The Windkey and the Lamplighter

That was the best meal I’ve had in a really long time.

We went to [Amelia's Trattoria][]
We started with fried calamari, piled onto a puck-shaped bed of lemon risotto, with
garlic aioli on top. I don’t always even like calamari, but it was
absolutely amazing. I think I really like risotto, too—I haven’t
had much of it, but you can do really neat things with it.

My entree was why I’d picked Amelia’s: gnocci, with butternut squash
and fried sage. In addition to the butter and parmesan in which the
gnocci were served, the dish had some sort of onion-family grass on
top. (This may have been their all-purpose spring garnish, Brian’s
seafood dish had the same thing.)

The gnocci was the best I’ve ever had–lighter and more pillowy. I’d
expected the sage and squash to be good—my favorite salad last fall
at [Za][] was built around butternut squash, with a fried sage
garnish—and it was. The real surprise was the onion-y garnish,
which was light enough not to bother the other flavors, while being
present enough to be a nice distraction from the very rich dish. The
whole thing was nicely but not too heavily spiced, with warm fall-ish
spices. (At least one was paprika, I suspect cinnamon and nutmeg, and
have no idea what the others were. ) It was absolutely perfect for
this cold spring day.

We also got dessert. I don’t usually like Tiramisu, but I’m really
glad Brian got it rather than sharing my panna cotta. I have never
seen or tasted a cream like that before. The top layer of the
tiramisu wasn’t just whipped cream. It was a lot more flavorful.

(My panna cotta was good, but the jam on top overpowered the vanilla
and other spices, and the texture was unusually curd-like. When I
scraped away most of the jam, it was a lot better.)

I have to learn to cook like this. I wonder how you do that…

On the corner of Harvard St., near Tech Square, is a tiny Italian
restaurant. I used to go there a bunch when I worked in Tech Square,
but haven’t been in several years. In that time, Amelia’s has
reinvented itself. They still have some of the same dish names that
I remembered, but make them entirely differently.

There’s still a calamari appetizer. But it’s no longer the
traditional greaseballs of squid with pepper. Now it’s served over a
lemon risotto, with an incredible salty-garlic oil. There’s still
gnocchi, but these are among the best gnocchi I’ve tasted.

Even the coffee’s better. I have no idea if it’s improved this much
for lunch: the office-worker crowd is looking for something different.
But the dinner food is absolutely incredible. This is the best food
I’ve eaten when I didn’t start the meal with a migraine.

Our first big combat happened last night. Three PCs (a Servant, a
Thief, and a Vagabond) were in the sewers trying to clear their names
by finding the real killer. They came upon a Skaven hive. One
guard saw them and sounded the alarm, so they ended up fighting half a
dozen common clanrats and a visiting dignitary assassin-poisoner.

The battle had several points of tactical interest—especially as I’m
still trying to learn what makes for good play for tactical players.

First, a character’s chance to hit in WFRP is solely dependent on his
skill. There are defenses—but they’re not rolled off against one
another, as in Exalted. And there’s no AC, as in d20. An attacker
rolls against his own Weapon Skill. If he succeeds, he hit. A single
bit flies from attacker to defender. The defender may make a defense
roll. This is only against his own Agility (if he has the Dodge Blow
skill) or his own Weapon Skill (if Parrying). A single bit flies back
to the attacker. Then a damage roll is made. This makes for
tremendously fast gaming: you don’t have to ask the target what his AC
is. You don’t have to tell him what your result is, and wait for him
to compare. Running 7 opponents, I could play them very quickly,
interacting fluidly with all the players.

One player commented today that this made the boss brutal: if you did
anything overly aggressive near him, you’d die. He had a 60% chance
to hit, two attacks per turn if he didn’t move, and did enough damage
to kill quickly. So if you sacrificed your defense for a +10% chance
to hit, you’d hurt him and then he’d probably kill you. In fact, if
you didn’t have both Dodge and Parry (and only one character in this
group has Dodge), you’d be in terrible danger from him. Even with
just the one attack, he was exactly twice as likely to hit each PC as
the clanrats with their 30% chances to hit. The PC with the 60%
chance to dodge was half as likely to be hit by any given attack as
the PC with the 20% chance to parry.

This independence makes statting up characters a breeze.

The players also got a nice introduction to shields, tunnel fighting,
why you don’t want to be surrounded, how fighting in tight lines might
be useful, and the difficulties of mixing ranged and hand-to-hand
combat. I do think they’ll try much harder next time to ensure that
the bowman and the slingers are back from the melee, able to keep and
control their range.

I got to learn something about satisfying player desires, clarity of
statements, and what happens when the PCs get surrounded. When a line
of PCs met a line of rats in a tunnel, the players of the PCs at the
back complained of boredom. If I’d left them that way, the PCs could
have safely chewed threw the line of rats: the PC in the front
outclassed each rat, and the PCs in back were better with bow and
sling than the rats in back were with thrown rocks.

Since the player at the back complained, I let the rats run on walls
to move into melee with him. I gave them some penalties for doing
this, like saying it took one hand and both feet to hang on to the
wall, so they could neither parry nor dodge. But it let the rats
surround and out-number the PCs.

It felt for much of the fight like I might kill the PCs. I think I’m
learning that most good fights will feel that way: putting pressure on
early, but slackening as the mook NPCs fall down. Eventually, the PCs
outnumber the big bad guy 3 to 1, and he goes down.

So, sometime last summer I was out skating on the Minuteman Trail, and
somehow I lost a wheel. Like, the whole thing—wheel, bearing, axel
and all. I’m really not sure how I managed to lose it and not notice
until I started to lose a second one, but we never found it—even
though we skated back the same way we had come. Someone must have
picked it up for me or something. So I learned that I could skate
with only a front and back wheel on one of my skates, but it wasn’t
much fun.

I quickly discovered that while wheels and bearings were really easy to
replace (and I needed new ones anyway) axels are really tricky. My
skates are a weird brand (CCM, which mostly makes hockey skates) and
the manufacturer doesn’t make them anymore, so I can’t just buy parts
from them. No worries—they’re really just standoffs with hex-keyed
screws, one of which is built-in. Perfectly normal standoffs will
work fine, if I can figure out what size.

I finally remembered to bring my calipers home and measure the
bearings for my inline skates. The internet tells me they’re usually
7mm or 8mm, and mine are .312 inches, so they must be 8mm. The space
between the "blades" is 1.15 inches wide, so anything around an
inch will do nicely. Conveniently, .312 is 5/16. I should be able to
find a 5/16 inch OD standoff which is 1 inch long—shouldn’t I?

Nope. I emailed them, but the McMaster-Carr online catalogue has 1/4" and 3/8", which is
really not close enough. .315-.25 =.11", which I think is too much
slop… I guess I ought to be able to figure that out, somehow, if I
model the forces and the friction properly.

Drat. Now where do I look? I guess if I have to I could get some
stock, and access to a shop, and drill/tap them myself, but the "get
access to a shop" part is tricky. I have no metalworking tools.

Thanks to BoingBoing

Now the computer will roll the die for you.

But you probably still shouldn’t let the Ninja pick up the Amulet.

The work I’m currently doing is documenting some commercial equipment
so we can purchase it. This requires writing up 5-10 pages of mostly
boilerplate data, filling in information from the vendor datasheets
(when it’s provided) and contacting vendors when it isn’t. Great, not
the best work in the world, but it wasn’t all bad and someone has to
do it. For much of it, that someone wasn’t even me—I occasionally
have lackeys (or electrical engineers) who can help with the research.

The part I haven’t been able to delegate is fixing minor formatting
errors and then turning the documents into PDFs, so they can be
combined with PDF printouts of our Pro/Engineer drawings for
archiving. This part is going to drive me mad.

Before I even get to the meat of my complaining, Pro/E is no picnic
to edit. It’s a big, somewhat unwieldy program, and on my workstation
it is SLOW AS DIRT. I’ve literally started opening a big model, gone
for coffee, and come back to find that it’s not done loading
yet. Furthermore, since the drawings we’re making need to look like
continuation pages of the Word document, every time the Word document
changes in length by a page in either direction you have to renumber
the 1-9 pages of drawing, each individually by hand. (There’s normally
an autonumbering feature, but it doesn’t have a way to specify an offset.)
So formatting issues with Word are particularly annoying.

Word, for all that it is WYSIWYG, doesn’t feel that way when you’re
creating PDF documents. The "autocorrect" feature has an annoying
tendancy to "help" me organize my ordered lists, automatically
formatting them with the appropriate indentations. Great—except
that the format requires that all the sub-categories not be
indended, so then I have to fix the indentations manually. This seems
to happen about every other time I save the document.

I have Adobe Acrobat Professional, so when I create a PDF document, I
have a really convenient-looking button to click to turn my Word
document into a PDF. "Great!", I think, "This will be so much easier
than the PDF printer I had before". Well, yes and no. AAP makes a
PDF by saving the document, closing it, opening it again, printing the
document, closing it again, and then opening it for you to work again.
It does it all automatically—except for the status messages.

A typical PDF generation, then, looks like this:

"The document being saved contains tracked changes. Continue with
save?"

"This document is reserved to prevent accidental editing. Enter
password or choose read only"

"The document being printed contains tracked changes. Continue with
printing?"

prompt for a location to save PDF

"The document being saved contains tracked changes. Continue with
save?"

"This document is reserved to prevent accidental editing. Enter
password or choose read only"

And then I have a PDF, which I can merge with the Pro/E pages.

No wonder everyone hates doing documentation.

We got an old (red) hymnal from St James, since they are replacing
them with the new (also red, there was a green and a blue in between)
hymnal, so I was flipping through it. One of the Easter hymns has
beautiful poetry, and some lovely lyrics that somewhat date the book.

Awake my heart with gladness,
See what today is done;
Now after gloom and sadness,
Comes forth the glorious Sun;
My Savior there was laid
Where our bed must be made;
When to the realms of light
Our spirit wings its flight.

The Foe in triumph shouted
When Christ lay in the tomb;
But, lo, he now is routed,
His boast is turned to gloom.
For Christ again is free;
In glorious victory
He who is strong to save
Has triumphed o'er the grave.

This is a sight that gladdens;
What peace it doth impart!
Now nothing ever saddens
The joy within my heart.
No gloom shall ever shake,
No foe shall ever take,
The hope which God's own Son
In love for me hath won.

Now hell, it's prince, the devil,
Of all their pow'r are shorn;
Now I am safe from evil,
And sin I laugh to scorn.
Grim Death with all his might
Cannot my soul affright;
He is a pow'rless form,
Howe'er he rave and storm.

The world against me rageth,
Its fury I disdain;
Though bitter war it wageth,
Its work is all in vain.
My heart from care is free,
No trouble troubles me.
Misfortune now is play,
And night is bright as day.

Now I will cling forever
To Christ, my Savior true;
My Lord will leave me never,
Whate'er He passeth through.
He rends Death's iron chain,
He breaks through sin and pain,
He shatters hell's dark thrall, --
I follow Him through all.

To halls of heavenly splendor
With Him I penetrate;
And trouble ne'er may hinder
Nor make me hesitate.
Let tempests rage at will,
My Savior shields me still;
He grants abiding peace
And bids al tulmult cease.

He brings me to the portal
That leads to bliss untold,
Wheron this rime immortal
Is found in script of gold:
"Who there My cross hath shared
Finds here a crown prepared;
Who there with Me hath died
Shall here be glorified"

The BoingBoing Article about the North Korean Arirang Festival
points to a page with some beautiful video and stills of the mass
games which opened the North
Korean celebration of the birthdate of the late Communist
leader Kim Il-sung (April 15).

The most striking thing, to me, is the absolute precision of all the
performers. From the card-holders (who clearly were drilled and
practiced extensively, in addition to having cards laid out on hinges
in the proper order) to the very young-looking dancers and gymnasts,
performing very difficult tricks in perfect synchronization.
It is amazing to me, and an indication of how hard and long they
must have practiced, that none of those little girls fell, or stepped
too early, or anything. Now, gymnastics (especially the types they
were doing–I noticed a bunch of what the Olympics now call rhythmic
gymnastics) is a pretty precise sport/art, but … I wonder how they
trained. Did they go to school with the other children? Did they have
special classes (there are certainly enough of them to support a
special school)? Does their education suffer because they were busy
training for this celebration?

Anyway, the result is beautiful, even if I have my suspicions about
the methods and am not a fan of the subject.

edit: Apparently there is a movie about the training of two of
gymnasts who performed in the 2003 mass games, called A State of Mind

May the great Author of all texts,
the Creator who gifted His chosen people
with liberty and law and the love of the law,
so bless all His creation.