more than two, because after “Banacek” I’m pretty much out of names. guts and transfer them to the new case.

It was only after I had installed the motherboard and all five drives in the new case that I realized my existing 92mm case fan wouldn’t fit. The Wizard has space for two fans: one 120mm fan in the back of the case and an 80mm fan in the front. Not wanting to risk overheating any of the components, I put the project aside until last night when — two new fans in hand — I dove back into Hannibal’s innards.

It wasn’t pretty. After I connected all of the cables and fired up the machine I found that Windows XP wasn’t seeing my main applications drive. Plenty of cable reseating and system rebooting later I determined that the problem was most likely a bad IDE cable. After replacing the cable, the drive was once again where it should be, but Norton Internet Security 2007 was reporting an error that — according to Symantec’s support page — required reinstallation of the product. Hoorah.

Once I had the Norton reinstall straightened out, I decided to run some of the diagnostic tools on the Ultimate Boot CD to make sure everything was working properly. Everything checked out fine until I ran PowerMax, Maxtor’s hard drive diagnostic utility on my data drive; the tool immediately indicated that the drive was failing and suggested I visit Maxtor’s website to determine the nature of the failure based on a hex code generated by PowerMax. Oh, goody.In hindsight, I probably should have seen this coming. A few weeks ago, I noticed that iTunes had misplaced a number of MP3s from my library; this was probably an early warning sign that something was amiss with the drive.

Unfortunately, Maxtor has been acquired by Seagate, and for reasons I cannot begin to fathom the the page detailing the PowerMax diagnostic codes is inaccessible. The drive is failing but Seagate doesn’t seem to want to tell me what’s wrong with it.

I had already planned to steal Eeyore’s external backup driveLaura’s desktop is named after a mopey donkey; her laptop is named after Emily Dickinson. I offer no commentary on this, merely simple fact., but Hannibal’s failing hard drive made it an imperative, so I scavenged the USB 2.0 card from Eeyore and stole the 17″ LCD monitor while I was at it. Score!

Now that I’ve back up the roughly 60 GB of data from the failing drive to the Maxtor OneTouch external drive and moved the bulk of my documents onto my 80 GB applications drive, I’m faced with the fact that I’ve got a 160 GB hard drive that could turn into a brick at any time; clearly, it will need to be replaced.

The problem with replacing the hard drive the investment starts moving into the territory of real money. The case and two fans set me back less than thirty bucks (again, assuming the rebate arrives), which is fine, but the idea of spending a hundred dollars or more on a computer that is in the neighborhood of seven years old doesn’t sit well with me. A hundred bucks represents a fifth of the cost of a new, low-end desktop system and today’s low-end systems make Hannibal look like Matlock.

Posted April 14, 2007 Comments(13)