Last year's theme was a refining my collection of games that play during a lunch break.
Card games featured prominently, there aren't enough board games that play in 45-60 minutes.
291 plays of 84 different games.
Here are my notes for a new game that came to me, and the process I went through building out the initial concept. This was surprisingly similar to the way Hunt or Gather came into being.
This year's game plays were far more focused than year.
Dominion has emerged as our group's favorite game, with many plays of all expansions. But even more than that, this year we focused on playtesting and developing my own board game, Hunt or Gather, which I have self published on The Game Crafter, in order to print on demand copies to send for blind playtesting.
There's a little contest going on, sponsored by a radio programming, asking HOW WOULD YOU REDESIGN MONOPOLY?. Here is my Answer.
My goal here is not to completely reinvent Monopoly. If you want to play a good game based on some aspect of Monopoly that you link, watch Board Games with Scott 070 - Breaking Up the Monopoly. The goal here is to fix the way people play the game, bringing it back closer to the original intent of the game. I have borrowed and elaborated on ideas from one or more boardgame podcasts.
I would change Free Parking to Paid Parking. This will help to discourage the house rule where people collect a pot of all paid fines when they land on that space. That way of playing arbitrarily lengthens the game, making for a bad play experience.
As a flat tax it will hurt the players who are further behind, bringing the game to a close faster, one of the primary complaints with this game.
From a thematic point of view, this change to Paid Parking will make perfect sense to our increasingly urban population. For the growing majority, parking simply is not free.
I would keep the rule that states "If you do not wish to buy the property, the Bank sells it at through an auction to the highest bidder."
The only problem with this rule is that most people don't seem to know it. To encourage people to learn the rule, I would add a new space to the center of the board titled "Auction House", to make people ask the quesion, "what is that?" and look it up. The rule could even be written directly on the board.
After my ancient Dell Dimension 8400 got killed by a Trojan I was initially thrilled at my success in installing Ubuntu from a thumb drive and rescuing my data, but then I couldn't get Windows XP to install again.
I tried out using Ubuntu for a couple weeks, and I must say it's pretty awesome. But there are two show stoppers. First, I need Photoshop, Gimp is just, well, gimpy. Second, Netflix streaming does not support Linux. We could watch from the Wii in the living room, but the LCD in the office is so much nicer.
So I tried formatting the drive NTFS, FAT32, but nothing worked, Windows just couldn't see my hard drive. I located my drivers CD and pressed F6 during the initial setup. No luck. Finally, when I was about to resort to setting up a VirtualBox, I found this barely intelligible post in a dell forum:
Its a common problem with Dim 8400. what you can do is enter into BIOS and expand drives and goto sata operation and change it to RAID AUTO/ATA.
Posted by karthiktkv1 on 20 Dec 2008 3:00 AM
That solved it!
This is my contribution to the The Five & Dime Report - 2010 Edition. In 2010 I played 50 different games a combined total of 235 times.
These games are among my favorites and should have made the cut.
While I'm glad nobody in our group has resorted to playing online to really accelerate their game play, I believe there are some elements of our group-think which could be taken up a notch.
The first is our pacing, and I'm not talking about slow play (you almost got away unscathed Dan). I'm talking about the rise and fall of our deck engines. What I'm proposing is that a deck which is really working well, pulling big 8+ coin hands, when the last Province is purchased, will not score as well as a deck which is sputtering out and choking under the weight of its own kingdom cards at the end.
We often get caught up in this ideal plan, some perfect set of cards we'd like our deck to start producing hand after hand, that we forget this is ultimately a race game, and hesitate to purchase victory cards.
Another thing which I've observed, in myself and others, as an over-abundance of +action cards. Ending a turn with extra actions is probably a waste, when you could have ended with something to get you extra coin, buys, or card draws (in hopes of pulling more coin). The goal of each hand is to end up with enough purchasing power to get the cards you want. You can't buy anything with actions (well, mostly not), but a nice big card-drawing terminal action should let you grab some more coin. We have, at least, gotten much better about picking up enough Silver and Gold.
Every year on Board Game Geek we celebrate the games which we play at least 5 or 10 times. In 2009 I played 50 different games, here are my five & dimes:
Source: Five and Dimes report for divinentd
For comparison, check out my 2008 Five & Dimes, where I only had one dime out of 59 different games played.
With the new Twitter integration on citysearch.com you can have a conversation directly with local business owners, for example: Solyn Studio
Citysearch is not a social network, so that conversation is not held captive on our site. The dialogue appears simultaneously on Citysearch and Twitter.
There are a few aspects of the integration which could be improved, beyond some minor layout refinements.
If you are signed into Citysearch, you have the option of linking your accounts. Currently this OAuth happens on the back-end after visitors enter their Twitter credentials into the site. This preserves the nicely integrated Ajax experience, but is a bad security design pattern. Hopefully we can switch to using RPX and use their OAuth workflow.
Another part that should be improved shortly is the way we load the tweets. We are relying on the Twitter search API to pull any tweet from, to, or mentioning the business. But in addition to stability issues, the search API has trouble pulling older tweets. It is also very aggressive about blocking "spam", which is what the posts of many businesses appears to be.
I had under-estimated the lazyness of our Java developers (a foolish move, to be sure). The search API is only supposed to return the last 7-10 days posts, so it is not the correct API to be using for our integration.
I don't know how many sites have been white-listed for this new feature*, but one cool thing you can do is sign up for a new Twitter account directly on Citysearch. Once a business owner has claimed their business (a new free feature) they may enter their Facebook fan page and Twitter account information. But if they don't have a Twitter account, or haven't even heard of Twitter, we offer the ability to sign up for a Twitter account using Citysearch.
We also suggest a Twitter handle for the business owner, if the most logical handle has not already been taken.
Our hope is that this new integration will benefit all parties. Business owners will be able to communicate directly with clients. Twitter will get exposure to a new audience of small business owners (and maybe one day find a business model?!). And Citysearch will facilitate the connection.
We were the first site to launch the new twitter sign up feature.
If you google GTD you'll find all kinds of over-engineered systems for getting things done. A good proctrastinator can spend a lot of time building a system without actually accomplishing anything.
At work we've recently switched to the Scrum system, which strikes a good balance between organizational overhead and actual work. But for an individual on the weekend it's too much. And the priorities are different. On the weekend, if you've got a regular job, slacking off is an important part of the schedule.
My system is built around a list of tasks and operates in two different modes, depending on what I'm trying to accomplish.
The first step is always the same: make a list of prioritized household projects. They can be regular chores like cleaning the cat boxes or doing the dishes, or one-off tasks like fixing something around the house. Generally they'll each take 10-30 minutes. If they're longer break them down into smaller pieces.
For a relaxation day here's what I do. I look at how many hours I've got, figure out how many tasks I need to do per hour to get them done. Then I drop the list and go watch TV, or play a video game, read a book etc. But here's the key. At the top of each hour I pause what I'm doing and bang out the necessary tasks so that I can get back to slacking off.
Creative personal projects, like design or writing, will eat as much time as you'll give them. I've got two approaches. One is to treat the project just like my relaxation approach, breaking hourly to do the required tasks.
But if the project requires a sustained period of time, hours of focus without distraction, then you may only have one choice: do all the necessary tasks immediately. Then you'll have the rest of the day to focus.
Now, if I want to be really productive here's what I do. I break down my fun stuff, be it watching a TV show, taking a hike, mucking about on the computer, into finite tasks. Then I prioritize them along with the boring stuff and just work down the list.
Two important things to keep in mind. One is to make sure nothing on the list takes more than an hour, max. If you think it might then break it down into smaller parts. This helps with momentum and with the next important thing. Make sure the fun stuff is mixed in with the obligatory stuff.
In the end these systems are all about using the stuff that you actually want to do as motivation to get what you need to do done. They're also about prioritization and momentum.
I forgot two important things, probably more important than the rest of my ramblings.
Skilled front-end coders are hard to find, sometimes you just have to make them...
The following is a series of lecture topics I covered with my UI team at Citysearch. I'll write a post with an overview of each and links to further reading.
If you are viewing this on your phone hopefully you didn't have to zoom in to read it. I just launched the mobile version of this site using MOBIFY.
The address for now is http://divinentd1.mobify.me/. I'm using JavaScript to detect your device and redirect. Both of those things need to change. The address should be m.divinentd.com, and instead of JavaScript (which is bad for performance) I need to handle the redirect on the server side. I'm hoping to pull it all off with .htaccess, wish me luck.
My last post was one year ago, almost to the date. And then my blog got hacked. I repaired the damage, but ended up locking the site down because I couldn't solve the cause of the vulnerability, a WordPress install that wouldn't upgrade.
Now I have redesigned the site, which I'll write more about later, and moved back to Blogger, which I'll touch on now.
When I first started blogging at the tail end of 2000 blogger was the hot new thing. Then I stayed with Blogger for 7 years. What can I say, I'm not a fan of migrating data and configuring crap.
But eventually the lure of greater typography drew me to WordPress. For about a year I enjoyed the greater control of hosting my own blogging software. It came with a price. I missed an upgrade. And then when I tried to apply then next one, it failed.
So now I have moved this journal back to Blogger. In the year that this site lay dormant I've learned a lot from working on a high traffic public website at my day job. My previous job's focus was on security, my focus at this job (and the site's current failings) have to do with speed.
With Google hosting the blogging software for this website I don't need to keep it up to date. Also, serving the pages as static HTML (ok, there may be some PHP involved, but that's a secret), even if it did get hacked and somebody injected a PHP file, it's not going to do anything. Go ahead, try going to http://divinentd.com/links.php.
There's nothing faster than serving static files. No database queries, no run-time processing of the page. The site on Blogger is simply faster than it could ever be running on other blogging software.
In the end I'm happy to have moved back to a low tech reliable solution. This way if I decide tomorrow to not touch the site for another 6 months, I don't have to worry about anything happening to it while I'm gone. The piece of mind is worth any loss in geek credibility.
First, let me introduce myself and my role in the project. I’m the senior user interface engineer for citysearch.com (a website that helps you find local businesses). I’ve been working, along with my colleages at Citysearch and the Facebook Connect team, to make the experience of using your Facebook login on Citysearch as seamless as possible.
So, what the heck is this Facebook Connect thing? Basically, it lets you log in to Citysearch using your Facebook account. Then when you write a review of a business on citysearch.com you can push it to your facebook feed at the same time. You can also see your other Citysearch/Facebook friends and the reviews that they have written on Citysearch.
We are combining the strengths of each website, Citysearch’s now hyper-local geography model, creating a home page for something like 75,000 neighborhoods, with Facebook’s ability to instantly connect you with all of your friends (and these days just about everyone is on Facebook). This creates a vital connection between messing around online, and finding a real world business or service.
“Okay, so you’ve got a local search website with a community writing reviews, so what’s the difference between that and say, Yelp?” you may ask. I would propose that with Facebook you get to share your favorite places with YOUR friends. Whereas on Yelp you are being asked to interact with a social clique which you may not be a part of.
Now, I am not without concerns about this integration, and here’s where any non-tech folk may want skip a few paragraphs.
To tell you what I don’t like about the basic premise of the way Facebook Connect works, first I’m going to talk a little bit about the right way to add JavaScript interactivity to a site. It’s called Progressive Enhancement. First you build a solid foundation, meaningful HTML. You set up your pages so that data is being passed consistently between server and browser using the technology of your choice, whether it’s a big corporate place using Java, or an agile satellite team using PHP. Next you make everything look pretty by adding a layer of CSS. Only then do you hijack that server interaction, attaching Ajax behavior with JavaScript to create a more interactive experience.
So that’s the problem that I have with the Facebook integration. The entire connection between the two sites is based on a hack, using JavaScript to create an iframe, and then passing information back and forth by reading the source of the iframe. For a more complete explanation, you can look at their diagram.
Now that’s not to say that I’m as strong a developer as some of the folks on the Facebook Connect team, or that a server side API would be as accessible to as many casual developers as a JavaScript API is. Only that a server side solution would have been more robust, and less susceptible to the vagaries of various web browsers.
Non-tech folks start again here :-)
Now, having said all that, once Citysearch and Facebook Connect are out of beta, I think we will have a very solid and nearly seamless interaction between the two sites. In fact, we think it’s working well enough that we invite you to try it out right now at this address:
You can use the “Sign in Using Facebook” link at the top. Or search for the last restaurant you ate at, use the “Write a review” button in the middle of the page. You will see a couple forms that you can ignore, and click the big blue “Connect with Facebook” button.
In the future I’m looking forward to greater speed and reliability from Facebook, richer interactivity between Facebook friends on Citysearch, and I’ve got some interface kinks to work out myself.
Knock on wood.
Senator Obama was doing press interviews by telephone in a holding room between events. Sometime later as he was getting ready to begin his event, he asked me if I was photographing his shoes. When I said yes, he told me that he had already had them resoled once since he entered the race a year earlier. Providence, R.I., 3/1/2008.
In firebug 1.2 console is not defined by default. See Changes to the ‘console’ object in Firebug 1.2.
Here’s Travis Cline’s solution. I would replace the function() {} definitions with window.alert for debugging in those other browsers.
Of course we’ll have to update this again if window.console becomes window.firebug.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall “Dracula’s lament”
This may just become an unconventional musicals blog. You’ve been warned.
