The Windkey and the Lamplighter

Cranberry Bread Pudding

Originally uploaded by katsniffen

Baking with bread is my new favorite thing about having a bread machine. I *love* bread pudding, and I love cranberries, and now’s the time for fresh ones.

If you don’t follow the Boston Globe’s “Big Picture” series, you’re missing out.
One of today’s images was too good not to repost:

Aurora australis and the beautiful sky

I’ve seen the Milky Way, and I’ve seen the sky at night from a mountain valley with ~ no light pollution, but I’ve never seen anything like that. Amazing.

We started unpacking our library last night. We spent about two hours, and I think we’re about half done!

Empty Boxes, piled to the sky!

Full Boxes Remaining

Paperback fiction and General Nonfiction

History, Reference and Classics

Gaming and hardcover fiction, more paperback fiction

“Do not drill here”
Electrical cables

The next best brand to Monster.

Thanks to the Bad Astronomer, I found this great poll at Ironic Sans. Also, another blog with font jokes and photography. How can you go wrong?
Anyway, go vote!

The current first place candidate is not surprising, but I was shocked that my candidate is in second!
Also, there was one that I didn’t recognize—anyone know what 4 8 15 16 23 42 is?

The economy of information flow and the awareness and orientation of participants is a key emergent feature of the best wargames. Few have explicit mechanics to represent this. Can we characterize good ways of writing systems to support player-level injection of distraction and deception? Can we write good systems at all that provide mechanical support for playing a better maneuver-warfare expert than the player?

Case study: D&D 4e stealth and perception. The default Perception action benefits the group. It’s helpful for everyone to roll, helpful for anyone or everyone to be trained in Perception—if you’re trained, you might see the monster coming, and then you can tell the rest of the party. Everybody benefits. You personally benefit in being surprised less often, but the whole party’s glad to hear that anyone got trained in Perception or increased his score.

The default Stealth action does not benefit the group: it only hides one character. We optimize in common play: only the worst member of the group rolls to hide the whole group, no matter its size. There is no benefit to mid-ranked characters increasing their scores. What if it did? What if the default Stealth action was to hide a group? Let everybody roll, and require separate perception checks to see through each veil?

I wonder if there’s anything out there that really deals with awareness and deception at a systemic level.

Photoshop has introduced content-aware scaling. This appears to be the same work by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir that we saw at SIGGRAPH last year under the name seam carving.

Until today, I haven’t been to Uno’s in, quite literally, years.(1) Last time we were there, they didn’t have many vegetarian options (we had only recently stopped eating meat), and the food was not terribly high quality—especially with Christopher’s right across the street. Today, however, we were driving home from Costco, hungry and spacey, and stopped at the Uno’s on Bear Hill Road in Waltham. I didn’t have high expectations, but I’m really glad we went!

They have really revamped their menu, with a number of vegetarian options as well as some very tasty-looking meat dishes. They had a vegetable soup that was excellent, and a broccoli and spinach pizza that was *amazing*.

After seeing this note on the menu:

Brian got some “pasta pillows” with the Bolognese sauce. I didn’t have any, but he was pretty pleased.

So, Uno’s, I salute your revamped menu and good lunch. We’ll be back.

(1) Uno’s in Porter Square had been one of our standby after-gaming dinners, back when I was a starving student and my friends all spent our Saturdays playing Earthdawn/Shadowrun converted to GURPS and then Exalted in an MIT classroom.

From the Very Small Array, a a prescient suggestion of the financial instruments most useful in the new post-bailout era.

Hoover $0 Bill

…is apparently the CoinStar machine at Star Market. Shortly after we moved into our apartment we bought a big tin of Twinnings Earl Grey tea. It didn’t last long, and the tin was repurposed as a repository for loose change. A while later, we bought *another* tin of Twinnings Earl Grey Tea, which was also put to work as a coin holder. Tonight, we took both these tins to the Star Market CoinStar machine to see what years of idle savings had wrought. I say it was the cool place to be not *just* because we were there, but because there were two other people there (one using the machine when we arrived, and one whom we let go in-between our two tins.)

What turned out to be the lesser of the two jars

Because our laundry machines at the apartment take quarters, I had dumped the two tins out and removed the quarters several times. I only got a picture of the second tin, which was $10 lighter than the first one:

Scoresheet for the second tin

The machine rejected all the non-American and non-coin items for us. Here’s one tin worth of UnAmerican coins and sundry:

Remnants. Don't they look UnAmerican?

The Results:
Dollars: 6
Half-Dollars: 1
Quarters: 3
Dimes: 658+756
Nickels: 623+463
Pennies: 2019+2731

Grand Total: $250.45

That’s some serious change. No wonder it was so heavy.